Isaac Chotiner
Palestinians break into the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border fence after gunmen infiltrated areas of southern Israel, on October 7, 2023.
On Saturday, Hamas militants stormed into Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing hundreds of people and taking dozens of hostages. It was one of the most significant offensives by Palestinian militants in fifty years. In response, Israel bombed targets in Gaza, killing hundreds more, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the country was at war. President Joe Biden offered full-throated support for Israel; despite its sometimes rocky relationship with Netanyahu, the Biden Administration has recently been working to broker peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
I spoke by phone on Saturday with Nathan Thrall, the author of the book “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama.” Thrall previously worked at the International Crisis Group as the director of its Arab-Israeli project, and currently lives in Jerusalem. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the calculations behind Hamas’s attack, why the political fallout in Israel is so hard to predict, and how the Israeli response may alter the future of Palestinian politics.
How do you understand the timing of this attack?
In recent weeks, we have seen a resumption of the protests along the border fence with Gaza, a deterioration in conditions in Gaza, and withdrawal of support from Qatar, which works closely with Israel in managing Gaza. And there was the Israeli declaration that it was suspending work permits for Gazans, which the Gaza economy relies on. Those are all proximate causes of the timing.
But, of course, it’s hard to imagine that Hamas could have pulled this off and surprised Israel in this way without a lot of planning. And in its messaging, Hamas is not emphasizing the conditions in Gaza. It’s emphasizing the Aqsa Mosque—the increased visitation by the Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and other Israelis to Al Aqsa and the open declarations of intent to build a temple there and so forth—which is self-serving for Hamas because it would rather be perceived as defending the greater Palestinian cause, and defending a Palestinian national symbol and a Muslim symbol, than as acting out of a more narrow interest to end the siege of Gaza.
At least one Hamas spokesman said on Saturday that this attack should be a warning for Arab states not to ally with Israel. We’ve seen increasingly close relations between Arab states and Israel recently, and now discussion about the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, brokered in part by the United States. What do you make of that?
Clearly, this act by Hamas is suicidal. It is an attack of unprecedented scope, and Israel will retaliate to a greater degree than it has before, potentially leading to outcomes we haven’t seen before: not just a simple razing of Gaza by airplanes but also a ground incursion and potential reoccupation of parts of Gaza. So the decision to wittingly, knowingly, undertake this comes from a sense that there are no other options and that there’s nothing left to lose. And part of the reason that Hamas, and Palestinians in general, feel that they’re in such a desperate situation is that they have been entirely abandoned by those who should be their allies: the Arab states. The talks about the steps toward normalization with Saudi Arabia certainly inform the Palestinian sense that they have been abandoned.
When you say that the attack by Hamas was suicidal, do you mean it’s suicidal for Hamas? Do you mean it will cause pain and suffering for the Palestinian people?
All of the above. I think that the attacks are virtually guaranteed to bring civilian deaths on a greater scale than we have seen, and Hamas has put in jeopardy its rule in Gaza and the lives of its leadership to a greater extent than ever before. It’s hard to overstate how shocking these images are to the Israeli public. Gaza is made up of refugees from towns within Israel, and more than seventy per cent of the population of Gaza comprises refugees, so it’s something out of Israeli nightmares that the refugees are going to come storming back and take over their old towns.
That degree of shock and that degree of military failure by Israel—not simply that the attack took place but that you and I are talking now, more than twelve hours after it occurred, and reports are that Hamas fighters have taken over and are still controlling military bases outside Gaza—is incomprehensible to any Israeli. Politically, it is hard to imagine that this government will not feel a need to exact an extraordinary price in order to save face.
But to go back to my question: When you first said that this was suicidal, it was in response to something about Israel making peace with its Arab neighbors. What I thought you were going to say was this is going to invite an overwhelming Israeli response, which in turn is going to put pressure on the Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia, not to make deals with Israel right now because it’s just going to be so gruesome and awful, and therefore Hamas will have achieved something diplomatically even if it faces huge retaliation.
Perhaps Hamas can delay a normalization that’s in the works, but I don’t think that its actions will thwart a normalization that would’ve otherwise happened. Now, there are considerable obstacles to normalization, and there are real difficulties and outstanding issues. The Saudis greatly dislike the Biden Administration. They would rather hand this gift to a Republican Administration. There are many, many reasons to believe that a normalization isn’t as imminent as it’s been reported in the press. But I don’t think Hamas had any reasonable hope that it could make the difference between normalization happening and not happening.
Why do this then? You don’t need to convince me that Palestinians feel completely hopeless about the situation and feel a need to turn to armed resistance. But the people who run Hamas are perhaps less sentimental than you or I, and would worry about doing something that might be suicidal to their movement. That’s why I was somewhat surprised by this.
I have written all about the explicability of everybody’s actions in this conflict through rational self-interest. That was the subject of my first book. And this move by Hamas appears to me to be inexplicable. They have put themselves in greater jeopardy than at any point in their history. Of course, this is going to increase the support for Hamas and make them appear heroic to some people, and there are political gains to be made from this brazen act, but the risks are just too high. This is perceived by Israel as a qualitatively different act.
Hamas can launch a bunch of rockets—and we’ve seen this pattern, and it lasts anywhere from a few days to a few weeks—and they survive because, at the end of the day, Israel doesn’t want to reoccupy Gaza. That is considered from the Israeli perspective to be an extremely undesirable task and a bloody and costly one. However, Hamas understands that this attack would be perceived by the Israeli public and political leadership as being of a totally different order of magnitude. And therefore, Israel would consider acts that it had not in past escalations, including coming in with ground forces and reoccupying Gaza and trying to eliminate its leadership.
Does this make you think differently about Israeli military preparedness and the competence of the current Israeli government?
There has not been a military failure of these proportions since the 1973 war. In 1973, on Yom Kippur, Israel was surprise-attacked by Egypt and Syria, and there was a commission of inquiry into the military failure. It is the trope in Israeli politics of a misguided conception of your enemies and what they intend. And every Israeli military official has in his bones the lesson of 1973: to constantly question your premises and to be prepared for them to be challenged. So, not only does this call into question for Israelis the competence of their Army but also for every outside observer. It’s shocking. This is one of the strongest militaries in the Middle East. And a group of fighters from a besieged ghetto penetrated the fence and took over Israeli military bases.
There has been some criticism of Netanyahu’s government for harming military readiness with its domestic plans. What do you think of that argument?
With the judicial reform, you’ve had all of these reservists, in particular those from the Air Force, who said they’d refuse to serve when called up. So the protesters say that Netanyahu, by doggedly pursuing the judicial reform, is jeopardizing Israel’s security. And that’s the partisan claim that has been made recently.
It’s entirely self-serving. It’s a claim made by the opponents of the judicial reform. I don’t doubt that it has harmed Israel’s capabilities. But there is a rebuttal from Netanyahu and his allies, which is, O.K., let’s not dispute the fact that this reserve protest has harmed Israel’s security and its preparedness. But who’s to blame for that? Is it that we are to blame for it, for doggedly pursuing what we consider to be an entirely legitimate judicial reform? Or is it that these reservists crossed the line?
And I would imagine you find both sides of this debate to be missing the point?
Yes, I very much disagree with the entire premise of the protests over the judicial reform, which are based on the assumption by both sides that Israeli democracy is at stake. I do not see how any definition of democracy can include a situation in which one in ten Israeli Jews lives in the occupied territories and has full rights—voting rights, civil rights—and, when they go to and from their workplaces and their homes, they do not cross an international border. When the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics publishes the number of Jews and Arabs in the country, it lists the Jews living in the settlements. It doesn’t say that they’re living abroad. When the people vote in the settlements, they do not cast absentee ballots; in every sense, these people live inside the state of Israel alongside millions of people of a different ethnic group who are deprived of basic civil rights. That has existed for decades.
The 1973 war is considered as having had very long-term political consequences for Israel, and for the Israeli Labor Party, which was never the same afterward. How do you think this might register politically? For now, it appears that Netanyahu’s opponents are going to join him in a unity government while this war continues.
This is an enormous challenge to Netanyahu and to this government because of the scale of the failure. That said, the opponents of the current coalition are not very impressive politically, and Netanyahu has proved himself to be extremely adept and resilient. Even on the day of a catastrophe of this scale, I am unwilling to predict that that will lead to the demise of Netanyahu’s political career.
There were a number of consequences of 1973. One of them was internal, as you say. It was the beginning of the end for decades of Labor Party dominance. But the most important consequence of the 1973 war was that it pushed Israel to reassess its policy toward Egypt and toward holding on to Sinai. And it started to take steps toward reaching an agreement with Egypt; that happened iteratively at first, and then led eventually to the peace agreements with Egypt and the full withdrawal of the Israeli forces and settlements from Sinai.
As you’ve seen the statements from around the world, Europe and the United States especially, do you think the full-throated support we’ve seen for Israel is a sign that Israel has had some success diplomatically? Or is this event so shocking and horrific that you would expect this kind of reaction regardless? I was not surprised by the condolences sent, but there were not many calls for “an easing of tensions,” etc.
First of all, Western and U.S. support for Israel is unwavering, and that is entirely unsurprising. In terms of the absence of calls for restraint: those are often perceived by Israel as a signal to quickly end some bombing campaign in Gaza. The absence of it here I interpret to be the opposite: it’s a green light for Israel to take the retaliatory steps that we all are sure are coming.
I am not under the impression that Israel is in a difficult place diplomatically. There’s lots of chatter about how much the Biden Administration may not like working with the most right-wing Israeli government in recent memory and open racists in senior ministerial positions and so on. But, at the end of the day, what is the policy of the Biden Administration toward Israel? It just allowed Israel to enter the Visa Waiver Program, which was a coveted diplomatic victory, and it’s doing next to nothing to stop a forced displacement of more than eleven hundred Bedouin in the West Bank.
How might Palestinian politics look different in a few months?
If there’s anyone who’s shaking in his boots right now, it’s Mahmoud Abbas. He is watching as city centers in the West Bank come out in support of Hamas and other groups in Gaza. He and the Palestinian Authority are perceived as working hand in glove with Israel to keep a lid on any kind of resistance to Israeli occupation. So this giant boost for Hamas’s popularity is extremely threatening to him, as is the increased violence that we see in the West Bank, both preceding Saturday’s events and immediately following them.
It suggests that the future is extremely unknown if this is extremely worrisome for both Hamas and Abbas.
A lot of it depends on how high a price Israel is willing to pay to really change the situation from the one that existed on Friday. And that’s what I meant by suicidal. If Hamas understands Israel—and I think that it does—it will have known prior to launching this attack that Israel was going to contemplate options it had never contemplated before.
What else have you been thinking about today?
I’m looking at the media coverage of this event. For a decade I was working at the International Crisis Group, and a lot of my job was to write a reactive report every time there was an escalation in Gaza, because all the world’s attention is on the issue as soon as we have any kind of a surge in violence. But we all turn our eyes away when that doesn’t exist. And the process, for me, of working at the International Crisis Group and writing the same report over and over again about the escalation, convinced me that I should leave the International Crisis Group and this sort of work. And that what I needed to do was to bring more attention to the root causes, which are ignored and we are just guaranteed to see more and more of these sporadic outbursts of violence, with civilians killed on both sides, because we refuse to focus on the actual causes of the violence.
When I was choosing a subject for a book, I wanted to explicitly draw the attention of the world to the structural causes. It was very tempting to choose something that is attention-grabbing, like bombings in Gaza, or attacks by Hamas. Those are the things people care about. But I deliberately chose something ordinary, something that happens all over the world—a car accident, a tragic collision involving a group of kindergartners on their way to a play area. What does it mean for something like this to take place in this specific system where the parents have different ability to visit their children in different hospitals depending on whether they have a green I.D. or a blue I.D.? And to explore the daily lives of the people who are trapped in the system that is the real driver of these explosions that grab our attention every few months or years.
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