There are two types of people who believed Netanyahu's threat to wipe out Hamas.
- Stupid people.
- Wait, there's only one.
The point was never to wipe Hamas from the face of the planet, the point of saying so was to convince stupid people that Israel has the willpower to do so and the capability, so you'd better not get any ideas from what Hamas did.
The problem is that stupid people have always believed that Israel is so powerful and so impervious to world opinion that it has both the capability and the willpower to wipe out whomever they want to wipe out. They're not.
So there are four (actually four) problems with this strategy.
- Israel can only bluff so many times before the bluff catches up with them. Just like their enemy combatants, the more they threaten destruction, the more urgent it is to meet their threats with force if anyone is going to believe them. If Israel continues to pursue this policy, eventually it is going to have to actually decimate one of its enemies. To decimate the enemies, they would have to decimate everywhere the enemies hide, and that means decimating hundreds of thousands of civilians Hamas and Hezbollah soldiers hide within. For the moment, that is extremely unlikely, but if a WMD is ever fired into Israel, that is precisely what would happen.
- So many "stupids" around the world believe that Israel is a unique confluence of evil and power that, for the moment, they thoroughly believe Israel intends to wipe out Hamas, whatever the cost. Therefore, they act as though this is what Israel will do, and it results in Israel being isolated around the world, and eventually would result in Jews being isolated too.
- Netanyahu's coalition testifies to the fact that there are at least a couple million Jewish 'stupids' too, and view it with approval. Netanyahu has always straddled that line between true believer and realist, but he so values his own power that he inevitably chooses realism. But if a true believer ever becomes Prime Minister, like Finance Minister B'Tzalel Smotrich, he might truly believe Israel can accomplish what Israel's establishment knows is a threat Israel can't possibly carry out.
- Even moreso than the actual damage Israel does, propaganda about the extent of Israeli power is Hamas's best recruitment tool. The unseen is always more powerful to the imagination than the seen, and however cataclysmic the damage done to Gaza, the thought still exists in the minds of potential recruits: "If you think what Israel did to us now is bad, imagine what would happen if Israel visits its full might on us. After all, they say they will."
The inevitable cost of propaganda is that, eventually, the line between bullshit and reality is so blurred that propagandists come to believe their own propaganda. Hundreds of millions in the rest of the Middle East persist with the idea that you can get rid of the Jewish presence, and because this propaganda is so successful, their leaders inevitably come to believe it too. Israel has relied on the myth of its infinite power and will for the near-entirety of its existence, and every year, more Israelis come to believe it.
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