Why the Hamas-ISIS Comparison is Appropriate

These are important differences to bear in mind when waging war against Hamas.  But they do not detract from the fundamental likeness that merited the analogy in the first place.  By slaughtering Israeli civilians, Jewish, Arab, Arab-Jewish, and a host of others, Hamas demonstrated an ideological zeal comparable if not identical to ISIS.  Hamas fighters not only murdered families in horrific fashion, but live-streamed their actions, called family members to brag about how many Jews they killed, and generally relished in the gore of their conduct.  Hamas is like ISIS insofar as it is an organization that cannot live peacefully with its Jewish neighbor.  It is like ISIS because it is genocidal in intention.  It is like ISIS because it relishes in bloodshed.  This fundamental similarity justifies Israel’s stated objective to destroy Hamas.  In this interpretation, Hamas and ISIS are alike not so much because they share a theological orientation (they do not), but because they both became what scholar Glenn E. Robinson calls “movements of rage.”