Hussein Agha and Robert Malley write:

The war that has engulfed Israel, the Gaza Strip, and well beyond since October 7, 2023, has confronted the world with much on which it had never set eyes before. In scope and brutality, Hamas’s assault on Israelis exceeded any prior Palestinian act. Israel’s military attacks and forced starvation in Gaza are an onslaught governed by unusual rules, in which the death of Palestinian fighters seems like collateral damage, while the widespread, indiscriminate slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians, many of them women and children, appears the main event. Killing is the purpose. Death is everywhere, its victims uncertain when or where it will strike next. Horror also has come at the hands of the West’s collusion and Arab governments’ indifference, which is no different from complicity.

October 7th turned relations between Israelis and Palestinians upside down. How much of this matched Hamas’s planning and calculation, how much the chaotic, bottled-up frustrations and furies of fighters and civilians of all stripes, is debatable. Confined to the Strip, captives for years, often from birth, because of the Israeli blockade, Gazans could set eyes but not feet on lands from which parents and grandparents had been forced to flee. When Hamas breached the fence that separated Israel from Gaza, many followed the organization’s deadly script; others seized the opportunity to flood into what they considered stolen territory, to brutally lash out at those they deemed their captors, and to kidnap those they could hold as prisoners. In the short distance from Gaza to southern Israel, they were transformed in little time from conquered to conqueror, victim to perpetrator, detainee to abductor.

Yet for all that it changed, the war was neither new, anomalous, nor aberrant. Not an abnormal deviation from traditional Israeli-Palestinian dynamics but their culmination. Not the wave of the future but the past’s formidable revenge. Amid the vagaries of the decades-old clash between two nations vying for the same plot of land, one constant has been violence, perpetrated and endured, on minor and colossal scales. If Palestinian attacks against Israelis never before reached the recent toll, it has not been for lack of trying but for lack of success. If Israeli military operations against Palestinians have fallen short of this ferocity, it has not been for lack of desire so much as for lack of opportunity.

For a while, Israeli and Palestinian leaders invested in diplomacy, gambled on its effectiveness, and trusted in its primacy over force, out of political calculation, tactical considerations, or both. A majority of Israelis and Palestinians have at times favored a negotiated resolution and resigned themselves to necessary compromises. Each diplomatic venture ended in failure. Each failure rekindled the gravitational pull of an existential, pitiless struggle. In the end, what mattered was the balance of power and brute force. Those who mattered most knew it best.

October 7th and its aftermath provide the starkest of reminders. Gaza played host to the conflict’s multiple historical layers of enmity, rage, and revenge. Strip away the occasional ceasefires and peace deals that turn out to be neither; what remains is a naked contest that originated long ago and stubbornly refuses to go. [Continue reading…]