Real lessons of Oct. 7 must not be ignored
The first anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacres in southern Israel adds yet another sacred date to a calendar already filled with those devoted to mourning tragedies in Jewish history. But the pain is fresh from this most recent instance of Jewish suffering.
The war against Islamist terrorists that began last Oct. 7 is ongoing with hostilities against Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon. And more than 100 of the hostages taken are still unaccounted for or continue to be held captive by Palestinian terrorists.
In Israel, much of the commentary will focus, as it has in the previous 365 days, on pinning responsibility for the massive failure on the part of Israel’s military, intelligence and political establishments that allowed the catastrophe to unfold. But the post-mortems shouldn’t be limited to how and why Hamas was able to breach the border so easily, setting in motion a day of horror that was the worst instance of mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
Both in Israel and in the Diaspora, the discussion about what happened must also include broader misconceptions that not only helped bring about this epic disaster but that might conceivably allow it to be repeated in the future. That’s especially true in the United States, where public discussion of the war on Hamas continues to center on myths that should have been rejected long ago.
‘Solution’ tried and failed
Belief in the idea of a two-state solution to the conflict evaporated in Israel in the wake of the collapse of the 1993 Oslo Accords with the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, which brought nearly five years of suicide bombings into every realm of Israeli civilian life.
The two-state concept was once embraced by a majority of Israelis amid the euphoria that ensued when those accords were signed on the White House Lawn in September 1993. But the once-dominant Israeli parties on the left were destroyed when the Palestinians — then led by the arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat, head of the PLO — proved they regarded them as merely a stepping stone to the destruction of the Jewish state.
That point was made even clearer after 2005 when then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew every Israeli settlement, settler and soldier from Gaza in a vain effort to “disengage” from the Palestinians. Some on the left, especially in the United States and Europe, cling to the lie that Gaza was nevertheless still “occupied” by Israel or an “open-air prison.”
The Strip might have been transformed — with the help of the billions in Western foreign aid — into a Palestinian Singapore; instead, it was taken over by Hamas in 2007, which turned it into a terrorist fortress.
More to the point, it was, for those 16 years until Oct. 7, an independent Palestinian state in all but name. As such, it was an experiment that demonstrated what a two-state solution that encompassed the far larger and more strategic Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) would mean.
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In the years following the Hamas takeover, I took part in dozens of public debates with a liberal colleague, former Forward editor JJ Goldberg, about the two-state solution and related issues.
When I would point out that most Israelis regarded the idea of repeating Sharon’s Gaza experiment in Judea and Samaria as not so much ill-advised but madness, he would invariably respond that his sources in Israel’s intelligence community disagreed. They were sure, he said, that the various efforts at “mowing the grass” — a term that referred to Israel’s periodic efforts to degrade Hamas’ military capabilities with offensive operations in 2009, 2012, 2014, 2019 and 2021, demonstrated that even a terrorist-controlled Palestinian state was no real threat to Israel.
The events of Oct. 7 proved just how wrong they were.
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Yet none of this seems to have penetrated the consciousness of the American foreign-policy establishment.
While there are individual Palestinians who may believe in the idea of peace with Israel, they are isolated and overwhelmingly outnumbered by supporters of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the so-called “moderates” of the Fatah party (whose nearly 89-year-old leader Mahmoud Abbas serves as the head of the Palestinian Authority). They have all made it clear over and over again in their organizational charters, statements and rejection of every effort at a compromise peace plan over the decades that they deny the legitimacy of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders might be drawn.
Only relevant debate
To Israelis and those elsewhere who have been paying attention to Palestinian rejectionism, this is nothing new. Post-Oct. 7, belief in the myth that the conflict can be solved by partitioning the country beggars the imagination.
The point of the mass terror attack wasn’t to end the “occupation” of a coastal enclave that had been evacuated by Israelis 18 years earlier or to push for a withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. It represented a Palestinian desire to turn back the clock to 1947 or even 1917 and destroy the State of Israel, even within the borders that existed before 1967.
The widespread support among Palestinians for this effort (and for the atrocities that ensued) lays bare the futility and the insanity of any attempt to force Israel to make territorial retreats to accommodate yet another attempt at a Palestinian state. Palestinian political culture is solely predicated on the premise that Zionism and a Jewish state are incompatible with the minimum demands of their national identity.
This is something that ought to be clear to all Americans by now. Oct. 7 should have ended the debate about two states and the peace process for the foreseeable future. That is frustrating and hard to grasp for Americans who believe compromise is always possible or for Jews who are hard-wired to believe in millenarian solutions even when the facts on the ground argue otherwise.
At the moment, the only debate about Israel that is relevant is the one that the pro-Hamas mobs that took over America’s streets and college campuses since Oct. 7 have been wanting to have: whether one Jewish state on the planet is one too many.
Calling out antisemites
That is a position many on the American left have increasingly adopted. Indeed, it is the reason why anti-Israel protesters chant “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada.”
The whole point of woke ideology, such as critical race theory and intersectionality, as it applies to the Middle East, is to delegitimize Israel as a “settler/colonial” state. Seen from that perspective, nothing it does in its defense — even against the most barbarous opponents, like Hamas and Hezbollah — can be falsely characterized as “genocide” since there is virtually nothing Israel could do to defend itself that could be justified in their eyes. And it’s why the same people dismiss the atrocities of Oct. 7 (which, like Holocaust deniers, they simultaneously justify and minimize).
And so, it is incumbent on Israelis and friends of Israel elsewhere to stop bickering over peace plans or pretending that Israel should be “saved from itself,” as former President Barack Obama believed it should.
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In the absence of a complete transformation of Palestinian society that is nowhere in sight, any advocacy for a Palestinian state in the post-Oct. 7 world from those who claim to support Israel is a unique form of delusionary thinking.
The only logical way to defend Israel going forward must begin by recognizing this truth and stop treating those who wish to deny Israel the same rights granted to every other nation in the world as if their opinions were reasonable and well-intentioned.
We must not hesitate to call out those who seek to “flood” cities like New York with protests glorifying the Oct. 7 massacres as justified “resistance” — call them out for being antisemites and proponents of foreign terror groups.
After Oct. 7, we must no longer treat those who oppose Israel’s existence as if there was some distinction between their position and that of classic Jew-hatred. The brutal truth is that whether or not they root their stand in what they call “anti-racism” or even if they claim to be Jewish, those who wish to eradicate the only Jewish state on the planet are, at best, the “useful idiots” of the Oct. 7 murderers, rapists and kidnappers. At worst, they are their active supporters.
As much as Israelis can and must sort out the crucial questions about who bears the lion’s share of the blame for the success of Hamas’ brutal surprise attack, there are more important lessons to be learned from this episode than just another repeat of the same questions that were asked after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which began with a similar failure.
Doing so will be extremely hard for liberal Americans who believe in the two-state myth as if it were a religious doctrine handed down from Mount Sinai. But if we fail to learn these lessons, they will set the stage for more such tragedies.
