Multiple vehicles collided on a road north of Cairo, with several cars catching fire, state media say.

Peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict had already been difficult to achieve before Hamas’s barbarous October 7 attack and Israel’s military response. Now it seems almost impossible, but its essence is clearer than ever: Ultimately, a negotiation to establish a safe Israel beside a safe Palestinian state.

Whatever the enormous complexities and challenges of bringing about this future, one truth should be obvious among decent people: killing 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 200, including scores of civilians, was deeply wrong. The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. It seems odd that one has to say: Killing civilians, old people, even babies, is always wrong. But today say it one must.

[Franklin Foer: Tell me how this ends]

How can educated people justify such callousness and embrace such inhumanity? All sorts of things are at play here, but much of the justification for killing civilians is based on a fashionable ideology, “decolonization,” which, taken at face value, rules out the negotiation of two states—the only real solution to this century of conflict—and is as dangerous as it is false.

I always wondered about the leftist intellectuals who supported Stalin, and those aristocratic sympathizers and peace activists who excused Hitler. Today’s Hamas apologists and atrocity-deniers, with their robotic denunciations of “settler-colonialism,” belong to the same tradition but worse: They have abundant evidence of the slaughter of old people, teenagers, and children, but unlike those fools of the 1930s, who slowly came around to the truth, they have not changed their views an iota. The lack of decency and respect for human life is astonishing: Almost instantly after the Hamas attack, a legion of people emerged who downplayed the slaughter, or denied actual atrocities had even happened, as if Hamas had just carried out a traditional military operation against soldiers. October 7 deniers, like Holocaust deniers, exist in an especially dark place.

The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity. It holds that Israel is an “imperialist-colonialist” force, that Israelis are “settler-colonialists,” and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors. (On October 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as “white” or “white-adjacent” and Palestinians as “people of color.”

This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the “oppressed” to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an “oppressor” to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as “white” and “privileged”; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of “exploitative capitalism” and in the Middle East through “colonialism.”

This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities—and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigor—has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians. When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts.

Indeed, it requires an astonishing leap of ahistorical delusion to disregard the record of anti-Jewish racism over the two millennia since the fall of the Judean Temple in 70 C.E. After all, the October 7 massacre ranks with the medieval mass killings of Jews in Christian and Islamic societies, the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1640s Ukraine, Russian pogroms from 1881 to 1920—and the Holocaust. Even the Holocaust is now sometimes misconstrued—as the actor Whoopi Goldberg notoriously did—as being “not about race,” an approach as ignorant as it is repulsive.  

Contrary to the decolonizing narrative, Gaza is not technically occupied by Israel—not in the usual sense of soldiers on the ground. Israel evacuated the Strip in 2005, removing its settlements. In 2007, Hamas seized power, killing its Fatah rivals in a short civil war. Hamas set up a one-party state that crushes Palestinian opposition within its territory, bans same-sex relationships, represses women, and openly espouses the killing of all Jews.

Very strange company for leftists.

Of course, some protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” may have no idea what they’re calling for; they are ignorant and believe that they are simply endorsing “freedom.” Others deny that they are pro-Hamas, insisting that they are simply pro-Palestinian—but feel the need to cast Hamas’s massacre as an understandable response to Israeli-Jewish “colonial” oppression. Yet others are malign deniers who seek the death of Israeli civilians.

The toxicity of this ideology is now clear. Once-respectable intellectuals have shamelessly debated whether 40 babies were dismembered or some smaller number merely had their throats cut or were burned alive. Students now regularly tear down posters of children held as Hamas hostages. It is hard to understand such heartless inhumanity. Our definition of a hate crime is constantly expanding, but if this is not a hate crime, what is? What is happening in our societies? Something has gone wrong.

In a further racist twist, Jews are now accused of the very crimes they themselves have suffered. Hence the constant claim of a “genocide” when no genocide has taken place or been intended. Israel, with Egypt, has imposed a blockade on Gaza since Hamas took over, and has periodically bombarded the Strip in retaliation for regular rocket attacks. After more than 4,000 rockets were fired by Hamas and its allies into Israel, the 2014 Gaza War resulted in more than 2,000 Palestinian deaths. More than 7,000 Palestinians, including many children, have died so far in this war, according to Hamas. This is a tragedy—but this is not a genocide, a word that has now been so devalued by its metaphorical abuse that it has become meaningless.

I should also say that Israeli rule of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank is different and, to my mind, unacceptable, unsustainable, and unjust. Settlers under the disgraceful Netanyahu government have harassed and persecuted Palestinians in the West Bank: 146 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were killed in 2022 and at least 153 in 2023 before the Hamas attack, and more than 90 since. Again: This is appalling and unacceptable, but not genocide. The Palestinians in the West Bank have endured a harsh, unjust, and oppressive occupation since 1967.

Although there is a strong instinct to make this a Holocaust-mirroring “genocide,” it is not: The Palestinians suffer from many things, including military occupation; settler intimidation and violence; corrupt Palestinian political leadership; callous neglect by their brethren in more than 20 Arab states; the rejection by Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, of compromise plans that would have seen the creation of an independent Palestinian state; and so on. None of this constitutes genocide, or anything like genocide. The Israeli goal in Gaza—for practical reasons, among others—is to minimize the number of Palestinian civilians killed. Hamas and like-minded organizations have made it abundantly clear over the years that maximizing the number of Palestinian casualties is in their strategic interest. (Put aside all of this and consider: The world Jewish population is still smaller than it was in 1939, because of the damage done by the Nazis. The Palestinian population has grown, and continues to grow. Demographic shrinkage is one obvious marker of genocide. In total, roughly 120,000 Arabs and Jews have been killed in the conflict over Palestine and Israel since 1860. By contrast, at least 500,000 people, mainly civilians, have been killed in the Syrian civil war since it began in 2011.)

If the ideology of decolonization, taught in our universities as a theory of history and shouted in our streets as self-evidently righteous, badly misconstrues the present reality, does it reflect the history of Israel as it claims to do? It does not. Indeed, it does not accurately describe either the foundation of Israel or the tragedy of the Palestinians.

According to the decolonizers, Israel is and always has been an illegitimate freak-state because it was fostered by the British empire and because some of its founders were European-born Jews.

In this narrative, Israel is tainted by imperial Britain’s broken promise to deliver Arab independence, and its kept promise to support a “national home for the Jewish people,” in the language of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. But the supposed promise to Arabs was in fact an ambiguous 1915 agreement with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who wanted his Hashemite family to rule the entire region. In part, he did not receive this new empire because his family had much less regional support than he claimed. Nonetheless, ultimately Britain delivered three kingdoms—Iraq, Jordan, and Hejaz—to the family.

The imperial powers—Britain and France—made all sorts of promises to different peoples, and then put their own interests first. Those promises to the Jews and the Arabs during World War I were typical. Afterward, similar promises were made to the Kurds, the Armenians, and others, none of which came to fruition. But the central narrative that Britain betrayed the Arab promise and backed the Jewish one is incomplete. In the 1930s, Britain turned against Zionism, and from 1937 to 1939 moved toward an Arab state with no Jewish one at all. It was an armed Jewish revolt, from 1945 to 1948 against imperial Britain, that delivered the state.

Israel exists thanks to this revolt, and to international law and cooperation, something leftists once believed in. The idea of a Jewish “homeland” was proposed in three declarations by Britain (signed by Balfour), France, and the United States, then promulgated in a July 1922 resolution by the League of Nations that created the British “mandates” over Palestine and Iraq that matched French “mandates” over Syria and Lebanon. In 1947, the United Nations devised the partition of the British mandate of Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish.

The carving of such states out of these mandates was not exceptional, either. At the end of World War II, France granted independence to Syria and Lebanon, newly conceived nation-states. Britain created Iraq and Jordan in a similar way. Imperial powers designed most of the countries in the region, except Egypt.   

Nor was the imperial promise of separate homelands for different ethnicities or sects unique. The French had promised independent states for the Druze, Alawites, Sunnis, and Maronites but in the end combined them into Syria and Lebanon. All of these states had been “vilayets” and “sanjaks” (provinces) of the Turkish Ottoman empire, ruled from Constantinople, from 1517 until 1918.    

The concept of “partition” is, in the decolonization narrative, regarded as a wicked imperial trick. But it was entirely normal in the creation of 20th-century nation-states, which were typically fashioned out of fallen empires. And sadly, the creation of nation-states was frequently marked by population swaps, huge refugee migrations, ethnic violence, and full-scale wars. Think of the Greco-Turkish war of 1921–22 or the partition of India in 1947. In this sense, Israel-Palestine was typical.

At the heart of decolonization ideology is the categorization of all Israelis, historic and present, as “colonists.” This is simply wrong. Most Israelis are descended from people who migrated to the Holy Land from 1881 to 1949. They were not completely new to the region. The Jewish people ruled Judean kingdoms and prayed in the Jerusalem Temple for a thousand years, then were ever present there in smaller numbers for the next 2,000 years. In other words, Jews are indigenous in the Holy Land, and if one believes in the return of exiled people to their homeland, then the return of the Jews is exactly that. Even those who deny this history or regard it as irrelevant to modern times must acknowledge that Israel is now the home and only home of 9 million Israelis who have lived there for four, five, six generations.  

Most migrants to, say, the United Kingdom or the United States are regarded as British or American within a lifetime. Politics in both countries is filled with prominent leaders—Suella Braverman and David Lammy, Kamala Harris and Nikki Haley—whose parents or grandparents migrated from India, West Africa, or South America. No one would describe them as “settlers.” Yet Israeli families resident in Israel for a century are designated as “settler-colonists” ripe for murder and mutilation. And contrary to Hamas apologists, the ethnicity of perpetrators or victims never justifies atrocities. They would be atrocious anywhere, committed by anyone with any history. It is dismaying that it is often self-declared “anti-racists” who are now advocating exactly this murder by ethnicity.

Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.

If the “settler-colonist” narrative is not true, it is true that the conflict is the result of the brutal rivalry and battle for land between two ethnic groups, both with rightful claims to live there. As more Jews moved to the region, the Palestinian Arabs, who had lived there for centuries and were the clear majority, felt threatened by these immigrants. The Palestinian claim to the land is not in doubt, nor is the authenticity of their history, nor their legitimate claim to their own state. But initially the Jewish migrants did not aspire to a state, merely to live and farm in the vague “homeland.” In 1918, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann met the Hashemite Prince Faisal Bin Hussein to discuss the Jews living under his rule as king of greater Syria. The conflict today was not inevitable. It became so as the communities refused to share and coexist, and then resorted to arms.

Even more preposterous than the “colonizer” label is the “whiteness” trope that is key to the decolonization ideology. Again: simply wrong. Israel has a large community of Ethiopian Jews, and about half of all Israelis—that is, about 5 million people—are Mizrahi, the descendants of Jews from Arab and Persian lands, people of the Middle East. They are neither “settlers” nor “colonialists” nor “white” Europeans at all but inhabitants of Baghdad and Cairo and Beirut for many centuries, even millennia, who were driven out after 1948.  

A word about that year, 1948, the year of Israel’s War of Independence and the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe”), which in decolonization discourse amounted to ethnic cleansing. There was indeed intense ethnic violence on both sides when Arab states invaded the territory and, together with Palestinian militias, tried to stop the creation of a Jewish state. They failed; what they ultimately stopped was the creation of a Palestinian state, as intended by the United Nations. The Arab side sought the killing or expulsion of the entire Jewish community—in precisely the murderous ways we saw on October 7. And in the areas the Arab side did capture, such as East Jerusalem, every Jew was expelled.

In this brutal war, Israelis did indeed drive some Palestinians from their homes; others fled the fighting; yet others stayed and are now Israeli Arabs who have the vote in the Israeli democracy. (Some 25 percent of today’s Israelis are Arabs and Druze.) About 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes. That is an enormous figure and a historic tragedy. Starting in 1948, some 900,000 Jews lost their homes in Islamic countries and most of them moved to Israel. These events are not directly comparable, and I don’t mean to propose a competition in tragedy or hierarchy of victimhood. But the past is a lot more complicated than the decolonizers would have you believe.

Out of this imbroglio, one state emerged, Israel, and one did not, Palestine. Its formation is long overdue.

It is bizarre that a small state in the Middle East attracts so much passionate attention in the West that students run through California schools shouting “Free Palestine.” But the Holy Land has an exceptional place in Western history. It is embedded in our cultural consciousness, thanks to the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, the story of Judaism, the foundation of Christianity, the Quran and the creation of Islam, and the Crusades that together have made Westerners feel involved in its destiny. The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, the real architect of the Balfour Declaration, used to say that the names of places in Palestine “were more familiar to me than those on the Western Front.” This special affinity with the Holy Land initially worked in favor of the Jewish return, but lately it has worked against Israel. Westerners eager to expose the crimes of Euro-American imperialism but unable to offer a remedy have, often without real knowledge of the actual history, coalesced around Israel and Palestine as the world’s most vivid example of imperialist injustice.  

The open world of liberal democracies—or the West, as it used to be called—is today polarized by paralyzed politics, petty but vicious cultural feuds about identity and gender, and guilt about historical successes and sins, a guilt that is bizarrely atoned for by showing sympathy for, even attraction to, enemies of our democratic values. In this scenario, Western democracies are always bad actors, hypocritical and neo-imperialist, while foreign autocracies or terror sects such as Hamas are enemies of imperialism and therefore sincere forces for good. In this topsy-turvy scenario, Israel is a living metaphor and penance for the sins of the West. The result is the intense scrutiny of Israel and the way it is judged, using standards rarely attained by any nation at war, including the United States.

But the decolonizing narrative is much worse than a study in double standards; it dehumanizes an entire nation and excuses, even celebrates, the murder of innocent civilians. As these past two weeks have shown, decolonization is now the authorized version of history in many of our schools and supposedly humanitarian institutions, and among artists and intellectuals. It is presented as history, but it is actually a caricature, zombie history with its arsenal of jargon—the sign of a coercive ideology, as Foucault argued—and its authoritarian narrative of villains and victims. And it only stands up in a landscape in which much of the real history is suppressed and in which all Western democracies are bad-faith actors. Although it lacks the sophistication of Marxist dialectic, its self-righteous moral certainty imposes a moral framework on a complex, intractable situation, which some may find consoling. Whenever you read a book or an article and it uses the phrase “settler-colonialist,” you are dealing with ideological polemic, not history.  

Ultimately, this zombie narrative is a moral and political cul-de-sac that leads to slaughter and stalemate. That is no surprise, because it is based on sham history: “An invented past can never be used,” wrote James Baldwin. “It cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay.”

Even when the word decolonization does not appear, this ideology is embedded in partisan media coverage of the conflict and suffuses recent condemnations of Israel. The student glee in response to the slaughter at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and other universities; the support for Hamas amongst artists and actors, along with the weaselly equivocations by leaders at some of America’s most famous research institutions, have displayed a shocking lack of morality, humanity, and basic decency.

One repellent example was an open letter signed by thousands of artists, including famous British actors such as Tilda Swinton and Steve Coogan. It warned against imminent Israel war crimes and totally ignored the casus belli: the slaughter of 1,400 people.

The journalist Deborah Ross wrote in a powerful Times of London article that she was “utterly, utterly floored” that the letter contained “no mention of Hamas” and no mention of the “kidnapping and murder of babies, children, grandparents, young people dancing peacefully at a peace festival. The lack of basic compassion and humanity, that’s what was so unbelievably flooring. Is it so difficult? To support and feel for Palestinian citizens … while also acknowledging the indisputable horror of the Hamas attacks?” Then she asked this thespian parade of moral nullities: “What does it solve, a letter like that? And why would anyone sign it?”   

The Israel-Palestine conflict is desperately difficult to solve, and decolonization rhetoric makes even less likely the negotiated compromise that is the only way out.

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Olso Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. In the same way, the decolonization ideology, with its denial of Israel’s right to exist and its people’s right to live safely, makes a Palestinian state less likely if not impossible.

The problem in our countries is easier to fix: Civic society and the shocked majority should now assert themselves. The radical follies of students should not alarm us overmuch; students are always thrilled by revolutionary extremes. But the indecent celebrations in London, Paris, and New York City, and the clear reluctance among leaders at major universities to condemn the killings, have exposed the cost of neglecting this issue and letting “decolonization” colonize our academy.

Parents and students can move to universities that are not led by equivocators and patrolled by deniers and ghouls; donors can withdraw their generosity en masse, and that is starting in the United States. Philanthropists can pull the funding of humanitarian foundations led by people who support war crimes against humanity (against victims selected by race). Audiences can easily decide not to watch films starring actors who ignore the killing of children; studios do not have to hire them. And in our academies, this poisonous ideology, followed by the malignant and foolish but also by the fashionable and well intentioned, has become a default position. It must forfeit its respectability, its lack of authenticity as history. Its moral nullity has been exposed for all to see.  

Again, scholars, teachers, and our civil society, and the institutions that fund and regulate universities and charities, need to challenge a toxic, inhumane ideology that has no basis in the real history or present of the Holy Land, and that justifies otherwise rational people to excuse the dismemberment of babies.

Israel has done many harsh and bad things. Netanyahu’s government, the worst ever in Israeli history, as inept as it is immoral, promotes a maximalist ultranationalism that is both unacceptable and unwise. Everyone has the right to protest against Israel’s policies and actions but not to promote terror sects, the killing of civilians, and the spreading of menacing anti-Semitism.

The Palestinians have legitimate grievances and have endured much brutal injustice. But both of their political entities are utterly flawed: the Palestinian Authority, which rules 40 percent of the West Bank, is moribund, corrupt, inept, and generally disdained—and its leaders have been just as abysmal as those of Israel.

Hamas is a diabolical killing sect that hides among civilians, whom it sacrifices on the altar of resistance—as moderate Arab voices have openly stated in recent days, and much more harshly than Hamas’s apologists in the West. “I categorically condemn Hamas’s targeting of civilians,” the Saudi veteran statesman Prince Turki bin Faisal movingly declared last week. “I also condemn Hamas for giving the higher moral ground to an Israeli government that is universally shunned even by half of the Israeli public … I condemn Hamas for sabotaging the attempt of Saudi Arabia to reach a peaceful resolution to the plight of the Palestinian people.” In an interview with Khaled Meshaal, a member of the Hamas politburo, the Arab journalist Rasha Nabil highlighted Hamas’s sacrifice of its own people for its political interests. Meshaal argued that this was just the cost of resistance: “Thirty million Russians died to defeat Germany,” he said.   

[Read: Understanding Hamas’s genocidal ideology]

Nabil stands as an example to Western journalists who scarcely dare challenge Hamas and its massacres. Nothing is more patronizing and even Orientalist than the romanticization of Hamas’s butchers, whom many Arabs despise. The denial of their atrocities by so many in the West is an attempt to fashion acceptable heroes out of an organization that dismembers babies and defiles the bodies of murdered girls. This is an attempt to save Hamas from itself. Perhaps the West’s Hamas apologists should listen to moderate Arab voices instead of a fundamentalist terror sect.

Hamas’s atrocities place it, like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as an abomination beyond tolerance. Israel, like any state, has the right to defend itself, but it must do so with great care and minimal civilian loss, and it will be hard even with a full military incursion to destroy Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel must curb its injustices in the West Bank—or risk destroying itself— because ultimately it must negotiate with moderate Palestinians.

So the war unfolds tragically. As I write this, the pounding of Gaza is killing Palestinian children every day, and that is unbearable. As Israel still grieves its losses and buries its children, we deplore the killing of Israeli civilians just as we deplore the killing of Palestinian civilians. We reject Hamas, evil and unfit to govern, but we do not mistake Hamas for the Palestinian people, whose losses we mourn as we mourn the death of all innocents.   

In the wider span of history, sometimes terrible events can shake fortified positions: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin made peace after the Yom Kippur War; Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat made peace after the Intifada. The diabolical crimes of October 7 will never be forgotten, but perhaps, in the years to come, after the scattering of Hamas, after Netanyahuism is just a catastrophic memory, Israelis and Palestinians will draw the borders of their states, tempered by 75 years of killing and stunned by one weekend’s Hamas butchery, into mutual recognition. There is no other way.

Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst, said the incident may spur further warnings from Cairo to Israel.

Egypt hosts a peace summit in Cairo as the first aid convoy enters Gaza after two weeks of war.

The meeting has representatives from across the globe - including Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the State of Palestine - but Israel are not in attendance.

More than 4,200 people have been killed in Gaza in the last two weeks.

As aid remains blocked at the Rafah crossing, and Cairo residents collect donations, many ask when the border will open.

Israel is not the only Middle Eastern power that has a tortured relationship with the Gaza Strip. Although it’s not a combatant in the current war, Egypt has played an important role in the immiseration of Gazans over the past 16 years, as together with Israel it has sealed the air, land, and sea borders around the strip.   

Keeping Hamas out of the Sinai Peninsula has been an imperative for the Egyptian government since at least 2007, when the Islamist group defeated the security forces of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority in Gaza in a short civil war. Hamas’s success could inspire extremists in Egypt, Cairo reasoned, and so the blockade of the strip served Egypt’s interests as well as Israel’s.

The last round of violence in Gaza took place in 2014, a year after Major General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to power in Egypt in a coup d’état that overthrew Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Then, Egyptian leaders reasoned that having Israel mortally damage Hamas, itself a late-1980s creation of the Palestine branch of the Brotherhood, would greatly diminish the Islamist threat to both countries. And so Egypt privately counseled Israel to destroy Hamas. But the Israelis demurred, fearing the chaos and power vacuum that would likely result.

[Read: Inside Gaza’s last Catholic parish]

Today, the situation is reversed. The Israeli objective is to destroy Hamas, while Egypt warns of escalation and of the plight of Palestinians in Gaza. President Sisi has amassed tons of aid for the strip’s residents in a city about an hour to the west of the Rafah crossing, and he is demanding that the Israel Defense Forces allow the trucks in. He decried Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza’s civilians during a visit with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. And yet, for all of Sisi’s indignation, he has not opened Egypt’s borders to Palestinians seeking safety from Israel’s airstrikes.

Gaza and the war that is tearing it asunder present a domestic political conundrum for the Egyptian leader. To begin with, Egyptian and Palestinian nationalism are deeply intertwined. In the 1930s, Egyptians, and particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, were among the first in the Arab world to raise alarms about Jewish migration to Palestine. Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s revolutionary leader and second president, from 1956 to 1970, linked Israel’s creation to the colonial depredations Egyptians had been fighting since the late 19th century. Nasser positioned himself rhetorically as the champion of not just Egyptian but also Arab causes, and among these, he and his contemporaries saw no greater cause than Palestine. For many Egyptians steeped in this worldview, President Anwar Sadat’s 1978 peace with Israel was disorienting. The agreement brought relief from the military burdens of confrontation with Israel, but the abandonment of ideals, principles, and identity overshadowed those material benefits. As a result, many Egyptians regard Sadat’s separate peace as illegitimate.  

Sisi is therefore caught between history, morality, and geopolitical necessity. His two immediate predecessors were overthrown: President Hosni Mubarak, by mass protests in 2011, and Morsi by the coup that Sisi himself mounted in 2013. Sisi is watching his own back, and he must know that some of the groups that played a role in 2011 can trace their origins to the mobilization of activists in solidarity with Palestinians during the Second Intifada, in the early 2000s. Moreover, Israel is deeply unpopular with the Egyptian public, as President Sisi also seems to be. When he came to power, he promised Egyptians prosperity, security, and more effective governance. Instead he has given them an economic crisis, corruption, and coercion.

The crisis in the Gaza Strip, therefore, presents a domestic problem for Sisi as much as it does a foreign-policy one. Perhaps that’s why the Egyptian foreign ministry’s October 7 statement, which was noticeably not released in English, fails even to mention Hamas’s terrorist attacks but warns of the consequences of Israeli escalation following a “series of attacks against Palestinian cities.” Days into Israel’s aerial bombardment of Gaza, Sisi said that the Israelis had crossed the threshold of “collective punishment.”

The statements sought to place Sisi on the right side of Egyptian public opinion without going so far as to arouse the ire of Israel and its friends in the United States—especially in Congress, where some members have sought to punish Sisi for his deplorable human-rights record. Over the past 44 years, Israelis have grown used to Egyptian invective; they know that’s all it is, because Sisi and the Egyptian Armed Forces rely on Israel for the security of the Sinai Peninsula.  

[Read: Israel is walking into a trap]

In the end, the plight of Palestinian civilians has not moved Sisi to open humanitarian corridors. Egypt’s leadership maintains on principle that Gaza is Israel’s responsibility, and it does not want a refugee problem in the Sinai Peninsula. Officials in Cairo fear that allowing tens or hundreds of thousands of Gazans to find refuge on Egyptian soil would give Israel the opportunity to dump Gaza back on Egypt, which occupied the territory for most of the time from 1949 to 1967. Responsibility for Gaza, or for an enormous influx of refugees, could destabilize Egypt at a time when the country is broke and has its own security problems.  

Gaza therefore poses a dilemma for Sisi: Abandoning the Palestinian population to its fate, let alone cooperating with Israel or the United States, would run afoul of public sentiment that Sisi desperately needs to keep onside. But true humanitarianism toward Gazans would disrupt a tense and fragile political equilibrium. Solving that dilemma calls for a deft political and diplomatic touch that Sisi has never demonstrated. He’s more inclined to try to solve his problems with brute force—an approach unlikely to hold out much hope to the Palestinians of Gaza.

Certain books have the potential to extend beyond their covers: They can affect readers so dramatically that they spur change, whether in readers’ heads or across society. Some of these titles are well-known. The popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin made it impossible for many white northerners to ignore the abolitionist cause; Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique put into words women’s stultifying place in society, “the problem that has no name”; George Orwell’s Animal Farm gave the world a rich new metaphorical vocabulary for totalitarianism. Each helped readers recognize conditions they may have taken for granted or assumed were intractable, and gave them the conceptual tools for pushing back on them.

In ways large and small, the nine books on this list also do a version of this consciousness-raising. They examine different aspects of the status quo—the makeup of a country’s highest courts, everyday life under a government in turmoil, even how the art we consume is marketed to us. Then they use those distinctive elements of literature—its varied perspectives, its focus and clarity, the sense of scale it can provide—to illuminate injustice as well as what might just be in our capacity to correct.

Verso

We Want Everything, by Nanni Balestrini (translated by Matt Holden)

Admired by writers such as Umberto Eco and Rachel Kushner, this 1971 cult classic by Balestrini, an Italian novelist and poet, dives deeply into the long hours and stifling working conditions faced by employees at the Fiat factory in Turin that fueled strikes in 1969 that briefly paralyzed Italy and preceded the Years of Lead. The story is told from the perspective of a nameless factory worker originally from the south of Italy, whose narrative I compellingly transforms into a collective we in the novel’s second half as the employees band together in protest. The concern here is with power: who has it, who lacks it, and how the latter might wrest it from the former—in this case, by flooding the streets with the strength that can emerge from acting as a collective. “Now the thing that moved them more than rage was joy,” Balestrini writes triumphantly of the striking crowds toward the book’s end. “The joy of finally being strong. Of discovering that your needs, your struggle, were everyone’s needs, everyone’s struggle.”

[Read: How to make change, slowly]

Zed Books

Woman at Point Zero, by Nawal El Saadawi (translated by Sherif Hetata)

“They said, ‘You are a savage and dangerous woman,’” says Firdaus, an imprisoned woman awaiting execution for murder in a jail just outside of Cairo, to the psychiatrist visiting her in this 1977 novel by El Saadawi, an Egyptian feminist writer and activist. “‘I am speaking the truth. And truth is savage and dangerous.’” Purportedly based on a similar testimony given to El Saadawi by a woman she encountered at the Qanatir Prison while working as a doctor in the early ’70s, Woman at Point Zero follows Firdaus as she describes her impoverished childhood, her disastrous marriage to a man 40 years older than her, and her subsequent escape into a life of sex work. She’s pressed in on all sides by misogyny and desperation; ultimately, when a pimp steals her hard-earned money, she murders him—and ends up imprisoned, though she remains unbowed. The novel portrays how society can grind women into doomed, twinned roles—either a caretaker or a sex object—and use those categories to justify further violence against them. Firdaus’s electric, often disturbing account points out the hypocrisy in that system, and remains chillingly relevant.

Mariner

Three Guineas, by Virginia Woolf

A Room of One’s Own might be the best-known of Woolf’s nonfiction works, but I’ve always been partial to her book-length essay Three Guineas, written on the eve of World War II. Scattered with illustrative photos of men in uniforms, this is a thought-provoking deconstruction of patriarchy in all its various guises—the military, the court systems, the universities. The book is structured as a letter to an unnamed gentleman; the cool anger of its chapters first began as a mixture of alternating fact and fiction, before Woolf would go on to separate the fiction into its own freestanding book, The Years, the last novel she would publish in her lifetime. What is left is Woolf at her most radical, even bordering on anarchic, as she explicitly links the very existence of the state and the institutions that support it to the oppression of women. “As a woman I have no country,” she declares. “As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”

[Read: Trauma is everywhere. Write about it anyway.]

Semiotext(e)

Seasonal Associate, by Heike Geissler (translated by Katy Derbyshire)

Like a few of the other titles on this list, the 2014 novel Seasonal Associate, by Geissler, a German writer, is concerned with work, and how our jobs shape our lives. But it’s the rare book that portrays the early days of the gig economy, which has come to define millions of lives. Her protagonist, a woman whose creative labor as a writer isn’t quite paying the bills, starts a decidedly newer sort of job: She’s a seasonal shift worker at the Amazon warehouse in Leipzig. Switching between the first and second person as a way to draw the reader immediately into the tedium of sorting and packing delivery boxes filled with goods, Geissler weaves scenes culled from her own experiences working at the Leipzig Amazon warehouse together with thoughtful meditations concerning the meaning of economics, art, and a life well lived, drawing on writers and thinkers such as Elfriede Jelinek and Karl Marx. Seasonal Associate offers a lucid portrayal of the changing nature of work in the 21st century.

Soft Skull

Broken Glass, by Alain Mabanckou (translated by Helen Stevenson)

When one is faced with an absurd situation, the most logical solution might be to act absurdly in turn. Or so argues the Congolese writer Mabanckou in his 2005 novel, which follows a former schoolteacher known as Broken Glass as he spends his days drinking in a run-down bar in the Republic of the Congo called Credit Gone West, observing the lives of his fellow patrons and riffing on Congolese politics, everyday life, and various works of art. Broken Glass takes a critical view of governmental corruption after the country’s postcolonial independence, although the novel’s fragmented style is satirical and not entirely straightforward: The book details the lives of its working-class characters, such as Printer, whose experiences attempting to gain a better life in Paris lead to humiliation at the hands of his French wife, Robinette, whose literal pissing contest with a male patron turns into a surreal battle of the sexes; and the con artist Mouyeké, whose brief appearances at the bar Broken Glass are comparable to the cameos of Alfred Hitchcock in his own films. Throughout, Mabanckou’s writing seesaws across the page as though it, too, were under the influence.

[Read: Is literature 'the most important weapon of propaganda'?]

Open Letter Books

Thank You for Not Reading, by Dubravka Ugrešić (translated by Celia Hawkesworth and Damion Searls)

The Croatian writer Ugrešić was known for her sharp, sometimes verging on sour, view of the world, in works such as American Fictionary, her series of essays on visiting the United States in the midst of the Yugoslav wars of the ’90s, and novels like the devastating The Ministry of Pain, with its meditations on language, conflict, and placelessness. In her 2003 essay collection, Thank You for Not Reading, Ugrešić lays out a critique of the 21st-century publishing industry and the commercialization of literature, arguing that a world that favors content over literature will lead to a culture that is just as generic as the humdrum best sellers promoted on talk shows. Ugrešić is hilariously rude about the modern publishing industry, targeting book proposals, agents, and blurbs (which are “only apparently innocent”). In a cultural moment in which the pervading critical argument more often than not seems to boil down to “let people enjoy things,” Ugrešić refuses to sit by passively. Twenty years on, her book provides a refreshing, welcome perspective—and asks readers to take up their own provocative and sincere defense of art.

Clydesdale Press

The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair

First published in serial form in 1905 and then as a complete book in 1906, Sinclair’s The Jungle is a muckraking classic, and one that effectively uses some of fiction’s singular strengths—its interiority; its ability to conjure empathy for its characters; and its construction of vivid, detailed scenes, sometimes in the same paragraph—to create a shocking account of Chicago’s early-20th-century meatpacking factories and the labor they exploited. The novel follows a group of Lithuanian immigrants, including the just-married Jurgis and Ona, as they land in America and quickly have their fantasies of a better and easier life dashed: Jurgis, at one point, turns to alcohol to deal with cruelties of factory life, while Ona is sexually assaulted by her boss. The Jungle infamously sparked a federal investigation into the sanitary conditions of Chicago’s meatpacking facilities, and it’s still worth reading today, if only—considering the recent, shocking reports about the amount of child labor in America’s slaughterhouses—to track how little has actually changed.

[Read: Fairy tales for young socialists]

Seven Stories

A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, by Annie Ernaux (translated by Tanya Leslie)

Since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022, the French writer Ernaux’s global popularity has exploded, leading to renewed interest in her intense explorations of her own past. Two titles in particular have received most of the attention: Happening, detailing her illegal abortion in the 1960s, and Simple Passion, a novel based on her affair with a diplomat in the early ’90s. But her books preserving, and mourning, the working-class lives of her parents—A Man’s Place, first published in France in 1983, and A Woman’s Story, which came out five years later—are equally arresting. In both, Ernaux travels back in time to her childhood in Normandy, portraying, in spare, precise sentences, her mother’s push for her daughter to secure a better life than her own and her eventual death from Alzheimer’s, as well as her father’s struggles working in factories and farms before eventually running a local grocery store and café. She transcended their class through education, so in each, Ernaux tracks the familial divide that arose when her path ceased to resemble theirs. And she commits their history to paper as a protest against the slow erasure of their particular milieu: As she said in her Nobel-prize speech, “I will write to avenge my people.”

The parallels are blindingly and painfully obvious. A surprise attack against an Israel caught largely unaware; an invading military force; the timing, a holy day in early October; the victims, an unsuspecting population forced to scramble for underground bomb shelters and mobilize for war; the mistakes by an intelligence apparatus that is the envy of the world.

But the surprise attack that took place in Israel this past weekend is arguably worse than the one that launched the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Hamas, a guerrilla organization that controls the Gaza Strip, has already killed many more Israeli civilians in the first days of this war than Egypt and Syria, sovereign nations with national armies, killed during the October war 50 years ago. Hamas struck targets deep inside Israeli towns. The magnitude and sophistication of this past weekend’s attacks—carried out in multiple locations and involving thousands of fighters—implies that this offensive was in the works for several months, if not longer. And intelligence gathering should have been easier in Gaza, where Israel is reputed to have massive surveillance systems, than it was in Egypt and Syria in the early 1970s. How could Israel have missed the planning of this assault?

The first explanations put forth by experts and journalists suggest that the problem was largely a matter of intelligence collection. Perhaps Israel over-relied on signals intelligence and other electronic sources, and Hamas learned to circumvent detection—for example, by using drones to disable systems along the border. Another possibility is that Israel lacked enough, or credible enough, human intelligence sources within the inner circle of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, or access to the plans of its military commander, Mohammed Deif. In 1973, the Israelis had a highly placed human source: the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s son-in-law, Ashraf Marwan, who was also a close adviser to President Anwar Sadat. A third theory is that Israeli intelligence was distracted by a multitude of threats; much of the Israeli military was stationed near the West Bank before this weekend’s attack. Finally, Hamas might have used deception, lulling Jerusalem into assuming the group was willing to live with Israel’s normalization of relations with Arab countries. In 1973, the Egyptians used a regularly scheduled military exercise to cover up their war preparations.

[Andrew Exum: The Israeli military wasn’t ready for this]

But intelligence failures can also be the product of a failure of imagination. The disorganization and slowness of Israel’s response on Saturday strongly suggest that the country’s political and military leaders might suffer from the same psychological misconceptions that Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and her advisers—and some in the U.S. government—did in 1973. In both instances, Israel’s leaders appear to have misread their Arab adversaries, grossly underestimating their enemies’ propensity for taking risks and overestimating their own deterrent capability. These mental shortcomings can blind a modern intelligence service, no matter its level of sophistication, and the government it serves. A look back at what went wrong in October 1973, using some materials released in the past decade, provides useful historical context for thinking about the shock of last weekend.  

In the months leading up to the Yom Kippur surprise, Israel received ample warnings about a potential attack. Sadat initially doubted that the Egyptian military could pull off an operation intended to uproot Israel from the lands it had taken in the 1967 Six-Day War. The Israeli air force remained formidable. But by 1972, he’d begun to change his mind. In July, he expelled Soviet military advisers who had helped build the modern Egyptian army but had also cautioned prudence in challenging Israel. Three months later, Sadat informed his military command that he believed the time was right to cross the Suez Canal and recapture much of the Sinai. His goal was to change the politics of the Middle East by restoring Egyptian self-respect and crushing Israel’s sense of superiority. When the Egyptian military’s high command resisted the strategy, he fired half of his top generals. By April 1973, Sadat had readied the Egyptian army for an attack. According to Uri Bar-Joseph, the premier scholar of what Israeli intelligence knew and didn’t know in 1973, Israel’s mole, Marwan, shared details about Sadat’s evolving plans throughout late 1972 and early 1973.

Then came the first war scare. In April, Marwan turned over to the Mossad, Israel’s civilian foreign-intelligence service, the details of Cairo’s plans and said that the Egyptian military would cross the Suez Canal in May. Two weeks later, King Hussein of Jordan sent a secret message to Meir saying that “a major military fiasco in the area is inevitable.” Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan took these messages seriously and, for a time, ignored Major General Eli Zeira, the head of Israeli military intelligence, who argued that Sadat lacked the preconditions to go to war, according to Bar-Joseph. Dayan even ordered the Israeli Defense Forces to prepare to fight.

But Syria’s lack of military readiness forced Sadat to postpone the attack. When May came and went without military action, Zeira’s credibility in Israel rose, while that of the Mossad—and especially its key source, Marwan—sank.

[From the October 2023 issue: Nixon between the lines]

There is no evidence that Israel passed its top-secret information from Marwan onto Washington. Nevertheless, the Nixon administration was watching the situation closely, with its own sources of information, and sensed a crisis. On May 2, the CIA reported to President Richard Nixon, in a since-declassified President’s Daily Brief, that it was “possible that Sadat may be convinced that in the end only military action will generate movement toward a settlement and Egypt’s recent moves could well be preparations for such a contingency.” Still, Washington doubted this would happen. When Israel passed along King Hussein’s war warning to the U.S. government on May 3 and asked for its assessment, the U.S. intelligence community acknowledged that an invasion was possible but concluded that “Egyptian-Israeli hostilities appear unlikely in the next few weeks.” National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger assured Nixon that U.S. intelligence “assumes that Sadat is still operating primarily on the basis of rational calculation,” despite the fact that Sadat’s Arab contacts “have come away from recent conversations with him persuaded that he is in a frame of mind to ‘do something foolish.’” The Soviets, who were eager to reach a second arms-control agreement with Nixon, also warned Kissinger that there might be war in the Middle East. “[W]e dismissed this as psychological warfare,” Kissinger would later admit in his memoirs, “because we did not see any rational military option that would not worsen the Soviet and Arab positions.”

When war didn’t come, the May scare served to reassure those who had been skeptical that Egypt would start a conflict it would lose. Alarmists were looked upon as having cried wolf, even when signals started pouring in that the Egyptians were preparing for war in the fall. “Lulled by the false alarm of May, both Americans and Israelis interpreted these activities as merely more realistic exercises,” Kissinger would later write. At the end of the May crisis, some U.S. officials concluded that Sadat might yet risk a limited war to break the political deadlock in the Middle East, hoping to shock the Israelis into going to the negotiating table. The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) advised Secretary of State William Rogers that if there was no diplomatic progress, “our view is that the resumption of hostilities by autumn will become a better than even bet.” But by the fall, Kissinger observed, “strangely enough, INR abandoned its prediction as war actually approached.”

On October 4, 1973, two days before the Yom Kippur invasion, Israel got another dramatic break: Marwan notified the Mossad that he wanted to talk in person with its director. According to Bar-Joseph, Marwan’s message was that he needed to discuss “a lot of Chemistry,” the pre-arranged codeword meaning that an Egyptian attack was imminent. Marwan’s warning was clearer than ever. Israel needed at least 36 hours to call up its reservist forces, so it had sufficient warning, but just barely. Thousands of miles away in Washington, the National Security Agency had also detected clues that an invasion was imminent but apparently failed to convince analysts at the CIA and in the Pentagon. The United States passed along no warning to Israel.

On the morning of October 6, after the Israelis had finally concluded that they should take seriously the intelligence from their mole, the CIA, in another President’s Daily Brief, assured Nixon that “we have no information that would confirm the Israeli reports of an imminent attack.” When Kissinger, who became secretary of state in September 1973, learned that Israel was warning of war, he didn’t take the warning seriously. “First I thought it was an Israeli trick for them to be able to launch an attack although this is the holiest day,” he admitted to Alexander Haig, Nixon’s chief of staff, on October 6. Before U.S. intelligence detected the movement of Arab armies, Kissinger had called the Israelis, worried that they might launch a preemptive strike, and warned them not to.

[Michael Oren: This war isn’t like Israel’s earlier wars]

After months of unheeded warnings, Egypt attacked, and the consequences were felt immediately. More than half of Israel’s tanks were wiped out as Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal under cover of Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missiles and established positions in the Israeli-occupied Sinai. In the north, Syria appeared poised to retake the entire Golan Heights.

Given the enormity of this intelligence failure, the Israelis quickly investigated what had happened, establishing the Agranat Commission to look into the matter. The committee concluded that the principal cause was bad analysis, in particular an ironclad assumption regarding Egyptian intentions. According to the commission, Israel’s leadership believed that Sadat would not launch a war he knew he couldn’t win. Any potential military action by the Egyptians—or the Syrians, who would not move militarily without Egypt—was discounted by Israeli leaders as irrational. This bad analysis, which the Agranat Commission called the “conceptzia,” or the “concept,” produced in Israeli leaders what psychologists refer to as cognitive closure—the need for certainty even in the face of new information or mounting evidence.

A postmortem by the U.S. Intelligence Board concluded that the United States similarly was surprised by the outbreak of war because of a misreading of Arab intentions and capabilities. Information gathered by the U.S. intelligence community was “not conclusive but was plentiful, ominous and often accurate,” and was “sufficient” to prompt a warning of war to the president, investigators wrote in December 1973, on behalf of Director of Central Intelligence William Colby. But, the investigators continued, “certain substantive preconceptions, reinforced by official Israeli interpretation, turned the analyst’s attention principally toward political indications that the Arabs were bent on finding nonviolent means to achieve their objectives.”

The postmortem also found that analysts harbored a cultural bias—bigotry, really—against the Egyptians. U.S. analysts tended to underestimate Arab culture, to the point of contempt. Two months after the war, the CIA concluded, “There was … a fairly widespread notion based largely (though perhaps not entirely) on past performance that many Arabs, as Arabs, simply weren’t up to the demands of modern warfare and that they lacked understanding, motivation, and probably in some cases courage as well.”

The Yom Kippur surprise underscores that it’s not enough to get the right information about an enemy—to recruit the right agent, steal the right file, hack the right communications system, or monitor the right movements. Equally important is how individual analysts, and the intelligence system overall, process the information. Before Pearl Harbor, the American intelligence community didn’t have the right dots to connect (the United States had been breaking the Japanese diplomatic cipher, not its naval cipher). Before 9/11, the U.S. intelligence community had the right dots but failed to connect them (some al-Qaeda members known to U.S. intelligence were already in the United States before September 2001). In 1973, both Israel and the United States had lots of dots and connected them but formed the wrong picture with them. Intelligence officers in both countries lacked a dynamic view of the situation or of Sadat himself. They shared the arrogant belief that the Egyptian leader did not have the capacity, ingenuity, or nerve to surprise them. As Kissinger would write, “Sadat, in fact, paralyzed his opponents with their own preconceptions.”

We won’t know for some time exactly what Israeli or American leaders knew prior to the Hamas invasion, or exactly what the group’s political leader, Haniyeh, and its military chief, Deif, were thinking in launching Saturday’s attack. But the costs of underestimation should be well understood now. Less than a decade after the Yom Kippur War, Israel suffered intelligence surprises after misjudging the military capacity and political coherence of Lebanon’s Shia minority. Israel had not predicted that its 1982 invasion of Lebanon would provoke the militarization, with Iranian help, of Shi’a in the south. To this day, the group that emerged, Hezbollah, remains a significant adversary. Similarly, the United States, following 9/11 and the bitter wars in Iraq and Syria with al-Qaeda and ISIS, understands how formidable adversaries in the region can be.

[Bruce Hoffman: Understanding Hamas’s genocidal ideology]

But has this translated into an appreciation of Hamas’s strategic thinking? Or was Israel in 2023 also the captive of an assumption about its enemy? Some of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s past public statements seem to imply an expectation that Palestinians would simply go along with other Arab leaders’ recent rapprochements with Israel. “If you open up to the Arab world and you normalize relations with them, it will open the door for an eventual reconciliation and peace with the Palestinians,” Netanyahu said in 2018. “We should do both, but I think you should not underestimate the openness and the thirst in the Arab world today for Israel.” Only six days before Saturday’s attack, according to The New York Times, Israel’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, said in a radio interview, “Hamas is very, very restrained and understands the implications of further defiance.”

Although Kissinger had his doubts about Israeli intentions, one key difference between 1973 and 2023 is that the U.S. and Israeli governments are much less aligned today. After years of disagreement, Nixon and Meir had come to an understanding of Israel’s importance as a nuclear deterrent. Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu, however, hold different views of the Middle East. We do not yet know whether Washington reinforced any flaws in Israel’s analytical framework this time around. Some evidence suggests that the United States was less sanguine than Israel about the effects of the Abraham Accords, the recent series of agreements that normalized relations between Israel and a handful of Arab nations. In April of this year, CIA Director William Burns said in a speech: “Despite the promise of the Abraham Accords and progress to a normalization between Israel and more Arab states, tensions in the region, including between Palestinians and Israelis, threaten to bubble over again.” Still, a week before Hamas invaded Israel, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told The Atlantic, “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”

Fifty years ago, Israel and the United States discounted Sadat’s capacity to have a strategic vision that they didn’t understand. Although the players have changed, the danger of underestimation remains the same. Presumably Hamas’s leaders saw a window to stop a possible normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Perhaps they hoped to inflame the West’s Palestinian allies on the left, who might respond to any Israeli retaliation by complicating their governments’ approval of the Abraham Accords. Hamas also likely interpreted the deep internal divisions in Israeli society as a sign of weakness that would reduce its military readiness. There is a rationality in all of this. Yet let’s make another point clear: Hamas, unlike the Egyptians in 1973, is targeting civilians and taking hostages. Whatever their strategic motive, they have opted for terrorism.

Still, Hamas might share with Sadat the determination that the only way to upend an unfavorable status quo is by launching a military strike destined to be crushed by Israel. Hamas’s leaders chose to start this war on the anniversary of the last time Israel was caught sleeping. They know that history.