October 7: A Grim Anniversary

[Prefatory Note: Anadolu Agency RAF text on Oct 7; further reflections] 

October 7: A Grim Anniversary

Israel has long been renowned for its ability to shape public discourse

pertaining to its behavior toward the Palestinians, particularly in the West.

Its greatest triumph is undoubtedly the manner with which it managed the

media treatment of its response to October 7 in North America and Europe. Israel’s response was depicted as purely a matter of defensive security against Palestinian terrorists who staged an unprovoked and barbaric surprise attack by Hamas. This public distortion of the event gave the Western governments the political space needed to justify their closed eyes military, diplomatic, and intelligence support of Israel while genocide daily unfolded in Gaza.

This political manipulation of this incident in the long struggle between Israel and Palestine has several different dimensions. Above all, it absolutizes October 7 to create the false impression that peace and quiet prevailed in Gaza until ruptured by this vicious Hamas attack on Israeli villages and civilians gathered for a dance festival. The actual context from a Palestinian point of view couldn’t have been more different, and more objective.

The entire population of Gaza was living under a repressive occupation since the 1967 War as abetted by a punitive blockade imposed in 2007 that caused a steady and deliberate deterioration in the quality of Gaza civilian life that was already one of hardship, danger, and abuse. It is also worth remembering that Hamas was cajoled by Washington to give up armed struggle and pursue its goals by political means to avoid the stigma of its terrorist listing. In this spirit Hamas took part in the Gaza elections of 2006, which it was expected to lose. When it surprised Israel and the US by its success in these internationally monitored elections the result was not welcomed in Tel Aviv, which used its influence in Washington, to keep Hamas in a terrorist box, and the rest is history culminating in the genocidal assault of the past year.

But the history might have been different. Hamas for its part after its electoral success, reinforced by ousting Fatah from its leadership role in Gaza, resorted to diplomacy, seeking a political compromise with Israel reinforced by a long-term ceasefire of up to 50 years, which Israel refused to consider, much less take seriously. This gave Hamas little choice but to surrender its political rights, above all the right to self-determination, or resume its earlier posture of resistance by the means at its disposal.  

Further, from the first day that the extremist Netanyahu far right coalition took over the governance of Israel at the start of 2023 it proclaimed a ‘new Middle East’ which in a map exhibited by Netanyahu just weeks before October 7 erased Palestine. Even then, its main tactic in Gaza was the 2018 nonviolent ‘right of return’ movement, which Israel met at its borders with lethal violence again narrowing Hamas’ choices to surrender or armed struggle. This was a poignant moment when we take account of the fact that 75% of Gaza’s 2.3 milllion inhabitants were refugees or their descendants of the 1948 Nakba.

This course of development is consistent with the Western management of the October 7 event.  First, the early Israeli news releases that greatly exaggerated the atrocities attributed to Hamas were dutifully spread around the world by political leaders and echoed by a compliant media. But more than this, the complete absence of self-scrutiny involving the obvious lapse of Israeli border security helped shift exclusive responsibility to the attackers. This pattern gave rise to suspicions because of widespread reports of reliable warnings given personally to Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders in the days and months before October 7. In light of this it seems highly improbable that the impending Hamas attack was unknown to Israeli intelligence, likely supplemented by surveillance capabilities that could not have missed the training and rehearsals that almost openly preceded the attack.

Finally, it should not be forgotten that in the background of October 7 was the flagrant official greenlighting of settler violence that became part of the West Bank foreground after the attack. In the last days of August Israel unleashed a devastating Gaza-style military campaign so far focused on the West Bank cities of Jenin and Tulkarm.

When October 7 is contextualized, Israeli motivations for a genocidal response become

more plausible. The Hamas attack provided Israel with a pretext for genocide, and increasingly supported an interpretation of this severe violence as ethnic cleansing that should be understood as a prelude to land-grabbing, which helps us understand that the West Bank was always part of the theater of Israel’s military operation. In this sense, interpreters should take a hard look at October 9 (the day that Israel’s response began) if they want to grasp the significance of October 7. Currently, this exposure of ethnic cleansing realities is obscured by an obsessive Western media focus on the tragic fate of Israeli hostages while the larger scenario of Netanyahu extremism evolves beneath the radar.

All along Israel could not have addressed the Hamas challenge as one of pure terrorism without unwavering US and European support, no matter what the human costs and the reputational damage to Western global leadership. To the extent countered, it has been from Islamic sources, centering on Iran but including Hezbollah and the Houthis as active allies of Hamas. October 7 so perceived activated the larger conflict between the West and political Islam, with the Palestinian squeezed between, and for the last year victimized by the worst genocide since the Holocaust.

Among the many unfortunate consequences of the past year has been to weaken gravely the war and genocide prevention reputations of the UN. By ignoring the near unanimous rulings of the juridically respected International Court of Justice, the West showed its contempt for the authority of international law if it clashed with strategic interests. The contrast between insisting on the sanctity of international law in the Ukraine context and its complicity in the Gaza genocide exhibited both double standards and moral hypocrisy. A positive development, including in the Western countries supporting Israel, has been the civil society pro-Palestinian activism that is challenging the disregard of international law and human decency by the Western governments.

Let us hope that the year ahead brings peace and justice to the Palestinian people, the entire region, and the other 50 armed combat realties around the world. 

Tags: Gaza, genocide, ICJ, international law, Israel, October 7, Palestine, Politics