"The atrocities perpetrated by Hamas against innocent Israelis, the snuff films, mutilations and delight in simple cruelty, inspired immediate analogies to the Islamic State’s depredations."

"They also raised a question about Hamas’s strategy. Was this, as some averred, a desperate but calculated leap to barbarism, undertaken on the theory that only true grisliness would yield the kind of Israeli reaction required to scuttle peacemaking between Israel and its Arab neighbors? Or alternately, was it proof that Hamas had no normal strategic plan at all?... Radical movements are often multivalent, with ideologically motivated sadists and strategically minded gamblers converging on the same plan despite somewhat different self-understandings.... [A] movement deliberately going to extremes risks the Islamic State scenario, where you isolate yourself so completely that you end up first morally delegitimized and then cornered and destroyed.... But suppose that you light the match, you cross the line, you leave the civilized world behind, and a lot of your allies just … stay with you? Suppose you turn southern Israel into an abattoir and you don’t end up like the Islamic State thereafter? Suppose that, instead, most of your sympathizers just go to their usual corners, some making excuses and downplaying the violence, others committing fully to the glory of your cause?"

Writes Ross Douthat, in "The Victory Hamas Has Already Won" (NYT).