—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative
“From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” and “We don’t want no two states, we want 1948” are two of the slogans that have been heard on American campuses during the protests in recent weeks. These reflect the idea that Israel should be replaced by a Palestinian Arab state and violence should be used to achieve this goal if necessary. While much of the discourse since October 7 has focused on the nature of Hamas’s attack—the rapes, the burnings, the shootings—not enough has been written on what it actually sought to achieve.
There is nothing surprising about violent Palestinian opposition to Zionism. As Vladimir Jabotinsky wrote: “The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists. . . . Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised.” Ireland, Algeria, India, Vietnam—it is the same every time. What makes the Palestinian case different is that the Jews also have a legitimate claim to the land. This is why Israelis have responded differently to Palestinian violence than in all the examples above. As the famous Zionist song puts it: “I have no other country.”
This rejectionism creates a situation whereby the use of violence has always been more catastrophic for the Palestinians than it has been for the Jews. This phenomenon goes all the way back to 1929. That year, following false claims regarding Jewish ambitions toward the Temple Mount/Al Aqsa, violent riots broke out across Palestine, with the main focal points being Jerusalem, Jaffa, Tzfat, and Hebron. They lasted around a week, and by the end 133 Jews had been killed—the vast majority of whom had been murdered by Arabs—and 116 Arabs were killed—around 20 of whom were murdered by Jews, with the majority being killed because of police and military activities.
Crucially, most of the Jewish victims came from the two non-Zionist communities living in Palestine—the Sephardim and the Ultra-Orthodox, who together formed what’s known as the Old Yishuv. The simple reason so many of them were killed is that the Zionist communities had the Haganah (which had been established in 1920) to protect them. Predictably, following the riots, the non-Zionist communities sought Zionist protection and began to be absorbed into Palestine’s Jewish mainstream. As Hillel Cohen writes in his magnificent 1929: Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: “It was the attacks on Jewish communities in 1929 that forged the Yishuv. . . . Jews who had kept their distance from the Zionist movement drew closer to it, and Zionist institutions accelerated their work to bring the Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin under the movement’s wing.”
Strategically, Palestinian nationalists should have sought to achieve the opposite; their refusal to differentiate between the country’s Jewish communities proves false the claim that their problem was only with Zionists and not with Jews. At the heart of this fatal mistake was a refusal to accept the basic veracity of the Jewish claim of being a people with an ancient connection and historic rights to Palestine under any circumstances, a refusal that has ebbed and flowed over the years but has haunted the Palestinians to today.
In the 1990s, at the height of the Oslo Accords, Hamas launched devastating suicide bombings in the heart of major Israeli cities. Violence is a form of communication, and the message these bombings delivered was: It doesn’t matter if you live in Hebron or Tel Aviv, whether you are a new oleh or your family has been here for generations—you are all illegitimate settlers and legitimate targets of violence. This dynamic intensified during the Second Intifada when, following the failure of the Camp David talks, there were even more suicide bombs in major Israeli cities. Large numbers of Israelis, including many who had supported Palestinian statehood, logically concluded that the problem was not the occupation (as terrible as it was) but Israel’s very existence.
The fallout from October 7 reveals a similar dynamic. The victims were not settlers. They lived in sovereign Israeli territory, in areas known for being politically to the left, with a disproportionate number of residents active in Israeli–Palestinian peace activities like Road to Recovery. Indeed, many were surprised that they were targeted, just as people are sometimes surprised to learn that the non-Zionist Jews were targeted in 1929. Anyone with a basic understanding of Hamas’s ideology, though, would not have been surprised. In October 2021, for example, Hamas sponsored a “Promise of the Hereafter” conference for the period that would follow the liberation of Palestine, including discussions about which Jews would be killed, who would be allowed to leave or remain, and how to prevent a brain drain that would lead to the country’s collapse. As Sinwar himself said: “We are sponsoring this conference because it is in line with our assessment that victory is nigh. . . . [T]he full liberation of Palestine from the sea to the river [is] the heart of Hamas’s strategic vision.”
Intriguingly, though, there is some tantalizing evidence that Hamas themselves have realized the mistake they made on October 7. On his YouTube channel, the Israeli Middle East scholar Dr. Mordechai Kedar presented a summary of conclusions drawn by Hamas-associated media outlets in the months following the massacre (it is important to emphasize that Kedar did not specifically name the source), which he calls: “In the Eyes of Hamas: Israel’s Situation and the Next Attack Against It.” According to this summary, due to the attack on Israeli communities primarily identified with the left, and specifically the Nova party, which was held on Shabbat and attended by secular Israelis, the Israeli left is now less supportive of the Palestinians and has begun adopting the positions of the right. Naturally Hamas are not enamored with this development.
The claim that all Israelis are settlers unites Israelis living in Tel Aviv with those living in the West Bank and makes those on the left more hostile toward the notion of an independent Palestinian state. After all, if we’re all settlers, then what difference does the occupation make? Therefore, the Hamas analysis continues, the next attack should target settlements in the West Bank (but without rape this time!), because the settlers will be blamed for endangering themselves. The left will not go to war for the settlements, unlike the settlers, who leaped to the defense of the communities targeted on October 7 and have suffered disproportionately high losses during the war. Nor would Israel’s allies support it going to war in defense of what they view as illegal settlements.
While this analysis is highly speculative and of unclear provenance, it hits a nerve. Watching it, I immediately thought of the heroic story of the “Elhanan Team.” On October 7, Elhanan Meir Kalmanson and his brother Menachem, who lived in the southern West Bank settlement of Otniel, heard about the attack and headed to the south before they had even been called up for reserve duty. Later joined by their nephew Itiel, together they fought Hamas terrorists and helped save dozens of people. The next day, Elhnanan was killed in an ambush, but Menachem and Itiel survived.
There was a news feature about Menachem and Itiel meeting those they had rescued at the Dead Sea hotel where they had been evacuated. The atmosphere was, as one might expect, one of gratitude and unity. The division between religious and secular, settler and non-settler, evaporated amidst the celebration of the rescue and the mourning of the loss of Elhanan. As moved as I was, though, I couldn’t help but ask the terrible question echoing in the Hamas analysis: Would the reverse have taken place? It’s hard to think so. Residents of the south have rightfully complained for years that rocket attacks in the center are taken more seriously than those in the Gaza Envelope; the same is true for the differences in how terror attacks in Tel Aviv are reported compared to those in the West Bank, or even Jerusalem. While the settler movement has worked to improve its image among the general population in recent years, it hasn’t succeeded in erasing the psychological green line that exists in the head of most Israelis, specifically the idea that the West Bank is a dangerous place that is best avoided unless a visit is essential. This remains the case even if many Israelis don’t want to see it become a Palestinian state.
Specifically targeting the West Bank, though, is only one part of the issue. As Kedar’s summary of the Hamas analysis shows, their short/medium-term aim is to take control of any Palestinian state or statelet that emerges, but only as a staging post toward the goal of destroying Israel. The IRA had more of an impact on British policy when they began targeting the mainland, but they never sought the destruction of Britain. In this sense, specifically targeting settlements wouldn’t alter the basic dynamic that goes back to 1929. And yet it could still have a significant impact. A war fought exclusively in the West Bank, without the backdrop of destruction in so-called Israel proper, would be interpreted, not unreasonably, as a colonial war even among those who support Israel. The settlers insist they are the first line of defense for those living in the center of the country, but if push came to shove would this view be widely shared? I’m not so sure. Following October 7 there were allegations (which some question) that the south was left undefended because of the high numbers of troops in the West Bank. If the settlements were attacked with the same intensity, would a reverse charge take hold beyond the National Religious community?
Amidst all this speculation, and assuming there is something substantial behind Kedar’s reporting, one must ask why it has taken Hamas so long to draw this conclusion. Their suicide bombs in the 1990s wrecked Israeli support for the Oslo Accords, and their suicide bombs in the Second Intifada put the nail in the coffin of the two-state solution. Since then, Palestinian violence has remained consistent in targeting Israelis indiscriminately.
In the video, Kedar is intensely disturbed by what he describes, realizing its implications. “The writing is on the wall in fire,” he says, calling on Israel to immediately declare that any West Bank village or city from where terrorists depart to carry out an October 7–style attack will be treated the same as Khan Younis or Gaza City. He refers to this as a Middle Eastern solution, even though Israel’s own use of violence against the Palestinians has only fitfully worked as a deterrent.
If the Palestinians were to adopt the strategy described above, it is reasonable to think that the dynamic in Israel would change. It would create fissures among Israeli Jews, instantly rendering the split between left and right far more existential. October 7 united us because we rightly concluded that it didn’t matter where we lived or what we thought about Palestinian statehood; by virtue of being Israeli Jews and supporting the continued existence of a Jewish state, we were considered legitimate targets for violence. If Hamas were to weaken this consensus, even if tactically, it would become an existential threat to Israeli unity. The historical record, though, suggests that it is unlikely to be implemented with any consistency.
The same is true on college campuses, where the slogans often justify—implicitly or otherwise—Hamas’s violence. In one fascinating clip, the veteran anti-Israel scholar Norman Finkelstein spoke to the protesters at Columbia. In his remarks, he said:
The most important things are organization, leadership, and having clear objectives. Clear objectives means basically two things. One is slogans that are going to unite and not divide. . . . I don’t agree with the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” It’s very easy to amend and just say, “From the river to the sea, Palestinians will be free.” That simple, little amendment drastically reduces the possibility of your being manipulatively misunderstood. . . . I believe one has to exercise—not in a conservative sense, but a radical sense—in a moment like this, maximum responsibility to get out of one’s navel, to crawl out of one’s ego, and to always keep in mind the question: What are we trying to accomplish at this particular moment?
It’s easy to forget, given the often-unhinged vitriol that he showers on Israel, but Finkelstein is a reluctant supporter of the two-state solution. And it is this pragmatism, I think, that leads him to gently chide the student protesters for adopting a slogan that is widely understood as calling for the destruction of Israel, because—despite all the noise—there is little mainstream support for this position. In response, the students politely applauded before one of them snatched up the microphone to lead another chant of “From the river to the sea.” In other words, despite these sensible calls for pragmatism, the student protests continue to be led by people who support Hamas’s goal, a goal that most Israelis, no matter where they stand on the political spectrum, steadfastly reject, thus guaranteeing that the purveyors of Palestinian violence, and those whose protests encourage it, will continue to fail in their goals.
Alex Stein is a writer, translator, editor, tour guide, and educator based in Jerusalem. His Substack is called Love of the Land.
