What Was Possible Before October 7th, and What Remains Possible Now

Last October 7th, Hamas fighters stormed into Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing more than twelve hundred people. One year later, the Middle East is in its most precarious state in at least a generation: Israel’s response has killed more than forty-one thousand Palestinians in Gaza; state and settler violence against Palestinians has ramped up in the occupied West Bank; Israel has invaded Lebanon, where it is battling Hezbollah; and Israel and Iran remain on the brink of all-out war.

To talk about what might be next for the region, I recently spoke by phone with the Palestinian writer and scholar Yezid Sayigh, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Malcolm H. Kerr Middle East Center, and an expert on the Israeli- Palestinian conflict and Lebanese politics. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Hamas misjudged Israel’s response to October 7th, whether Israel has done any long-term planning beyond its military actions, and what the war in Gaza has revealed about international law.

How are you thinking about the past year in a larger historical context?

The first thing is that much of the Israeli response has been driven since Day One by Benjamin Netanyahu’s domestic political calculations, ie, how to retain office, which ensures him protection against prosecution on corruption charges. And that has meant retaining his coalition with far-right partners. That has clearly been privileged in his discourse, and in his political behavior and decisions.

The second thing is that military strategy and ultimately political strategy have evolved from at first being fundamentally reactive to the initial Hamas attack, from the imperative to restore Israeli deterrence and to punish Hamas. This always lacked a political end goal. And I think the Israeli political and military leadership have never resolved that particular problem of defining a meaningful end goal. This government has committed itself, in other words, to preventing Palestinian statehood and a meaningful political process with the Palestinians.

Pursuing military action in the absence of a coherent political goal has created its own momentum, and its own dynamic. And Israel has ended up with some kind of a more evolved political-military strategy. We now see this in action in Lebanon, in the war against Hezbollah, with various extensions attacking the Houthis in Yemen, and potentially attacking Iran. This evolution is interesting because, on the one hand, it’s clearly highly ambitious. Netanyahu now speaks of not only total victory against Hezbollah the way he spoke of total victory against Hamas but of redesigning the Middle East and creating a new regional order. And this reminds us of the exact kind of wording that Ariel Sharon used back in 1982, when, as defense minister, he oversaw the invasion of Lebanon.

It sounds like, in your view, Israel’s response has been almost inertial. That’s striking. In the past, you have talked about Israeli behavior—in regard to settlements, for example—as much more planned and thought through.

Exactly. You’re right in bringing up the grand settlement design for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which has been in place for decades. The current political-military strategy is emerging, but it’s not one that was pre-thought-out, or pre-determined. It’s emerging in the course of waging conflict. It’s driven by Netanyahu’s narrow, parochial, domestic political calculations, driven by messianism and, frankly, the fascistic and often genocidal outlook of his more extreme right-wing partners. It’s acquiring the appearance of something that is grand and thought-out, but it’s more grandiose than grand. Israel still doesn’t actually have a clear and coherent political end goal. It’s like dressing a Christmas tree. You add all the baubles and so on, and then you suddenly recognize, “Oh, we’ve got a Christmas tree.”

In March, you said that Hamas was “nihilistic” and suffering from a “delusion” about October 7th causing some huge regional war, with a mass uprising against Israel. Surely this isn’t exactly how Hamas intended it, but regional war seems closer now. Can you talk more about what you meant?

I have yet to figure out, to my own satisfaction, what I think Hamas was aiming for, or what they thought they were doing. Because there are so many contradictory indications, starting with the initial call by (Hamas military commander) Mohammed Deif, in an audio message, calling on Palestinians everywhere to rise up, inviting Arab armies to enter into the fray. You have to think there’s some delusion there—when you look at the realities of Palestinian populations, whether in the West Bank or East Jerusalem or citizens of Israel, let alone in Syria, where they were brutalized—to expect people to rise up, let alone Arab armies that are under the clear control of their governments. To even think of this, even from a purely propagandistic point of view, is troubling. I’m not sure what adjective to use there.

But the other thing I try to grasp is why Hamas paid so little attention to the question of insuring that its fighters inflicted minimal damage on civilians in Southern Israel. And by that I mean civilians or non-combatants, in the sense of soldiers who were unarmed or had been taken prisoner, or people who might’ve been reservists but were attending a music festival—in all these cases these were people who, under international humanitarian law and the laws of war, should have been protected. And I still can’t for the life of me work out whether any sort of plan was made, or whether (Hamas leader Yahya) Sinwar and Deif simply didn’t care, or were quite knowingly and deliberately pursuing maximum shock effect through the targeting of large numbers of civilians.

I’ve entered into many conversations with Palestinians and Lebanese and others, especially in the early weeks after October 7th, where there’s this bizarre sequence of pushback from them. They say, “Do you really believe civilians were killed?” And I’d explain why I did believe it. And then the question will be, “Well, so you really believe those were the numbers?” And I’d explain why I believe those were the numbers. And then you get the final response, which is, “Well, they were all settlers anyway.” And it’s, like, well, if that’s what you believe, then why get into a discussion about whether civilians were killed or not, since in your view you don’t regard them as civilians and you don’t believe it matters. And this is the kind of logic, of course, you hear among Israelis who regard all Palestinians as guilty, none of them are innocent, and it’s even moral to starve them to death. We’ve heard this from such a wide range of Israeli political and military people.

Sinwar is promoted by his biographers, foreign and Palestinian, as knowing the Israeli enemy so well. How he could possibly have thought that killing civilians in such large numbers, or failing to protect them from wild behavior by his own fighters or allied fighters, would help any negotiating position is beyond me.