Cutting Through Special Edition: A Year of October 7
The past year has been a disaster for Palestinians, and, yes, another tragedy for the Jewish people as well. More, it is a mark of shame on a world that is far too comfortable with another genocide
Thank you for checking out this special edition, a deep dive into the past year, from October 7 to October 7.
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The events of October 7 have infused every second that has occurred since. They have fueled genocide in the Gaza Strip; multiple deadly incursions in the West Bank; devastation and wholesale slaughter in Lebanon; attacks in Yemen and Syria; and the increasing likelihood of a war that would start between Israel and Iran but could expand to include much of the region, if not the world.
Yet for such a momentous event, we have precious little clarity about it. That is the case even though Israel, the United States, and other international parties have moved forward with great assuredness about their positions, often invoking October 7 to justify a genocide in Gaza that cannot be justified.
There’s a lot to be asked about October 7, and for all the death and destruction that day has caused, there are precious few answers. Let’s examine first what we know and don’t know and how various parties have responded.
Background: Prelude to October 7
If there is one thing that has been crucial for Israel and, especially, for its American supporters, it has been the notion that everything started on October 7. That is where the story begins for them.
Listen to any mainstream Democrat discuss the genocide in Gaza and you will hear it every time. “Let’s remember how we got here. Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 and…” is how Kamala Harris routinely starts her answer to any question about Gaza and Lebanon.
This bit of propaganda dovetails perfectly with the oft-repeated lie from AIPAC and its fellow travelers, that “there was a ceasefire on October 6.”
Before October 7, Gaza was starving. Unemployment for young workers—in a place, lest we forget, where the average age was 18—was as high as 60%. There was virtually no potable water available. People could not enter or leave the Strip without going through an arduous, lengthy process of obtaining permits from the Israeli forces placing Gaza under siege, and these permits were routinely denied, often even for medical emergencies.
Israel sharply restricted the goods that could come into Gaza, including food. “Putting the people of Gaza on a diet” was the phrase Israel used, and they also periodically “mowed the lawn” with bombing raids and other military incursions.
For their part, Hamas and other militant groups would, from time to time, fire shoddy rockets at Israel, which usually did no damage at all. Or, in a slightly more effective tactic, they might launch incendiary kites toward Israeli fields to set them afire.
None of this describes a ceasefire, let alone “peace.”
Meanwhile, the United States, Israel, and their Arab partners were marginalizing the entire Palestinian cause. The Abraham Accords were only the icing on a cake that had served to remove Palestine from the international agenda. Many of us warned that doing this would only mean the issue would force itself back into the center of attention with great violence. Our warnings, as usual, were proven correct and went unheeded.
Joe Biden came into office determined to one-up Donald Trump in cutting off all hope of a resolution of the issue by finding a way to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel without resolving the question of Palestine. It’s worth recalling that, since 2002, full normalization with the entire Arab League has been on offer in exchange for an end to Israel’s occupation, the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a negotiated resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue.
Instead of working with that offer, Biden determined that he would simply eliminate the last substantial piece of diplomatic leverage the Palestinians had: Israeli-Saudi normalization.
These were the conditions that led to the October 7 attack. It did not come out of nowhere, it was not a simple expression of hate, much less antisemitism (not a single person was attacked for being Jewish that day. They were attacked, legally or not, as Israelis, Jewish or not), and it was not, as racists often contend, born out of some Arab bloodlust. There was a political and strategic calculation and, with Israeli leadership ignoring warnings and redeploying forces toward the West Bank, a tactical opportunity.
Hamas likely miscalculated just how vicious, unhinged, and genocidal the Israeli response would be, but they knew it would be harsh, and they decided to launch that attack because they hoped to advance Palestinian goals by doing so.
History did not begin on October 7, and any attempt to begin the story on that day is a willful attempt to mislead the audience. Sadly, that is what Democrats, most prominently Kamala Harris, have been doing every time.
Hamas’ attack on October 7: The Right To Resist and War Crimes
Did Hamas have the right to carry out the October 7 attack?
Most people, whether they are supporters of Israel or supporters of Palestinian rights, believe they can answer this question with a definitive ‘yes” or “no.” Neither is correct.
The first principle at stake in this question is that of the right of an occupied people to resist its occupier. That is an unequivocal right under international law, but more than that, it is an obvious reality of any ethical evaluation.
The ethical principle at stake is one of being allowed to resist oppression. Supporters of Israel love to split hairs over the question of Gaza having still been occupied after Israel removed its settlements and redeployed its military forces outside the Strip. This, they argue, means Gaza was no longer under occupation.
The position is absurd on its face. Israel maintained control over most of Gaza’s borders, except for the southern one with Egypt, which was administered by joint agreement of Egypt and Israel, granting Israel an effective veto over what crossed that border, just as it had over the others. Israel also controlled the shoreline and airspace, the supply of water and electricity into Gaza, and the economy.
As was widely agreed by international legal experts, Gaza was still under occupation and Israel still had the responsibilities of an occupying power. More than that, any ethical evaluation must come to the same conclusion: Israel was responsible for the well-being of the people in Gaza to the extent that it exerted control over their lives, which was considerable.
As such, the people of Gaza had every right to fight back against their oppressors. Since Israel exerted its control over Gaza from outside the territory of Gaza, Palestinians certainly had the right to breach the barrier that had turned the Strip into the world’s largest open-air prison.
The right to resist, however, is not without its limits. Resistance, like all violence in warfare, must still adhere to the principles of international humanitarian law; chiefly, this means the principles of distinction (directing all operations at military targets) and proportionality (causing the least amount of harm to civilians, and when harm cannot be avoided, it must be proportional to the military advantage). Hamas cannot claim that the October 7 attack met these standards.
Hamas claims to have planned to target an Israeli military installation, which it did, although clearly kibbutzim and a major music festival were the sites of horrific carnage, assaults, and murders. It seems likely that the military sites were the ultimate target, but to facilitate this attack, Hamas infiltrated several kibbutzim along the way, with the intention of battling Israeli forces there while a separate contingent engineered the capture of as many soldiers as possible.
This plan, in itself, entailed crimes and bloodshed. Even in a world where not a single civilian was killed in the operation, it recklessly and intentionally endangered non-combatants. Even the ultimate goal was a war crime: the taking of hostages. That is illegal and it applies to both civilians and soldiers; prisoners of war are different from hostages. It also applies to state actors like Israel as well, a point we will get to later.
In the actual event, Hamas’ war crimes were vast. Al Jazeera relied in part on footage taken by Hamas members themselves documenting some horrific crimes that day. The willful and intentional killing of non-combatants is beyond dispute, as is the taking of hostages and wholesale destruction in the kibbutzim and, most prominently, at the Nova music festival.
Hamas claimed that their people were not involved in the deliberate attacks, assaults on, and murders of civilians. It is, at this stage, impossible to know for certain which individuals did what, but the point is moot. This was Hamas’ attack, their plan, which they executed. They are responsible.
The picture that emerged from the various investigations of the events of October 7 is that Hamas and other militant groups breached the wall and were shocked to have been met with little immediate Israeli resistance. They also did not, apparently, know about the music festival.
The lack of opposition and the festival combined, it seems, with a lack of control by Hamas of the individuals who breached the fence. Many were with some militant faction or other, but a substantial number, apparently, were not.
Of the 1,139 people killed by those who breached the barrier that day, 373 were soldiers or other security forces. The remaining 766 were non-combatants. Given the lack of any possible military rationale that could justify the attack on the NOVA festival, and the questionable legitimacy of the operation involving the kibbutzim, this is a serious crime.
Yet it is not clear how many of these deaths can be laid at the feet of Palestinians with complete certainty. Doubtless a great many of them would be, but we know that some number were killed by Israeli forces. Some may have been collateral killings, but we also know that orders were given in at least some instances by Israeli commanders to destroy homes where it was known that Palestinians were holding Israeli hostages, and other cases where kidnap victims were fired on to prevent their being taken to Gaza.
The extent of these incidents is not known. The incidents of actual firing on hostages may have been just a few isolated cases. Or they may have accounted for a shocking number of deaths on October 7. There is no way to know for certain because Israel has refused to investigate the events and has obstructed investigations from outside parties.
That’s sadly understandable, as the picture we have now, though imprecise, is one of enormous failure by Israel’s security apparatus. The Palestinians who breached the fence were able to move freely in Israel for hours before encountering the sort of resistance they had expected. And, while there is no way to know how much of the damage to the kibbutzim and death of the people there were caused by Israel’s own security forces, we already know it’s not zero, and it will therefore be a major scandal.
The question of sexual assault
Few doubt that there were cases of sexual assault on October 7. Yet, to this day, there is absolutely no substantiation for the Israeli claim that sexual assault was systemic and part of the plan for the attacks that day.
On the contrary, to date, the available evidence suggests that incidents of sexual assault were sporadic and random. The extent of them, again, cannot be known because of Israel’s obstruction of investigators from the outside and the lack of credible investigations from within.
The clearest evidence of sexual assault thus far has been the testimony of former hostages, but these were incidents, appalling though they may be, that occurred after October 7.
To make matters worse, there has been an enormous propaganda campaign around this issue. It is one among many different avenues Israel has pursued to whip up hysteria over October 7 and generate support for genocide by dehumanizing Palestinians.
Israel has repeatedly accused others of claiming that sexual assault did not occur on that day. Credible people haven’t made such an assertion. And to be clear, sexual assault is a horrific crime and even one case is one too many.
But there have been few direct testimonies from victims or from witnesses of sexual assault that day, and many of those we have heard have been thrown into question or debunked completely. It may well be that, at a future time, we will hear from people with more credible allegations. But, to date, there remains no evidence of systematic sexual assault, and the lurid tales that have been told have often traded on Islamophobic tropes which have been proven baseless.
Victims of sexual assault on October 7 have been done a terrible disservice by the willful dissembling of outlets like The New York Times, that most people (generally, people who have not followed the question of Israel-Palestine much) expect better of.
Palestinians are no different than any other people. There are men among them who are sexual predators just as there are in any other group of men. But the only sense in which they are especially prone to sexual abuse is in the bigoted minds of Islamophobic and anti-Arab forces.
After October 7
There are fewer mysteries surrounding the events after October 7, but that is certainly not for lack of effort on Israel’s part.
Military censorship clamped down hard on Gaza almost immediately. For Israelis, this meant that they would have to find alternative news sources because the Israeli ones would be censored. Naturally, only the most concerned and interested parties did so. Ordinary Israelis, like anyone else, still got their news from their televisions and newspapers.
For the rest of us, the censorship meant that access to Gaza was heavily restricted. International journalists could not enter Gaza, and if they did so, they were offered no protection by the Israelis. They largely stayed out.
When foreign journalists did enter, they were embedded with Israeli troops and under the guidance of Israeli spokespeople. Luckily for the world, Israeli forces proved remarkably incompetent at this.
They would show tunnels and claim them to be Hamas command centers, when in fact they were nothing of the kind. Some of those tunnels were actually built by Israel when it controlled Gaza; others might have been part of an underground network for travel, but nothing more than that. IDF spokespeople showed a calendar in Arabic and claimed it was a schedule for guarding hostages, when any Arabic speaker could see it was no such thing.
These obvious blunders got little attention, unfortunately, from a western media that was frequently complicit in the propaganda campaign defending Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza.
The New York Times ran feature stories that were later demonstrated to have been false or exaggerated. CNN repeated Israel’s lies about beheaded babies with no fact checks, no qualifications, and in a manner designed to elicit outrage. Headlines routinely used the passive voice to describe Palestinian deaths, avoiding any mention of who caused those deaths, while being specific about any attack emanating from Palestinians. Journalists from outlets like the Times, CNN, and the BBC went public about bias in their newsrooms.
But the media, for all its influence, would not have been the powerful motivator for genocide it has been without the full backing of the President of the United States.
From the bully pulpit, Joe Biden repeatedly lied, telling stories of beheaded babies, babies killed in their mother’s wombs, families forced to watch the executions of their children, and other outright lies. Biden even continued referring to these stories after they had been debunked, and, in some cases, even after his team tried to walk back some of his comments.
This is not a case of a blundering old man unable to distinguish fantasy from reality, much less a charming and folksy slip of the tongue. This was the single most powerful government official in the world, a man who many naïve people see as the “leader of the free world” repeating lies whose express purpose was to dehumanize Palestinians and whip up a frenzy where a global mob mentality would not only permit genocide, but excuse, cover for, and encourage it.
Media also worked hard to demonize Palestinian-Americans, depicting them as celebrating the murder of Israeli civilians. In fact, what Palestinians were celebrating about October 7 was the breaching of the Gaza barrier as an essential expression of Palestinian resistance and hope for liberation.
Nihad Awad, president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was singled out specifically. He responded, saying:
“Despite my clear remarks, an anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian hate website selected remarks from my speech out of context and spliced them together to create a completely false meaning.
“What I actually said while discussing international law: Ukrainians, Palestinians and other occupied people have the right to defend themselves and escape occupation by just and legal means, but targeting civilians is never an acceptable means of doing so, which is why I have again and again condemned the violence against Israeli civilians on Oct. 7th and past Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians, including suicide bombings, all the way back to the 1990s—just as I have condemned the decades of violence against Palestinian civilians.
“The average Palestinians who briefly walked out of Gaza and set foot on their ethnically cleansed land in a symbolic act of defiance against the blockade and stopped there without engaging in violence were within their rights under international law; the extremists who went on to attack civilians in southern Israel were not. Targeting civilians is unacceptable, no matter whether they are Israeli or Palestinian or any other nationality.”
Accusing the other side of your own actions
In the event, we find that Israel carried out many of the atrocities it accused Hamas of. Because of incredibly courageous Palestinian journalists, we have been able to see the effects of Israel’s onslaught. We have seen the ravaged bodies of children, even babies, in horribly mangled states that I cannot bear to describe.
We have seen the utter destruction of health, education, electrical, religious, housing, and all other infrastructure in Gaza. And this was not, as sometimes alleged “indiscriminate.” No, this was targeted, the intention to destroy Gaza and make it uninhabitable perfectly clear. If Hamas targeted civilians on October 7, Israel has targeted over two million civilians in Gaza every day since.
Sexual assault of Palestinian prisoners has been rampant and this is notable. While this is not the first time Israeli armed forces and prison guards have been accused of sexually abusing prisoners, the accusations have reached a much higher level, doubtless spurred on by the dubious narrative of October 7 and the alleged, but completely unsubstantiated, “systematic sexual abuse” that day, as well as the incidents that did occur.
The response of much of the Israeli public has been to protest against any restraint on prison guards and soldiers that might prevent them from committing sexual assault.
Israeli forces, as has happened many times in the past, made extensive use of Palestinian prisoners as human shields, even while accusing Hamas of using the civilian population of Gaza as the same.
Hostages and prisoners
One striking fact is the place prisoners and hostages occupy in the discourse around October 7 and its aftermath.
As noted above, the kidnapping of Israelis on October 7 is a war crime. Yet for all the attention the world has paid to those hostages, the repeated calls for their release, the concern Joe Biden has shown for them (far greater concern than he has shown for Americans killed by Israeli forces), little if any attention is paid to Palestinian abductees.
Israel is holding between 9,000 and 10,000 Palestinian prisoners. To be sure, there are fighters that Israel has captured. But many of the Palestinians in Israeli prisons, both now and for decades before October 7, are held without charge, without access to lawyers, and without contact with their families. They might be non-violent activists, people who attended a protest or made a social media post. Or they may just have made the mistake of being a Palestinian in the wrong place at the wrong time.
After the October 7 kidnappings, Israel stepped up its detention of Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank. They are just as much kidnap victims as the Israelis, and many have been tortured, suffering abuse far worse than what has typically been reported by Israelis freed from Gaza.
Yet somehow these hostages elicit little concern around the world.
It is also important to note, as do many of the people out in the streets protesting in Israel, that this regard for Israeli prisoners being held in Gaza, on top of it being a feeling the world holds, apparently, only for Israelis and not for Palestinians, is not shared by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.
A temporary ceasefire last November saw the release of some 105 hostages. Israel has freed seven hostages in military operations that slaughtered hundreds of innocent Palestinian civilians, and, in these and other operations, caused the deaths of an unknown number of Israeli captives.
As most in Israel are aware, the constant escalations by the Israeli military, as well as the expansion of the war into Lebanon and against Iran have made it clear that Israel does not care about its own hostages and uses them only for propaganda purposes.
Yet if the lives of the Israeli hostages—which have been cheapened by Israel from the very start of the genocide in Gaza to this day—have little value to Netanyahu, the lives of Palestinians everywhere have far less, not only in the eyes of Israeli leaders, but in the eyes of American and European leaders, media figures, and others.
In every way we can imagine, the devaluing of Palestinian lives and the double standard for Israel and Palestinians has been abundantly clear. It is not a matter merely of hypocrisy; it is the difference of life and death.
That is what the year of October 7 has meant. It is another Nakba for the Palestinian people. And, yes, it is also another tragedy for the Jewish people as well. More, it is a mark of shame on the entire world, a world that is entirely too comfortable with yet another genocide.
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