To the day, two years passed since October 7, when Hamas attacked Israel. The calendar says that we are supposed to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. On this years Feast of Tabernacles commemorating the exodus from Egypt, the mood is not for celebration. There are still about 20 surviving hostages held by the Palestinian Hamas in Gaza. And as to the dead hostages kept by Hamas, their families deserve to bury them in Israel.
A Short Retrospective
A lot has happened since October 2023. Attacks from Lebanon’s Hezbollah led to an intensive air and ground offensive that ended with the defeat of the terror group and the potential that Lebanon can finally rebuild after decades of civil war and Hezbollah terror. Israel eventually answered Iran’s first rocket attack on Israel with a 12 day war targeting Iran’s nuclear and rocket arsenal, as well as the military leadership and nuclear scientists. The Ayatollahs are still running the show in Iran and happily continue murdering thousands of suspected Israeli agents and dissidents, but who cares?
In the meantime, the defeat of Hezbollah and weakening of Iran’s military might has helped Syria to overthrow their tyrant Bashar al-Assad. Assad was a second generation Middle Eastern dictator with an infamous genocide record who created the biggest refugee crisis in the 21st century. The new Sunni Islamist leadership now persecutes minorities such as Christians, Druze, and Alawites (a Shia Islamic group). Pressured by the Israeli Druze community, Israel has actively interfered in Syria to protect the Druze.
In the meantime Turkey under the leadership of the Sunni Islamist president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is encroaching Syria and fighting yet another minority in the region – the Kurds. For decades the Kurds – an ethnic group within its own territory in Eastern Turkey, Northern Iraq, and Northern Syria – have been fighting for independence. Their land was divided among these aforementioned countries on the urge of British and French colonialists at the end of the Great War (World War I).
Yemen’s Houthi rebels, another Iran proxy like Hezbollah, are pestering Israel with missile and drone attacks. The reader will be pleased to know that one of the reasons for the high oil price are the Yemenite attacks along the important Red Sea / Suez Canal shipping route. As the Europeans do what they are so good at doing, that is wait for better times, the US at least tried to stop the menace. In the meantime Israel is targeting the Houthi leadership and infrastructure in the hope it will discourage them from further attacks on Israel.
Israel Today
All these momentous developments in the Middle East are fading away when one looks at Israel. The Gaza war has been dragging on for nearly two years. Many of my young co-students spent hundreds of days in the war zones. Some of them lost friends and comrades in this war. Those casualties do not appear in the international press.
The international media’s reporting on the Gaza-Israel war (it is customary to mention the aggressor first) often regurgitates Hamas propaganda. A recent Galei Zahal broadcast shed some light behind it when an Israeli military expert numbered the Hamas PR division at 1500 members, twice as many as Israel employs. Unless a journalist in Gaza is truly suicidal, every photo, video, or text will either be provided by Hamas, approved by Hamas or at least purvey the message that Hamas wants you to get. On the other side, Israel has completely lost the media battle and opinion war, with catastrophic consequences. Antisemitism is at a peak. Israel is politically isolated.
Israel’s society is split: Those who want a save return of the hostages and an end to the war, even if it comes at a high cost. And those who want the total defeat of Hamas, even if the hostages get killed and more Israeli soldiers die in battle as a result. There is no good solution to it. Hamas is using this internal strife to bring about a halt to Israels military campaign. Recent polls give a clear picture: about 2/3 of the Israeli population want an end to the war now. We can only hope that Hamas and the Israeli government accept the Trump proposal that’s on the table. A much better option would be the overthrow of Hamas by the Palestinians in Gaza, which would lead to an immediate end to the fighting. Where are the courageous Palestinians?
I’m being hopeful that the war ends soon and that we all can get back to heal the wounds and build our lives. One question remains, though: Why have so many people around the world subscribed to the Hamas narrative of Israel being the aggressor against a helpless Palestinian people who want nothing but freedom and independence?
Getting it All Wrong
A year and a half ago I had written to New York Times’ correspondent Roger Cohen pointing out a mistake in his article “We Are Not Very Far From an Explosion”, an article on the West Bank and Israeli settlers. The cover photo showed an Israeli woman with binoculars overlooking the Palestinian village Hable, with the caption: “A settler on a water tower in El Matan looks out at Hable, the Palestinian village next door.” The woman was neither a settler, nor did the photo show El Matan (indeed a West Bank settlement), but the Israeli town of Matan. The NYT corrected the mistake and subsequently moved the photo towards the end of the article, as the new caption and the photo had little to do with the subject of the article. Or did it?
Today I read another article of Mr. Cohen, “Israel at War With Itself”. One sentence caught my attention: “For Palestinians, a statehood that more countries have recognized of late remains a remote aspiration, at best, and that is the immovable issue at the heart of war after war” (emphasis by me). Mr. Cohen, you got it all wrong!
The Palestinian struggle was never about statehood. If it were about statehood, the Palestinians could have had their country in 1948. And again in 1993, 2000, and even 2008, to mention but a few very real opportunities. Between 1948 and 1967, Palestinian statehood was in the hands of the Palestinians themselves as well as Jordan and Egypt. Israel wasn’t part of the equation. Back then Jordan had occupied and annexed the biggest part of Palestine – the West Bank – and Egypt controlled Gaza. Did the Palestinians protest? No, despite the fact that they represented the majority in Jordan! Despite the fact that the UN had assigned these lands to the state of Palestine.
In truth, the “issue at the heart of war after war” is the undoing of Israel, or in other words, the annihilation of the Jewish state. Palestinians and supporters use the term “from the river to the sea” to describe a Palestine from the Jordan river in the East to the Mediterranean Sea in the West, that is a Palestine without the state of Israel. Public opinion polls among Palestinians, both in the Gaza strip and in the West Bank, clearly express this sentiment.
In a recent poll from May 2025 an – albeit small – majority of the interviewees in Gaza still support Hamas, after almost two years of war and devastation. The picture in the West Bank, however, is a lot worse: Hamas can count on strong support there. No wonder the Palestinian Authority government in the West Bank, led by president Mahmoud Abbas and the Fatah party, postponed or cancelled democratic elections ever since 2006 when Hamas won the elections in Gaza.
Going back to February and March 1996, the Hamas suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv helped Benjamin Netanyahu win the Israeli elections by the narrowest of margins, against what would have been a certain victory for Shimon Peres, the Israeli architect behind the Oslo accords and the two-state solution. Whenever a proposal for a Palestinian state next to Israel was on the table, Hamas made sure to blow it up, literally. The second intifada (a euphemism for Palestinian terror) was the answer to the Camp David Summit. In the summer of 2000, the Palestinians rejected the Israeli two-state proposal presented at Camp David. When US president Clinton asked Palestinian leader Arafat about his counterproposal, the latter did not reply. In subsequent interviews, both Clinton (see this latest video with him!) and former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami recalled this fateful moment. Some years later Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert tried to revive the peace process, but like his predecessor, Palestinian president Abbas was neither prepared nor willing to proceed.
Mr. Cohen won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Russia-Ukraine war. His coverage of Israel and the Palestinians also has some merit. Unfortunately, he – like many of his colleagues – is mistaken about the root cause of the conflict. I wish he or others had the courage to write about it. It might help Palestinians recognize their fallacy and take responsibility for their own future.