The meaning of October 7

The narrative of the Hamas attack one year on

By Peter M Johansen

On October 7, it was one year since the Hamas attack on military positions and well-armed kibbutzim and settlements in the southern part of Israel bordering the Gaza Strip. The attack did not happen in a vacuum, as the name Hamas gave to the operation: “Tha Al-Aqsa flood” implies.

– The attack happened a year and a half after Israel had stepped up considerably its military actions against the Palestinian resistance in the West Bank – without Western reactions beyond the replays of messages of concern and recommendations to both parties.

– The attack came after widespread settler violence against Palestinian farmers, the expulsion of small villages and the confiscation of land, under the protection of the Israeli occupation army (IDF) and the arming of the settler militias by the national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

– The attack came after repeated provocations against the sacred height Haram-ash-Sharif in Jerusalem by the Israeli authorities and Jewish activists under the protection of paramilitary police forces.

-The attack followed Israel’s designation of six major Palestinian organizations as terrorist entities, targeting civil society without significant reactions from Israel’s traditional supporters.

“For Frantz Fanon, the colonized’s violence is counter-violence, which is used against a system which is itself a product of violence, which is sustained by violence.”

Adam Shatz, author of “The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon”, in conversation with Yohan Shanmugaratnam in Klassekampen (June 13)

Sticking to October 7th

The background for the Hamas attack was quickly overshadowed by two other factors: the Israeli narrative of the Hamas attack and Israel’s genocidal warfare in Gaza. This was accompanied by two “side issues”:

Israel’s increasingly frequent attacks on the West Bank, now including outright bombing raids using drones and aircraft. And Hezbollah’s rocket attacks against Israeli military installations in northern Israel, conducted in solidarity with Palestine and demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

This has solidified October 7th as the pivotal moment that intensified the regional conflict, despite frequent reminders that the underlying issues stem from the absence of a Palestinian state and that the Iranian-Israeli tensions trace back to Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Hanne Eggen Røislien, special adviser on culture in the Defense Staff and former researcher in The Cyber ​​Defense, the Institute for Peace Research and The Institute of Defense Studies has been praiseworthy lately been heard breaking “the vicious circle” by pointing out that Israel had the plans ready for a regional battle with the so-called the “axis of resistance” and implemented them already on  October 8th.

“What is happening now has been on the cards since October 7. This means that the war in Gaza was a beginning. It means that it is not over, and that it is not finished, but is part of something larger,” Røislien concludes to the Norwegian daily Klassekampen (September 26).

Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran

This points out the future. Nevertheless, it is obviously important to hold on to the idea that it all started with October 7th, because the Hamas attack can be labeled as terrorism and can be linked to the holocaust the way Israel and its western allies immediately did.

The labeling as terrorists is attached to outdated analyses that do not hold up against the development of Hamas since the second intifada (2000-05) – and the election to the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) in January 2006. There, Hamas gained a majority both in Gaza and the West Bank, but was met with an international boycott by the same Western countries that had pressured Hamas to participate, despite Hamas not accepting the Oslo Accords or the institutions that came with the agreement, such as the PLC.

The label of terrorism also follows Hezbollah, which is often reduced to “Iran-aligned militia” even though Hezbollah is Lebanon’s largest party and is part of the government coalition, constitutes the country’s largest social movement, and has been closely allied with the Lebanese army, especially under President and former Chief of Staff Michel Suleiman (2008-14) and General Michael Aoun (2016-22), both Christians according to Lebanon’s distorted constitution.

Hezbollah has been the stabilizing factor in Lebanon, against the Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory and warfare (2006) and keeping al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS) out of Lebanon. A decisive battle took place in the Sunni Muslim mountain town of Arsal in the Anti-Lebanon mountains from August 2 to 7, 2014. The army, with the help of Hezbollah, who sided with the Assad regime in Syria, pushed back the al-Qaeda-aligned Jabhat an-Nusra (Nusra Front) and ISIS, thereby securing the border during the Syrian Qalamoun offensive.

The self-censorship of fear

When leading mainstream media summarize their review of the Middle East, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen are schematically listed as Israel’s opponents alongside Hamas, not “Palestine.” It’s not about Palestine, just about Gaza, not about that the Hamas attack was part of the long liberation struggle that began, “from the river to the sea,” during the British mandate period after 1917. The struggle has gone on through various phases and with different means – and with the same labeling of terrorism, including PLO.

The West has therefore supported Israel’s geographical and political division of Palestine to break down the unity of the popular resistance, as was clearly evident in the 2006 election. The division has obviously intensified the internal contradictions among the Palestinian factions and was deepened after the election through the Western isolation of Hamas.
The war “against Hamas” or “between Hamas and Israel”, are terms used to downplay that the war and occupation are about Palestine.


The common thread, extending all the way to Tehran, is ‘terror.’ It has morphed into a stifling constraint on politics and media, further tightened by repeated, distorted references to the Holocaust. The resulting fear is overwhelming, inhibiting deeper examination of the Hamas attack due to the risk of immediate accusations of supporting Hamas and, by extension, terrorism. This has become Israel’s most crucial lifeline, which is beginning to strain as one delves deeper into the Hamas attack and, for instance, bases analysis on Røislien’s examination of Israel’s plans.

Not just Hamas

The Hamas attack was the most decisive, extensive military attack from the Palestinian side against the occupying power Israel. The Israeli self-examination lies ahead in time, but the war against Lebanon and Iran undoubtedly has an aspect of attempting to restore the IDF’s and the security apparatus’s lost reputation, both outwardly and inwardly.

The psychological aspect of the Gaza war is to establish Israel’s “invincibility,” which is part of the Zionist ideology, whether in the secular version of President David Ben-Gurion and Prime Minister Golda Meir or the revisionist-religious version of Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has inherited it from his father, Jabotinsky’s private secretary.

The Hamas attack was initially a “closed” military operation aimed at Israeli military targets, including the IDF, the police, and the armed security militias in the kibbutzim and settlements located in areas where Palestinian villages once existed. Many Gaza Palestinians are refugees from these villages.

Hamas, however, was not alone in the attack or in the resistance struggle that is still ongoing in the Gaza Strip. They brought with them Islamic Jihad and the secular Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) writes about this in its report “October 7 Crimes Against Humanity, War Crimes by Hamas-led Groups” which was published on July 17. (https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/07/17/october-7-crimes-against-humanity-war-crimes-hamas-led-groups

Kataeb Shuhada al-Aqsa emerged during the second intifada in 2000 in the beleaguered Balata refugee camp outside Nablus as part of Fatah, the party of PLO leader Yasser Arafat and his successor, President Mahmoud Abbas.
Since Fatah is split into several factions that submitted lists in the interrupted local elections in 2021, they are associated with the military faction at-Tanzim (The Organization) which was led by Marwan Barghouti. He is imprisoned with five life sentences and has the greatest support among the Palestinians.

The brigades broke with Fatah when they were banned by Abbas in 2007. In Gaza, they have operated as Popular Resistance Committees. (PRC).

During Israel’s war of terror, the five factions have issued joint statements emphasizing that Hamas is not isolated in the Palestinian liberation struggle. In the West Bank, various factions have united in the Jenin Brigade and in the “Lion’s Den” (Arin al-Usud) in Nablus since August 2022. Many young people are being recruited again in Balata, the birthplace of the first and second intifadas.

Terror labeling

The terrorism label is once again being employed to push for a ‘two-state solution’ for Palestinians. Hamas is to be excluded from any ‘arrangement’ for Gaza and kept out of the PLO. However, Islamic Jihad, PFLP, DFLP, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, and ‘The Lion’s Den’ are all similarly listed as terrorist organizations. This designation encompasses all forms of Palestinian armed and popular resistance, disregarding international law’s provision for occupied peoples’ right to resist and UN condemnations of armed settler colonies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as violations of international law.This approach impedes more nuanced examinations of the Hamas attack, which, according to the prevailing narrative, ‘killed nearly 1,200 Israelis.’ A deeper analysis would consider who was killed, how, and the specific numbers in each category.

The Al-Aqsa Flood was:

  1.  Regular combat between Hamas and Israeli forces in an exceptionally successful military operation.
  2. Fighting between Hamas soldiers and armed kibbutzim in settlements that most Palestinian groups view as legitimate military targets. Several of the settlements and kibbutzim are built on land that belonged to displaced Palestinian families who live in Gaza today.
  3. Hamas’ terror massacre of civilians in the kibbutzim.
  4. It is well documented that Israeli military and civilians were killed by their own forces shooting “blindly” based on a large-scale use of the so-called Hannibal directive as described in iIsraeli Ynet. How many has not been made public.
  5. But there is also an aspect of the attack that is stands out as being overseen to a large degree, a revolt (cf. the American political scientist Norman Finkelstein.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) writes in its report that “an unknown number of civilians were killed in gunfire when Israeli forces moved in to repel the attack, including Israelis who were taken captive,” according to the Norwegian news agency NTB (July 17).

October 7 is complex. It doesn’t suit Israel, also for internal reasons. According to official statistics, 332 Israeli soldiers and 57 police officers were killed in combat during the Hamas attack (not including Shin Bet officials and kibbutzim militsia). This is an exceptionally high number that will impact the Israeli investigation of the military and intelligence services that has long been anticipated and will have profound consequences.

For comparison, at least 373 Israeli soldiers have been killed so far, according to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs statistics (as of November 12th) during the ground invasion of Gaza since October 21 2023.

https://www.gov.il/en/pages/swords-of-iron-idf-casualties

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_October_Hamas-led_attack_on_Israel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war#Israel

In the description of Tom Karon, editor of Al-Jazeera’s AJ+, there is an implication that the Hamas attack on the Southern Command’s military facilities opened the gates for a high number of young Palestinians who were not part of the Hamas attack. They were able to make their way to the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im. This was not part of Hamas’ plan for the simple reason that the festival was extended by one day, to Saturday (called Black Sabbath), just two days in advance.

The relocation of about two-thirds of the Southern Command in order to reinforce the occupation of the West Bank may be the reason why a much higher number of young Gaza Palestinians were able to penetrate deeper into the “civilian zone” around the Gaza Strip than one could assume. Several Israeli sources estimate that 200-500 young Palestinianswere involved, jumping on their motorcycles or into their cars.

These individuals let their deeply felt hatred of Jews have terrible outlets, a hatred of Jews without politicized and ideological antisemitism. Young men do not read the Hamas charter, neither the one from 1988 nor the revised version from 2017, which Western media also doesn’t seem to use as a basis and which is not up to date with regard to Palestinian politics.

“The charter is not the Quran,” Mousa Abu Marzouk pointed out. He is deputy head of Hamas’ political bureau, in exile in New Cairo until he moved to Doha in Qatar after the Hamas attack last year.

“The use of violence by Israel suggests that they have moved to a different stage than before. The difference is not about scope, but character. The Palestinians who have not been killed are reduced to merely surviving and begging for rations. This is far more devastating than Nakba.”
(Adam Shatz, writer for New York Times Magazine, New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker.)

Pertinent Warning

Psychiatrist Eyad Serraj, who led Gaza Mental Health until his death in 2013, strongly warned about what occupation was doing to the growing generation. Those who have worked with children in Gaza

can confirm this, as does the Norwegian special educator Marit Nyen who worked with Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP) for Women Empowerment Project at Palestine Red Crescent Society in Khan Younis in 1999, in her book “Look Me in the Eyes.”

This was before Israel’s five bombing wars against Gaza, which all young people over 17 have experienced. They have seen the residents of Sderot, a city of about 33,000 inhabitants located just 840 meters from the Gaza Strip at its closest point, settle in camping chairs on the heights above Gaza City and cheer when the bombs rained down in 2014, duly documented by the Norwegian broadcasting NRK correspondent Sidsel Wold.

“Frantz Fanon is helpful if you want to understand how people who are brutalized and not given any political prospects will rebel in a violent way,” 

Adam Shatz, US editor of the London Review of Books.

Israel’s “total victory”

Israel’s pursuit of ‘total victory’ in Gaza misses the mark. While Hamas is facing military setbacks, it could potentially achieve several of its political objectives by reshaping the agenda for Palestine and the broader Middle East as events unfold.

Since November, media speculation about tensions between President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu has intensified. This coverage has inadvertently highlighted the gravity and reality of genocidal rhetoric emanating from Israel’s political and military leadership. For many, this has revealed the disturbing truth behind the war’s objectives and the concept of ‘total victory.’

Meanwhile, the death toll in Gaza has risen dramatically – from 10,000 to 20,000, then to 30,000, and now approaching 44,000. An unknown number of additional casualties remain missing and buried in the rubble.

One year after Hamas’s October 7 attack, where does the war stand? Rather than focusing on Israel’s goal of ‘total victory,’ we should consider a Palestinian narrative that extends far beyond Hamas, encompassing the vision ‘from the river to the sea and beyond.’

Just weeks after the attack, Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington observed that ‘Hamas’s concept of military victory is entirely about long-term political results… not in one or five years, but through decades of struggle to increase Palestinian solidarity and isolate Israel.’ In this scenario, Hamas mobilizes Gaza’s besieged population, channeling their anger while contributing to the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) collapse by portraying it as an irresponsible extension of Israeli military power.

Hamas is trying “to use Israel’s far greater strength to defeat Israel,” Alterman writes. “Israel’s strength allows the country to kill civilian Palestinians, destroy Palestinian infrastructure, and deny global calls for restraint.” Paradoxically, these actions ultimately serve Hamas’s objectives.

The unconditional support in the USA – and largely in the rest of the West – for Israel’s war, which is wrongly dated to October 7, and the illusions about Israel ‘as just another peaceful Western country’ are cracking and have never had a foothold in the global South, notes Tom Karon, a former editor at Time magazine, with a background as an activist against the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Breaking the chains in Gaza

Hamas has long been searching for a way to break the chains of governing a besieged Gaza that is cut off from the West Bank and East Jerusalem on terms entirely dictated by the occupying power, believes Tareq Baconi, board member of the Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka and affiliated with Columbia University’s Middle East Institute and the think tank European Council on Foreign Relations.

Baconi, who is based in Ramallah, published the book “Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance” in 2018, where he elaborates on Hamas’s strategy. This has been the goal since “The Great March for the Right of Return” (Masira al-awda al-kubra), the large mass protests in Gaza every Friday where people marched towards the Israeli border barriers and were met with bullets.

The first march took place on March 30, 2018; the last one was on December 27, 2019. 128 protesters were killed, about 8,200 wounded. Systematically shot down by Israeli snipers. The Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert has reported on how they received the same type of gunshot wounds: In the right leg one Friday; in the left arm the next.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_Gaza_border_protests

According to Baconi, the intention of Israel and the USA, under President Donald Trump, was to prevent Palestinian unity with the aim of revitalizing the PLO, reforming the PA and holding various elections, which was attempted in 2021, and to unite the Palestinian factions behind a new strategy for the liberation of a united Palestine under the PLO.

The Hamas attack, “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” shot down the so-called “Netanyahu doctrine” of keeping the Palestinian areas separate and trying to pacify Hamas in Gaza. The doctrine has suffered defeat, both in Israel and internationally.

The outcome on the Palestinian side is more uncertain given the prevailing circumstances. The Biden administration “challenged” Netanyahu to accept a new Palestinian government in Gaza, either through a reformed PA or consisting of non-partisan technocrats for the time being.

Hamas and at least five other Palestinian factions are pressuring President Mahmoud Abbas and the new government of Mohammed Mustafa, former finance minister (2013-15) and head of the Palestine Investment Fund (PIF), not to agree to US arrangements. Mustafa took over on March 31 after Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyah resigned in order to put new cards on the table.

New International Agenda

The Hamas attack has set a new agenda and put Palestine back on the international agenda, regardless of whether Netanyahu accuses that “our friends are ready to deny Israel the right to defend itself against the monsters in Hamas.”

The ‘Netanyahu doctrine’ was possible because Palestine had disappeared from the agenda, both globally and in the Middle East. The last flicker of attention vanished when Israel torpedoed the futile negotiations led by US Secretary of State John Kerry in April 2014 by breaking the promise to release the fourth group of Palestinian prisoners. Instead, Israel pushed forward the demand that the PLO must accept Israel as a Jewish nation-state, a law that the Knesset passed on May 1, 2018.

The ‘two-state solution’ has long been a Western comfort phrase to avoid taking concrete action against Israel’s continuous violations of international law and systematic abuses against the Palestinian population. After the Hamas attack, the ‘two-state solution’ has become the great post-Gaza mantra.

This is enough to frighten Israel’s war cabinet, government, and most of the Jewish opposition. The Knesset has passed a resolution that no ‘solutions’ shall be imposed on Israel from outside, well aware that this is a fictitious issue. The Knesset then voted down the ‘two-state solution’ on July 18, with 68 votes against nine out of the 120 representatives in the national assembly.

Statements that have been made, including from Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide, strongly suggest that neither the Oslo Accords nor UN Resolutions 242 and 338 are viable anymore:

  • East Jerusalem will not be the Palestinian capital, but Ramallah.
  • The large settlements in the West Bank that are now being expanded will not be removed but will be replaced by ‘land for peace’ where Palestinians will be offered Palestinian villages in Israel in exchange.
  • Palestine will be demilitarized and have no external borders.
  • Refugees will not be allowed to return.

While several Western countries are attempting to criminalize the slogan ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,’ which has been used as an old greeting between Palestinians worldwide, and use it in their condemnations of Hamas, it has become clearer to many what the meaning entails: that Netanyahu stood in the UN General Assembly with a map of Israel ‘from the river to the sea,’ without the West Bank and without Gaza being marked: Israel is to have control over all land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea – or from the Euphrates to the Red Sea in the most extreme Zionist version.

Saudi Arabia in a Bind

Nothing in Hamas’s planning of ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ suggests that the attack was motivated by the Abraham Accords process, through which the US is working to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have already done so, followed by Sudan and Morocco, albeit under different circumstances. This process is the US’s main initiative in relation to Iran to counter China’s growing interests in West Asia/Middle East.

The political and economic ambitions of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his Vision 2030 likely outweigh the value of Palestine. However, Israel’s genocidal warfare, threats of a regional spread, and decisions to expand settlements in the West Bank during the Gaza war have reduced the Crown Prince’s room for maneuver.

Saudi Arabia had made significant progress before the Hamas attack in selling out parts of the Arab Peace Initiative for the Middle East, adopted at the Arab League summit in Beirut in 2002 on Riyadh’s initiative. Now, Israel’s perspectives on the Gaza war have undermined the Beirut initiative, and Riyadh has repeatedly stated that a Palestinian state is a prerequisite for recognizing Israel.

But what does Saudi Arabia mean by this now that the war includes Lebanon and Iran? Negotiations on the Abraham Accords appear to underlie the ‘two-state solution’ that the US is promoting and in which Norway is involved in preliminary discussions, according to all statements, including those from Barth Eide.

The US’s unwavering support for Israel, including $3.49 billion in annual military aid, arms deliveries, and a possible sale of new fighter jets, casts long shadows over Saudi Arabia’s demands to the US for its own security arrangement. This is one of three conditions Riyadh has put forward to Washington in order to enter into the Abraham Accords. The other two are access to sophisticated weapons technology and a civilian nuclear program.

One Palestine

The Hamas attack has immediately turned reality in the Middle East upside down. Israel’s warfare for ‘total victory,’ according to Netanyahu, has impacted the West in an unprecedented way and given the accumulated outlet for solidarity with Palestine among the population.

This challenges several European governments. The almost evangelical glossy image of

Israel as an oasis in the desert of darkness has cracked deeply in the same West, the only part of the world that counts for Israel’s politics since the establishment of the state in 1948.

An important point is that the Gaza war makes it almost impossible to continue seeing Palestine as separate territories, as Israel and its Western supporters have done since Hamas’s surprising victory in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections in January 2006 and Fatah’s failed attempt to oust Hamas from power in Gaza in June 2007.

Separating the territories has been central to Israel’s policy, with support from the US and Europe, since then. It is meant to displace the pan-Palestinian perspective that Hamas shares with the majority of Palestinian factions.

Most of Israel’s bombing wars against Gaza have their origins in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They have triggered rockets from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or other groups from Gaza. This happened in 2021, during the so-called ‘Unity Intifada’.

The eviction of Palestinian families from Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem and Israel’s provocations on the holy hill of Haram ash-Sharif led Hamas to send rockets towards Jerusalem (none of which reached their target) and triggered two weeks of bombing raids on Gaza in May 2021.

‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ on October 7 was motivated by the escalation of Israel’s killings of Palestinians in the West Bank a year and a half before the Hamas attack. The Gaza war has led the Biden administration to view Palestine as one territory for a ‘post-Gaza solution,’ whatever that might mean.

‘Immediate ceasefire has become the new two-state solution,’ observes British-Palestinian writer Hamza Yussuf on X, referring to Western politicians’ ‘robotic renditions about a two-state solution’.

‘Now Israel continues to pulverize Gaza, obliterate communities and maintain its brutal siege and occupation with no end in sight, while politicians placate critics by claiming ‘we want an immediate ceasefire,” Yusuf writes (August 22).

Translated by Johan Petter Andresen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war#Israel

 

PeterM

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