To submit means to surrender. To surrender to an enemy means to give up your goals, beliefs, traditions, hopes for the future, dreams for your children and grandchildren, and your personal freedom. It means to become shamefaced, to accept perhaps a limited future, and, finally to come to the understanding that there are no alternatives to giving up. Islam means “submission.” That is its goal for both Muslims and everyone else. However, sometimes the shoe is on the other foot.

Will Hamas be able to submit to Israel’s demands that it return the hostages? Maybe or maybe not! Usually, when submitting, there are no alternatives. However, in return for acceding to that demand, Israel will offer water, food, and fuel for the people of Gaza, at least some of whom are innocent of any complicity in Hamas’ crimes.

How much suffering will Hamas be willing to impose on its brothers and sisters before absorbing the embarrassment of delivering up the men, women, and children it holds? Perhaps it will prefer to allow all parties to grow weak, become sick, and die. That is a real possibility because Hamas’s members believe every Muslim owes his life in the fight against the infidels. If one thought this to be mere speculation, there is some information that needs to be absorbed by those who are reading this essay.

It is well-known that Hamas has an extensive series of tunnels they have constructed over the years. There has been evidence since 2014 that the conscripted tunnel diggers were not trusted to keep the locations of the tunnels secret. Therefore, Hamas operatives murdered them. It did not happen once but on numerous occasions. We know because there were tunnel diggers who escaped and reported this to be the case.

Image: Nazi soldiers surrendering because they could not win. US Holocaust Museum.

Given the deaths of the tunnel diggers, there is no reason to believe that Hamas or its allies around the world are going to save innocent lives by surrendering the hostages. Instead, the likelihood is that all the hostages will die along with thousands or hundreds of thousands of Gazans rather than returning the captives. Israel will be blamed for cruelty.

Events are moving ahead based on the presumption that Hamas will keep the hostages no matter what. Even now, the UN is voting to maintain hundreds of millions of dollars in ‘humanitarian’ aid to Gaza. The EU will do the same. The United States and Egypt are ‘negotiating’ with Israel to allow civilian passage out of Gaza. And Hamas supporters are organizing rallies worldwide.

Of course, the other possibility is that Muslim countries might pressure Hamas to surrender. Hamas could save face by agreeing to Arab demands instead of to Israel’s. But how likely is that?

The submission that is more likely is that Israel will call it a day after a few weeks. Then, the pressure on Israel will start in earnest. That submission is a two-state solution, something that will clearly be suicidal for Israel, as demonstrated by the slaughter last Saturday (October 7). All who ask Israel to agree to a two-state solution know that they are obviously seeking Israel’s demise.

Nonetheless, it will become the accepted reality that Israel’s mere existence as a sovereign nation threatens world stability. However, peace and stability are two different animals stemming from different mechanisms. Maintaining stability without the good feelings associated with peace will be far more expensive for the elites. Peering into the still-cloudy future, I see they will choke on their twisted version of reality. Peace could be Israel’s contribution to the Middle East if it were allowed to blossom. Stability will always leave the world balancing on a tightrope.

From this parsing of the concept of submission, we learn that the question of the moment is whether it will be peace or stability. A decisive Israeli victory will give the Gazans a fleeting opportunity to choose peace. Hamas’s fighters know they are walking dead men. How much suffering will they impose on the Gazans before fleeing or submitting?