Hitler had a plan.
So did Napoleon.
As the underrated military historian Mike Tyson has noted, everybody has a plan.
Until they get punched in the face.
Hamas’ horrific Oct. 7 attack on Israel wasn’t dreamed up overnight.
Iran helped script the mayhem and signed off on the timing, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Documents found on the bodies of dead terrorists indicate a comprehensive agenda of murder and bloodshed mapped out months, even years in advance.
“I’ve never seen this kind of detailed planning,” an Israel Defense Forces official told NBC News.
So it wasn’t a lark.
Someone put a lot of thought into this atrocity.
And viewed one way, the plan was a success.
If the goal was to kill more than a thousand Israelis and kidnap hundreds back to Gaza, then Hamas should be satisfied with its weekend of dirty work.
But it’s worth asking what Hamas and its Iranian puppet masters hoped all this savagery would achieve in the long run.
Because they’ll almost certainly end up getting more than they planned for.
Osama bin Laden thought he could chase the United States out of the Middle East with a single sucker punch.
He made a big mess, but now he’s gone.
Uncle Sam still has his toes in the sand. That wasn’t in the plan.
In 1948, the Arab states tried to strangle Israel in its infancy.
When the dust settled, the Jewish state controlled more territory than the United Nations had granted it.
After 1967’s Six-Day War, Israel gained control of the Sinai peninsula, Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and much of the Golan Heights.
The Yom Kippur War of 1973 started like the current conflict, with a surprise Arab invasion of Israel on a holiday coinciding with the sabbath.
It ended the way previous attempts to extinguish Israel did — in total Arab military humiliation.
The lesson couldn’t be clearer: When you pick a fight with Israel, chances are you’re going to lose.
Follow along with The Post’s live blog for the latest on Hamas’ attack on Israel
The monsters who drew up the plans to butcher Israeli babies surely didn’t expect Israel to react by jumping into the sea.
Hamas must have known a massive counterpunch was guaranteed.
So we can assume that’s what they’re hoping for.
But why?
To what end?
Israel has counterpunched Hamas before, but always while keeping its cool.
Targets were surgically selected for military value and to minimize civilian casualties.
Operations were limited and focused on degrading Hamas’ ability to terrorize Israelis.
Unlike its enemies, and contrary to US campus opinion, Israel distinguishes between soldiers and civilians.
The plan this time was to shock a modern, pluralistic, democratic society into losing its mind, to make the Israeli public crazy with rage, to show them videos of Hamas terrorists smiling as they massacred ravers in the desert.
The plan was to arouse the animal instinct for revenge.
You don’t have to be Mike Tyson to know that no plan survives contact with the enemy.
Israel is mobilizing for war and its generals have their own plans now.
Those involve removing Hamas from the chessboard — forever.
Some say the best option for Israel is to go the other way — to flummox Hamas and its Iranian sugar daddies by not giving them what they want, which is an ugly ground war in Gaza that a well-oiled propaganda machine can use to play the sympathetic global media like a rebab.
That’s like saying the best way to handle Donald Trump is to ignore him — fine in theory, but the provocations will continue until he gets the response he’s looking for.
Nobody knows how this will end.
But the way the Israelis and their American allies are talking, I wouldn’t plan on them going wobbly.
“No country can or would tolerate the slaughter of its citizens or simply return to the conditions that allowed it to take place,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday in Tel Aviv.
“Israel has the right — indeed, the obligation — to defend itself and to ensure that this never happens again.”
If that wasn’t clear enough, the arrival of a pair of American carrier-strike groups in the eastern Mediterranean should get the message across.
America will help Israel destroy Hamas.
That’s the plan anyway.
Things could go wrong.
They often do.
Matthew Hennessey is deputy op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
