October 7, Two Years On
Two years into its war on Gaza, Israel faces global condemnation and a growing Palestinian solidarity movement. Yet, as analyst Mouin Rabbani explains, US support remains unwavering, and Israel shows little concern for the world’s outrage.
Outrage at the way that Israel has conducted its war has forced Donald Trump to pressure it into accepting a ceasefire — the closest the United States has come to doing so since the war began. (Khames Alrefi / Anadolu via Getty Images)
- Interview by
- John-Baptiste Oduor
Israel began its war on Gaza in response to Hamas’s attack that killed over 1,200 people, the majority of whom were civilians, two years ago today. Since then, most estimates put the number of casualties in Gaza at 65,000, while others place it significantly higher. Israel’s refusal to allow humanitarian aid workers and journalists to move freely within the territory has made confirming deaths impossible. According to reports, famine is widespread and only fourteen hospitals within the strip remain functional.
In the two years since the war began, Israel has attacked Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Qatar, all with American support. Prior to October 7, 2023, the United States aimed to normalize relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, chief among them Saudi Arabia. But Israel’s attempt to dominate the region and its genocide of the Palestinians have made normalization impossible, at least in the immediate future.
While the United States remains steadfast in its support for Israel, a global movement in solidarity with the Palestinians has grown during this period. This has forced countries like Britain, France, and Canada, which have historically been staunch defenders of Israel, to recognize a Palestinian state. Meanwhile, outrage at the way that Israel has conducted its war has forced Donald Trump to pressure it into accepting a ceasefire — the closest the United States has come to doing so since the war began.
Jacobin spoke to Mouin Rabbani, an analyst of Middle Eastern politics, about the latest plans for a ceasefire. Hamas, Rabbani explains, has accepted most of Israel’s proposals, such as releasing the hostages and agreeing to relinquish political power within the strip. It is, however, unclear whether these proposals are capable of being, or even intended to be, long-lasting. They may, Rabbani speculates, simply be an attempt to create breathing room for Israel’s next attack on Iran.
It’s been two years since October 7. The initial response of politicians and journalists to that event was to deny that Israel’s actions constituted a genocide, to deny that it was a deliberate attempt to ethnically cleanse Gaza, and to view Israel’s campaign solely in the context of Hamas’s attack. Since then, Israel has been condemned by most nations. What’s shifted within elite and public opinion over the course of the past two years?
Well, I think several things have happened. As you know, the initial response, certainly from governments throughout the West, was to offer full solidarity with Israel and to characterize Israel’s response as part of a legitimate campaign of self-defense by deploying all the usual clichés.
Now, two years on, even Israel’s staunchest supporters, apart from the United States and maybe the UK and Germany, are singing a different tune. The reason is that their hand has been forced by a combination of factors. First among these is, I think, the combination of Israel’s conduct and its statements about its conduct have made it extremely difficult for these countries to continue to pretend that what they’re witnessing is an armed conflict, or a war between two adversaries in which Israel is engaging in an act of self-defense.
Second, these governments have come under growing popular pressure from their own publics. I grew up in Holland, and I’ve just been reading in the news that there was a demonstration of 250,000 people against the genocide and in support of the Palestinians in the Netherlands [on Sunday, October 5]. Five years ago, you would have been lucky to have 2,500 people. Holland is one of the most pro-Israeli countries in Europe. It boggles the mind how much things have changed.
It’s primarily these two factors: Israel’s own conduct, which has made it untenable for governments and elites to characterize things as they would like to, and growing pressure from below. This latter has made it impossible for these countries to not at least give the appearance of changing.
You mention the growing Palestine solidarity movement, but there has also been a right-wing backlash, which has taken on an international character. Britain’s far-right activist Tommy Robinson has recently been invited to Israel, and of course the Right in the US has also turned Israel into a rallying cry. How has this pro-Israel solidarity movement developed over the past two years?
Israel has always been an issue in the domestic politics of many Western countries. By this I mean that if you are pursuing a political career, it can be limited by your attitude toward Israel and the Palestinians. In other words, if you just played along and said the right things about Israel or ignored the issue and said nothing about Palestinians and their rights, you were considered safe. But if you began speaking out for Palestinian rights, that could be a career ender. Since the war began, Palestine has become a global issue and a litmus test for human decency and democratic values. This has made it an issue of contestation within many countries.
In Ireland, unionists would often raise Israeli flags and republicans and nationalists would raise Palestinian flags, especially as Israel came to be seen as a bulwark of the West against an imminent Islamic takeover after 9/11. Of late, Israel has increasingly become a domestic issue dividing the left and right, or more specifically, the far right and the Left and increasingly the far right and the center.
And if you look at the United States, for example — and this may well be the case in European countries too, although I’m less familiar with them — you see that opposition to Palestinian advocacy has been used as a battering ram to limit people’s freedoms. You saw it already during the [Joe] Biden years in the campaign against universities, the campaign against free speech. But Israel has now been weaponized to a much greater degree by the Trump administration.
To use the famous lines from Pastor [Martin] Niemöller, first they came after the supporters of Palestinian rights. And when they got away with it, they started coming after everyone else, because Palestine was seen as the weakest link. Once you can use attacks on advocates of Palestinian rights to establish a precedent, that precedent is set. We’ve seen it already even before 2023. In some US states, once they passed laws effectively banning advocates of a boycott of Israel from qualifying for federal funds or state jobs or the like, they then very quickly turned around and used the exact same laws on other enemies. They just replaced Palestine with abortion or climate change or whatever.
Domestically, this also plays out in the politics of immigration, at least in Europe where Muslims are seen by the Right as enemies of Western civilization.
I think those issues have been heightened now because the far right is very much focused on immigration and specifically on Muslim immigration. And they’ve tried to portray Palestine as somehow a Muslim jihadist issue.
The difference between European and American attitudes toward Palestine are quite stark. Partly, I think, this is because there’s a larger Muslim population in the UK and in other European countries, so it becomes harder to demonize Muslims. But do you think there’s something else going on?
Yes, I do think there’s something else going on. As you saw in the reaction of Israel and the far right when several Western governments recognized Palestine in recent weeks, they tried to present this as a result of weak Western governments capitulating to Muslim constituencies. In other words, they’re going out of their way to try to deny that this has become an issue that concerns the majority of the public.
Now, in direct response to your question, yes, you’ve had the designation of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization in the UK, and you’ve had various restrictions in Germany. But none of this is even remotely similar to what we’re seeing in the United States. Yes, the Muslim population is much smaller and the most repressive measures are increasingly being directed at Hispanics and immigrants rather than Muslims specifically. But the kinds of measures that have been directed at Palestinians and their advocates are a laboratory for many of the things that the US government is doing now against many others.
To turn to the ceasefire proposal, could you outline what’s involved in it? Who was involved in putting it together? And to what extent you think these plans are workable?
Yeah, well, those are several separate questions. I’ll just start with a little bit of background. There have been ongoing talks and negotiations — however you want to characterize them — about achieving a ceasefire, an exchange of captives, and an end to the war, essentially since March. But they have largely been a charade. What has changed is that during the United Nations General Assembly, Donald Trump met with a number of Arab leaders and leaders of Muslim states. I believe it was Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, and maybe one or two others.
These nations basically pressed him to come up with an initiative to end this genocide. They did this for reasons of their own because Israel’s war is increasingly enveloping the entire region. And I think that during these discussions two issues became critical. The first was Israel’s war against Iran, in which the US later participated. And then more recently, and even more alarmingly for many of these governments, was the Israeli bombing of Qatar. This really rattled these governments. You basically then had a situation in which the US was supporting one-client regimes in its attack on another. And for Washington’s Arab clients, it became clear that they would not be safe from Israel if it chose to bomb them.
To get back to your question, a number of these leaders, together with their US counterparts, worked out a twenty-one-point proposal that was supposed to lead to a ceasefire, a new administration and governance in the Gaza Strip, and so on, and at least open a pathway toward resolving the underlying political issues. Then [Benjamin] Netanyahu went to the US, met in Washington with the American negotiators, and successfully managed to revise the twenty-one-point proposal in fundamental respects.
The proposal was pared down to twenty points and to give you an idea of how successful Netanyahu was, the original US proposal specifically said that Israel would conduct no further attacks on Qatar. That wording was removed and it was basically changed into an instrument of capitulation, of surrender, and for good measure President Trump, in a joint press conference with Netanyahu, then presented Hamas with an ultimatum: if it didn’t respond within several days, it would be obliterated. What really struck me during that joint press conference by Trump and Netanyahu is that if you didn’t know better, you wouldn’t have been able to distinguish who was representing Israel and who was representing the United States. I mean, their statements were almost identical.
This put Hamas between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, it couldn’t accept this proposal without committing political suicide, but it also couldn’t reject it because the ball had been thrown into their court by the Arab and Muslim leaders, who, rather than rejecting the revised proposal after Netanyahu visited Washington, went along with it.
Hamas couldn’t reject the proposal because the Arab and Muslim leaders had supported it and turning away from the deal would also have been seen as a betrayal of the Palestinians in Gaza, who although I think very few of them saw this as a serious proposal, nevertheless believed that it could at least lead to a pause in the genocide and to a period of time in which urgently needed food, water, and medicine could enter the Gaza Strip. For many Gazans, that was good enough.
Adopting this position is perfectly understandable. If you’re being subjected to genocide and famine, and someone gives you a stay of execution for a week or a month, of course you’re going to take it. In this context, Hamas’s response was, I thought, quite constructive. On the one hand, they didn’t reject the proposal and instead accepted those elements that were most important to Washington, namely the release of all the remaining Israeli captives, dead or alive, during the first phase of the agreement in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.
Hamas also accepted an end to the war, and it accepted that it would no longer play a role in governing the Gaza Strip. These, of course, are all things that Hamas had previously accepted. And then as far as the other elements of the proposal are concerned: disarmament, this whole idea of making Tony Blair the colonial viceroy of the Gaza Strip, and so on, Hamas either ignored them or stated that they would need further discussion because they require either a national Palestinian consensus or can only be agreed upon in consultation with international law.
Now, there are unconfirmed reports, at least some of which are probably true, that the Hamas response and its communication with the US were choreographed with a number of Arab governments, presumably Turkey, Egypt, and Qatar. It’s also been reported that Hamas, despite the contents of the proposal, personally thanked Trump for having issued it. By playing to his vanity, Hamas’s response seemed to have been viewed by Trump as enough to continue negotiating. He accepted their response and announced that he was about to establish peace throughout the Middle East, etc.
And so now we’re going to see how serious this deal is. The bombing hasn’t stopped. You can’t trust anything Trump says because he’s so fickle and erratic and unpredictable. Some people believe that this is not an issue — that this is not a proposal that Israel will be able to abrogate without incurring fury from Washington, and that we’re now probably going toward either a ceasefire or a very much diminished Israeli military campaign. I’m not so sure I share that optimism. I think when it comes to these issues, Israel ultimately usually gets its way and is likely to try to find a way to abrogate the agreement, either in the short term or further down the line.
Trump issued an executive order last week, three days before the twenty-one-point plan, offering security guarantees to Qatar. How should we understand this order in the context of the US refusing to force Israel to commit to not launching any future attacks on Qatar?
Well, if you’re suggesting that Trump issued that executive order after the reference to no further Israeli attacks on Qatar was removed from the draft proposal, I think the sequencing of events did indeed work out that way, but whether one was specifically provided in response to the other, I’m not in a position to say. It may have been the case that this was already in the works and that Qatar did not take satisfaction with Netanyahu’s US-dictated apology or with the clause that was in the agreement, even if it had remained there. Let’s be clear, the Israeli attack on Qatar could not have happened without US authorization.
It’s quite possible that Qatar would have pursued this US security guarantee, even if the clause had not been removed from the proposal, to ensure that the US would be formally required to defend Qatar against any further Israeli attack. But there’s another angle to this, which is that many people are expecting that in the next few weeks or months, there will be a further Israeli campaign against Iran. And if in that context this security guarantee is equally applicable, which it will be, that could then provide the US with the pretext to once again participate with Israel in an attack on Iran.
So, part of the deal is also concerned with targeting Iran?
Yes. Let’s say Israel attacks Iran again, initially without direct US participation, and let’s say you get a situation where the Iranians decide that this time they’re not going to wait for the US to send its bombers over Iranian territory. Instead, they’re going to hit the US preemptively in Qatar [where the United States has 10,000 troops stationed]. Of course, this is purely speculation, but let’s say that happens — that would activate this US-Qatari agreement just as much as any supposed Israeli strike would.
We’ve gotten closer with this proposal to something that looks like a workable plan for a ceasefire and a transition plan than we did under the Biden administration. Why is it that nothing similar was proposed then?
Well, the Biden administration never had a similar proposal. And prior to October 2023 — in other words, for the first three years of his tenure — Biden was very much focused on normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which was never going to happen for a whole series of reasons. But securing normalization was his focus, regardless of how attainable it was.
In addition to this, Biden was focusing on normalization not as a springboard with which to then resolve the question of Palestine, but for the exact same reason that Trump pursued the Abraham Accords, which is to leapfrog the Palestinians and arrange Israeli-Arab normalization at their expense. This would leave the Palestinians at Israel’s mercy and the Palestinian question to be unilaterally resolved by Israel, as it sees fit without Arab opposition.
The result of that policy was October 7, 2023. The reason that Trump is now directly addressing the Gaza Strip is, I think, first and foremost, because of the actual situation there; it’s not something that can be ignored. But Trump also believes that if he successfully addresses this, not only will it give him a Nobel Peace Prize, but that a deal is a way station to Israeli-Saudi normalization.
But Israeli-Saudi normalization is impossible to imagine without some kind of resolution of the Palestinian question, which, given the direction that Israeli domestic politics has moved, seems close to impossible.
Exactly.
Is it possible to imagine a situation where the cost of Israel’s recalcitrance becomes so high that it just becomes irrational for the US to continue to support it, given that the Saudis, Qataris, and other client states are now having their interests actively undermined by Israel’s actions?
That’s possible. But I think we’re a very long way off, in a significant part because as we’ve seen during the past two years, these Arab states are basically not prepared to use their leverage with the United States in order to change its policies toward Israel. We know that they have leverage, and we know that it can be successfully deployed because during Trump’s victory tour earlier this year to Gulf Cooperation Council states [Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates], the one thing that they did continuously press him for was to lift the sanctions on Syria, and that he did.
The issue with Saudi-Israeli normalization as it sat prior to October 2023 was that the Saudis would have been prepared to make do with symbolic Israeli gestures toward the Palestinians. But even before October 7, 2023, the Israeli government was so extreme that it was incapable of even making these symbolic gestures. The problem now is that, on the one hand, Israel is thoroughly unprepared to do anything to resolve the situation in Gaza. At the same time, the Saudis are going to require much more than symbolic gestures to move ahead with this, mainly because of their own domestic public opinion, which is going to be much less tolerant of any normalization with Israel that does not directly address Palestinian rights in a credible and irreversible way.