The West Is Next

“It didn’t start on October 7^th.” These words have been repeated like a mantra by those who wish to justify Hamas’s actions of 7 October 2023, by suggesting that the savagery of that day was provoked by previous events.

There is a subtle conflation at work here. While it is obviously true that the wider Israeli–Palestinian conflict did not start on 7 October, the present war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza did start on that date, with the massacre and hostage-taking of the inhabitants of border-hugging kibbutzim and attendees at the Nova music festival, which prompted the Israeli government to explicitly declare war against Hamas that very day. And yet, 7 October is not entirely disconnected from a longer history, either. The attackers of 7 October planned their actions well before that date and they did within the context of the broader Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Hamas and its ideology existed long before 7 October.

So of course things didn’t start on 7 October 2023. But it’s similarly absurd to suggest that they started in 1948—a date often posited by anti-Zionists and their ideological allies as the alternative beginning of the conflict, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced during the Nakba. But to suggest things started in 1948 is to ignore the many violent pogroms against Jews that took place in the 1920s and 1930s, such as the looting of Hebron in 1929. It was because of local intercommunal violence that the British colonial powers proposed a two-state solution in 1936. In 1947, the UN implemented a two-state solution—but it failed to solve the conflict, instead giving way to the war of 1947–48. Neither did it all start with Theodore Herzl’s Der Judenstaat  of 1896, nor with the waves of Zionist Jewish immigration to Palestine from the 1880s onwards.

The ideology of Hamas goes back much further than any of these events.