J Street’s recent essay, “The State of Hamas in Gaza After October 7,” reads less like sober political analysis and more like a bedtime story for worried American Jews. Its refrain is soothing: Hamas has lost control, Gaza is rejecting its rule, its military is crippled, and its days are numbered. Who would not want to believe that? After October 7—the most traumatic day in Jewish life since the Holocaust—who among us would not cling to any suggestion that the perpetrators are already finished? But comfort is not the same as truth. And the Torah teaches that when false prophets cry “peace, peace,” when there is no peace, they imperil the people. The same applies here.
It is important to concede what is true. Hamas has been weakened. Its tunnels have been exposed and destroyed at unprecedented levels. Its bureaucratic control over the Gaza Strip has been severely degraded, in some neighborhoods erased altogether. Its population, battered by war, has turned on it with anger and despair. All this is true. Hamas is weaker than it was before October 7, and in some respects its governing project is collapsing. But weakness is not the same as irrelevance, and chaos is not the same as defeat. Hamas is battered, yes. But far from gone.
Consider the comparison that matters. When Nazism was defeated, it was not because ordinary Germans stopped hanging swastikas on their walls. It was because the Nazi state was destroyed, its armies crushed, its leaders executed or tried, its ideology criminalized, and its borders occupied by foreign powers. When ISIS was broken, it was not because disillusioned Iraqis or Syrians grew weary of their cruelty. It was because the caliphate was dismantled, its leaders hunted, and its territories retaken. Hamas has suffered none of these fates. It still commands territory, still holds hostages, still launches rockets, still runs propaganda, and most crucially—it still enjoys the sponsorship of states like Iran and Qatar and the sympathy of large populations across the Arab and Muslim world. That is the crucial difference. It is one thing to have a Nazi or ISIS flag on your bedroom wall. That is dangerous symbolism but powerless without a state. Hamas, by contrast, continues to be defended, armed, and funded by nations and movements. It is, therefore, not finished. It is embedded.
J Street’s analysis collapses because it refuses to see this. It points to looting in Gaza, to hunger, to the rise of tribal clans and rival militias, and it insists this proves Hamas is over. This is shallow. Gaza is a war zone subjected to relentless bombardment and total siege. Its institutions have been targeted and dismantled. To call the resulting disorder proof of Hamas’s incompetence is akin to bombing a hospital and then declaring the doctors incapable of running an effective clinic. The collapse of order in Gaza tells us nothing about Hamas’s long-term viability. It tells us only that sustained war can destabilize any society.
The article also insists that Gazans’ anger at Hamas is proof that the population has turned against them permanently. There are indeed protests, there is fury, there are looted offices and denunciations. But wartime psychology must be understood carefully. Civilians curse their rulers when they are starving. They shout against their leaders when bombs fall. They reach for scapegoats close at hand. But such anger is volatile. The same population may tomorrow rally to the very organization it despises today, when the external threat reasserts itself and no viable alternative emerges. We have seen this before. The Lebanese cursed Hezbollah during Israeli bombardment in 2006, only to reelect them in 2009. Many Afghans hated the Taliban, yet when America withdrew, it was the Taliban who marched back into Kabul. The lesson is bitter but clear: suffering generates anger, but anger does not necessarily translate into political divorce. To read wartime protests in Gaza as the end of Hamas is wishful thinking masquerading as analysis.
J Street also leans heavily on Israeli military briefings claiming that “95 percent” of Hamas’s forces have been eliminated. Numbers like these are crafted as much for public morale as for empirical accuracy. Hamas has survived precisely by investing in redundancy and concealment—networks of tunnels, layers of leadership, the ability to melt into the population. Even if it has lost thousands of fighters, it retains the capacity to launch rockets, conduct ambushes, and hold Israeli hostages. And here we must be ruthlessly clear: degrading Hamas militarily is not the same as erasing it politically. Insurgencies rooted in identity and ideology do not die because their arsenals shrink. They die when their ideology is discredited, their sponsors abandon them, and their populations reject them in favor of something stronger. None of that has yet occurred.
The greater danger in J Street’s analysis is not simply that it is wrong, but that it is seductive. It encourages Jews to believe the work is already done. It tempts us to think that victory is around the corner, that Gaza is ready to be reborn without Hamas, that October 7 will soon be a historical footnote rather than an ongoing reality. But false hope is deadly. If Hamas truly collapsed tomorrow, Gaza would not turn into a democratic haven. It would turn into Mogadishu: warlords, jihadists, Iranian proxies, and criminal gangs scrambling for control. That outcome would not make Israel safer. It would make the southern border even more volatile and unpredictable. A vacuum in Gaza is not a solution; it is an invitation to chaos.
The rabbis of the Talmud remind us that false comfort is itself a form of cruelty. They taught that it is forbidden to “speak one thing with the mouth and another in the heart.” To insist Hamas is finished when it is plainly not is such a cruelty. It does not prepare the Jewish people for the long, hard work of vigilance, deterrence, and, one day, the search for an alternative Palestinian leadership that is both credible and committed to coexistence. Instead, it lulls us into fantasies.
The harder truth is this: Hamas is bruised but breathing. Its organizational infrastructure is battered, but its ideology still animates millions. It has suffered losses, but it has not been discredited. It remains supported by states and defended by sympathizers across the Middle East and Europe. So long as Tehran signs the checks, so long as Doha shelters its leaders, so long as Palestinian despair finds no other outlet, Hamas—or something like it—will endure. This is reality. And reality, however bitter, is safer than fantasy.
Our task as Jews is not to indulge in illusions. It is to face the world as it is. Pirkei Avot teaches: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” Declaring Hamas finished is a way of pretending the work is already done. It is not done. The ideology that fueled October 7 is still alive. The states that armed Hamas still arm them. The despair that nurtured them still festers. Our work—the work of vigilance, of political honesty, of refusing to cloak ourselves in false comfort—remains.
J Street’s article is not a contribution to that work. It is a lullaby. And lullabies do not keep our children safe. The rabbis remind us that redemption comes not through denial but through confronting reality with clarity. The reality is this: Hamas is weaker, but not gone. And until we reckon with that truth, we will remain vulnerable to the next October 7.