A Collection of Narratives on the Israel-Hamas War

There are aspects of rah-rah patriotism. There’s also an ongoing sense of trauma. I mean, the number of people who died, the grisly fashion in which they died. It’s something that every Israeli has been seeing, and has really understood it. I mean, it is so shocking to the conscience, and so close to the lives of so many people here that I think it’s gonna be a while before people have processed this tragedy, this atrocity at that second level.

What you do have, though, is a political consensus and a military consensus that I think appeared relatively quickly after October 7, when Hamas broke through the Gaza wall and killed over 1,000 people. And that consensus is that, whatever else is true, Hamas cannot exist … I haven’t found, I think, almost any Israelis, except for extreme doves, who disagree … As a corollary to that, they also agree that that requires going into Gaza, and depending on who you ask, rooting out Hamas, killing its leaders, or possibly just leveling the whole place, which is something that I’ve heard a number of Israelis say.

That enemy is not the Palestinian people … The enemy is not exactly Hamas either, though Hamas is part of it. The enemy is the Palestinian theory of Israelis that makes the violence seen on October 7 seem to many of them a rational step on the road to liberation rather than, as Israelis judge it, yet another in a long string of self-inflicted disasters for the Palestinian cause …

The Palestinian strategy of terrorizing Israeli civilians is old, older even than the Israeli conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. When the PLO was founded in 1964 with the goal of driving the Jews from the country, the West Bank was still ruled by Jordan and the Gaza Strip by Egypt. The PLO adopted terrorism as the basic strategy for Palestinian liberation not in anger, but because it had just witnessed the astonishing success of the Algerian National Liberation Front in using such terrorism to drive the French from Algeria in 1962. And it goes back further still. Organized Palestinian violence against the Jews in 1920, 1929, the so-called Arab Revolt of 1936–39—all followed the same basic theory: The Jews are an artificial, rootless polity removable by sustained violence, so sustained violence must be deployed to remove them.

This Palestinian vision of Israelis is taught to Palestinian children as the basic truth of the Palestinian struggle. The contrast between “rooted” Palestine and “artificial” Israel is a major theme of Palestinian identity. The consequences of this longstanding vision and strategy has been nothing short of shattering for Palestinians … One can seek out the ideological roots of Hamas’s strategy of brutality in 20th-century decolonization movements or in theologies of Islamic renewal. But that history is mere background decor to the essential point—that this is a brutality that explodes against peace processes as much as against threats of annexation. No peace and no withdrawal will satisfy this impulse or grant Israeli Jews safety from the kind of wild, joyful hatred displayed on October 7. And that brutality has now made itself too dangerous to be tolerated.

The scale of Israeli casualties, which are still being tallied, greatly exceeds the casualty count of 9/11 as a percentage of the society in question. The scale of the intelligence failure is likewise comparable; all sides are united in wondering how Israel’s lavishly funded, reputedly sophisticated security state managed to miss a border incursion of this magnitude. 9/11 was America’s greatest humiliation since Pearl Harbor, and Hamas’s incursion is Israel’s greatest humiliation since the Yom Kippur War, a full fifty years ago. (In at least one respect, the analogy fails: it took mainstream US media years to begin to acknowledge that George W. Bush had failed to protect American lives, while Netanyahu’s failure is already a topic of fierce public debate in Israel, where Haaretz and some members of the military elite are calling for the prime minister’s resignation.)

But I also can’t remember a time since 9/11 when emotion and bloodlust overwhelmed reason as thoroughly as they do now, including among liberal elites in media and politics. The lasting impact of the 9/11 attacks was a kind of collective psychosis that overcame most Americans, and perhaps especially those in the DC–NYC corridor charged with crafting and enforcing conventional wisdom, who had witnessed the attacks up close … These were the conditions in which it was possible to sell the public, including leading liberal outlets, on a destructive imperial adventure in Iraq that virtually everyone now acknowledges was premised on false intelligence and wildly hubristic ambitions.

The United States arguably fought four wars after Sept. 11: A regime change operation in Afghanistan aimed at both Osama bin Laden and his Taliban enablers, a global campaign to disrupt and destroy Al Qaeda, a war in Iraq aimed at toppling Saddam Hussein and (in its more expansive moments) planting a democracy in the heart of the Middle East and, finally, a war against the Islamic State that emerged out of the wreckage of our Iraq policies …

Some lessons probably don’t apply to the current moment at all—particularly the elements of American folly that reflected our universalist overconfidence hyped up by our unique post-Cold War position as a globe-bestriding superpower. In 2003 we imagined ourselves capable of remaking the Middle East and, indeed, the world, on a scale that today’s Israel, a small country set about with enemies, is extremely unlikely to envision.

Other lessons do apply, but not in any simple way. For instance, one basic lesson you could take from America’s post-9/11 disasters is the importance of restraint in moments of maximal emotional trauma, of thinking it through and counting the cost rather than just obeying a do-something imperative. Among all the various factors that led us into Iraq, one shouldn’t underestimate the impulse that we just hadn’t done something big enough in response to the terror attacks, that the Afghanistan intervention alone wasn’t enough to satisfy our righteous rage or prove our dominance. And you can see this as a temptation for the Israelis now, with the horror so fresh—an impulse to reject anything that smacks of half-measures or limitations, to wave away the risks of civilian casualties or regional chaos, to treat any hesitation as a form of cowardice.

But not every aggressive path America took after 9/11 looks mistaken in hindsight. The long-term debacle of our Afghanistan occupation doesn’t make our initial decision to topple the Taliban unwise. The moral failures of our interrogation program don’t mean that we were wrong to take a generally aggressive posture toward Al Qaeda and its satellites. Setting out to destroy the Islamic State’s caliphate rather than seeking stable coexistence was a correct and successful call.

1) The Palestinian people. The prospect of normalized relations between Israel and Arab states had for decades been thought of as leverage to be used on behalf of the Palestinians. The Arab states were to withhold diplomatic recognition until there was a deal between Israel and the Palestinians that ended Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its blockade of Gaza. So giving Israel the big prize of Arab recognition before that—as both Trump and Biden favor—reduces the chances of the Palestinians ever being liberated from the humiliating subjugation they’ve endured for generations.

The iconoclastic Israeli journalist Gideon Levy this week characterized Israel’s attitude toward the issue like this: “We’ll make peace with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and the Palestinians will be forgotten until they’re erased, as quite a few Israelis would like.” Whether or not that is indeed the way many Israelis thought of the Trump-Biden normalization drive, it’s only natural that Palestinians would assume as much …

2) Hamas. Biden’s Saudi-Israel normalization deal would steer large amounts of money and other resources to the Palestinian Authority—Hamas’s western-backed rival for influence among Palestinians …

3) Iran. There’s no evidence that the Iranians conceived or orchestrated the attack on Israel, but they may have given it their approval. And in any event it’s unlikely that Hamas would have undertaken the attack had the envisioned consequences not seemed at least consistent with the interests of Iran, its long-time supporter. So it’s important to understand how threatening Biden’s proposed Israeli-Saudi deal seemed to Iran. The deal would have given the Saudis a guarantee that America would assist them if they wound up in a war. Iran no doubt feared that this guarantee would embolden the Saudis and also make them more likely to prevail over Iran in the event of war. More broadly, the whole normalization drive, including Trump’s Abraham Accords, seemed aimed at consolidating what Iran sees as an anti-Iran coalition: Israel, the US, and several wealthy Sunni Arab states.

Russia has started the largest war in Europe since World War II. China has become more bellicose toward Taiwan. India has embraced a virulent nationalism. Israel has formed the most extreme government in its history. And on Saturday morning, Hamas brazenly attacked Israel, launching thousands of missiles and publicly kidnapping and killing civilians.

All these developments are signs that the world may have fallen into a new period of disarray. Countries—and political groups like Hamas—are willing to take big risks, rather than fearing that the consequences would be too dire. The simplest explanation is that the world is in the midst of a transition to a new order … The United States is no longer the dominant power it once was… Political leaders in many places feel emboldened to assert their own interests, believing the benefits of aggressive action may outweigh the costs …

“A fully multipolar world has emerged, and people are belatedly realizing that multipolarity involves quite a bit of chaos,” Noah Smith wrote … Zheng Yongnian, a Chinese political scientist with ties to the country’s leaders, has similarly described the “old order” as disintegrating. “Countries are brimming with ambition, like tigers eyeing their prey, keen to find every opportunity among the ruins of the old order,” Zheng wrote last year.

The search for truth, even if one finds it, should not involve rigidity. We are all a product of our environments. When it comes to Israel and Palestine in particular, we bring our own preconceptions to any debate—our own selective read of history and our own developed sense of injustice. This is not about a disagreement over facts; it’s about how to interpret them … It should be possible to acknowledge two things at once. We can—and must—condemn Hamas’s heinous acts against Israeli civilians while refusing to forget that Israel has been a perpetrator of a brutal occupation against Palestinians. Some will condemn this as “bothsidesism,” but there are, quite literally, two primary parties to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, each with competing—and, sadly, irreconcilable—narratives. How could it be otherwise? Talking about atrocities after the fact is a minefield. In a time of war, doing it well requires precisely the kind of presumptive generosity toward the other “side” that war itself militates against.