Making a case for a wide-ranging viewpoint

Every investigation has a starting point. Sometimes that starting point is not obvious, and a decision must be made as to where to begin. The starting point shapes our perception and determines the conclusions we draw.

Take 7 October 2023, the day of the Hamas massacre in southern Israel. Germany's then Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, described this bloody day as "a turning point for Israel, for our country, for the world".

According to Germany's Federal Agency for Civic Education, "Jewish communities describe this day as a 'watershed' that fundamentally changed their lives (…) Many begin their narratives precisely with the memory of this day, which for them represents a historical beginning or break in their history."

A turning point, a break, even the beginning of history: a point from which everything that happened afterwards may be assessed. From a Palestinian perspective, though, 7 October 2023 was not a starting point that occurred in isolation, but rather the result of a long series of injustices.

Academic Yara Hawari, for example, emphasises that to understand the events of 7 October, one must first understand decades of Israeli occupation, ‘settler colonialism’ and the long-standing brutal blockade of the Gaza Strip – a blockade that has turned the area into an open-air prison. 

And Noura Erakat, one of the most eloquent voices of a younger generation of Palestinians in the United States, asks: “What did people think (...) a refugee population that has been (...) under occupation for 56 years and subjected to a debilitating siege for 17 years (...) would do?” ‘Racial colonialism,’ as she calls it, “breeds this kind of violence”.

A massive radicalisation program

Two traumatised sides face each other in the conflict in the Middle East. Depending on which prism one looks through, the point at which the analysis starts will differ. There is no right or wrong starting point for trauma, but there is for analysis.

Because the choices we make also determine the solutions we seek. If we choose the wrong starting point, our supposed solutions may not be solutions at all. If we see 7 October as a rupture or as the beginning of a story, the conclusion could be drawn that once Hamas is removed, then the world will be back in order.

This is precisely what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu advocates; it is his stated war aim. The disarmament of Hamas, a demand included in Trump's recently suggested Gaza deal, is promoted as the eradication of the organisation and, therefore, as victory.

This raises two questions. Is the stated goal realistic? And if the goal is actually achieved, will the problem really be solved? To both questions, I would answer no.

For two years, the Israeli army has razed large parts of the Gaza Strip, displaced hundreds of thousands of people and used starvation as a weapon. Yet despite its military superiority, it has failed to eliminate Hamas.

Rather, what we are witnessing in Gaza is a massive Palestinian radicalisation programme. How will a child rescued from the rubble after an Israeli attack that has buried his parents position himself, politically, later in life? There is no military solution.

Civil disobedience has achieved nothing

If, on the other hand, one looks at history as an ongoing process, one in which every decision, every action, every supposed rupture arises from the conditions which came before, then completely different conclusions may be drawn from 7 October, and different solutions would follow.

Then, the heart of the problem may in fact be the Israeli occupation. Despite the 2005 withdrawal of Israeli settlers and the army, the Gaza Strip is still considered occupied territory, as Israel controls both the land and sea borders, as well as the airspace. This assessment was confirmed last year in an advisory opinion issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague. 

The notion of ​​a peaceful occupation, against which there is no resistance from the occupied, is a contradiction in terms. Civil disobedience is, of course, an option for the occupied but the Palestinian experience is that no one listens when a farmer in the West Bank chains himself to his olive tree to prevent his land being taken away.

Throughout history, Palestinians have only received attention when they resort to militant and terrorist means: the Olympic attacks and plane hijackings in the 1970s; the Hamas attacks on buses in Israel in the 1990s; the Hamas rockets before 7 October.

Such brutal attacks on civilians may lie beyond our comprehension, but there is a difference between understanding and comprehension. We must attempt to understand the logic behind these attacks because until we understand that logic, we can not expect lasting change. 

The long tail of the Abraham Accords

The Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 was planned at a time when the fate of Palestinians had been largely forgotten. The occupation had turned into the status quo, no longer a talking point in either the international media or Israel.

Even some Arab states, most notably the United Arab Emirates, had established diplomatic relations with Israel at Trump's initiative in 2020; a free trade zone and visa-free travel were also part of the Abraham Accords.

The occupation and the Palestinians barely merited a footnote. They were no longer discussed—until they shot to the top of the international agenda on October 7. This mechanism must also be understood from a media perspective, that is, by questioning at what point we actually perceive a conflict, or as the Palestinians would say, an injustice.

The end of the occupation would be the solution

But back to the question of starting points. To understand the events of 7 October in the context of the Israeli occupation is to understand Hamas as a direct result of this context. Hamas was not born in a vacuum; it is a piece of the Palestinian militancy that arose from the occupation.

If there are no political prospects for Palestinians, there will always be militant responses to the occupation. As long as the occupation exists, resistance to that occupation will form. Should Hamas no longer exist, another organisation, whose name we do not yet know, will take its place. 

In the meantime, trauma is destroying the minds of both sides, the occupied and the occupier, leading to a decrease in vision and an increase in suffering, but no solution. Haaretz journalist Gideon Levi sums it up in a single sentence: "There is no Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East," he said. "There is only a brutal Israeli occupation; it must come to its end." 

This text is an edited translation of the German original. Translation by Louise East.