Bob Dole, a thrice-decorated veteran of World War II who served in the Senate for 30 years, and was the Republican presidential nominee in 1996, died on Sunday at the age of ninety-eight. Among the causes to which he was deeply committed was the plight of Soviet Jewry, as Jacob Kornbluh recounts. At a 1987 rally, with Natan Sharansky and other refusenik leaders present—and just before Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in the U.S. for arms-control talks—Dole spoke vigorously on behalf of those Jews still trapped behind the iron curtain. (Video, four minutes.)

There is another reason, I think, that the anti-Hamas demonstrations are gaining momentum, and that is the IDF’s decision to target both Hamas military commanders and members of the civilian government. By picking off the latter, it is undermining Hamas’s ability to govern, and showing that it is serious not just about achieving battlefield successes, but about ending Hamas rule in Gaza. Alas, many in the West still cling to the idea, propagated in the press for decades, that Hamas and similar groups have military and political “wings” that are entirely separate. Khaled Abu Toameh comments:

President Donald Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, said last week that he does not rule out the possibility that the Iran-backed Palestinian terror group Hamas could be politically active in the Gaza Strip after it disarms. . . . This assumption, of course, is untrue and misleading.

There is no difference between a Hamas political leader and a military commander. They all share the same extremist ideology, which does not recognize Israel’s right to exist and calls for destroying it through jihad.

Put differently, it’s not just the means employed by Hamas (terrorism, mass murder, rape, kidnapping) that are evil, but the ends as well. And that brings us back to why undermining it politically—whether done by the IDF or by Palestinian protesters—is necessary:

Hamas’s political leaders are aware that they will not be able to play any role in the Gaza Strip without the presence of their armed wing. The military wing of Hamas is crucial for the survival of the group’s political leadership. The political leaders need the military wing to control the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, as they have been doing since their violent coup there in 2007.