Was Hamas’s breakout attack on Israel justified? This latest attempt — surely the last-ditch, last-bullet, last-chance lashing-out of an exhausted people to awaken the world to their plight — was it right?

Every progressive commentator I read, while bemoaning Israeli counterattacks, is careful to emphasize that he or she holds no truck with the indiscriminate violence that Hamas wrought in Israel in the first days of their attack. And certainly it is lamentable. But I wonder: would anything less have put the Palestinian Problem back on the front page? The attack shoved the Ukraine War to Page 5 below the fold. It brought President Biden, cue cards in hand, dashing in from Washington to urge restraint. It got European parliamentarians shouting into microphones about Israeli cruelty — which everyone has known about for fifty years.

Attacks by Islamic terrorists in Europe didn’t do that. Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen had no impact. Flowery statements of solidarity from Arab capitals come and go like gusts of rain. Their moth-ridden solidarity — little more than grandstanding for the home crowd — hasn’t amounted to a hill of beans.

And Hamas’s attack isn’t going to move Palestine toward statehood either. For the Israelis remain in control. Overtly or covertly, they will pound the rebels down, promise them statehood with right hand raised and left-hand fingers crossed, and then continue their quiet onslaught: a gaggle of rock-throwers here, a couple more settlements there, and over yonder another street of Jerusalem added to their map. They have the American political class in their pocket and what counts of the European as well. And what China or the United Nations or the Pope might say is but a pebble in their pond.

For they have outmaneuvered and outgunned the Palestinians right from the start. As John le Carré said through his master terrorist in “The Little Drummer Girl”:

‘“Tayeh, my friend, we Palestinians are very lazy people in our exile. Why do we have no Palestinians in the Pentagon? In the State Department? Why are we not yet running the New York Times, Wall Street, the CIA? Why are we not making Hollywood movies about our great struggle, getting ourselves elected Mayor of New York, head of the Supreme Court? What is wrong with us, Tayeh? Why are we without enterprise? It is not enough that our people become doctors, scientists, schoolmasters. Why do we not run America as well? Is it because of this that we have to use bombs and machine guns?”’

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Nor have Palestinians gained substantial leverage in Arab capitals. Unless attacked first, are Iranians going to risk an Israeli nuclear attack for Palestinian statehood? No. Will Egyptians fight another war? No: a single Israeli bombing attack on the Aswan Dam would finish them. Garden-variety militias will fire their rockets, Hezbollah will make a good show, but no Arab president is going to go down the line for Palestinians. If just two or three oil and gas producers threatened to withhold exports to the West until the two-state vision was implemented, the issue could be settled in a day. Decades and decades on, Palestinians are still waiting.

Nor have they done any better with the media. The Spanish public-television newcast that I watch is one more sheep in the media pen, and its newscast the other day gave five full minutes of airtime to throwing dirt on the idea that Israel was responsible for the attack on al-Ahli Arab Christian Hospital in Gaza. A child could see through that malarkey. As Jonathan Cook wrote, a missile that loud, that fast, and that powerful did not come from the soldering shed of a Hamas missile artist.

Nor will the hostages taken by Hamas give the Israelis much pause. According to the Israeli Air Force, their airplanes have dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza in the past week. Clearly, the government considers the hostages a nuisance and has consigned their loss to same class as those of their soldiers.

But even if the Israelis gave in to Palestinian demands for an end to the blockade of Gaza and so on, even signing some new agreement, what is the likely result? Agreements are just so much confetti for Israelis; ask Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. As soon as the news organizations drifted away to other bloodshed, the implacable Israelis would be back at their slow strangulation of their captives and robbery of their lands — enough to maintain momentum, not enough to make headlines. They would find and finance a new militia in Gaza, or take control of whatever authority the U.N. set up. Arab leaders, now catching a new wind in their sails with the rise of the Russia-China union, would breathe a sigh of relief that they needn’t sacrifice blood and budget in a war for the luckless Palestinians.

In short, the Palestinians have lost their struggle. There is no fanatic, no cruelty like those inspired by religion, and that is what they are up against: a people that believes — yes, it’s true — that they have a God-given right to lands taken from them two thousand years ago. They don’t give a hoot what others think of them, what trouble they foist on friends and enemies, what money they need to spend or what rules they need to break. They will get their sacred lands come hell, high water, outbreaks of Arab rage, or hand-wringing in the West. Their nuclear arsenal is the very symbol of their obsession.

That is the context in which I see Hamas’s attack. I place it in a category with Operation Valkyrie, the Warsaw Uprising, and The Alamo: angry, for-the-hell-of-it attempts by brave people who can see success smirking at them from the top of a sheer cliff.

The punchline is that Hamas’s attempt might set off the war that really would end all wars.