The events of October 7, 2023, can be interpreted through two fundamentally different lenses.
The first interpretation holds that the Palestinian population cannot be appeased. The world watched in horror as Hamas terrorists celebrated while slaughtering families, filming their atrocities, boasting to their parents, and dragging innocent civilians into Gaza, where frenzied crowds greeted them with cheers.
Yet the deeper shock lay in the widespread endorsement of these actions across the West Bank and Gaza. Survey data revealed that between two-thirds and three-quarters of Palestinians supported Hamas’s assault, casting doubt on the possibility of peaceful coexistence. For many Israelis, sympathy evaporated entirely, replaced by a conviction that only overwhelming force could suffice—a sentiment reflected in the ferocity of the subsequent military campaign.
The second interpretation frames October 7 as a warning that the Palestinian issue demands attention; that persistent deprivation and injustice made a violent eruption virtually inevitable. Many Israelis resist this view because it misattributes the attack to Palestinian grievances rather than to Hamas, which would combat Israel regardless of circumstances. Nevertheless, this perspective helps explain why so many Palestinians—even those acknowledging the facts—rallied behind the assault.
It also illuminates why Hamas and its allies have wielded such effective propaganda. Other factors certainly contribute: entrenched antisemitism, far-left hostility toward the West, the naivety of global progressives, Arab petrodollars, and Russian and Chinese exploitation of the conflict to fracture democratic alliances. Yet the genuinely untenable conditions facing Palestinians remain a potent instrument in this information war.
Israel Confronts Genocide Allegations
The convergence of these dynamics produced remarkable effects. By October 9—before Israel had finished identifying its victims or launched its ground invasion—charges of “genocide” had already proliferated across social media, activist networks, academia, and eventually government corridors. By October 13, demonstrators in London were already marching under banners decrying genocide. On October 17, the Qatar-based Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies convened a symposium titled “The War on Gaza: Palestinian Defiance and Resistance against Orchestrated Genocide and Expulsion.”
Within weeks, South Africa had filed a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague—the “crime of crimes,” a term historically reserved for the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and Rwanda, and defined by the United Nations as an attempt to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
When Israeli forces eventually entered Gaza, they confronted an adversary that had deliberately engineered conditions to maximize civilian casualties on its own territory. Hamas calculated that such carnage would isolate Israel globally as a genocidal aggressor, fracture the bond between American Jews and the Jewish state, and thereby erode Washington’s political support.
Consequently, the Israel Defense Forces discovered weapons stockpiles, command bunkers, and rocket launchers hidden inside residential buildings, densely populated districts, hospitals, schools, mosques, and UN facilities. As Hamas fighters vanished into tunnel networks beneath civilian homes, every child killed, every structure demolished, and every grieving parent became real-time evidence in a continuously unfolding indictment broadcast across social media to audiences worldwide.
This strategy contained another dimension, one I have confronted repeatedly on international television, particularly on networks such as Al Jazeera: namely, that while October 7 was horrific, it represented a reaction by Hamas to Palestinian suffering.
Palestinians do indeed live under oppression, but Hamas is not their defender. I remain astonished by interviewers who appear unable to grasp that this Iran-backed jihadist organization is itself a principal cause of Palestinian misery. Like Israel’s hardline Right, Hamas seeks to prevent partition of the Holy Land; its goal is not statehood but the annihilation of Israel, the overthrow of neighboring regimes, and the establishment of an expansive caliphate.
Recognizing Hamas’s true nature, however, does not render the pre-October 7 status quo acceptable. In the West Bank, three million Palestinians coexist alongside approximately half a million Jewish settlers without equal rights, and remain largely subject to military occupation—the Palestinian Authority exercises little more than municipal governance. In recent years, extremist Jewish settlers have engaged not only in land seizures but in outright terrorism against Palestinian communities, often with the tacit acquiescence of Israeli security forces and government institutions.
In Gaza, more than two million Palestinians endure a crippling blockade jointly enforced by Israel and Egypt—a consequence of Hamas’s rule over the territory. The siege has failed to spark popular rebellion because Hamas maintains absolute ruthlessness. The blockade has reduced living conditions to a level frequently likened to an open-air prison, yet it has not stopped Hamas from acquiring arms—a failure that the ensuing two years of warfare have frustratingly failed to reverse.
Hamas, which unleashed terrorist violence immediately following the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, spent decades seeking to derail the peace process by pushing Israeli voters toward the political Right, and it succeeded. October 7 marked the next phase of that strategy, and Israel’s open-ended military response landed precisely in the trap Hamas had set.
During a recent Al Jazeera broadcast, I appeared alongside Ahmed Abu Askar, a young Gazan introduced as a humanitarian activist and engineering student. He appeared emaciated after three days without food, and expressed hope that an aid flotilla might breach the blockade and enable his ailing father to receive medical evacuation.
I attempted to provide context, explaining the malign role of Hamas and the necessity of its removal. Ahmed responded with raw emotion: “Israel—not Hamas—is the one that killed my sister, her children, and her entire family on November 6, 2023. Not all Palestinian people are Hamas. The goods, why are they not entering? ‘It is because of Hamas.’ We are not Hamas. We are human, in the end.”
I answered: “My deepest sympathies are with Ahmed. It is true that Israeli action killed members of his family, and that is horrible. But I suspect he knows that Hamas started this war, and in a manner so epically brutal that Israel concluded it had no choice but to try to uproot Hamas. People in Gaza cannot speak freely. Our audience is not naive. They know that if Ahmed were to criticize Hamas, they would kill him.”
At that point, the host interjected: “But Dan, our audience is not so naive as to think that this started on October 7.” He then asked Ahmed for his greatest wish. “Open the border,” he replied, “so we can go out and come in.” Then he added: “This is not about Hamas. Believe me, if Israel harms us, I will not kill Israeli babies. I will not let them starve.”
He was mistaken—everything I stated was factual—but he won the argument nonetheless, because he was a decent person in anguish. No historical or political exposition can overcome the moral authority of human suffering.
This maddening reality has traumatized Palestinians and Israelis in disturbingly parallel ways. Palestinians—anchored in a traditionally conservative society resistant to compromise—have been driven, in significant numbers, into the arms of a nihilistic movement like Hamas, which genuinely advocates genocide against Jews.
Israelis, for their part, have had empathy beaten out of them in vast numbers; they no longer wish to contemplate Palestinians except through prisms of security and retribution. Some now openly dream of expulsion. Compassion is dismissed as weakness. October 7 made Israelis somewhat unhinged as well—exactly as Hamas intended.
Yet if Israelis conclude that Palestinians understand only force—a proposition that Hamas, incidentally, has disproven—they are ensuring a fatal cycle of violence. A grievance left to rot, with no creative effort to alter its underlying dynamics, will detonate repeatedly. Therefore, following the next election—assuming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is finally removed from office—Israel will need to confront this dilemma with fresh thinking and innovative approaches.