“The shock of everything that has happened caught us and the world off guard. Hamas has a political wing and military wing. There are reports that the military wing didn’t inform the political wing they were going to do this. And we see this with the hesitation of the ground invasion that Israel had been threatening.”
Israel’s response, Burch says, will play a major role in coming events. “If Israel launches a full-scale ground invasion, it could be hard for Hezbollah to remain on the sidelines. If there’s going to be daily news footage from a ground war in Gaza, that could increase the pressure on Hezbollah to open another front and engage Israel more directly. There’s always a possibility of scaling into a regional conflict. It’s like a series of dominoes.
“There is still so much we’re learning,” he adds. “Some people claim Iran knew about the attack on Israel; some say Iran knew nothing. Some people will point to negotiations between Israel and Saudi Arabia as being a motivating force, or to the fact Israel has been incredibly divided this past year. We’ve seen mass street protests in Israel over the [prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul. Hamas could have thought this was a time when Israel was weakened and divided.”
When U.S. President Joe Biden spoke to the nation recently, he said he would ask Congress for $60 billion in aid to Ukraine, and $14 billion in aid to Israel, to help those fellow democracies fight two vastly different and unpredictable wars. How Congress acts, given its own division, is just as unpredictable, Burch says.
“The president is definitely trying to thread the needle within Congress. There has been increasing resistance among Republicans to provide funding for Ukraine but a lot of support to provide funds for Israel. He was trying to link them together to try to secure more funding for Ukraine.”
