One year ago today, an armed force of at least 3,000 men managed to penetrate a hostile border, overrun fixed and mobile defenses, commandeer army bases, and occupy for long hours a broad swath of Israeli territory in which they went house by house and village by village killing, burning, mutilating, raping, and abducting. For Israel, this was both an intelligence failure and a combat failure. A plot involving so many fighters and such careful and rehearsed action should not have been missed by military intelligence, and a territorial invasion, even with the element of surprise, should have been successfully resisted by a standing army well before the horrors of that Saturday reached their unfathomable nadir.

This essay will not look at either the intelligence or the combat failures. Lesson-learning in both of those domains should be straightforward enough. Beyond those limited tactical failures, however, are larger conceptual frameworks that were vigorously held onto in the years leading up to October 7 and that have not yet been entirely abandoned. These mental models weren’t just products of ignorance or applications of prejudice. They were comprehensive conceptual toolkits for assimilating new information and processing policy dilemmas. On October 7, they failed completely. An honest appraisal of them is crucial for any postwar policymaking.

Tactical lesson-learning is relatively easy because it doesn’t require us to abandon cognitive conceptions that we might have a heavy moral investment in. There might be a personnel investment, but personnel can be replaced, especially following a crisis. Bad ideas are different. Dislodging them often involves parting from something central to ourselves.

Even calling them “bad ideas” is an injustice. The failed concepts covered in this essay didn’t lead to disaster because they were obviously bad, but rather because they seemed to work, or at least presented a reassuring front to those who wanted to believe they were working, for so long.

Until the moment they collapsed.

In this essay, I’ll review four interrelated categories of flawed thinking in four expanding circles of blunder. The obvious starting point is Israel’s long-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. He cannot escape responsibility for Israel’s biggest security fiasco ever. But his failings are only part of the story. It is impossible to understand them without understanding the ideological aspect of his governments’ miscalculations about Gaza, especially the way that a particular right-wing religious ideology has distorted Israel’s policy priorities over the last fifteen years or more—and above all in the last two.

Ending the dissection of conceptual dead-ends there would be ideologically appealing to some and ideologically appalling to others, but it would be analytically inadequate. For neither Netanyahu the man nor messianic settler Zionism can tell the whole story. A third set of concepts has characterized the approach to Arab-Israeli conflict resolution of the people and ideas we have come to call the “peace processors.” These ideas—divorced from centuries of accepted practice in conflict mediation—are beloved by establishment liberals in the West who see themselves as genuine friends of Israel and the Jewish people, and whose repeated failures seem to have no effect on these ideas’ shelf life.

But the delusions of the peace processors can’t by themselves satisfactorily explain the failure that has brought the Middle East to such a catastrophic war this past year. For that we need to look at a fourth set of failed conceptions, those of the broader international community, from the UN to all the various self-styled humanitarian organizations, which have focused their efforts in the Arab-Israeli arena on methods that exacerbate conflict rather than mitigate it and that incentivize violence rather than reduce it. The combined result of the international community’s efforts is the creation of a unique form of governance, a veritable new category of constitution, that exists only around Israel’s borders, where non-state militias exercise a kind of sovereignty that leaves them in control of arms but without any institutional responsibility for welfare, education, food, or public utilities and without any moral responsibility not to kill their neighbors or even to protect the lives of their own citizens.

I. The Man

Benjamin Netanyahu has been Israel’s prime minister for thirteen of the last fifteen years. In 28 of the 30 years leading up to the October 7 war, from the time he took over the Likud in 1993 until Hamas’s rampage, he was always either the opposition leader, the prime minister, or a senior government minister. His presence has dominated Israeli politics and dictated its agenda as he remade right-wing Israeli politics and as his center and left-wing opponents spent an inordinate amount of time in the same years (with the notable exception of the early 2000s) refashioning their own politics in opposition to him.

The basic contours of Israel’s position vis-à-vis Hamas, Gaza, the Palestinians, and the Arab world on October 6 are a catalog of Netanyahu’s wishes, fears, hopes, illusions, and procrastinatory temptations. His approach to national security has all along been characterized by suspicion and skepticism about Israel’s Arab neighbors and the international community, indecision and deferral on Israeli action, and a mystical belief in the importance of messaging over policy. But these aren’t personality flaws. Each in fact represents a fundamental political orientation, defining policy on every front.

He did not think Yasir Arafat had genuinely turned away from terrorism and toward reconciliation, and he believed whoever didn’t see this was hopelessly naive or worse. He believed that he alone could see the threat of Iranian nuclear ambitions, but when the possibility for a military strike presented itself, roughly in the 2010–12 period, he couldn’t make the decision to carry it out. His vocal opposition to the 2015 nuclear deal didn’t manifest itself in effective diplomacy but rather in a showy speech to Congress that failed to change American policy, even if it made a favorable impression on Israel’s soon-to-be Gulf allies.

In the West Bank, Netanyahu preferred to maintain the status quo, especially after a failed round of negotiations in 2014 seemed to confirm all his worst suspicions about both the Palestinian interlocutors and the American mediators. At times it seemed his attitude towards the continued occupation of the West Bank most resembled someone who has parked his car in a no-parking zone and steps out every few minutes to see if there’s a citation on the windshield. Seeing nothing tacked under the wipers doesn’t actually convey any useful information. It doesn’t tell you if an inspector won’t be there for hours or if one might show up in a minute. Nor does it tell you if you should move your car. Only finding a parking ticket gives you new information, and it is, by that point, not useful at all.

Netanyahu doesn’t trust Israel’s enemies, barely trusts Israel’s friends, and sees as reckless and callow the enthusiasm of Israeli elites for peacemaking, international guarantees, and alleged “new signs of moderation” that pop up every few years. Thus he never believed the claims made by the Obama administration and its media satellites that Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan represented a new moderate political Islam. And never for a second did he believe the Arab Spring was anything other than one despotic elite replacing another. He wasn’t wrong about Arafat, wasn’t wrong about Erdogan, and wasn’t wrong about the Arab Spring. Being right when everyone else was wrong, being the buzzkill when everyone else was excited, and especially the belief that the passage of time would grant him a kind of liberating vindication are central to his conception of himself.

The same is true about deferral. There was a brief period in 2020 where Netanyahu advanced a hare-brained scheme to annex parts of the West Bank. Details were never forthcoming, and the whole thing was abandoned once the normalization pacts with Bahrain and the UAE were bruited. It was the only time Netanyahu advanced his own proposal regarding Israel’s most existential policy conundrum, the future of the West Bank. In every other sense and at every other time, he has avoided almost entirely taking any position or doing anything to change the status quo.

If there is a case to be made for Israel staking a juridical claim to part or all of the West Bank as fully Israeli territory, Netanyahu seems to believe that the diplomatic cost is now too high. If there is a case to be made for withdrawal from all or most of the territory for some kind of peace deal, Netanyahu seems to believe that embarking on one with the Palestinian Authority under its current leadership is not worth the downsides.

But what then is the alternative? To wait for . . . a more moderate Palestinian leadership willing to affirm Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state? A collapse of the Hashemite regime in Jordan and an entirely different Palestinian interlocutor? A generational shift toward moderation in the Palestinian public pushed along by pro-American Gulf monarchies making separate peace deals with Israel? A future war? A change in international norms? A wave of Jewish immigration that upends the demographic balance?

Whatever it is, Netanyahu isn’t just stricken by decisional paralysis or lazy procrastination. He came into power believing the time wasn’t right, and at each decision node since, he has discovered new reasons why the time just isn’t right. He keeps poking his head out and seeing no parking ticket on the state’s windshield, so he goes back in and promises to keep checking. True on the West Bank, and true on the issue he rode back into power on in 2009: the need to confront the Iranian nuclear program. For years he was mocked for his indecision by experts in Israel and abroad whose prognostications often invoked the image of a “tsunami” of one kind or another that was about to wash over Israel due to Bibi’s negligence.

The tsunami metaphor at some point transformed from an attack on Netanyahu to a sarcastic reference to the Cassandras among the opposition politicians and disgruntled ex-ministers from his own cabinets. On October 6, the word might still have been a sarcastic punchline.

As for messaging, Netanyahu’s career has been a continuous exercise in public diplomacy, his polished English employed to impress not so much foreign audiences as the domestic Israeli one. His skill (real or imagined) at making Israel’s case—at the UN, the U.S. Congress, and elsewhere—came to substitute for actual strategic thinking. And, as with skepticism and deferral, experience kept teaching him the wrong lessons—until disaster struck.

This is equally true in domestic politics. In Netanyahu’s mind, his bitter defeat in the 1999 election (56 percent to 44 percent only three years after coming to power by a narrow margin) reinforced the same belief that years of pro-Israel advocacy abroad had already imprinted on him: the liberal media was the problem. In his 2015 upset election, he learned to appeal to his base directly with Facebook ads and WhatsApp messages with a steady but deniable stream of rumor, anger, and innuendo.

Skepticism, deferral, and an obsession with messaging are how Netanyahu does politics. They are how he does policy. They are how he processes events and formulates actions. They are not quirks, but rather foundational principles, reinforced by years of both political success and occasional critical examination of political failure.

And they are at the heart of Netanyahu’s approach to the problem of Gaza since he came back into office in 2009 weeks after the first Gaza War (called Operation Cast Lead in Israel), winning a campaign on the promise to “topple the Hamas regime.” Netanyahu had no personal investment in the success of the disengagement from Gaza, having made his opposition to it well known with his resignation from Ariel Sharon’s government at the time, and having reiterated it ever since. His return to power after ten years, and the right’s return power after three, was seen as a public rebuke of the strategy of unilateral withdrawals, which had, in the three years of Kadima-Labor government, led to unprecedented rocket barrages from both southern Lebanon and Gaza, territories Israel vacated unilaterally earlier in the same decade.

Netanyahu was not going to waste political capital making the disengagement work. He was not going to initiate any adventure in territorial withdrawal—not by unilateral action, not by bilateral negotiation, not by international mediation. He did not believe the efforts to foster reconciliation between the Hamas government in Gaza and the PLO government in the West Bank—which might restore something like a legitimate government to Gaza and bring back the international mechanism for managing the Rafah Crossing between Gaza and Egypt as envisioned in the agreements that accompanied disengagement—could succeed if tried. He didn’t believe Israel had any business in encouraging it anyway. He thought the Obama administration was naive about the willingness of pro-American Arab states to make even tiny gestures toward normalization (this was true in the short term) and about the good intentions of the supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority led by President Mahmoud Abbas.

This basic skepticism buttressed the constant deferral. The status quo, with two diplomatically impotent Palestinian governments at odds with each other, was convenient. It froze any realistic prospect of a two-state solution. It did not, however, freeze any prospect of bilateral negotiations, including diplomatic pressure for Israeli concessions. Twice Netanyahu folded under Obama administration prodding to make concessions, first in 2009 by declaring that he accepted Palestinian statehood, and later in 2014 in the final-status talks presided over by John Kerry. Both times what “saved” Netanyahu from having to go any further was, predictably, Palestinian rejectionism.

The addiction to messaging turned a situation he inherited, never advocated for, and had no idea how to navigate out of into something of a desired steady state. Neither Netanyahu nor anyone else on the Israeli right or left, nor any major international figure, ever thought the Palestinian problem would become easier if Hamas controlled one Palestinian territory, including an international border, and Fatah controlled the other under overall Israeli suzerainty. But a terrible arrangement became something to be maintained, explained, and believed in.

Netanyahu believed that the threat of Hamas was contained to Gaza. Hamas had been routed in the West Bank by the IDF in 2002, and couldn’t recover the position it lost twenty years ago thanks to the continuous Israeli presence there as well as the reluctant security cooperation of the Palestinian Authority. It was effectively deterred, not just from mounting military offensives, but even from restarting its destructive suicide-bombing campaign of the 1990s and early 2000s. It had learned its lesson from two difficult wars under Netanyahu’s leadership in 2014 and 2021 that Netanyahu and those around him genuinely believed had somehow achieved what other military offensives hadn’t without ever adequately explaining the difference.

Boxing Hamas into its own self-created mess meant it couldn’t take any big risks, and it meant that the entire Palestinian cause was in a stalemate, if not a checkmate, freeing Israel to pursue an opening to repressive Arab regimes in the Gulf that Netanyahu of the 1980s and 1990s, with his oft-professed belief in the power of democracy in the Arab world to bring peace, would have shied away from.

Nothing symbolizes the failed Netanyahu concept—no part more perfectly stands for the whole—than suitcases of Qatari cash conveyed into Gaza under his watchful eye and with his explicit support. This was the ingenious arrangement that tied together his whole vision of freezing the status quo in the West Bank, keeping Gaza afloat but deterred, and tethering Gulf actors to both ends of his long-term regional priorities. It ended up being the grossest of all the miscalculations.

First, it was a complete miscalculation of where Palestinian politics were headed and of what Hamas’s intentions and goals were. Qatari dollars didn’t entangle Hamas in a fragile web of governance and dependance; they allowed it to prepare for war under international sponsorship. Second, it was a miscalculation of the regional political dynamics. Gulf monarchies certainly have tired of the veto that Palestinian rejectionism has placed on their own diplomatic needs, and two, Bahrain and UAE, have even signed peace treaties with Israel. Qatar might open its doors to Israeli soccer fans if that is the price for hosting the World Cup, but ultimately it has its own agenda, advanced globally by an openly anti-Semitic media network and a soft-power arsenal of sports clubs, media acquisitions, endowed chairs, and contributions to NGOs and policy think tanks left and right.

Third, and relatedly, it was a miscalculation of U.S. regional policy commitments. The U.S. had no problem moving military assets around to deter adventurism from Hizballah in the week the war broke out. But there was no real capacity for any kind of American action against two of its allies, Turkey and Qatar, that were harboring the Hamas terrorist leadership on their soil. In the case of Qatar, a “major non-NATO ally” where the U.S. keeps an enormous military base, there was no pretense of threats even as the war dragged on because there was no American will to carry them out if the Qataris ignored them.

Fourth and last, it was a miscalculation of domestic politics too. In a polarized society where people discover what their opinions on daylight saving are based on the social and political camp they belong to, Qatari cash was something Bibi couldn’t sell to the public or even to his own most loyal constituency. The stench of shadiness and corruption about it played into the worst beliefs about him among his domestic political opponents while not playing up a single positive image of him among his supporters. It was a decision taken with embarrassment in real time that became an enduring symbol after October 7 not just of Israel’s failures but of the delusions of Bibi as a politician and a leader.

II. The Ideology

A discussion of failed “conceptions” that focused only on the Prime Minister would end up being inadequate, because the policy failure didn’t just emerge from his personality or even his worldview. If it had, its deficiencies would have been easy to spot and correct. But the failed concept wasn’t his alone and the cognitive vices weren’t just overreliance on skepticism, deferral, and messaging. There was a distinct ideological component to the failed conception that brought Israel to the catastrophe of October 7. And that ideology is right-wing religious settler Zionism.

The long march of the West Bank settler movement has been a generational project that has resulted in what might best be termed state capture. It kicked off in earnest in 1974 during the illegal encampment at Sebastiya, near Nablus. It’s notable, with respect to the argument at the end of this essay, that what broke the will of the Israeli government and the IDF to remove the illegal settler encampment the seventh time after six successful removals was the passage of the infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution by the UN General Assembly in 1975.

To discuss the West Bank settler movement and its impact on policy in terms of state capture is to imply two things. First, that the policy priorities of the movement do not represent those of the majority of the Israeli public or any reasonable aggregation of diverse interests and desires. Second, that the result is to distort the state’s policies in a way that are inimical to its actual strategic interests but to the benefit of the particular interest that has effected the capture.

When I speak of the “settler movement” of “right-wing religious settler” ideology, I am not talking about the motives of all the Israelis who chose to make their lives beyond the Green Line nor of all the Israeli leaders, bureaucrats, and intellectuals who supported, for a host of reasons (many mutually contradictory) the growth of an Israeli civilian presence in the territories occupied in 1967. I don’t even mean every Israeli with a beard and a kippah living in Efrat or Ariel and voting for Likud or the National Religious Party. Rather I mean a specific cluster of ideological and theological commitments that made settling the West Bank a top religious and national priority as part of a comprehensive reconceptualization of Israeli sovereignty, Zionism, and even Judaism itself.

Roughly half a million Israelis live in settlements in the West Bank (not including annexed areas of Jerusalem), but the majority are not ideological adherents of the movement I speak of here. Israeli governments have allowed and even encouraged Israeli civilians to settle in the West Bank since almost immediately after it was conquered from Jordan in 1967. Sometimes this was a priority and sometimes it was the result of political inertia. The motives were mixed and often self-contradictory. Settling Israelis near the old armistice line was supposed to bring about a situation where a future negotiation on withdrawing from the West Bank (and Gaza for that matter) would leave Israel with a more favorable border. Settling Israelis farther away along the new border with Jordan (and Egypt) was supposed to ensure some kind of security perimeter, though how this fit with the first motive was never clearly established. Settling Israelis in the middle, around but almost never inside historic cities in the West Bank with deep religious and symbolic meaning for Jews—and where large concentrations of Arab population meant that no amount of settlement could ever realistically achieve any sort of demographic dominance—didn’t really have a security concept in its favor (except preventing future withdrawals entirely), but it did ignite the passions of a newly awakened religious national fervor, particularly in the doldrums of Israel’s stupor following the shock of the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

This fervor, and the ideology it gave rise to, has made the settler movement something more than a sectoral interest wielding effective bargaining power in pursuit of its narrow goals, like, say, a teachers’ union getting higher salaries or a powerful industry tweaking environmental regulations to its benefit. It is an ambitious ideological program, far outside the realm of ordinary political lobbying, for reconstituting the state on its own theological foundations.

In this way, the aims of the settler movement are qualitatively different from any other narrow sectoral interest in Israeli politics (the obvious comparison here is, of course, the Haredim). But its means are also qualitatively different, for two important reasons. Firstly, it has endeavored over decades to effect an institutional capture that no comparable group in Israel has ever wanted, much less achieved, putting a vanguard of religious settlers in key positions in the military, the media, academia, and elsewhere. In a similar fashion, the settler movement has leveraged the open primary process in the Likud to ensure a huge overrepresentation in the largest right-wing party in parliament.

Secondly, its bargaining position has been immeasurably enhanced by the prime minister’s legal troubles. Any right-wing leader trying to form a coalition normally seeks to get a majority by turning either to the center or to small parties on the far right. Both kinds of potential partners know that there is a limit to the kinds of demands they can make, as the prime minister can always drop them and go in the other direction. But Netanyahu’s criminal investigations and eventual indictments have led to an effective boycott of him by centrist parties that has lasted nine years, broken only in the emergencies of COVID and the initial weeks of the October 7 war, both times by the guileless Benny Gantz. Such a boycott means that potential partners on the far right have absolutely no concerns about making outsized demands on government policy as concerns the settlement enterprise because the prime minister has nowhere else to go.

The results of all this could fill volumes, but for our purposes they can be illustrated with one village and one photograph. The Jewish village of Homesh is located in the northern West Bank, not far from Jenin. Its mostly secular residents began abandoning it after the second intifada erupted in 2000. During the 2005 disengagement from Gaza, Ariel Sharon also evacuated Homesh along with three other nearby settlements. This didn’t constitute a special dilemma: Homesh had no real religious or security importance. After the withdrawal, the Jenin sector (sometimes dubbed northern Samaria) became the largest area of the West Bank to have no Israeli civilian presence. In fact, the Jenin sector was something of an anomaly. Gaza had no Israeli civilians and no Israeli army. The remainder of the West Bank, except for the Jenin sector, had an Israeli military and civilian presence. Jenin and the area around it in the northern West Bank were exceptional: no Israeli civilians but full freedom of action for the Israeli army.

The results, in the years (roughly 2005–2020) when this anomaly was maintained, were unmistakable. The northern West Bank was the most peaceful and prosperous Palestinian area and saw the fewest losses to Israeli security forces, the least violence against Israeli civilians, and the smallest threat as a base for terror or rocket attacks on Israel. Investment and trade from nearby Arab communities in northern Israel played a key role too. No settlers to protect meant no checkpoints, no escalating violence from disputes over land takeovers or grazing. The kind of primordial fears which the interface of settlements and Palestinians arouse—for the Israelis of being an embattled minority in a sea of violent hostility and for the Palestinians of having their land gradually taken over by foreign colonists—were not a present in this part of the West Bank, even as the conflict itself was not solved and the occupation continued.

Efforts to resettle Homesh began almost immediately after the disengagement, first under the guise of tours or religious pilgrimages. The IDF generally allowed Israeli civilians to come to the site for these purposes, but whenever they tried to stay, the army gently evicted them. But 2020 brought two significant changes. COVID lockdowns meant that the flow of cash from Israeli Arab investors and shoppers crossing into the northern West Bank dried up. And a new centrist defense minister, keen not to provoke the animus of the right lest his promised rotation into the prime minister’s office be derailed, took a much laxer approach to the continuous attempts to resettle Homesh. Tours and festivals, in time, became a religious seminary with some full-time residents. When a settler was murdered there, the perverse logic of the entire settlement movement took over.

An illegal settlement cannot be evacuated during the religiously mandated mourning period; to do so would be to give in to terrorism. Hundreds more people showed up from other settlements to express solidarity. But the threat to their safety remained and was, if anything, more acute, so more soldiers needed to be sent there to protect them, and roadblocks had to be set up, and so forth. The Jenin sector, once the quietest part of the West Bank, quickly became, together with nearby Nablus, not just a focal point of skirmishes among settlers, the army, and Palestinian militants, but also the epicenter of a new wave of terrorism targeting Israelis in central Israel.

The new wave of violence which began in 2020 kept growing and growing, indifferent to the internal political drama of Israel in those years. In places where a tense calm had reigned for nearly two decades following the IDF’s decisive defeat of the various Palestinian militias that had embarked on the suicidal second intifada, that calm was unraveling.

The Palestinians’ defeat in the second intifada, and the tectonic shifts in Arab politics after the failed Arab Spring, opened before Israel genuine diplomatic opportunities. These have already resulted in the Abraham Accords. But to exploit these opportunities fully, Israel needed leaders dedicated to the pursuit of the state’s strategic interests. It has been years, maybe decades, since Israel had a leadership that was able to set aside the settler movement’s special pleas and pursue those interests rationally. By the time the far-right swept into power on the coattails of Netanyahu’s return in 2022, these were no longer even special pleas. The call was coming from inside the house.

In short, Israel lulled itself into complacency on the Gaza front not just because of an overabundance of confidence in its deterrence and not just because of its prime minister’s vices, but because both of these were nurtured by, and reinforced, a comprehensive ideological worldview that places the West Bank settler enterprise above the state’s considered interests.

And that brings us to the photograph, taken on the night of October 5, 2023, that has come to represent all the ways Israel was sleepwalking into the disaster that would unfold barely 36 hours later.

In the center of the picture is a young far-right politician who entered the Knesset exactly eight months before October 7 upon the formation of Netanyahu’s latest coalition. His name is Zvi Sukkot, and in a morbid bit of nominative determinism, his most memorable contribution to Israeli history will be the sukkah he constructed and in front of which he is standing and smiling in this photo.

The flag he holds represents a state whose army he never served in and whose security and police forces have had to detain him numerous times on suspicion of terror offenses, incitement, and arson. In the spiraling violence of the northern West Bank in 2023, attacks and counterattacks often centered around Huwara, a Palestinian village through which runs the main road leading to the settlements ringing Nablus. Following the murder of two settlers in February, a Jewish mob rampaged through Huwara, burning property and killing at least one Palestinian, egged on by leaders of the parliamentary list that brought Sukkot into the Knesset. Following another attack in Huwara, during Sukkot (the holiday), Sukkot (the man) put up a sukkah (the structure) in the middle of the village.

No better representation of what the settler movement has done to symbols of Zionism and Judaism can be conjured up than this sacred booth, used in the celebration of a joyous family-centered holiday, plonked in the middle of an impoverished Arab village surrounded by chop shops and auto mechanics, foregrounded by the smirking visage of a flag-bearing politician with a long rap sheet and no record of ever having held what might be called a real job. And no better representation of what the settler movement has done to Israel’s security concept can be conjured up than this smirking politician who never served a day in the IDF standing in front of his sacrilegious tabernacle being guarded by uniformed men of the IDF, hours before thousands of kibbutz families would be abandoned to their deaths.

This is a snapshot of the Israel that was jolted from sleep at 6:29 on October 7. The picture resonates with Israelis in a way that a thousand op-eds from left-wing intellectuals in Haaretz never could, bringing together both the abusive appropriation of Jewish symbols and the egregious misallocation of the army’s resources. The morning after that picture was taken was Friday, October 6, 50 years exactly since the surprise attack that opened the Yom Kippur War. Sukkot was ending and, with the sunset, Simchat Torah, the last holiday in a month brimming with holidays, would begin.

As darkness descended on Israel that Sabbath, Sukkot’s Huwara sukkah stood tall, guarded by young soldiers spending their holiday weekend protecting the sukkah from Palestinian militants and, with demonstrably less verve, the Palestinians of Huwara from settler militants. That night, as Hamas’s elite Nukhba fighters made final preparations for their early morning assault, the IDF fielded 32 combat battalions in the West Bank, not to guard it from an “eastern front” in a conventional war, but to protect its population of settlers. Around the entire Gaza Strip, from the Egyptian border and all the way to the Mediterranean, the number of battalions stood at two.

III. The Process

A policy failure so closely linked to the personality of the prime minister and so obviously a product of a coherent and comprehensive ideological preference should yield an easy victory for the political opposition arrayed against that ideological preference. But somehow, it just hasn’t. Are Israel’s center and leftist parties missing a golden opportunity to make their case? Or is something else going on? Israel’s political opposition is very clear about identifying the first set of failures, those connected to the person and personality of Prime Minister Netanyahu, but rather reticent about the second set, those connected to the right-wing settler ideology.

Among the liberal “critics of Israel” who fill the op-ed pages of major American newspapers that reticence is even odder. There is no shortage of personal attacks on Netanyahu from the podcast stars of the Obama administration, who often sound as though they believe Netanyahu and not Hamas is holding Israelis hostage in dark tunnels. But the open goal of the bigger ideological and conceptual failures remains mostly unremarked upon.

Neither Netanyahu, nor the most vocal proponent of settler ideology, committed the October 7 massacre, of course. That was done by Hamas, in an action that was overwhelmingly popular with the Palestinian public despite its deadly consequences and that was entirely consistent with the ideology of Hamas and the expressed and revealed preferences of Israel’s Arab enemies over decades and decades of conflict. Perhaps the sometimes absurd lengths to which Westerners go to avoid discussing the unhidden ideological program that animates Israel’s enemies is part of the reluctance to engage with the ideological basis of Israel’s failure to defend itself adequately on October 7.

But I don’t think that’s the whole story.

More radical voices haven’t struggled to assimilate their previous normative commitments in a way that also coherently explains the October 7 events. If the Hamas atrocity provoked any doubts, these were quickly resolved by reimagining Israel as even more essentially evil. This is how the patently absurd genocide claim became part of the argot of anti-Israel obsessives only days after the seventh of October, long before Israel had begun any offensive operation in Gaza.

But for Israeli liberals and peace processors in the West, any reckoning with policy failures that goes beyond just the character of Prime Minister Netanyahu raises far too many uncomfortable problems. The ideology that motivated Israel’s conceptual failures may have been right-wing religious settler Zionism, but the implementation was entirely peace processor, borrowing the methods and self-justifications of the Oslo years and the ideas of the Oslo crowd that persisted long after almost word for word.

Netanyahu’s penchant for skepticism, deferral, and messaging led to him to nurture Hamas in Gaza and blinded him to the threat that it posed. The settler right’s indifference to Israel’s regional and strategic interests as it focused only on its messianic mission to settle the West Bank and refashion Zionism to justify Jewish minority rule led it to conceive of Hamas rule in Gaza as an “asset”—in the word’s of Bezalel Smotrich, the movement’s leading political figure—and embark on provocative actions that were inevitably met by Palestinian violence (and reduced international legitimacy for Israel).

But the implementation of policies geared towards these goals was all peace processor. Hamas rule in Gaza would be maintained by nurturing its autonomy, bringing in foreign money, and “burdening” it with the responsibilities of governing.

The delusions about Hamas rule in Gaza in the decade leading up to 2023 sound eerily similar to those about Arafat’s regime in the years before 2000.

Hamas’s rule over Gaza and its dependence on Israel, Egypt, and various international agencies, the argument went, meant that it had something to lose and it would never risk actually losing it. This included, of course, the valuable income of Gazans coming into Israel for work, many of them in the agricultural communities that became sites of massacres on October 7, whose numbers swelled into the tens of thousands in the months before the attack. Since it was irrational to throw all that away, Hamas could be counted on not to take any action that would. This was a familiar retelling of the delusions regarding the state-in-the-making which the Oslo process created for the Palestinians in the 1990s. Having gained autonomy, elections, armed forces, passports, stamps, embassies, massive international investment and economic cooperation, an international airport, and more, the Palestinian Authority would never throw it all away for a suicidal war. Until it did.

Gaza’s new rulers after the 2007 coup were more interested in governance than in pursuing their fanciful goals of eliminating Israel and replacing it with a unitary Islamist regime. They needed to clear the garbage and fill the potholes, and the revolution would have to wait. Since their medium-term goal was to depose Fatah in the West Bank too, they had an extra incentive to demonstrate effective governance. A reconciliation pact might, after all, make them once more candidates in a Palestinian election. This too was a repeat of a delusional talking point from the 1990s, where new moderate voices were always being discovered only to turn out to be indistinguishable from the old ones.

A corollary of the governance delusion was the automatic discounting of eliminationist rhetoric. Hamas never toned down its murderous talk regarding Israelis or Jews, and these were on particular display around the 2018 attempts to breach the Gaza fence, which Israel was universally condemned for stopping. But as in the Oslo years, it was considered unsophisticated to take any of this seriously. Violent anti-Semitic rhetoric is just bluster for the consumption of a benighted public, never a statement of true intentions or beliefs. Israelis concerned about incitement to violence, support for terrorism, or anti-Semitism in official media organs and school texts were dismissed as lacking nuance or looking for excuses not to make their own concessions.

This particular delusion followed its peace processor predecessor to an unoriginal extreme. Hamas, we were told around 2017, had actually updated its charter and no longer called for the elimination of Israel. But as in 1998, this was mostly wishful thinking, as no such thing had happened, and it shouldn’t have taken a close critical reading in either case to make the determination, yet those who did were the ones routinely accused of bad faith.

And even if all these suppositions were somehow wrong—that Hamas didn’t care about having something to lose, that it wasn’t actually more interested in governance, and that its rhetoric was not bluster—we didn’t need to worry because the backing of U.S.-allied Arab regimes were an insurance against adventurism. In the 1990s it was the moderating influence of Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and the Jordanians that meant that Arafat couldn’t possibly turn hard-fought autonomy into a base for a fully armed insurrection against Israel; in the 2010s it was of course the Qataris—sponsors of so many righteous academic and non-governmental institutes as well as disseminators of slick progressive propaganda that one almost forgets what kind of regime they actually operate at home—that were the source of this reassurance.

Another peace processor rabbit’s foot was the reminder that Israel was much stronger than the Palestinians, and whatever threat they posed right now was not strategic but rather a kind of nuisance. Suicide bombings in the Oslo era or rocket attacks from Hamas in Gaza weren’t an existential problem, and anyway the Palestinians in both cases were so cognizant of the power differential between them and Israel that they were effectively deterred.

Gaza policy vis-à-vis Hamas didn’t just replay a few platinum records from the Oslo years. It even brought back a few minor hits, such as the belief that Israel needs to work with one terrorist group committed to its destruction in order to stave of the threat of a smaller but much more radical group that functions as a kind of opposition. In the late 1990s, Fatah was helping Israel deal with the threat of Hamas. In the early 2020s, it was Hamas that was supposedly helping Israel deal with Islamic Jihad.

The last self-delusion might mean a bit less for public opinion at large, but is acutely felt by the kind of educated middle-class multilingual Israelis connected by business or profession to the outside world and sensitive to global public opinion. It was the fallback delusion, the one that was supposed to kick in if all the other delusions turned out to be wrong. It held that even if all the other cherished maxims turned out to be false—that Hamas wasn’t just interested in governance, that its eliminationist rhetoric wasn’t just bluster, that it wasn’t deterred, that its U.S.-allied patrons were no guarantee that it would restrain itself—even if despite all this Hamas did drag Israel into a war, the whole world would see that Israel was in the right and support it.

But as with Arafat and the second intifada, this simply did not happen. Hamas rocket fire, which began in 2001, continued right past the last Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, but somehow came to be remembered as a response to the partial blockade imposed in 2007. Outbreaks of war in 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021 never ended in a decisive military offensive, but rather in cease-fires and accusations—against Israel. Even the October 7 massacre itself did not buy Israel credit with the international community; its “right to self-defense” was occasionally mentioned, but any offensive military action to actualize that right was immediately seen as crossing a red line or violating an imagined rules-based order despite violating no rule or precedent for warfare in the last half-century anywhere in the world.

The peace-processor concept sees any outbreak of violence in the Arab-Israeli conflict as the expression of a grievance against Israel. It imagines solutions for problems it wants to have rather than for the conflict that actually exists. One of the comical manifestations of this after October 7 was the push by some Western countries to respond to the massacre by recognizing a Palestinian state.

Put aside the perverse incentive structure this creates—rewarding murderous violence rather than peace negotiations. The basic fact is that there does not exist today a Palestinian state, and that is not because it has not been recognized. It is because at each point in history over the entire century of conflict, it is the Palestinians who have rejected the possibility of establishing such a state as long as that meant reconciling themselves to the existence of a Jewish state next door. The performative “recognitions” of righteous Western governments is predicated on a state already there which an evil Israel is preventing. An empty act becomes a way to poke the Israelis in the eye that does nothing to advance a Palestinian state which the Palestinians show over and over and over that they do not want and are not prepared to establish. It also implicitly imagines that the pogrom of October 7 was an understandable if lamentable reaction to the unanswered grievance of Palestinian statelessness, rather than an expression of the same consistent preference which led statehood to be rejected so many times.

But as I’ve explained elsewhere, the peace-processor concept of mediation ignores all the conventional rules of negotiating and diplomacy, not to mention common sense, and hasn’t changed despite the fact that it has failed consistently.

The most exemplary instantiation of this failure is the string of diplomatic initiatives following the failure of Camp David and the eruption of the second intifada. In all of them, whether at Taba or Geneva, whether by informal negotiators or international mediators, whether in talks or UN Security Council resolutions, the Palestinians are offered better terms than what they have rejected and the Israelis worse terms than what they previously agreed to. The implication is that previous initiatives failed and violence erupted because the Palestinians just weren’t given enough.

Imagining this method in any other kind of conflict shows just how perverse it is. Offering better terms to the side that rejected a previous compromise, resorted to violence in the hopes of securing for itself a better outcome, and was defeated in the war it initiated incentivizes all the worst behavior of all sides. The losing side has no incentive to agree, because losing again only improves its position. The winning side has no incentive to agree, but the status quo of conflict gives it a better position than the proposed compromise.

The alternative to a realistic compromise in a conflict situation is not an unrealistic compromise; it is no compromise at all. All the various initiatives taken since 2000 have entrenched the status quo and provided both sides with perverse incentives. The denial of what the basic Arab claim against the Jews in the Middle East has been all along—a Jewish state should not be formed, and once formed should be destroyed—has meant that both Israelis and Westerners have imagined that with the right combination of territorial concessions, public works, and rising living standards, the Palestinian grievance could be resolved.

For Netanyahu, this was about keeping a status quo that suited him politically. For the settlers, it was about keeping the road open to their long-term ambitions in the West Bank and Israel. For the peace processors, it was about nurturing a fantasy no less disconnected from reality: that the explosion of hate directed at Jews throughout the Arab Middle East in the 20th century was not a pathology but just an inarticulate call for redress of an actual grievance.

IV. The Constitution

Any primer on the Gaza Strip from the last half-century or so will normally mention that is one of the most densely populated places on earth, that its population consists mostly of people registered as refugees, and that its people are poor and need massive provisions of international aid to survive. These descriptions are all mostly true, but normally unmentioned is that they are all the direct outcome, intended or not, of the work of a web of international institutions and organizations.

None of Gaza’s population would qualify as refugees under the UN’s official definition: “A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war, or violence.” Those who fled one part of Palestine during the 1947–9 war for another are considered internally displaced persons (“someone who has been forced to flee their home but never crossed an international border”). This definition, notably, applies both to Arabs who fled from Isdud to Gaza (40 kilometers) when the Egyptian army retreated south and to Jews who fled Kalya to Shefayim (about 80 kilometers) when the Jordanian Legion advanced. Arabs who fled from Palestine into Lebanon would certainly count as refugees under the standard UN definitions, but not their descendants. Many others fled to Jordan or to places that Jordan would occupy, but as they quickly became Jordanian citizens, they would, by standard legal definitions, be considered “rehabilitated” and no longer refugees.

Gaza, though, has no refugees. Not the tiny handful of people still alive who lived in what is now Israel before 1948, and certainly not their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. The idea that a Palestinian living in Palestinian territory under a Palestinian government is somehow a refugee from Palestine is a deadly contrivance, the work of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

Gaza, despite the oft-repeated claim, is not the most densely populated place on earth, nor is its high population just an outcome of the displacement that occurred in the 1948 war, at the end of which the Strip’s total population (200,000, about the same as Reno, Rochester, or Richmond) was about one tenth what it is now (2,000,000, about the same as the metropolitan areas of Cleveland, Nashville, or Indianapolis). The high population growth is the direct outcome of radically pro-natalist welfare policies of UNRWA itself. Gaza’s fertility rate throughout the decades since UNRWA’s arrival has consistently been at least 50-percent higher than any neighboring Arab state in the region.

And its population has been, over the decades, much better educated than that of any nearby Arab state, also due to UNRWA. This makes the poverty of Gaza all the more remarkable. It is a territory with an educated population and, before the Jewish settlements were abandoned in 2005, it was a net exporter of agriculture products. The fact that a territory with all the fundamentals of economic success needs international assistance—often ferried through a country (Egypt) that is actually poorer—to keep its population afloat is a political choice, a political choice made almost entirely by the international community through its various mechanisms of managing the Palestinian situation, not least through UNRWA.

Perhaps political doesn’t quite capture it. More apt would be constitutional. Gaza has a peculiar constitution. Military and police powers are vested in Hamas, a terrorist organization doctrinally committed to the elimination of Israel and the murder of Jews and backed, like Hizballah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Other state-like competences lie outside the remit of Gaza’s de-facto rulers. Education and welfare is largely taken up by UNRWA, the world’s only refugee agency forbidden from rehabilitating or resettling the displaced persons in its care. The investment of UNRWA is enormous. (For the sake of comparison, UNRWA employs over 30,000 to deal with less than 6 million “refugees,” almost none of whom meet the minimal requirements for being counted as refugees by the UNHCR, the official United Nations refugee agency, which employs only 20,000 to deal with nearly 45 million actual refugees.) It has brought Palestinians to higher levels of overall educational achievement than any comparable Arab country, and yet Gaza’s economy produces nothing of value and its inhabitants live in an enforced poverty. It educates generation after generation of Palestinians to believe that they are not home, that their current residences are temporary, and that justice will be served when a fantasy of “return” will wipe away the Jewish presence in the region and restore them to a prelapsarian Eden that was their lot before 1948. Much as no one has ever washed a rented car, no population of 2,000,000, however well-educated and well-supported, has ever invested in the local economy of a place it believes is only a temporary refuge.

The constitution of Gaza doesn’t provide for a real agricultural sector either. Food isn’t grown in Gaza or traded for with Gaza’s neighbors. It is shipped in by aid agencies, normally through the crossing with Egypt—a country that is on every measure poorer than Gaza. Historically agriculture was a mainstay of the local economy, and the abandoned farms of the Jewish settlements that Israel withdrew from in 2005 were exporters. But caring for the livelihoods and nutrition of the population is a delegated power of the Gaza constitution, whose governing authorities produce rockets and dig tunnels, but don’t need to concern themselves with such trifles as education, health, and nutrition as these competences are others’ responsibilities.

Something similar is true about public utilities. Israel is responsible for ensuring the supply of electricity and clean water, even over the 24 years that Hamas has been using Gaza as a base to fire rockets on nearby Israeli cities, a situation without any precedent in the annals of warfare. The mere threat to end this absurdity in October 2023 was the grounds for spurious charges of “genocide” against Israel.

Gaza’s constitution manifests a human experiment in governance as significant and as worthy of study as the one that emerged from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, but for the opposite reasons. It is not a local creation, however, bur rather entirely the product of actions taken by the web of governmental and non-governmental organizations we refer to as “the international community.”

One is tempted to say that there is nothing in the world like the Gaza constitution, but this isn’t so. There are no fewer than three examples of this constitutional model—a very partial sovereignty held by an organization that is now or at least was in the past considered to be an international terrorist organization where crucial state-like functions are outsourced to the UN and the international community—all within 50 kilometers of Israel’s borders. And they share something else: they base their legitimacy entirely on a rejection of the Jewish state and a belief that one day the cosmic crime of its creation will be reversed.

The other two, of course, are the Fatah-run proto-state in the West Bank and Hizballah’s state-within-a-state in southern Lebanon. There are of course enormous differences among these three regimes, not least that the Fatah-run proto-state in the West Bank known as the Palestinian Authority actively engages in security cooperation with the IDF on some matters while the other two are in engaged in a hot war against it. Nothing at all like them exists elsewhere, and their commonalities all emerge from a particular attitude and indulgence that the international community affords Israel’s enemies. It’s hard to think of any post-1945 precedent for non-state militias being granted the powers of limited sovereignty over a piece of territory, and the fact that the three most notable examples are arrayed around Israel, and that all three involve militias that were for decades proscribed terrorist groups (and two still are) is telling.

The example of Hizballah, on Israel’s northern border, serves to refute a great deal of pro-Palestinian apologetics regarding Hamas, and at the same time reveals a great deal about the essential animating cause of Palestine—not the liberation of one people but the elimination of another.

Hizballah is not, of course, Palestinian, but Lebanese and Shiite. Its consistent ability to mobilize so many international organizations and actors behind its interests shows that it isn’t so much a pro-Palestinian movement playing on sympathies for Palestinian suffering, but rather an anti-Israel one. Lebanon and Israel have no territorial dispute. Hizballah is not “resisting occupation.” Israel is not “denying statehood” to the Lebanese as it is frequently accused of doing to the Palestinians by people who don’t know or don’t care that the Palestinians have refused statehood at every opportunity since the 1930s if it meant reconciling with a Jewish state next door. On the contrary, Israel would like very much for Lebanon to exercise its sovereignty right up to the border.

There is no “humanitarian crisis” in Lebanon that might explain radicalization there. Nor is there a blockade on Lebanon that might explain why the most powerful political party and armed force in Lebanon is so eager to go to war with Israel. On the contrary, Hizballah’s rocket arsenal is more threatening than that of Hamas precisely because of the absence of a Gaza-style blockade on Lebanon.

The constitutions of Hizballah in southern Lebanon, Fatah in the West Bank, and Hamas in Gaza can be best described as anti-sovereign governance, and, for all the variation among them, they are all the creation of the international community and its unique approach to the Arab conflict with Israel. These constitutions are anti-sovereign in two senses, an internal one and an external. Internally, they exercise stable political and military power without full sovereignty and without any of the responsibilities that come with full sovereignty. And externally, the ideological basis of their entire political project is the denial of sovereignty to the Jewish state they live next to.

Neither of these forms of anti-sovereignty are considered normatively appealing in any context not related to the Jewish state. In all three cases, it was the withdrawal from occupied territory—either carried out in interim agreements, unilaterally, or as part of rejected attempts at peacemaking—that entrenched the quasi-sovereign powers of the anti-sovereign authority and escalated its claims against Israel. This is in stark contrast to the repeated assertion, consistently refuted, that Israeli withdrawals would moderate the claims of Israel’s enemies, reduce the violent threats against Israel, and mobilize global opinion to support Israel.

The Taif Agreement of 1990 ended the Lebanese Civil War and brought about the decommissioning and disarming of all Lebanese militias—except Hizballah. From then until the current war, Israel fought three mini-wars with Hizballah in 1993, 1996, and 2006, each one more intense and deadlier than the previous. All three were accompanied by lurid accusations against Israel from Western NGO’s and international organizations, as well as enormous pressure to accept cease-fires that solidified Hizballah’s role as a legitimate armed force inside a sovereign state. This was manifestly bad for Israel, but it was even worse for Lebanon, which, but for the special role of Hizballah, was maneuvering on a path of normal statehood.

The exact same playbook was used in the mini-wars of Gaza in 2009, 2012, 2014, and 2021. In between the two series of military confrontations was Israel’s 2002 offensive in the West Bank against the jihadist militias responsible for the wave of suicide bombings which began in 1994 and intensified in 2001. There, uniquely, there was no internationally imposed cease-fire. Wild accusations of a massacre in Jenin that didn’t happen or an Israeli religious desecration in Bethlehem that didn’t happen excited the foreign press and various human-rights organizations. But despite global public opinion being inflamed against Israel, the IDF didn’t stop until the mission was complete. The West Bank terrorist infrastructure of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and even the Fatah-led Tanzim still hasn’t recovered more than two decades on.

In Lebanon, three wars and three cease-fires formalized Hizballah’s status as a legitimate international actor in a manner that no non-state actor has attained since at least the East India Company two centuries ago. Informal understandings in 1993 became a multilateral agreement in 1996, which in turn became UN Security Council Resolution 1701 in 2006. In that resolution, Israel agreed to make a full withdrawal south to the international border in exchange for Hizballah forces moving north of a UN-designated buffer zone. Friendly governments made loud promises to move their own forces into Lebanon to enforce the resolution. The Israeli withdrawal happened; the promised forces never arrived. Hizballah stayed in southern Lebanon, spending the ensuing eighteen years building exactly the kind of long-range rocket and missile arsenal Hamas was prevented by a blockade from acquiring too.

The security concept for such cease-fires is as unique as the general constitutional and institutional concepts. Israel is supposed to accept the presence of armed militias dedicated to its destruction either because Israel is so strong that it could meet any threat or because meeting the threat now would be too costly. It means that the deterrence Israel is supposed to exercise over its enemies is purely theoretical. I call this the avocado model of deterrence. The conditions for Israeli military action are always not ripe, not ripe, not ripe, and then way too late.

Avocado deterrence was the rule with Hizballah in Lebanon after 2006 just as it was the rule with Arafat and Hamas in the West Bank in the 1990s and 2000s. And nowhere was the avocado principle more dearly held to than in Gaza. Hamas rockets were something Israel needed to learn to tolerate or even accept that it deserved. The incendiary bombs, carried by balloons, which burned so much productive Israeli farmland during the five years before the October 7 attack were far too small a provocation to warrant an Israeli response. Attempts by Hamas militants to breach the fence in 2018 were best understood as a protest against the Palestinians’ righteous victimhood and not a security threat (as October 7 clearly showed them to be) to the Israeli communities just outside the Strip. Any Israeli preventive action against the growing arsenal of rockets and tunnels was, as it was always asserted, an overreaction to an exaggerated threat.

When wars did break out in 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021, the consensus suddenly shifted. Now any action Israel might take to eliminate the threat was too costly and impractical. Hamas was too embedded in the territory, its rockets too numerous, and any invasion would result in too many casualties.

If military power is too strong to meet a threat early on and too costly to meet it later, and if Israel’s economic levers are limited to a partial blockade that still leaves Israel on the hook for water and electricity, then we shouldn’t expect that it can actually deter any aggressive action against it. As it indeed turned out to be the case with Arafat’s PA and the frenemies he tolerated in the West Bank throughout the Oslo years and into the second intifada, with the Hizballah state-within-a-state in Lebanon, and with the Hamas fiefdom in Gaza.

Avocado deterrence is the overarching security concept. Buttressing it is a jihadist strategy of human sacrifice. Pro-Israel voices sometimes exaggerate the use by Israel’s enemies of human shields, both because it lessens Israel’s moral responsibility for civilian casualties and because it coheres with a diabolical image of the jihadists. Hamas’s indifference to massive civilian casualties on its own side isn’t nearly as unique as we might think. Lots of tyrants in history have behaved similarly in wars. What is unique in the case of Israel’s wars is how much the international community incentivizes human sacrifice as a strategy.

Consider the boilerplate statements by foreign offices the world over whenever some terrorist outrage or other befalls Israel. “We support Israel’s right to self-defense, and remind Israel that it needs to comply with international humanitarian law,” is the standard wording. But this wording is rarely used for other countries, and never used for Western countries themselves, though none of them make the effort Israel does to distinguish combatants from noncombatants and their records—in Afghanistan, Mali, Iraq, Panama—are much worse than Israel’s in this respect.

The incentive structure this creates is clear. Human sacrifice does not constitute in this case an expression of nihilism or cynicism; it makes tactical sense in the rules the international community sets for conflicts involving Israel.

All these concepts collapsed on October 7, 2023. Avocado deterrence does not actually deter anything. It leaves you with a stack of rotten avocados. Incentivizing a human sacrifice strategy, leads, unsurprisingly, to the adoption of a human sacrifice strategy.

A piece of territory governed for the benefit of its inhabitants, even poorly governed, will invest in agriculture to feed its population, trade with its neighbors to improve standards of living, and harness its natural advantages for its own security and prosperity. A piece of territory whose basic competences of governance are devolved to a murderous jihadist cult and an international “relief” organization both equally dedicated to the proposition that the people being governed are only temporarily resident in the territory and to an eschatology that fantasizes about a cosmic justice that resettles them in a neighboring country populated by a usurper nation touched by sin will do none of these things.

A territory with a constitution like that can’t possibly end up much better than the Gaza Strip has. We can blame the zeal (or lament the “anger”) of Hamas all we want; neither is exceptional in history. The exception is the global investment in a regime that nurtures the absolute worst human political drives while actively suppressing anything that might actually improve the lives of the people whose “liberation” it claims to support.

The entire discussion would be merely academic if the failed conceptions that led to the catastrophe of October 7 stopped being relevant. But all four of them are still with us. Netanyahu continues to defer formulating a clear position and continues to subordinate national security policy to the need for political messaging and the lack of faith in both his domestic rivals and potential international partners. His government won’t make a strategic decision about Gaza’s future because such a decision will necessarily involve a strategic decision about the West Bank, and any such decision risks alienating the settler ideology on which his fragile coalition relies on to survive.

Diplomatic efforts of Israel’s closest allies settled on the empty slogan of Israel’s “right to defend itself” rather than on Israel’s duty to win this war. The negotiations over cease-fires ended up reprising all the same mistakes of negotiations over Palestinian autonomy and final status. Demands were made of Israel by its allies before the negotiations even began (not entering Rafah, ensuring supplies and logistics for the Hamas regime) which radically disincentivized any concessions from Hamas itself. Failures in talks were always treated as Israeli failures, further incentivizing Hamas never to reach an agreement. At no point in the past year has there been any indication that Hamas is actually interested in a deal, however generous, for the release of all hostages. The November cease-fire gave Hamas the opportunity to unload the hostages who were a moral and logistical burden. It has never shown even the slightest willingness to go further.

The international community, UNRWA, and sundry human-rights organizations at every step have acted as a force multiplier for Hamas and Hizballah. Particularly depressing has been the abuse of the post-1945 organs of international justice that have been hijacked to protect the jihadist murderers of October 7 from the defeat that is their inevitable lot. If we have any expectation of learning the lessons of that terrible day, let alone of escaping endless and bloody conflict, we have to dismantle these mental models.