Thoughts on Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel
Dear friends,
We have all been stunned by what has happened since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel—which included the killing of many Israeli civilians: An atrocity and a war crime—and the Israeli government's response, for which civilians living in the Gaza Strip have paid dearly. In this Substack installment, I try to take stock of what has occurred, to put recent events in wider context, and to explore what they imply for finding a way out of the endless cycle of violence in which Israelis and Palestinians have been trapped for decades.
As always, your thoughts are welcome. This crisis has aroused strong feelings, and for understandable reasons, but let us keep such exchanges we do have civil, if only to set an example at a time when civility has become a rarity.
Photo: Flickr
No reasonable person could expect Israel’s leaders to sit on their hands following Hamas’s October 7 attack, which took the lives of 1,400 people, mostly civilians. Some protests organized to highlight the undeniable suffering of Palestinians under the Israeli occupation have valorized Hamas’s assault as legitimate resistance. That is morally obtuse: the premeditated murder of civilians is an atrocity, as many Palestinians, including Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority, have declared.
Besides, though Hamas claims to represent the interests of Gaza’s two million people—never mind that it has not allowed a single election for any post since 2007—it has now put the enclave’s civilian lives in jeopardy. They stand exposed to Israel’s relentless airstrikes and embargo on basic supplies—and to a looming IDF ground offensive.
Still, military retaliation by Israel, while justified, must distinguish between Hamas’s crimes and the rest of Gaza’s population, which the ban on basic supplies has singularly failed to do. Hamas’s killing of Israeli civilians cannot excuse, and certainly does not require, the collective punishment of Gaza’s entire population. Nor is there any benefit to the United States in condoning Israel’s decision to take this step.
The question, then, is not whether an Israeli retaliation is rightful but whether it can be proportional and just, to the extent possible, in means, ends, and scope. If it fails on those fronts, even if the IDF achieves Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declared goal of destroying Hamas altogether, the depth of Gazans’ ill will toward Israel will deepen, eventually enabling the rise of Hamas-like entities.
Israel faces additional dilemmas.
An all-out IDF offensive aimed at obliterating Hamas, assuming that’s achievable, will entail a prolonged campaign that will inevitably kill even more civilians in Gaza. It’s safe to assume that in murdering Israeli civilians, Hamas anticipated and prepared for an IDF invasion. Hamas may lose in the end, but the IDF will find that waging war in a dense urban setting, one that Hamas knows intimately and in which it has built a network of deep underground tunnels, proves to be a bloody business that claims the lives of many Israeli soldiers. As excellent a fighting force as the IDF is, it has never undertaken a campaign like this.
Moreover, even if the IDF limits itself to eradicating the upper echelons of Hamas’s political and military leadership, even that more measured campaign could morph into an extended war if it runs into resistance more fierce and cunning than anticipated. As the saying goes, no plan survives contact with the enemy: an adversary does not lack agency and may respond in unanticipated ways that derail even the most carefully-plotted plan.
Plus, the longer the war lasts, the greater the risk of unforeseen consequences, such as its spread to other parts of the Middle East, or even the fall of Arab leaders friendly to Israel under the weight of massive protests, which, sparked by Gazans’ worsening plight, embrace larger objectives, as did the demonstrations that erupted during the Arab Spring.
If Israel achieves either objective—destroying Hamas or eliminating its top-level leaders—it may have to choose between forming an alternative government, without which Gaza will devolve into chaos, an outcome that will scarcely make Israel more secure, or occupying a population that is even more resentful and hostile. The bloodier the IDF’s military operation, the more difficult it will be for Israel to find Gazans who are willing to fill the political void produced by Hamas’s demise. Israel could walk away after victory, but Israeli success could produce violent anarchy whose consequences spill beyond Gaza and unavoidably, given geographical circumstances, affect Israel.
There is, in short, no military solution to the problem Israel faces in Gaza.
Indeed, the horrors of October 7 demonstrated the failure of Israel’s “mowing the lawn” strategy for managing the Palestinians: maintaining the blockade of Gaza initiated in 2007, retaliating against Hamas’s intermittent rocket fire, and policing and increasing settlements on the West Bank. The right-wing governments that have ruled Israel since 2000 have adopted that approach; but it cannot work—unless Israelis are willing to endure endless cycles of violence, including some gruesome incidents, even if they are not as horrific as the most recent one.
A political settlement that addresses Palestinian aspirations is the only way out of a dead-end status quo. President Biden’s call on October 25 for resuming talks on a two-state solution in effect recognized this and ought to be welcomed.
Israel cannot of course negotiate with Hamas or any likeminded successor movement that seeks its destruction. But it does have a partner in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority, whose leaders recognized Israel in 1988, renounced violence, and pursued, between 1993 and 2000, talks toward the creation of a Palestinian state. Those negotiations failed for complicated reasons, though the commonplace narrative that Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat a full-fledged Palestinian state in the West Bank but was spurned, is not accurate, as Clayton Swisher shows in his book The Truth About Camp David. But past failures ought not to preclude renewed efforts facilitated by a mutually acceptable mediator.
That the negotiator will face a complicated, politically-volatile problem. A patchwork of settlements now exists on the West Bank, and the pace of construction, which was not halted even during the years when diplomacy aimed at a two-state solution was underway, has accelerated in recent years. Today, the settler population totals about 500,000. Moreover, far-right members of the current Israeli government want to increase the number to one million. Uprooting the settlers will prove incomparably more difficult than Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s 2005 dismantling of the settlements in Gaza, which had a population of only 9,000. Besides, the West Bank has a historical and religious significance for Israeli Jews that Gaza never did.
Furthermore, finessing the status of East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians will seek as the capital of any future state, will require artful diplomacy. Jerusalem, east and west, was declared Israel’s capital city under legislation the Knesset passed in 1980.
None of this can be feasible while Israel remains gripped by fear, sorrow, and anger. But in time, perhaps, a political realignment could emerge that makes renewed dialogue with Palestinian leaders possible. True, support within Israel for a two-state deal had fallen sharply even before the October 7 attack, but there remain Israelis and Palestinians committed to a negotiated peace; neither community is a political monolith.
Many violent and protracted conflicts once seemed set in stone—think of Northern Ireland—but were eventually settled. We must hope that the one between Israelis and the Palestinians isn’t an exception because only a diplomatic breakthrough can marginalize extremism and end the long-running bloodshed. The United States is in a unique position to serve as mediator given its special relationship with Israel, but the question is whether it can, using carrots and sticks, induce Israel to take the hard decisions needed for a viable Palestinian State on the West Bank while also nudging.
But all this is for the future. In the meantime, there are immediate steps that Hamas and Israel can take to ease the plight of civilians. Hamas should release all Israeli civilians it has taken hostage—without preconditions and all in one go, not in installments. Israel, for its part, should suspend its relentless bombing campaign (6,000 bombs were dropped on the Gaza Strip by October 14 alone according to the Israeli Air Force) directed at a highly urbanized, small enclave with a high population density in order to allow humanitarian aid to flow unhindered through the Rafah crossing point separating Gaza and Egypt. (Israel and Egypt can establish a verification regime, on the Egyptian side of the checkpoint, to ensure that no war-related material enters Gaza.) Israel could also suspend the bombing to create the conditions needed for the inflow and distribution of humanitarian assistance.
These are small steps for sure—but scarcely insignificant ones for the civilians, Israelis and Gaza’s Palestinians, whose lives have been turned inside out since October 7.