On October 7 last year, Hamas fighters stormed into Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing more than 1,200 people. A year later, the Middle East is at its most unstable in at least a generation. More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza as a result of Israel’s response. In the occupied West Bank, state and settler violence against Palestinians is escalating. Israel has invaded Lebanon and is fighting Hezbollah there. And Israel and Iran remain on the brink of all-out war.
To talk about what’s next for the region, I recently spoke with a Palestinian writer and scholar who is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Malcolm H. Carr Middle East Center and an expert on Israeli peace issues. I spoke with Yazid Sayegh on the phone. Palestine conflict and Lebanese politics. In our conversation, edited for length and clarity, we discuss why Hamas misjudged Israel’s response to October 7, and whether Israel has any long-term plans beyond military action. We then discussed what the war in Gaza revealed about international law.
How do you view the past year in its larger historical context?
First of all, much of Israel’s reaction since day one has been driven by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s domestic political calculations: how to ensure he is protected from corruption charges, and how to stay in power. It means that it has been moved. And that means maintaining alignment with far-right partners. It has clearly been privileged in his discourse, policy actions and decisions.
Second, military strategy, and ultimately political strategy, evolved from the initial radical response to Hamas attacks to the imperative of restoring Israel’s deterrence and punishing Hamas. . This always lacked a political end goal. And I think Israel’s political and military leaders have never resolved the particular problem of defining a meaningful end goal. In other words, this government is committed to preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state and a meaningful political process with the Palestinian people.
The pursuit of military action in the absence of a coherent political objective has created its own momentum and dynamics. This led Israel to develop a more advanced political-military strategy. We are now seeing this in action in Lebanon and the war against Hezbollah, and in various extensions attacking the Houthis in Yemen and potentially attacking Iran. This evolution is interesting because, on the one hand, it is clearly very ambitious. Prime Minister Netanyahu now speaks not only of a complete victory over Hezbollah, just as he has spoken of a complete victory over Hamas, but also of redesigning the Middle East and creating a new regional order. And this is reminiscent of just such expressions used by Ariel Sharon in 1982, when he was overseeing the invasion of Lebanon as Minister of Defense.
In your view, Israel’s response seems to have been largely inert. That’s impressive. You have previously talked about Israel’s actions being more deliberate and thoughtful, for example with regard to settlements.
that’s right. It is right to bring up the grand plan for settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which has been in place for decades. Current political and military strategies are emerging, but they are not preconceived or predetermined. It is manifested in the process of waging a conflict. It is driven by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s narrow-minded, parochial domestic political calculations and messianicism, and frankly by the fascist and often genocidal views of his more far-right partners. Although it has acquired the appearance of something grand and well thought out, it is more grandiose than grand. Israel does not actually yet have a clear and consistent political end goal. It’s like decorating a Christmas tree. You add all the baubles and stuff and all of a sudden you realize, “Oh, I have a Christmas tree.”
In March, you said Hamas is “nihilistic” and suffers from “delusions” of sparking a major regional war and mass uprising against Israel on October 7th. Although this is certainly not what Hamas intended, a regional war now appears to be on the horizon. Could you please elaborate on what you mean?
I still don’t fully understand what Hamas was aiming for or what it thought it was doing. This is because there have been very contradictory signals, starting with the first voice message from (Hamas military commander) Mohammed Deif, calling on Palestinians everywhere to uprising, and calling on Arab forces to join the conflict. Because there are many. You have to think there’s a kind of delusion there – when you look at the reality of the Palestinian population in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, in the Israeli public, and even more so in Syria, where they’ve been brutalized – people. It must be considered that there is some kind of delusion in expecting that the government will stand up. Only Arab armies are under clear government control. Even from a purely propaganda perspective, the very thought of this is alarming. I don’t know what adjective to use there.
But the other thing I’m trying to understand is why Hamas paid so little attention to the issue of minimizing the damage its fighters inflict on civilians in southern Israel. I’m talking about civilians or non-combatants here in the sense of unarmed soldiers, prisoners of war, or people who may have been in the reservists but were attending the music festival. In all these cases, these people were: International humanitarian law and the laws of war were to be upheld. And I don’t know whether some plan was hatched, or whether (Hamas leader Yahya) Sinwar and Deif were simply indifferent, or whether they were deliberately seeking maximum shock effect through targeting. I still don’t understand for the life of me. large number of civilians.
I’ve had a lot of conversations with Palestinians, Lebanese and others, and there’s been a strange series of pushbacks from them, especially in the weeks since October 7th. “Do you really believe that civilians were killed?” they say. And I’ll explain why I believe that. And the question will arise: “So do you really believe in that number?” And I’ll explain why I believe that number. And the final answer is, “Well, they were all colonists anyway.” And that is, if you believe that, why do you need to engage in a debate about whether civilians were killed or not, because in your view you do not consider civilians to be civilians, and that Because they don’t believe that is important. And this, of course, is the kind of logic you hear among Israelis who think all Palestinians are guilty, no one is innocent, and it is moral to starve them to death. We’ve heard this from a wide range of Israeli politicians and military officials.
Sinwar is touted by foreign and Palestinian biographers as knowing a lot about Israel’s enemies. How could he have thought that killing so many civilians and failing to protect them from violent actions by his own and allied combatants would help his negotiating position? I don’t understand.
