There comes a moment in every lost war when language becomes the last weapon standing. The ammunition runs out, the front lines collapse, and all that remains is the communiqué. This week offered a textbook example.
Hamas announced the dissolution of its government in Gaza. The head of its administrative committee submitted his resignation. The keys to the enclave were handed over to a technocratic committee formed by the Board of Peace established by Donald Trump, under the watchful eye of a United Nations observer taking notes.
Then the movement’s spokesman emerged to explain that all of this was merely “proof of seriousness” and a way of “removing the occupation’s pretexts.” What remarkable ingenuity.
After two decades of governing through force, tunnels, and armed rule, the project ends with one bureaucrat resigning and official seals being transferred to another group of bureaucrats based in Cairo because they are themselves barred from entering the territory they are supposedly set to govern. And we are expected to believe this marks another chapter in the Hamas narrative of “divine victory.”
An Innocent Question for the Cheerleaders
Where are they now? Where is the chorus of self-styled strategists who have filled television studios and social media platforms since October 2023, assuring audiences that Israel was “finished” and that the Al-Aqsa Flood operation had rewritten history?
Where are the gurus of “strategic awareness” who insisted that wholesale destruction was not a defeat but merely a sophisticated form of attrition?
There comes a moment in every lost war when language becomes the last weapon standing. The ammunition runs out, the front lines collapse, and all that remains is the communiqué.
Perhaps they can answer a simple question: How does surrendering political power – the movement’s only tangible prize from its 2007 takeover of Gaza – to a committee created under White House auspices amount to victory?
The answer is predictable because we have heard it all before. Many times before.
The Archive of Victorious Defeats
The Middle East possesses perhaps the richest archive in the world of redefining defeat as something else.
In June 1967, Ahmed Said, the famous Egyptian radio announcer, proclaimed over the airwaves that enemy aircraft were falling “like flies,” even as Egypt’s air force was being destroyed on the runway. The planes did not fall. The Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank did. But the communiqué emerged victorious.
In 2003, Iraqi Minister of Information Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf stood atop buildings in Baghdad proclaiming that the “infidels” were being slaughtered at the city’s gates, even as American tanks appeared in the background of the very images being broadcast. He became an object of global satire, yet his school of political communication never closed. If anything, it appears to have opened a new branch in Gaza.
Even beyond the region, when Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender in 1945, he could not bring himself to utter the word “surrender.” Instead, he told his people that the war had developed “not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” Two atomic bombs. An empire in ruins. All of it merely “not necessarily to our advantage.”
At least he showed a measure of linguistic restraint.
Here, surrender itself is presented as “a responsible step toward reorganizing internal affairs.” Nor should we forget Hassan Nasrallah’s notorious admission that Hezbollah would not have kidnapped an Israeli soldier “had I known ” what a disaster would ensue – perhaps the only genuinely candid admission to emerge after the 2006 war before it was swiftly buried beneath the rhetoric of “divine victory.” Within this political tradition, acknowledging error is treated as an unfortunate slip of the tongue. For them, admitting a mistake is a slip of the tongue; the destruction they cause is something to defend, embrace and turn into doctrine.
Nearly two thousand years ago, the Roman historian Tacitus placed these words in the mouth of the Caledonian leader Calgacus, resisting Rome’s conquest of Britain: “They create a desert and call it peace.”
Political Islam has refined the formula. It devastates its own land – and then calls it victory.
Dissecting “Absolute Seriousness”
Consider the resignation statement. It declares that “all administrative and legal arrangements for the transfer of authority” have been completed and that government employees stand ready to continue their work “under the responsibility of the national committee and in accordance with its directives.”
An organization that places itself above the state cannot acknowledge defeat because defeat is not merely a military outcome; it is a theological crisis.
Translated from the language of official statements into the language of politics, the meaning is simple: The movement that once proclaimed “victory or martyrdom” has discovered a third option absent from its literature – “or the committee.”
The organization that presented Gaza as a sacrifice to Tehran’s regional axis, and whose supporters insisted its war would pave the road to Jerusalem, now hands responsibility for garbage collection, border crossings, and public-sector salaries to a U.S.-backed technocratic body.
A project that once claimed to stand above the state, above geography, and above political calculation now operates under the supervision of a United Nations observer attending handover meetings.
Even this “historic concession” has convinced no one. An Israeli official dismissed the move as meaningless deception because the central question – the movement’s weapons – remains unresolved.
In other words, Hamas relinquished the authority it had already lost beneath the rubble while retaining the weapons that produced the rubble in the first place. That is not the removal of pretexts. It is the deliberate preservation of the only pretext that still matters.
The Structure Remains Unchanged
Those familiar with this ideological tradition will find nothing surprising here. An organization that places itself above the state cannot acknowledge defeat because defeat is not merely a military outcome; it is a theological crisis. To admit it would mean admitting that the supreme leadership was wrong, that lives were squandered in vain, and that the slogans sold to followers were fundamentally fraudulent.
Reality therefore requires revision. Withdrawal becomes “tactical.” Surrender becomes “internal reorganization.” Relinquishing authority becomes “removing pretexts.” Total devastation becomes “legendary steadfastness.”
States hold leaders accountable after military defeats. Ideological movements punish those who dare describe them as defeats. That is the essential distinction between the logic of the state and the logic of the movement – and it is a distinction for which Gaza has paid the full price, in blood and ruin, over the past two decades.
A Cold Conclusion
In politics, as in accounting, numbers do not flatter. You governed for twenty years. You chose the timing of the war. You lost power. The territory was devastated.
Your only remaining bargaining chip is the weapon, sitting on a negotiating table managed jointly by your adversaries and the mediators. In every political lexicon on earth, that is called defeat. Its defenders may choose other words – “a phase,” “a maneuver,” “a deferred victory.” Language is patient, and paper can absorb almost anything.
History, unlike a press release, issues no revised edition. It will simply record that the movement that promised a flood ultimately handed over the keys to a committee.
And that Ahmed Said and Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf finally found successors worthy of their school.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MBN’s editorial stance.
