The Desperate Effort to De-Contextualize October 7

Hamas bears full responsibility for its crimes on October 7, but the event was still the result of disastrous policy decisions by many outside actors. Both things can be and are true.

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Back in 2019, I wrote the following: “If the US is impeding non-violent Palestinian responses while doing nothing to curtail Israeli impunity, just what kind of response are they steering the Palestinians towards? The answer is obvious and should be of concern to all of us.”

I’ve said similar things many times over the years, and I’m far from the only one. Six months into the genocide in Gaza, I am left to wonder what exactly people thought we were warning about. The United States, Europe, many of the Arab dictatorships, and other countries cut off every non-violent route Palestinians had, aside from acquiescence. Palestinians were left with a choice: continue with an ineffectual “peace process” designed to entrench the apartheid regime, not end it; or turn to violence.

The United States passed various laws threatening the funding of international agencies if they included Palestine. The U.S. and Israel took draconian measures against the Palestinians to penalize them for going to international legal institutions for redress. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has been demonized, and the fight against antisemitism has been weaponized against all critics of Israeli policy. And all of this was happening in full force for years before October 7, 2023.

By the end of the Barack Obama administration, the sham “peace process” lay in tatters, and the United States and Israel both implicitly agreed that the way forward was to “manage” the occupation. For Israel, this meant, in the short term, increasing its settlement expansion, laying de facto claim to the annexation of the Jordan Valley, reinforcing its “security” programs in the West Bank, and otherwise vying to maintain the status quo in both the West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.

The United States could content itself with benign-sounding talk of a “future” Palestinian state, while occasionally stating mild discomfort with settlement expansion, but moving forward with business as usual.

For all that Donald Trump made some splashy moves that fed Palestinian rage and despair, his agenda was largely the same, on a somewhat bigger scale. The occupation continued to be “managed,” but the U.S. was more supportive of settlement expansion and of Israel’s claims to the Jordan Valley. Most of all, though, he wanted to redefine “peace” in the Middle East to mean economic deals and normal diplomatic relationships between Israel and Arab dictatorships. And to do that, he intended to simply ignore the Palestinians, a people who had no strategic value, political power, or economic impact.

One might have thought that Joe Biden would change some of that, but, aside from a shift in rhetoric (and a minor one at that), Biden largely pursued a policy similar to Trump’s. He ignored the Palestinians, ignored the increasingly draconian and harsh behavior of Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultra-right government, and pursued normalizing relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

I, and so many of my colleagues warned that this was a dangerous course. Other administrations have tried to remove Palestine from the top of the international agenda. It might seem to succeed for a while, but the issue always, without fail, returns to the center in an ugly way.

By autumn 2023, the Saudis—normalization with whom represented the last major incentive for Israel to compromise at all on the occupation—were lowering their demands on Palestinian rights, tempted by security guarantees and potential support for a nuclear energy program from Washington. The Palestinians had been pushed into a corner, and the feckless Palestinian Authority had no options.

None of this justifies the brutal excesses by Hamas on October 7. Attacks on civilians are out of bounds, and the hundreds killed, in circumstances where they were helpless and defenseless, goes well beyond the legitimate right to resist occupation, siege, and the daily violence Palestinians face from Israel.

Yet, while some Israelis have also correctly blamed their own government for its massive failures on that horrible day—failures that quite clearly exacerbated the destruction and significantly magnified the murders and destruction—there is not nearly enough introspection on the parts of policymakers whose disastrous failures were so obvious long before that awful day. Those failures led to a predictable nightmare, first for one day for Israelis, and then for six months for Palestinians (we should not forget that Israel has also significantly increased its crimes and atrocities in the West Bank, though, obviously, not to anything like the extent that they have done in Gaza).

Historical examples of violent revolts

Historically, there are other examples of attacks by oppressed, colonized, or enslaved people that have contemporaneously been seen similarly to the common perception of October 7. As the view of history lengthens over time, such events come to be understood in the context in which they occurred. Sometimes, that leads to their being condoned by many; other times, they are seen as exceeding the boundaries of acceptability, but are understood to have been a product of their times and historical circumstances.

The scholar Norman Finkelstein recently penned a controversial comparison of October 7 to Nat Turner’s slave revolt in 1831. The revolt was, without a doubt, a brutal one, unusual in the context of uprising of enslaved peoples in the United States.

Historian Howard Zinn, in his book, A People’s History of the United States, described the revolt: “Turner…gathered about seventy slaves, who went on a rampage from plantation to plantation, murdering at least fifty-five men, women, and children.”

According to Finkelstein, “The unfolding scene was ghastly: babies decapitated, other whites disemboweled and hacked to pieces.” The similarities to stories that emerged from October 7 are clear, although the most sensationalized stories from Hamas’ attack have been effectively debunked. While there were clearly more than sufficient numbers of revolting and atrocious acts that did, in fact, occur on October 7, it is the perception that even worse happened that spurred the fiercest of the responses.

After Turner’s rebellion was put down—in ways that were equally if not even more grotesque than anything the rebelling enslaved people had done—harsh laws were passed prohibiting gatherings of slaves, prohibiting slaves from learning to read, and other restrictive measures reacting to the fear of further rebellions, a fear that existed long before Turner, but was exacerbated by it.

As Finkelstein notes, however, “In 1988, a book on Turner’s life (introduced by Coretta Scott King) was selected for inclusion in the ‘Black Americans of Achievement’ biography series for children. By now, Nat Turner occupies an honored place in American history.”

Turner’s rebellion is still debated, to be sure. But even those who condemn Turner, or at least believe he exceeded what could be called an “acceptable” form of resistance (acceptable by whom is a worthwhile question), recognize the circumstances from which his actions sprung.

Another example can be found in 1622 when, after years of tensions and the failure of numerous indigenous attempts to find accommodation with the European colonists who had settled in Jamestown, Virginia, the Powhatan tribe attacked numerous points of the colony, killing 347 people, a very sizeable percentage of the colony’s entire population. Years of brutal, genocidal war by the colonizers followed, taking a dreadful toll on the Indigenous people in the area, driving many off, and severely diminishing the tribes’ strength.

The attack in 1622 was viewed as an unprovoked atrocity, as there was no immediate war that was going on at the time. But European incursions, seizures of lands and repeated violence, including kidnapping and murder, had become intolerable at the time. But to the colonizers, like the slave-owners more than two centuries later, it was an example of the “savage” nature of the Indigenous people. History, obviously, has rendered a different judgment.

There are other examples throughout history. There is no doubt that there were horrific acts committed by oppressed peoples in these and many other incidents. One does not try to justify the excesses, even if we can understand the need to rise up and take arms against an oppressive force.

The determination to keep context out of October 7 and the Gaza genocide

History will eventually pass its judgment on the actions of October 7. There remains a good deal of controversy around the events themselves, with many Israeli claims having been shown to be fabricated, while documented and convincing evidence supports some very horrific actions by those who came into Israel that day. No doubt, given the nature of the entire issue of Palestine and Israel, there will be a great, discursive battle over the narrative.

But the immediate reaction from Netanyahu, Biden, and Israel’s supporters all over the world, was to say “there is no context” to October 7. Indeed, in debates over both the Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent destruction of Gaza, the pro-Israel side routinely does all it can to make sure that the conversation starts with October 7, and ignores everything that happened before.

This, of course, serves to paint the Hamas attack as “unprovoked.” Indeed, much like the population of Jamestown in 1622 and the plantation owners in 1831, Israel’s argument is that the attack came out of nowhere, with no basis to it other than an expression of Palestinian savagery and hatred of Jews. And, as in 1622 and 1831, this ignores the conditions that existed prior to the attacks, and, most of all, reflects the racism of the oppressor who must always depict the oppressed as lesser, as dangerous, and as undeserving of the rights and responsibilities that the supremacists enjoy.

In the context of history, most of us understand that slavery was a horror, a form of violence that continued, without pause, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The atrocities visited upon Africans taken from their homeland and cast into bondage, and their descendants, are well-documented, and now, more than a century and a half removed from the abomination of slavery, we understand the revolt. Similarly, we have come to understand the ravages of European settler-colonialism, the dispossession, the raids, the cruelty and the dehumanization inherent in all of these acts.

Yet at the time, the uprisings were unexpected. What, one wonders, did colonists and slaveowners think was the lot of the enslaved or dispossessed?

Similarly, many Americans, and Israelis, did not see the people of Gaza. This goes beyond the obscene racists who would share an image of a shopping mall in Gaza and consider it proof that Gazans were living comfortable lives.

The inescapable context of October 7

The reality of Gaza was quite different. The blockade of the Strip, which had been in place for sixteen years, had strangled what was already a struggling economy in an area that was one of, and at time the single most densely populated place on Earth. Entry and exit were extremely difficult, and impossible for most of Gaza’s citizens, while both imports and exports were severely curtailed.

At the end of September 2023, unemployment hovered around 45%, and up to 70% for young college graduates. 81% of the population lived in poverty. Potable water was almost non-existent in Gaza. A report by the humanitarian organization, ANERA, in September stated that “In Gaza, only 3.2% of households can drink water out of their home taps. As a result, villages struggle to maintain livestock, water crops, and access clean drinking water. Limited water access has worsened in the past few months as the hottest temperatures on Earth were recorded.”

There was no hope in Gaza. Attempts by pro-Israel forces to blame these conditions on Hamas are blatant propaganda. That is not to say that Hamas was not an authoritarian and theocratic authority. There were serious issues of human rights and freedom in Gaza. But the desperate situation was not of Hamas’ making, but of Israel’s.

And amid this, leaders like Joe Biden and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia were working to sideline the entire Palestinian issue permanently, while integrating Israel into the Middle East community. Worse, they were doing this while the far-right Israeli government under Netanyahu, and his fascist partners Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir was allowing radical settlers to rampage with impunity in the West Bank and was launching more and deadlier raids into Palestinian cities.

Of course, Netanyahu and Biden don’t want anyone to think about this context, which clearly led to the attack on October 7. Because it was not only Israeli defense and intelligence that failed that day. October 7 was the result of a total failure of policy by all the key players outside of Palestine.

This doesn’t mitigate Hamas’ responsibility for the crimes committed that day. But it does mean that all of this ugly business could have been avoided if better—indeed, if merely reasonable—policy had been pursued by those players.

I’ll reiterate this for those who are likely to twist these words in any case. Hamas bears full responsibility for its actions on October 7. There were crimes clearly committed that day. Those crimes include the taking of hostages, the killing of civilians, and the commission of sexual and other excessive forms of violence. While it is certainly true that Palestinians have a right to resist, including by armed resistance, this covers the infiltration and the attacks on military forces, not the attacks on civilians and other breaches of the laws of war.

That being said, I continue to wonder just what people thought we were warning them about for those many years. Israel, the United States, and many of their fellow travelers blocked or interfered with every non-violent means Palestinians and their supporters tried to use. What other path, we warned, was there but violence if non-violent action is labeled illegal, antisemitic, or intolerable?

Did they think we meant that there would be more individual cases of stabbing, car-ramming, even bombs? No, we were clear, we were warning of something unprecedented, something massive, something horrifying.

We got just that on October 7 and genocide in the six months since. American and Israeli leaders are desperate to portray October 7 as a savage, senseless attack, with no motivation other than hatred of Jews. Major pro-Israel organizations love to say, “There was a ceasefire in place on October 6,” as if all was well before the Hamas attack. They prefer to ignore the fact that 2023 was already the deadliest year for Palestinians since the second intifada well before October 7. They prefer to ignore the hundreds of Gazans killed and injured by Israeli snipers, artillery, and drones when they attempted mass demonstrations on their side of the border wall separating Gaza form Israel in 2018 and 2019, the demonstrations called The Great March of Return.

They ignore the siege on Gaza and the occupation in general in making these statements. And they do so in the most grotesque manner of denialism, seeing the stateless, dispossessed, and powerless condition of Palestinians as normal, or even as self-inflicted. Indeed, many of those same voices are the ones who are denying the already conservative and undercounted death tolls coming out of Gaza today.

The need to de-contextualize October 7 was an immediate reaction from supporters of Israel. There are numerous reasons for that, but a big one is that the policies pursued by successive American and Israeli administrations, policies these advocates supported with the zeal only fanatics can muster, led directly to that horrific day. Hamas, other groups, and individual hangers-on bear the full responsibility for all crimes committed on October 7. But it was American and Israeli policies, aided by those of European and Arab states that were fully complicit in these decisions, that led to those crimes, and it is those policies that must be addressed, reversed, and repaired.

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