OPINION - Oct. 7: A grim anniversary

• The exposure of ethnic cleansing realities is still inexcusably obscured by an obsessive Western media focus on the tragic fate of Israeli hostages while the larger playbook of Netanyahu's extremism flies under the radar
  
• By ignoring the near unanimous rulings of the juridically respected International Court of Justice, the West showed its contempt for the authority of international law if it clashes with their strategic interests

The author is Milbank Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University, and former Special Rapporteur for the UN Human Rights Council on Occupied Palestine.

ISTANBUL

Israel has long been renowned for its ability to shape public discourse pertaining to its behavior toward the Palestinians, particularly in the West. Its greatest public relations triumph is undoubtedly the manner with which it managed the media treatment of its response to Oct. 7 in North America and Europe. Israel’s response was depicted as purely a matter of defensive security against ‘’Palestinian terrorists’’ who widely staged an unprovoked and barbaric surprise attack by Hamas. This public distortion of the event gave the Western governments the political space needed to justify their closed eyes approach to military, diplomatic, and intelligence support of Israel while genocide daily unfolded in Gaza.

The political manipulation of this incident in the long struggle between Israel and Palestine has several different dimensions. Above all, it absolutizes Oct. 7 to create the false impression that peace and quiet prevailed in Gaza until ruptured by this vicious Hamas attack on Israeli villages and civilians gathered for a dance festival. The actual context from a Palestinian point of view could not have been more different, and more objective.

Hamas tried diplomatic solution

The entire population of Gaza has been living under a repressive occupation since the 1967 War, and worse, enduring a punitive blockade imposed in 2007 that caused a steady and deliberate deterioration in the quality of Gazan civilian life that was already beset by hardship, danger, and abuse. It is also worth remembering that Hamas was cajoled by Washington to give up armed struggle and pursue its goals by political means to end the stigma of its terrorist listing. Heeding this advice, Hamas agreed to take part in the Gaza elections of 2006, which the US and Europe expected it to lose badly. When it surprised Israel and the US by its success in these internationally monitored elections, the result was, to put it mildly, not welcomed in Tel Aviv, which influenced Washington to keep Hamas in a terrorist box until it met some unreasonable conditions, and the rest is history best described as an apartheid regime of control, culminating in the genocidal assault of the past year.

But this history could have been different. Hamas for its part after its electoral success, reinforced by ousting a corrupt Fatah from a leadership role in Gaza, resorted to diplomacy. It sought openly and by back channels a political compromise with Israel bolstered by a long-term ceasefire of up to 50 years. Israel refused even to consider such a peace initiative, much less take it seriously. Such a reaction gave Hamas little choice but to surrender its political rights, above all the right to self-determination, or resume its earlier posture of resistance by what instruments of struggle were at its disposal.

Further, from the first day that the extremist Netanyahu’s far right coalition took over the governance of Israel at the start of 2023, it proclaimed a “new Middle East” which in a map exhibited by Netanyahu just weeks before Oct. 7 erased Palestine. Even then, Hamas’ most aggressive tactic in Gaza was the 2018 nonviolent “right of return” movement, which Israel met at its borders with lethal violence again narrowing Hamas’ choices to surrender or armed struggle. This was a poignant moment, especially when it is realized that 75% of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants are refugees or descendants of the forced expulsions of 1948, known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or catastrophe.

Political distortion of Oct. 7

This course of development is consistent with the Western distorted portrayal of the Oct. 7 event. First, the early Israeli news releases that grossly exaggerated the atrocities attributed to Hamas were dutifully spread around the world by political leaders and echoed by a compliant media without demanding a shred of evidence. But more than this, the complete absence of self-scrutiny of Israel’s part was quite astonishing considering the obvious lapse of border security that allowed such a major attack. This accusatory mindset helped shift exclusive responsibility to the attackers. This pattern quite naturally gives rise to suspicions about whether Israel let the attack go forward, a skeptical view given credibility by widespread reports of reliable warnings of an impending Hamas attack given personally to Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders in the days and even months before Oct. 7. This alone makes it seem highly improbable that Hamas’ plans were unknown to Israeli intelligence, and quite likely supplemented by Israel’s superior surveillance capabilities that could not be imagined to have missed the training and rehearsals that almost openly preceded the attack.

Finally, it should not be forgotten that in the background of Oct. 7 was the flagrant official greenlighting of settler violence that became part of the West Bank foreground after the attack. In the last days of August Israel unleashed a devastating Gaza-style military campaign so far focused on the West Bank cities of Jenin and Tulkarm with only the flimsiest of explanations.

When Oct. 7 is contextualized, Israeli motivations for a genocidal response become more plausible. The Hamas attack provided Israel with a pretext for launching genocide. This increasingly supports an interpretation of the second phase of severe violence in the service of ethnic cleansing that should also be seen as an organic prelude to increased land-grabbing, which helps us appreciate that the West Bank was always part of Israel’s planned establishment of Greater Israel. In this sense, interpreters should take a hard look at Oct. 9 (the day that Israel’s response began) if they want to grasp the significance of Oct. 7. Currently, this exposure of ethnic cleansing realities is still inexcusably obscured by an obsessive Western media focus on the tragic fate of Israeli hostages while the larger playbook of Netanyahu's extremism flies under the radar.

All along Israel could not have addressed the Hamas challenge as one of pure terrorism without unwavering US and European support, no matter what the human costs and the reputational damage to Western global leadership. To the extent this support was actively opposed, it has come from Islamic sources, centering diplomatically on Iran but in the form of armed initiatives by Hezbollah and the Houthis who do not hide their active support of Palestinians. Although Hamas supporters did not play an active or confirmed role in Oct. 7 itself, which ignited this larger conflict between West and political Islam. In this process The Palestinian people are being squeezed to death, victimized during the past year by the worst genocide since the Holocaust.

Among the many unfortunate consequences of Oct. 7 has been to weaken gravely the war and genocide prevention reputations of the UN. By ignoring the near unanimous rulings of the juridically respected International Court of Justice, the West showed its contempt for the authority of international law if it clashes with their strategic interests. The contrast between insisting on the sanctity of international law in the Ukraine context and its complicity in the Gaza genocide exhibited both double standards and moral hypocrisy. A positive development, including in the Western countries supporting Israel, has been the civil society pro-Palestinian activism that is challenging the disregard of international law and human decency by the Western governments, and this may over time lead to a new surge of populist support for law-guided international behavior and a more effective UN.

Let us hope that the year ahead brings peace and justice to the Palestinian people and the entire region.

*Opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Anadolu's editorial policy.