Why did Hamas attack Israel on Oct. 7, 2023? Was it because they hated Jews and Israel so much they just had to scratch that itch and massacre 1,200 people? Because they’re animals, inhuman, or some other dehumanizing category of creature that frees us from considering motive?
Or did Hamas do it to achieve a specific outcome?
It’s unlikely Hamas expected Israel to surrender. So what exactly did Hamas want?
Oct. 7 has been called Israel’s 9/11 — although the proportionate casualty count is much higher than America’s was on America’s 9/11 — so let’s recall what al Qaeda wanted from 9/11.
It’s called terrorism because the immediate goal is to terrify. Why? Because terrified people not think good. Panic produces mistakes.
“Keep calm and carry on” isn’t just an emotionally tone-deaf pep talk. It’s armor against doing something stupid. Which is the purpose of terrorism.
The U.S. was at a disadvantage on 9/11 because for stupid reasons Americans had narrowly and stupidly split over the 2000 presidential race and the Supreme Court stupidly stole it for the stupidest candidate, who staffed the White House with people itching to do stupid things.
Al Qaeda air-mailed them a reason to do stupid things and they did. Win-win!
With 9/11 terrifying far too much of the country — including putative opposition leaders — into comfy-feeling “unity” behind Team Stupid, America embarked on all-time historical stupidity. Black sites. Torture. Invading Afghanistan but not getting Osama bin Laden. Invading Iraq but not having legal justification to do so. Abu Ghraib. The Department of Homeland [sic] Security. Domestic spying. On and on.
The 9/11 attacks didn’t become a success until America made them one. Which brings us to Oct. 7.
The Wall Street Journal yesterday revealed (gift link so you know it’s important) — and virtually no one seems to care — that Israel’s military has found documents clarifying exactly what Hamas wanted. And that Hamas achieved it.
The documents include minutes from a Hamas meeting on Oct. 2, 2023. Hamas’s chief in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, is in the minutes saying an “extraordinary act” was needed to blow up the road Israel and Saudi Arabia were on to normalizing relations between the two, for Saudi Arabia to recognize Israel as a country.
Another document recommended escalating clashes in the West Bank and Jerusalem to the same end.
“[T]he Saudi-Zionist normalization agreement is progressing significantly,” Sinwar said, and if completed would “open the door for the majority of Arab and Islamic countries to follow the same path.”
Sinwar wasn’t wrong. The Saudis for months had been working on a wish list from America in exchange for making nice with Israel.
They Saudis had been scrubbing their textbooks of blatant antisemitism and references to the Israeli and Zionist “enemy.” One book’s chapter on World War II still didn’t mention the Holocaust, but, y’know, baby steps.
In September, Crown Prince Muhammad told Fox, “Every day we get closer” to a deal.
That same month, for the first time, Saudi Arabia welcomed its first ever ministerial visit from Israel. The second Israeli minister landed in Riyadh just a week later, on the same day Sinwar addressed that Hamas meeting back in Gaza. Normalization was very much on everyone’s agendas.
Hamas’s greatest enemy was on the verge of making friends with Hamas’s most important friends. Attacking Israel, of course, risked generating sympathy for Israel and even pushing Saudi Arabia and others to rally to Israel’s side.
Unless Israel fucked up.
That was Hamas’s fundamental gamble. That they could be horrible and vile enough that the stupidest Israeli officials would meet no opposition pushing Israel to do its worst. Its very worst.
Israel’s seemingly unrestrained military response, the opposite of keeping calm, almost instantly incinerated the global sympathy it received when the scope of the Oct. 7 attacks first became clear.
Pres. Joe Biden and Donald Trump helped Hamas’s efforts by supporting in deeds if not always in words pretty much everything Israel has done. The U.S. has illegally supplied Israel with the weapons blowing up its own future, weapons used in crimes against humanity. Republicans but also some Democrats demonized those who urged restraint as antisemites and terrorist sympathizers.
Biden said, “Israel has the right to respond — indeed has a duty to respond — to these vicious attacks… if the United States experienced what Israel is experiencing, our response would be swift, decisive, and overwhelming.”
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said, “We will do everything necessary to support Israel’s effort to defeat the Hamas terrorists and their barbarity.”
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) reportedly objected to a cease-fire, saying, “Let’s get back to killing.”
Six months in to Israel’s campaign in Gaza, Trump endorsed it:
“I would say I would act very much the same way... You'd have to be crazy not too. Only a fool would not do that. …It bothers me so much when I see people, they don't talk about Oct. 7 anymore, they talk about how aggressive Israel is."
Trump’s whole party pretty much fell in line with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wholesale assault on civilian targets. Like Fetterman, a handful of Democrats, too, declared that anything Israel and Netanyahu did was okay with them and tore into any fellow Democrats calling for America to force a cease-fire or at least comply with laws against arming crimes against humanity.
All of which was what Hamas wanted. Hamas was depending on Israel acting without restraint. And Israel’s supposed American allies protected Israel from any pressure not to give Hamas what it wanted.
Israel’s daily massacres — slaughtering innocent people with no sign of discrimination; cover stories and explanations shredding instantly like soggy, non-Bounty paper towels — almost instantly made Arab alignment with Israel politically impossible.
On Oct. 7, the Saudis had urged both sides to de-escalate. But within the first week of Israel’s onslaught, the Saudi message turned to one of support for “our brothers in Palestine.” Saudi diplomats suspended talks with Israel on Oct. 13, just six days after the “extraordinary act” planned with the hope of achieving just that. Hamas had won.
(That’s the real legacy of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Democratic Majority for Israel wielding the dark money of hard-line American Jews and Christians to take out sane Democrats and make sure American politicians give Israel Hamas everything it wants.)
Today, a year and a half later, the Wall Street Journal reports, the Saudi prince has privately disclosed two conditions for resuming talks with Israel. One is ending the war in Gaza and the other is beginning diplomacy toward the creation of a Palestinian state.
In short, Israel’s panicked, furious, allegedly genocidal response — killing more than 53,000 people and gripping two million Gazans in a grinding, ongoing humanitarian disaster — gave Hamas exactly what it wanted: Reeling Saudi Arabia away from Israel and back into the business of advocating for Palestinians.
If U.S. officials — or even Trump out of office — had made restraint a political necessity for Israel, Hamas might have failed.
Israel instead might have built an international, strategic coalition to take out and, hey, maybe even bring to justice, the savage war criminals of Hamas who ordered and carried out the Oct. 7 attack. Maybe then Oct. 7 could have made things easier for Saudi Arabia, giving its leaders political space to finally normalize relations and begin genuine, deep cooperation.
This, too, might have isolated Hamas even further, possibly even building pressure for Iran, in turn, to reduce its support for Hamas, as well. There’s no way to know now.
What we do know is Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are busily deporting and imprisoning people whose counsel, if followed, would have benefited Israel incalculably and potentially cost Hamas its most vital allies.
Blithely unconcerned with the consequences for Israel, Trump plays the fool, playing into Hamas’s hands, casually contemplating the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. On Tuesday, he called for the Saudi-Israeli normalization he has made so much more difficult, but shrugged at the prospects he’s helped shatter: “You’ll do it in your own time.” Whatever. You’re welcome, Hamas.
No one’s even speculating when normalization might come now. Because the self-righteous, chest-thumping, militaristic, simplistic, ostensible “support” of Israel by U.S. Republicans and Democrats alike cleared the way for Israel’s astonishing plummet down a cursed trajectory to ignominy, war crimes, and international isolation.
The best advice for Israel came a couple weeks after Oct. 7 and might have been too late even then:
“After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes… the choices are never clear or easy for the leadership. There’s always costs. But it requires being deliberate. It requires asking very hard questions. It requires clarity about the objectives and an honest assessment about whether the path you are on will achieve those objectives.”
Not as pithy as “Keep calm and carry on,” but an unmistakeable, prophetic, and unheeded warning about what would happen if Israel went down the path it ultimately chose.
It’s tempting to wonder how things might have been different if Biden, too, had heard and heeded that counsel. Except he was the one who offered it.
TFN creator and writer Jonathan Larsen co-created Up w/ Chris Hayes and wrote for Countdown with Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, helped launch CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and Air America Radio, and has also worked at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Young Turks.
Is that a typo about the election before 9-11, when the stupidest was allowed to win due to a Supreme Court decision? You wrote 2020, and not 2000.
Sobering analysis. Warmongers in both American parties gave Hamas what they wanted, leading to the annihilation of Gaza journalists, children, women, and men. Israel’s tattered reputation now attracts Spain and China to call out their killing, and many citizens to protest financial relationships with Israel. The savagery unleashed on Israel and Gaza leaves everyone a loser.