The Missed Moral Lesson of October 7

No one should be made to relive that evening, when the smoke was still rising and the only authority was that of panic. But in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, mingled with the rage, the grief, the humiliation that night, there should have been another feeling: a stunned clarity. That the barbarism and blood visited on the Nova festival and kibbutz Be’eri were mirrors of a blood and barbarism long inflicted on the West Bank and Gaza. That the homelessness of one people was never sound enough reason to enforce homelessness on another. That deterrence and military might will fail if you don’t acknowledge why your enemy fights. That the pursuit of domination will never lead to peace or even a tolerable kind of stasis; it leads instead, with depressing regularity, to its gory opposite.

If that day is to have any meaning, if the memory of the dead is to be used for a higher purpose than as license for more murder, it must be in service of a moral lesson: No state can live sanely in a condition of permanent siege. With that lesson, Israel’s leaders would have put the planes back in their hangars, reversed the tanks back to their depots, switched off the algorithm that allows them to coolly and clinically slaughter the blameless by the dozen, and on October 8 immediately restarted negotiations for a just peace.

Don’t waste time with counterfactuals, we historians are told. Counterfactuals are just fantasies, really, wishful dreams, and they become more deceitful the further they drift from reality. But to mourn the present and wish for something different is not a counterfactual. It is a warning of the kind that has been sounded at every critical juncture of the last eight decades and has always been ignored by those who have the power to behave differently.

The path was laid in 1967, in the euphoria of victory in the Six-Day War and the seizure of what little territory the Palestinians had in their possession. Instead of retreating from what did not belong to it, instead of adhering to the laws and resolutions that told it to withdraw, the Israeli state chose to exalt its armies as colonists of the future. I.F. Stone, as great a moral mind as he was a journalist, saw easily and early what was chosen by refusing peace in favor of a God-given arrogance on the land. Radical though he was, Stone was no Bundist or anti-Zionist. In 1946, he had sailed as a reporter and sympathizer from Poland with survivors and escapees of the Holocaust on what he called the “Jewish Mayflowers,” dodging the British blockade to Mandate Palestine. It was worry and fear that made him notice, in 1967, the vice-grip tighten:

The spiral of fear and hate … the atmosphere of a besieged community, ringed by hostile neighbours … turning every man and woman into a soldier, regarding every Arab within it distrustfully as a potential Fifth Columnist, and glorying in its military strength. Chauvinism and militarism are the inescapable fruits.… In the absence of a general settlement, war will recur at regular intervals.

“The finest day,” Stone hoped, will be the day Israel “achieves reconciliation,” a greater and more permanent triumph than any military victory. Every day since the Six-Day War, and every day since October 7, has been in defiance of these warnings, these hopes. Every day has been proof that generations of leaders could have picked a wiser course and chose not to. Every massacre is a choice.

One of the chief stupidities of the Hamas offensive was to kill, along with many innocents, Israel’s reckoning with itself. Since January 2023, the better part of the nation—that part sensitive to the threat of dictatorship—had come out in a monthslong rolling thunder of protest, strike, and civil disobedience against the Likud’s “judicial reform,” a project of vandalism to strip Israel’s Supreme Court of its ability to overturn unconstitutional laws. The so-called reform’s twin purposes were to protect Benjamin Netanyahu from seeing prison on corruption charges and to create the opening through which Netanyahu’s coalition partners—the Jewish Power and Religious Zionist parties—could intensify their campaign of building new settlements in the West Bank. These days we regard the word polarization with fear, but in this case polarization was necessary and good: The country divided, and those who preferred secular democracy over the whims of hysterical messianists were in the majority.

By October 6, the majority was arriving (slowly and much too late) at a realization that the settler movement incubated in the frontier had returned to infect the very heart of the nation. Even if most could not recognize the need to retreat from that frontier, they noticed what the frontier had done. Made there, on the hilltops of Hebron and Nablus, ringed in wire, in the daily disinterment of someone else’s olive groves, was a bacillus of fanaticism and bloodlust. Israel had not annexed the territories; the territories had annexed Israel. So it was that during Passover in 2023, a squad of the faithful (partly incited by Itamar Ben-Gvir) tried to get to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to perform a ritual sacrifice. In return, Palestinian youths tried to fortify the Al Aqsa mosque against them, only to be cleared out roughly by Israeli police. Thus October 7 earned its grotesque name, Al Aqsa Flood; thus Stone Age rituals provoked Stone Age justice; thus Israeli citizens were denied a showdown with Netanyahu’s settler coalition, the chance to finally excise them from political life.

A misguided strain of liberal thinking places blame for the disaster of October 7 and all subsequent disasters on Benjamin Netanyahu alone. Profoundly corrupt, decisively incompetent, savage to his toes, only he could have made the Jewish state the least safe place on earth for Jews. With any luck, the rest of Netanyahu’s life will be spent in a small prison cell—whether in The Hague or in Tel Aviv. He knows this, so the deeper and wider he makes the war on Gaza, and now on Lebanon, the longer he will put off the inevitable. This is why, the argument goes, he has personally sabotaged every proposal for a cease-fire, no matter how reasonable, no matter how necessary for the rescue of the hostages he claims to care about so much.

But if we are honest with ourselves, the ugliness of this picture would not meaningfully ease were Netanyahu removed from the frame; the crisis would look little different with someone else at the head of the government, and certainly no better—not the defense chief, Yoav Gallant, nor the “opposition” leaders, Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid. None of these men depend on the war for their political survival, yet they all have endorsed its illegal and most lethal methods. The Israeli elite, regardless of its words, is bound by the same force it has unleashed. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish called it—during Israel’s savage siege of Beirut in the summer of 1982—being “in the claws of the tank”: trapped by the machinery on which you rely, the weapons you have made turned into a fetish of national salvation that is really a weapon for the destructions of nations and of people—your enemy’s and your own. It is a logic that regards the Palestinians as a “problem,” and then only as a military problem; a logic that obliges those leaders to reach for the gun at first instinct. From the heights of a jet bomber or through the optics of a rifle, force that has failed is force that has not been applied firmly enough. And the machine, I.F. Stone once wrote, “is forgiven atrocities many-fold more terrible than those of the guerillas.”

The elites and their propagandists have a code word for the aggressive cascades of this horrid year, a useful euphemism. They call it “security.” When the fighting is over, “security” is what Netanyahu wants to wield over what’s left of Gaza’s people. The settler movement’s conference in January was called “Settlement Brings Security.” For Bezalel Smotrich, champion of that movement, any talk of any ceasefire at any time serves only to “harm Israel’s security.” To its patrons and armorers in Germany and the United States, “security” sounds reasonable and resounds with all those myths that have been so violently overthrown in the last 12 months but which they still believe in: restraint, self-defense, and, most deluded of all, “purity of arms”—the fable that holds the Israel Defense Forces to be the “most moral army in the world.” For anyone who has ever faced the pointed end of this version of “security,” they know its true meaning: domination and supremacy.

These constant spasms of savagery are an expression, strange though it may seem, of a profound vulnerability—a lack of real security. In the same way that negotiations were the only reliable method for returning hostages from Gaza and defending those locals still trapped there, a negotiated settlement—at last—is the only guarantor of safety. True safety, that is: the kind freed from fear and from anxiety, from a situation that requires you, periodically and with ever-increasing cruelty, to turn yourself and the soldiers you command into war criminals. It might take a generation; it might take two generations. Anyone with even a shade of the courage Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin showed in the early 1990s—when he recognized the virtue of a political solution over endless bloodshed—will be killed just like he was, if the settlers have anything to say about it. Indeed, weeks before Rabin was murdered by a fascist in 1995, before the promise of the Oslo Accords was betrayed, Netanyahu had led a protest calling Rabin a “traitor.” If this is the insult thrown at those who would rather obey the warnings that for so long went unheeded, then we too should all be traitors. Better that than make yourself an accomplice.