After the October 7 massacre, it is difficult to calmly reflect on Palestinian strategy and thinking. There is no Israeli who is not affected, no one without family and friends who is suffering from Hamas’ attack, no one, including this author, who is not overwhelmed by concern for relatives or neighbors who are now being drafted into the war.
And yet it is necessary. It is necessary to understand the enemy, the chain of rationalization and habits of mind that produced him and shaped his strategy of brutality.
That enemy, of course, is not the Palestinian people, even though support for terrorist attacks is widespread among Palestinians. The enemy is not necessarily Hamas either, although Hamas is part of it. The enemy is the Palestinian theory of the Israelis, which makes the violence of October 7 appear to many of them as a rational step towards liberation and not, as the Israelis see it, as another in a long line of self-inflicted disasters for them Israeli Palestinian Cause.
The October 7 massacre was not an outlier in Hamas’s long history of brutality; it was his apotheosis. That’s what Hamas would do if it could. On that dark Saturday it suddenly realized it was possible, and it did.
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But the incredible brutality of the terrorists does not mean that the massacre was an emotional act. Palestinian terrorism is rarely chaotic and emotionally motivated. The most horrific examples of this, past suicide bombings or Saturday’s shooting spree and mass kidnapping, are carefully planned and premeditated acts.
The Palestinian strategy of terrorizing Israeli civilians is old, even older than the Israeli conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967. When the PLO was founded in 1964 with the aim of driving Jews out of the country, the West Bank was still controlled by Israel rules Jordan and the Gaza Strip through Egypt. The PLO adopted terrorism as a fundamental strategy for Palestinian liberation not out of anger, but because it had just witnessed the astonishing success of the Algerian National Liberation Front, which used this terrorism to drive the French out of Algeria in 1962.
To illustrate, British troops carry shields at the ready as they advance on a crowd of Arab demonstrators during an uprising in Jerusalem in June 1936. (AP photo)
And it goes back even further. Organized Palestinian violence against the Jews in 1920 and 1929, the so-called Arab Revolt of 1936-39 – all followed the same basic theory: the Jews are an artificial, rootless community that can be eliminated by sustained violence, therefore sustained violence must be used to eliminate them.
This Palestinian vision of Israelis is conveyed to Palestinian children as a fundamental truth of the Palestinian struggle. The contrast between “rooted” Palestine and “artificial” Israel is a major theme of Palestinian identity.
The consequences of this long-standing vision and strategy have been nothing short of devastating for the Palestinians.
What do you want?
Supporters of the Palestinian cause in the West, even as they resent images of parents murdered in front of their children or bodies of babies burned, are now asking a simple question in defense of Hamas: “What would you do if you were confronted with this?” decades of Israel’s Occupation?” They argue that Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza, and the resulting pain and injustice, are the cause of the hatred on display on October 7th.
People gather and light candles in Dizengoff Square in Tel Aviv to remember the victims murdered by Hamas terrorists in southern Israel, October 14, 2023 (Tomer Neuberg/Flash90)
The problem for the Palestinians – and it is a problem with immense consequences for them – is that the vast majority of Israelis disagree. They believe that Hamas would have acted the same way even if the occupation had ended two decades ago. This belief may seem self-serving to outsiders, but it is rooted in a deep and painful experience.
In the fall of 2000, a wave of about 140 suicide attacks began in Israeli cities and towns, killing grandmothers and small children on buses and pizza restaurants and driving the political left from power so completely that it has barely recovered a generation later.
The shocking impact of this mass murder was not only caused by the shock and trauma of the attacks. It was also the timing.
In 2000, the peace process had not yet experienced two decades of stagnation. There were no right-wing extremist parties in the government coalition. Ending the occupation was an idea that won an election. Negotiators at Camp David reportedly discussed shared Israeli-Palestinian sovereignty on the Temple Mount. There were no Israeli soldiers in any Palestinian city or town – they had been withdrawn over the past three years – and Palestinian incomes and higher education rates were rising. Things seemed to be falling into place. Many Israelis assumed that peace was imminent.
The political left had also waged what amounted to an internal political civil war up to this point, seeing their leader assassinated, and winning a hard-fought victory in the 1999 elections to complete the task of peacemaking, and that The result of their efforts was the most brutal and sustained Palestinian attack on Israeli civilians in the country’s history.
So what was this massive, ongoing wave of terror about?
Police and paramedics inspect the crime scene after a suicide bomber blew himself up on a rush-hour bus near Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood during the Second Intifada on June 18, 2002. (Flash90/File)
The Palestinians’ statements only increased anger. Palestinian officials went on Israeli television and told Israelis that the reason for this was then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount shortly before the violence broke out. For the Israeli left, it was worse than no explanation at all. It amounted to telling left-wing Israelis that all their struggles and sacrifices for peace had been built on a foundation of dust and were undone by the first act of right-wing politics that Palestinians found unpleasant. This onslaught of killings was, the Palestinian statement said, inevitable.
Palestinian intellectuals have since offered better answers, including that the violence began as an internal Palestinian uprising against Yasser Arafat’s increasingly tyrannical regime in Ramallah, a sort of harbinger of the Arab Spring in 2011, and was quickly redirected into a campaign by a frightened Arafat became terrorism against Israeli civilians.
But amid the bombings, few Israelis had the bandwidth to think about such complexities.
For them, it was as if all Palestinians had joined the murderous campaign. To recruit hundreds of suicide bombers (about 140 have made it into the Israeli security services; a much larger number have attempted or planned), one needs a recruiting infrastructure, leadership that provides religious and social validation for the attacks, supply networks, laboratories, and Engineers to make the bombs, a basic intelligence apparatus to help the bombers get past the Israeli security forces, as well as bank accounts, safe houses and the like.
And for what? The question has plagued and undermined the Israeli left for a generation.
Would an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank have prevented Hamas’ October 7 attack? Israelis, still living in the shadow of this two-decade-old trauma, don’t believe this. They truly and seriously believe, even among liberal voters, that such a withdrawal would have only created a larger terrorist entity capable of launching a much larger killing spree.
A Hamas video shows Hamas terrorists on motorcycles crossing the breached fence from Gaza into Israel on October 7, 2023. (Youtube screenshot)
And this Israeli belief is the Palestinians’ biggest strategic problem, even if neither their leaders nor their supporters abroad are willing to recognize it.
This belief makes Israelis immune to outside pressure. If the response of Palestinian politics to the Oslo peace process was the mass murder of Israeli civilians, and the reaction of Palestinian politics to the stagnation of the peace process under Benjamin Netanyahu was the mass murder of Israeli civilians, then Israeli politics is not the cause of the Palestinian mass murder Israeli civilians.
While foreign activists threaten Israelis with boycotts if they do not leave the West Bank, Hamas threatens Israelis with murder from any territory they leave. Hamas is louder.
The point is not that this Israeli experience is the objective, comprehensive historical truth, but only that the vast majority of the Israeli Jewish majority believes it and that this belief is strong and rooted in blood-soaked experiences. It has made Israelis immune to both foreign economic pressure and Palestinian violence.
In Israeli thinking, the Palestinian national movement seems to be directed against itself. There is nothing that the Global Campaign for Palestine can do in the Israeli psyche that Hamas’ brutality cannot undo.
Protesters gather in support of Palestinians in Geneva, Switzerland, on October 14, 2023. (Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP)
clarity
Then came Saturday and the death of the Israeli questions. For a moment Israel’s guard let down. Hamas was free to exercise its intentions. This was done with overwhelming clarity and purpose.
It is clear to Israelis that Hamas’s brutal strategy cannot liberate the Palestinians, so they cannot explain the violence as an attempt at liberation. Nor does Hamas bother to make its strategic motives clear to the Israelis, as the Algerian FLN once made clear to the French. It tells them to flee or die, but cannot articulate where to flee.
Israelis are now convinced that the October 7 massacre, in its enormity and astonishing cruelty and, above all, in the joy with which it was carried out, was not a Palestinian miscalculation, for Palestinian independence was not its goal.
The goal on October 7th, as in the fall of 2000, was simply the complete expulsion of Jews from this country.
With clarity comes closure. Israelis are united like never before, and not just because of the horrors perpetrated by Hamas. Your question is finally answered. The brutality they once viewed as a question turned out to be the answer, purpose and goal of much Palestinian politics.
Israeli soldiers carry the body of a person killed in a Hamas attack in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2023. (AP/Erik Marmor)
The ideological roots of Hamas’ brutality strategy can be found in the decolonization movements of the 20th century or in theologies of Islamic renewal. But this story is just background decoration for the main point – that this is a brutality directed against both peace processes and threats of annexation. No peace or retreat will satisfy this impulse or provide protection for Israeli Jews from the kind of ferocious, joyful hatred that was expressed on October 7th.
And this brutality has now become too dangerous to be tolerated.
Hamas does not yet seem to realize the depth of the Israeli public’s resolve. Hamas’s only strategy for survival appears to be to force Israeli forces to cause so much civilian damage in Gaza that the world calls for a halt to the Israeli war machine.
But the images from October 7th will keep Israelis on tenterhooks for a long time. They have their answer, and with it comes a clear sense of purpose that has been missing for the last three decades. The Israeli war machine will be relentless. Hamas will not survive.
A tragedy is about to unfold in Gaza, made worse by the long learning curve Hamas will need to understand the depth of Israel’s resolve. It has deprived Israel of any interest other than its destruction. From Israel’s perspective, Hamas will commit any brutality it can commit. And so he must not be allowed to commit an act ever again.
And at the end of this long, dark road, this may be the only spark of optimism.
Palestinians flee to the southern Gaza Strip after the Israeli army issued an evacuation warning on October 13, 2023 to a population of over 1 million in the northern Gaza Strip and Gaza City to seek refuge in the south before a possible Israeli ground operation could take place . (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)
When Hamas is destroyed, Israel will have finally freed the Palestinian cause from the boundless brutality of its most ardent supporters, from the harrowing albatross of a violent decolonization movement that refuses to understand that its enemy has no colonial motherland to return to, and so on from an addiction to cruelty without purpose or function.
Western supporters of the Palestinians will no longer be forced to justify the targeted massacre of babies in order to protect the Palestinian national movement from itself. And Israeli critics of Israeli policy will be free to focus on Israeli misdeeds without having to answer for Palestinian atrocities, even and especially in times of peacemaking.
A brutalized, embittered Israel will finally free the Palestinians from their own shattered vision of their cause and their enemy, not out of magnanimity but out of Israeli need and pain. The destruction of Hamas alone will not bring peace, but perhaps it is not too optimistic to hope that it can mark the end of Palestine’s long collapse.