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Since Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7, followed by Israel’s reprisals in Gaza, people have filled streets and squares across the globe, voicing their fury, expressing grief for the victims, and protesting against the continued violence. Gathered below are images from a handful of these recent demonstrations.
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Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the WeekMany observers are characterizing the recent attack on Israel as that country’s 9/11. On reflection, what did you learn from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and America’s responses to it?
Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.
Conversations of NoteIsrael, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, and related subjects are far too complex to tackle comprehensively here. So I have tried, this week, to present a range of narratives about Hamas’s attacks and how Israel is responding, if only to underscore how differently the conflict is understood by different people.
My colleague Graeme Wood, who traveled to Jerusalem, described what he found to Radio Atlantic host Hanna Rosin:
There are aspects of rah-rah patriotism. There’s also an ongoing sense of trauma. I mean, the number of people who died, the grisly fashion in which they died. It’s something that every Israeli has been seeing, and has really understood it. I mean, it is so shocking to the conscience, and so close to the lives of so many people here that I think it’s gonna be a while before people have processed this tragedy, this atrocity at that second level.
What you do have, though, is a political consensus and a military consensus that I think appeared relatively quickly after October 7, when Hamas broke through the Gaza wall and killed over 1,000 people. And that consensus is that, whatever else is true, Hamas cannot exist … I haven’t found, I think, almost any Israelis, except for extreme doves, who disagree … As a corollary to that, they also agree that that requires going into Gaza, and depending on who you ask, rooting out Hamas, killing its leaders, or possibly just leveling the whole place, which is something that I’ve heard a number of Israelis say.
Writing in The Times of Israel, Haviv Rettig Gur offers an explanation for that near consensus among Israelis, rooted in how some of them understand “the enemy”:
That enemy is not the Palestinian people … The enemy is not exactly Hamas either, though Hamas is part of it. The enemy is the Palestinian theory of Israelis that makes the violence seen on October 7 seem to many of them a rational step on the road to liberation rather than, as Israelis judge it, yet another in a long string of self-inflicted disasters for the Palestinian cause ...
The Palestinian strategy of terrorizing Israeli civilians is old, older even than the Israeli conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. When the PLO was founded in 1964 with the goal of driving the Jews from the country, the West Bank was still ruled by Jordan and the Gaza Strip by Egypt. The PLO adopted terrorism as the basic strategy for Palestinian liberation not in anger, but because it had just witnessed the astonishing success of the Algerian National Liberation Front in using such terrorism to drive the French from Algeria in 1962. And it goes back further still. Organized Palestinian violence against the Jews in 1920, 1929, the so-called Arab Revolt of 1936–39—all followed the same basic theory: The Jews are an artificial, rootless polity removable by sustained violence, so sustained violence must be deployed to remove them.
This Palestinian vision of Israelis is taught to Palestinian children as the basic truth of the Palestinian struggle. The contrast between “rooted” Palestine and “artificial” Israel is a major theme of Palestinian identity. The consequences of this longstanding vision and strategy has been nothing short of shattering for Palestinians … One can seek out the ideological roots of Hamas’s strategy of brutality in 20th-century decolonization movements or in theologies of Islamic renewal. But that history is mere background decor to the essential point—that this is a brutality that explodes against peace processes as much as against threats of annexation. No peace and no withdrawal will satisfy this impulse or grant Israeli Jews safety from the kind of wild, joyful hatred displayed on October 7. And that brutality has now made itself too dangerous to be tolerated.
In the n+1 article “Have We Learned Nothing?,” David Klion echoes a line of argument I’ve seen repeatedly––that the comparison to 9/11 is apt and Israel is poised to repeat America’s mistakes:
The scale of Israeli casualties, which are still being tallied, greatly exceeds the casualty count of 9/11 as a percentage of the society in question. The scale of the intelligence failure is likewise comparable; all sides are united in wondering how Israel’s lavishly funded, reputedly sophisticated security state managed to miss a border incursion of this magnitude. 9/11 was America’s greatest humiliation since Pearl Harbor, and Hamas’s incursion is Israel’s greatest humiliation since the Yom Kippur War, a full fifty years ago. (In at least one respect, the analogy fails: it took mainstream US media years to begin to acknowledge that George W. Bush had failed to protect American lives, while Netanyahu’s failure is already a topic of fierce public debate in Israel, where Haaretz and some members of the military elite are calling for the prime minister’s resignation.)
But I also can’t remember a time since 9/11 when emotion and bloodlust overwhelmed reason as thoroughly as they do now, including among liberal elites in media and politics. The lasting impact of the 9/11 attacks was a kind of collective psychosis that overcame most Americans, and perhaps especially those in the DC–NYC corridor charged with crafting and enforcing conventional wisdom, who had witnessed the attacks up close … These were the conditions in which it was possible to sell the public, including leading liberal outlets, on a destructive imperial adventure in Iraq that virtually everyone now acknowledges was premised on false intelligence and wildly hubristic ambitions.
While I concur that the Iraq War was a catastrophic mistake, Ross Douthat’s analysis of America’s reaction to 9/11 is closer to my own:
The United States arguably fought four wars after Sept. 11: A regime change operation in Afghanistan aimed at both Osama bin Laden and his Taliban enablers, a global campaign to disrupt and destroy Al Qaeda, a war in Iraq aimed at toppling Saddam Hussein and (in its more expansive moments) planting a democracy in the heart of the Middle East and, finally, a war against the Islamic State that emerged out of the wreckage of our Iraq policies …
Some lessons probably don’t apply to the current moment at all—particularly the elements of American folly that reflected our universalist overconfidence hyped up by our unique post-Cold War position as a globe-bestriding superpower. In 2003 we imagined ourselves capable of remaking the Middle East and, indeed, the world, on a scale that today’s Israel, a small country set about with enemies, is extremely unlikely to envision.
Other lessons do apply, but not in any simple way. For instance, one basic lesson you could take from America’s post-9/11 disasters is the importance of restraint in moments of maximal emotional trauma, of thinking it through and counting the cost rather than just obeying a do-something imperative. Among all the various factors that led us into Iraq, one shouldn’t underestimate the impulse that we just hadn’t done something big enough in response to the terror attacks, that the Afghanistan intervention alone wasn’t enough to satisfy our righteous rage or prove our dominance. And you can see this as a temptation for the Israelis now, with the horror so fresh—an impulse to reject anything that smacks of half-measures or limitations, to wave away the risks of civilian casualties or regional chaos, to treat any hesitation as a form of cowardice.
But not every aggressive path America took after 9/11 looks mistaken in hindsight. The long-term debacle of our Afghanistan occupation doesn’t make our initial decision to topple the Taliban unwise. The moral failures of our interrogation program don’t mean that we were wrong to take a generally aggressive posture toward Al Qaeda and its satellites. Setting out to destroy the Islamic State’s caliphate rather than seeking stable coexistence was a correct and successful call.
What about America’s influence on the present conflict?
Bob Wright argues that U.S.-backed efforts to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel were bound to seem threatening to three Middle East actors with the power to destabilize the region.
He lists them:
1) The Palestinian people. The prospect of normalized relations between Israel and Arab states had for decades been thought of as leverage to be used on behalf of the Palestinians. The Arab states were to withhold diplomatic recognition until there was a deal between Israel and the Palestinians that ended Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its blockade of Gaza. So giving Israel the big prize of Arab recognition before that—as both Trump and Biden favor—reduces the chances of the Palestinians ever being liberated from the humiliating subjugation they’ve endured for generations.
The iconoclastic Israeli journalist Gideon Levy this week characterized Israel’s attitude toward the issue like this: “We’ll make peace with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and the Palestinians will be forgotten until they’re erased, as quite a few Israelis would like.” Whether or not that is indeed the way many Israelis thought of the Trump-Biden normalization drive, it’s only natural that Palestinians would assume as much …
2) Hamas. Biden’s Saudi-Israel normalization deal would steer large amounts of money and other resources to the Palestinian Authority—Hamas’s western-backed rival for influence among Palestinians …
3) Iran. There’s no evidence that the Iranians conceived or orchestrated the attack on Israel, but they may have given it their approval. And in any event it’s unlikely that Hamas would have undertaken the attack had the envisioned consequences not seemed at least consistent with the interests of Iran, its long-time supporter. So it’s important to understand how threatening Biden’s proposed Israeli-Saudi deal seemed to Iran. The deal would have given the Saudis a guarantee that America would assist them if they wound up in a war. Iran no doubt feared that this guarantee would embolden the Saudis and also make them more likely to prevail over Iran in the event of war. More broadly, the whole normalization drive, including Trump’s Abraham Accords, seemed aimed at consolidating what Iran sees as an anti-Iran coalition: Israel, the US, and several wealthy Sunni Arab states.
In contrast, David Leonhardt argues that America’s waning global influence played a part in the attack:
Russia has started the largest war in Europe since World War II. China has become more bellicose toward Taiwan. India has embraced a virulent nationalism. Israel has formed the most extreme government in its history. And on Saturday morning, Hamas brazenly attacked Israel, launching thousands of missiles and publicly kidnapping and killing civilians.
All these developments are signs that the world may have fallen into a new period of disarray. Countries—and political groups like Hamas—are willing to take big risks, rather than fearing that the consequences would be too dire. The simplest explanation is that the world is in the midst of a transition to a new order … The United States is no longer the dominant power it once was... Political leaders in many places feel emboldened to assert their own interests, believing the benefits of aggressive action may outweigh the costs …
“A fully multipolar world has emerged, and people are belatedly realizing that multipolarity involves quite a bit of chaos,” Noah Smith wrote … Zheng Yongnian, a Chinese political scientist with ties to the country’s leaders, has similarly described the “old order” as disintegrating. “Countries are brimming with ambition, like tigers eyeing their prey, keen to find every opportunity among the ruins of the old order,” Zheng wrote last year.
Of course, that could all be wrong! In The Washington Post, Shadi Hamid prudently urges epistemic humility:
The search for truth, even if one finds it, should not involve rigidity. We are all a product of our environments. When it comes to Israel and Palestine in particular, we bring our own preconceptions to any debate—our own selective read of history and our own developed sense of injustice. This is not about a disagreement over facts; it’s about how to interpret them … It should be possible to acknowledge two things at once. We can—and must—condemn Hamas’s heinous acts against Israeli civilians while refusing to forget that Israel has been a perpetrator of a brutal occupation against Palestinians. Some will condemn this as “bothsidesism,” but there are, quite literally, two primary parties to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, each with competing—and, sadly, irreconcilable—narratives. How could it be otherwise? Talking about atrocities after the fact is a minefield. In a time of war, doing it well requires precisely the kind of presumptive generosity toward the other “side” that war itself militates against.
That’s it for today––see you next week.
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As the war in Gaza continues to intensify, the Palestinian Authority has been conspicuously quiet. Since its establishment in 1993, and particularly since the Second Intifada, in the early 2000s, the PA has been losing credibility not only diplomatically but also among the Palestinian people. Hamas rushed to fill the subsequent vacuum in ideas, politics, and security. Today the Palestinian people are paying the price. Any political arrangement made after this war in Gaza needs to focus not just on the future of the coastal strip but also on rehabilitating the PA.
Since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the Palestinian people have been presented with two competing, irreconcilable visions of their future. One, posited by the Palestine Liberation Organization—a secular, though by no means democratic, group and the parent of the Palestinian Authority—envisioned a diplomatic process leading to a Palestinian state side by side with Israel. The other, promoted by Hamas, a designated terrorist group and a member of the larger Muslim Brotherhood network, called for the establishment of a Palestinian state from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean—in other words, the destruction of Israel—to be achieved through violence. Diplomacy, terror, governance, charities, political organizing, messaging: The opponents used all tools at their disposal to advance their objectives both on the ground and in the hearts and minds of Palestinians.
[Graeme Wood: What is Israel trying to accomplish?]
In the days immediately following the signing of the Oslo Accords, the PA held a clear advantage. Oslo itself gave the Palestinian people hope for achieving freedom after 25 years of occupation. The establishment of the PA saw Palestinians governing themselves on parts of their land for the first time in living memory, and PLO leaders, who had symbolized the Palestinian cause for generations, returned to live among their people, generating a sense of pride.
But that moment turned out to be the high point. The peace process stalled and later collapsed. Its failure undermined the PA’s central message—that liberation could be achieved through diplomacy—and cast doubt on not only the wisdom of having signed on to Oslo but also the PA’s very raison d’être.
The PA was not solely responsible for the devolution of the peace process. Yes, it made mistakes, including failing to take matters of security seriously during the 1990s, which eroded trust among Israelis. Israel, for its part, continued expanding its settlements, which fueled Palestinian suspicion. Each side at different times adopted maximalist, inflexible negotiating positions, and the United States was unwilling to take the parties to task. Hamas, meanwhile, used terror to derail diplomacy: In a grisly pattern that dominated much of the 1990s, every advance in negotiations was followed by a spate of Hamas terror attacks against Israeli civilians.
Failed diplomacy certainly injured the PA, but it was only part of the story. For the rest, the PA had itself to blame. It governed on the model of Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s in Tunisia—a model whose corrupt authoritarianism produced a region-wide backlash during the Arab Spring. Government jobs were political favors to be doled out to supporters; public funds, many of them from international aid, were mere means toward the enrichment of officials. Efficiency, responsiveness to the public, and the provision of services were all an afterthought. Palestinians became disenchanted with the PA and with government itself.
Hamas saw a political opportunity in the PA’s troubles. In 2006, the newly elected PA President Mahmoud Abbas called elections, and Hamas ran an effective campaign focusing on the PA’s corruption and promising clean governance. With that messaging and a well-organized political machine, Hamas won the elections. A year later, it clashed with the PA old guard in Gaza. The latter’s security forces were fractured, riddled with internal rivalries. A victorious Hamas was able to expel the PA from Gaza, and has since been firmly in control of the coastal strip.
Reeling from the shock of defeat, the PA then came under international pressure to reform itself, particularly from the George W. Bush administration, which rallied European and Arab countries around this objective. The PA appointed a new prime minister, Salam Fayyad, who instituted significant reforms. Yet his approach did not sit well with other PA political leaders, who worked to undermine him and pushed him out in 2013.
The PA has been steadily losing ground ever since. Today, a staggering 87 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza believe that the PA is corrupt, 78 percent want Abbas to resign, and 62 percent believe that the PA is a liability. This loss of popular legitimacy has had real-life implications. Even before the current war in Gaza, areas of the West Bank were practically ungoverned. The international community, appalled by the PA’s corruption and dealing with competing crises elsewhere, reduced aid. Diplomatically, outside powers continued to treat the PA as the legitimate representative of the Palestinians. But in reality, world leaders have largely given up on it.
In the Gaza Strip, meanwhile, Hamas’s initial popularity has evaporated—today 72 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza believe that Hamas is corrupt—but the group maintains its power through fear and brutality, not the consent of the governed. Its October 7 terror attack, which claimed the lives of more than 1,400 Israelis, was meant in part to bolster its image of strength and reinforce its message that terror can yield political dividends—a message amplified by Hamas’s media mouthpieces, most prominently the Qatari-funded Al Jazeera Arabic TV channel.
The PA’s response to the Hamas attack has underlined its irrelevance and its insecure standing among its people. In the first hours and days, the PA was noticeably silent. Then it was hesitant and confused, wavering between mirroring Hamas’s messaging and weakly denouncing “violence against civilians by any party.” The timorousness was apparent in the readout of President Joe Biden’s phone call with Abbas, in which the American president, not the leader of the organization purporting to be the “sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” stated that “Hamas does not stand for the Palestinian people’s right to dignity and self-determination.”
Under different circumstances—if the PA were a more effective, clean government, better trusted by its people—one might imagine it returning to Gaza when this war ends and leading the process of reconstruction and recovery. But Palestinians have no confidence that the PA has their interests at heart; the international community does not trust it to administer funds on the scale of those that will be needed for reconstruction; and the PA anyway lacks the institutional infrastructure to do the job.
In the absence of a PA that can be counted upon, the people of Gaza and the international community will be forced to choose from a menu of bad options. Israel may have to reoccupy Gaza—an outcome that neither the Gazan people nor Israel want, and which would be costly for both. Or Hamas might remain in power, injured logistically but empowered politically to resume its oppressive rule and prepare for the next round of devastating war. Or outside actors may stand up an international administration that sounds good on paper but will be extremely difficult in reality to sustain.
This war will end, and when it does, the governance of Palestinians will be of urgent concern. As long as the PA remains weak and discredited, the Palestinians will lack a positive model to rally around. Its rehabilitation is therefore a long-term necessity, not only for the people under its authority but for any enduring prospect of peace.
Rehabilitating the PA will require Israel to reexamine its policies in the West Bank— addressing the growing problem of settler violence and making meaningful gestures to enhance the PA’s authority and improve Palestinian quality of life. It will also require a serious effort, using both incentives and pressure, to ensure that the PA cleans up its act and presents a government that both Palestinians and the international community can trust.
www.bbc.co.uk › news › uk-england-shropshire-67162627
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www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2023 › 10 › hamas-hostage-taking-manual › 675691
A hostage-taking manual that an official in the Israel Defense Forces told me was recovered in the aftermath of the Hamas attack suggests that the group’s hostage-taking on October 7 did not go according to plan. Right now over 200 hostages are thought to be in Hamas’s hands in Gaza. The manual suggests that the group at first intended not to spirit all of them into Gaza, but instead to take them hostage where they were found inside Israel, possibly for a protracted standoff.
The Atlantic obtained a copy of the manual from an IDF official, who vouched for its authenticity and who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the materials. Israel’s President Isaac Herzog had earlier referred to the document in an interview on CNN, calling it “an instruction guide, how to go into civilian areas, into a kibbutz, a city, a moshav [agricultural coop].” He said it described “exactly how to torture them, how to abduct them, how to kidnap them.”
[Graeme Wood: What is Israel trying to accomplish?]
The hostage-taking, according to the manual, is to take place “in the field,” in areas that have been “cleansed” and brought under control. After bringing together the hostages, it says, they should be culled (“kill those expected to resist and those that pose a threat”) and bound and blindfolded, then “reassured,” to keep them docile. “Use them as human shields,” it says, and use “electric shocks” to force compliance.
“Kill the difficult ones,” it adds. It specifically notes the need to separate women and children from men—confirmation that the snatching of children was planned from the start, and not the product of some kind of excess fervor following battlefield success. It specifies that only senior field commanders should negotiate with Israeli authorities, and then only with the advice of their own superiors, presumably still in Gaza. The final section, which has circulated online but was not included in the IDF version, advises the hostage-takers to threaten to kill prisoners if they revolt, or if Israel attacks or tries to gas them. (The document otherwise matches the one I received from the IDF, which would not authenticate the final section.)
The manual is printed out and marked “confidential” on top. It is written in Arabic, and it includes a guide to Israeli military ranks and weaponry. There is one small handwritten comment on the first page, and the graphics on the cover suggest that it was an official production of the unit that created it. It is impossible to tell whether the manual was a guide for all hostage-taking operations, or only for those at the site where it was recovered. The document bears a cover with the seal of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and a watermark from something called the “al-Quds Battalion.”
All of the manual’s instructions suggest that the scenario originally envisioned was a standoff within Israeli territory. There were such standoffs over the course of the attack, such as in Kibbutz Be’eri, but none lasted for days, as the attackers seem to have expected. A whole section is devoted to “supplies,” in particular the hoarding of food and drinks, flashlights, batteries, and other equipment useful in holding out during a protracted siege. “Don’t use your own supplies to feed the hostages,” it cautions, “except in an emergency.”
The apparent discrepancy between the situation Hamas seems to have planned for, and the one that is still unfolding, explains some of the haphazard nature of the hostage-taking. Hostages were brought into Gaza with improvised transport, including SUVs, golf carts, and motorbikes. No such improvisation is mentioned in the manual I obtained: the Hamas members appear not to have expected that they could transfer their victims in such a disorderly manner, or indeed transfer them at all. Just as nearly all Israelis were shocked at how little resistance Hamas encountered, Hamas itself was likely put off balance by their quick dominance of the battlefield and ability to continue dominating it for hours, without encountering the full force of the resistance of a modern military.
[Graeme Wood: Hamas may not have a step two]
The al-Quds Battalion barely exists online. Subunits of armed groups in Israel and Palestine proliferate and subdivide rapidly, so the existence of a new named group is not itself unusual. Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), another group with a significant presence in Gaza, has an al-Quds “brigade” (saraya). And on October 6—the day before the Hamas atrocities—PIJ announced that an al-Quds “battalion” (katiba) would operate in the West Bank. But this manual is clearly marked as an al-Qassam Brigades operational manual.
A Quranic quote appears on the cover: “Our forces will certainly succeed” (37:173). The author of the manual foresees the hostage situation ending—he does not say how—with Hamas leaving the site. He says to mark the burial sites of Hamas’s dead, so they can be disinterred and moved after Israel’s eventual withdrawal from the land. But the effect of Hamas’s success was not predictable either by its perpetrators or by its victims. Two hundred hostages, ranging from little babies to old women, is an order of magnitude more hostages than Israel ever contemplated, in its worst nightmares, and Israel’s conviction that Hamas must now be eliminated is in large part due to the enormity of this crime. The hostage-takers carried out a more successful operation than they expected, possibly even more successful than they wished.
www.aljazeera.com › news › 2023 › 10 › 19 › what-hit-ahli-hospital-in-gaza
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