Omri Ceren writes in the lead article of the October 2014 issue of Commentary Magazine that, contrary to the claims of Hamas and several critics of Israel, the IDF defeated Hamas in this past summer’s Operation Protective Edge. Ceren is the managing director for press and strategy at The Israel Project, publisher of The Tower.

Central to Ceren’s thesis are the threats Israel was facing at the beginning of the summer, and to what degree they had been eliminated or degraded at the end of fifty days of combat.

We now know that Hamas operatives in the West Bank were preparing to generate a massive wave of violence designed to radicalize the territory politically, make Israeli–Palestinian security cooperation impossible, and deprive the Palestinian Authority—which is controlled by Hamas’s rival, Fatah—of critical Israeli intelligence and strength of arms. With money from Hamas’s Gaza leadership, and under the auspices of the group’s Turkey-based commander, Saleh al-Arouri, the West Bank plotters had for years been preparing for their coming terror war by building infrastructure and stockpiling weapons. Hamas would use violence and the Palestinian Authority’s isolation, so the plan went, to overthrow its reign in the territories as it had done almost a decade ago in Gaza.

Meanwhile, in Gaza, Hamas leaders had prepared a series of strategic “surprises” (their language) in anticipation of a full-blown military confrontation with the Israel Defense Forces. Various ordnances and tactics had been readied with an eye on executing mass-casualty attacks against Israeli civilians. The Muslim Brotherhood’s year-long regime from 2012 to 2013 in Egypt had allowed Hamas’s smuggling operations into and out of Egyptian territory to flourish, and Hamas was able to import through its tunnels dozens of advanced M-302 rockets powerful enough to reach the outskirts of northern Israel. Terrorists had slipped in and out of Gaza for hang-glider training and were preparing to replicate tactics that had facilitated some of the Palestinians’ most devastating terror attacks. Drones had been acquired; Hamas leaders boasted that some were packed with explosives for suicide missions. Meanwhile, Hamas had diverted hundreds of thousands of tons of cement (given as humanitarian aid) into the construction of 32 attack tunnels that ran under the Israel-Gaza border. Teams of commandos were readying to infiltrate Israel through those passages, which would empty them out a few minutes away from sparsely populated and lightly defended Israeli communities.

But “[a]ll of it was gone by mid-August.” Not only had “zero percent of Hamas’s spectacular attacks on civilians—to be conducted via long-range rockets, drones, hang gliders, and tunnels—succeeded,” but Hamas was not able to “secure the core demands it long insisted were prerequisites for a truce.”

An oft overlooked aspect of Operation Protective Edge is that Israel has used it to reach out to Arab “pragmatists” – including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan – to forge a de facto alliance “in opposition to Shiite Iran on one side and an axis of extremist Turkish/Qatari/Muslim Brotherhood types on the other.”

This was one of themes that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emphasized in his speech before the United Nations General Assembly earlier this week.

Ceren further observes that in the past, Israel has learned from its conflicts and likely learned an important lesson this past summer:

Hezbollah has undoubtedly dug its own network underneath Israel’s northern border in anticipation of war. Israel has now set to work and is focused on protecting itself from below as well as above. Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors will not thank Hamas for having awakened the Jewish state.

Having thus defeated Hamas militarily, prevented it from achieving its goals, and learned an important strategic lesson, Israel won. Ceren concludes:

This is what victory looks like. It is not total victory, but total victory was never sought. In the summer of 2014, Israel was forced to defend itself—and it did so, brilliantly.

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