Richard Falk
Princeton professor emeritus and TFF Associate since 1986.
October 7, 2024
Israel has long been renowned for its ability to shape public discourse pertaining to its behaviour toward the Palestinians, particularly in the West.
Its greatest triumph is undoubtedly the manner in which it managed the media treatment of its response to October 7 (2023) in North America and Europe. Israel’s response was depicted as purely a matter of defensive security against Palestinian terrorists who 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 military, diplomatic, and intelligence support of Israel while genocide unfolded daily in Gaza.
This article is drawn from two articles published on October 7, 2024, on the author’s blog.
This political manipulation of this incident in the long struggle between Israel and Palestine has several different dimensions. Above all, it absolutizes October 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 couldn’t have been more different and more objective.
The entire population of Gaza has been living under a repressive occupation since the 1967 War as abetted by a punitive blockade imposed in 2007 that caused a steady and deliberate deterioration in the quality of Gaza’s civilian life that was already one of hardship, danger, and abuse.
The demonization of Hamas went completely unchallenged, although it has been persuaded by the US Government to compete in the 2006 Gaza legislative elections in Gaza as a path if taken by Hamas would lead to political normalization, understood to include removal from the terrorist list. Yet neither Washington nor Tel Aviv expected Hamas to prevail in the internationally monitored elections, and when they did, and Hamas later displaced the corrupt Fatah presence in Gaza, Israel went to work reversing the reassurances given to Hamas prior to the elections, refusing to honor the results, imposing a comprehensive blockade on Gaza in 2007, which continues in effect and amounted to a cruel extended form of collective punishment of the entire Palestinian population of the Gaza strip, 75% of whom were refugees from the 1948 War denied their right of return under international law. Only very recently has there been some attempt to present Hamas in a balanced manner, most notably in a book co-edited by Helena Cobban, Rami Khouri, and David Wildman, entitled Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters (OR Books, 2024).
My own views on Hamas were influenced by meetings ten years ago with Hamas leaders in Doha, Cairo, and Gaza City while I was acting as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I was impressed by the intelligence and moderation of these Hamas officials that I remain convinced that they were not putting on ‘a show’ to mislead a minor UN official.
In these discussions, two elements were stressed—first, the need for a political alternative to the resumption of armed struggle for the sake of both Palestine and Israel, and secondly, a long-term ceasefire coupled with an Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Palestinian Territories of Gaza, West Bank, and East Jerusalem as a formula for long-term stability. Turkey more than other countries at the time sought covertly to mediate between Hamas and Israel under the leadership of its star diplomat, Ahmet Davutoglu (later Turkey’s Foreign Minister and Prime Minister), with hopes that some accommodation could be agreed upon, bringing stability and hope to the region and a recovery of some limited sense of normalcy to the long oppressed Palestinian people, now to the people of Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and most of all, Iran. Yet, as events since 2006 have darkly demonstrated, this was not to be. Quite the contrary!
But the history might have been different. Hamas, for its part, after its electoral success, reinforced by ousting Fatah from its leadership role in Gaza, resorted to diplomacy, seeking a political compromise with Israel reinforced by a long-term ceasefire of up to 50 years, which Israel refused to consider, much less take seriously. This 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 the means at its disposal.
Further, from the first day that the extremist Netanyahu 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 October 7 erased Palestine. Even then, its main 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 when we take account of the fact that 75% of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants were refugees or their descendants of the 1948 Nakba.
This course of development is consistent with the Western management of the October 7 event.
First, the early Israeli news releases that greatly exaggerated the atrocities attributed to Hamas were dutifully spread around the world by political leaders and echoed by compliant media. But more than this, the complete absence of self-scrutiny involving the obvious lapse of Israeli border security helped shift exclusive responsibility to the attackers.
Secondly, this pattern gave rise to suspicions because of widespread reports of reliable warnings given personally to Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders in the days and months before October 7. In light of this, it seems highly improbable that the impending Hamas attack was unknown to Israeli intelligence, likely supplemented by surveillance capabilities that could not have missed the training and rehearsals that almost openly preceded the attack.
Thirdly, the worst distortion in these first months after October 7 was the insistence in the Western liberal democracies that the use of the word ‘genocide’ in connection with Israel’s military operation was defamatory, an instance of ‘hate speech’ that warranted punitive responses such as formal retractions, student dismissals, faculty suspensions, and forced administrative resignations. ‘Playing it safe’ in many corporate and governmental settings meant keeping silent about Israeli atrocities except in private conversations among trusted friends. Western governments accentuated this anti-democratic turn by exerting pressures on educational administrators and government employees.
Not mentioning genocide was to ignore the proverbial elephant in the room.
Numerous statements by top Israeli political officials and military commanders made no secret of their genocidal intent. On October 9, Israel’s Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, announced ‘a total siege’ of Gaza applicable to food, fuel, and electricity. He explained that when ‘fighting human animals’ it is necessary to treat the adversary accordingly. Prime Minister Netanyahu invoked the bloodiest chapter in the Bible justifying revenge against the Amalekites: “Do not spare them, put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” Modern Torah teaching generally interprets this troublesome passage metaphorically or as a message intended to address the evil within Jews, but for the far right, including cabinet members of the Netanyahu coalition, the Amalek passage is taken literally and has long served as justification for killing all and any Palestinians.
When reinforced by tactics exhibiting disregard for Palestinian vulnerabilities, the inference of genocide was unmistakable, so much so that even the juridically cautious ICJ gave a preliminary nod in the direction of acknowledging genocide in their rulings of January 26 in response to the South African initiative seeking resolution of its contention that Israel was violating the Genocide Convention of 1951. Of course, Israel rejected these genocidal allegations by its usual tactic of castigating the motives of critics, insisting as always, that it was confronting worldwide antisemitism as well as Hamas terrorism, which it characterized as ‘genocide’ in a willful effort to reverse perceptions.
After this early period of mind control and public confusion, Israel gradually lost control of the discourse except in the Western elite circles where opinion bent somewhat, but in a manner coupled with irresponsible continuation of support.
Israel shifted the focus to the plight of the hostages seized on October 7, and admittedly subjected to a harrowing experience of captivity and Israeli bombardments often ending in their death. Such a humanitarian concern about the fate of the hostage is fully justified, although typically diluted by Western silence about the unspeakably abusive detention of several thousand Palestinians on scant or no charges.
Even the European members of NATO were induced by popular protests in their own countries increasingly to abstain rather than openly side with Israel in UN ceasefire votes, leaving only the US and Israel firmly opposing any pronounced criticisms of Israel even if after the near unanimous Advisory Opinion of the ICJ on July 19 condemned Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories as unlawful for multiple reasons. This ICJ pronouncement was given a strong measure of approval in a resolution adopted by the General Assembly on September 17 by a vote of 124-14, with 43 abstentions. To be expected, the US and Israel were among the 14, while the European countries abstained.
Such a new objectivity was also evident in the gradual rise of civil society opposition to what Israel is doing in Gaza and throughout its region. It is not yet robust enough to penetrate the bipartisan support given to Israel by the US, although the media is slightly more willing to expose the daily cruelty of Israel’s tactics, but still habitually cushioned by Israel’s official accounts that whitewash Israel’s controversial tactics by raising their often unsupported claims of Hamas responsibility by way of their siting of tunnels and human shields. The media rarely invites spokespersons for the Palestinian side or strong civil society critics of Israel to its most prestigious platforms.
Perhaps, the most vivid demonstration of this Phase 2 of the Israeli genocide was the widespread protests on college campuses around the world, having the indirect effect of exposing the widening gap between what the governments of the West support and what a growing proportion of their citizenry believe and favor.
Israel’s loss of control over the public discourse is unprecedented and coupled with the increasing weight of authoritative interpretations of international law within the UN framework that underscores both Israel’s unlawful behavior of the past year and its underlying unlawful occupation policies, and lingering presence since 1967, as the Occupying Power of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
The US has, during the year over and over again given its endorsement to Israel’s strategic moves and occupation policies at the cost of disregarding international law. When coupled with its indignant insistence on international law compliance by Russia in the Ukraine context, the US made clear that it will not hesitate to use international law to attack adversaries while dismissing it when an international ally’s behaviour is unlawful. This is clearly a glaring instance of double standards and moral hypocrisy, reducing international to a policy instrument rather than a regulative norm.
In other words, the more we learn about October 7, the more suspect becomes the official rationale for Israel’s ferocious response. An independent international investigation is long overdue. How can the ‘security lapse’ that let the attack happen, acknowledged recently by Israel, be reconciled with the warnings Israeli leaders received from Egypt and the US, undoubtedly confirmed by Israel’s surveillance and intelligence capabilities in Gaza.
The inevitable skeptical views directed at the Israeli retaliation was given immediate credibility by the scale and intensity of the Israeli response that seemed to offer a pre-planned pretext to escalate pre-October 7 plans to establish Greater Israel from the river to the sea facilitated by the forced expulsion of as many Palestinians as possible.
At present, it seems almost foolish to anticipate that October 7, 2025, will be a time to look back on the despair of 2024 as a grotesque anomaly in human experience, but it is not foolish to pray that it might be so.
Finally, it should not be forgotten that in the background of October 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.
When October 7 is contextualized, Israeli motivations for a genocidal response become more plausible.
The Hamas attack provided Israel with a pretext for genocide, and increasingly supported an interpretation of this severe violence as ethnic cleansing that should be understood as a prelude to land-grabbing, which helps us understand that the West Bank was always part of the theatre of Israel’s military operation.
In this sense, interpreters should take a hard look at October 9 (the day that Israel’s response began) if they want to grasp the significance of October 7. Currently, this exposure of ethnic cleansing realities is obscured by an obsessive Western media focus on the tragic fate of Israeli hostages while the larger scenario of Netanyahu’s extremism evolves beneath 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 countered, it has been from Islamic sources, centring on Iran but including Hezbollah and the Houthis as active allies of Hamas.
October 7 so perceived activated the larger conflict between the West and political Islam, with the Palestinians squeezed in-between and, for the last year, victimized by the worst genocide since the Holocaust.
Among the many unfortunate consequences of the past year 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 clashed with 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.
Let us hope that the year ahead brings peace and justice to the Palestinian people, the entire region, and the other 50 armed combat realities around the world.
October 7: A grim anniversary added by JO on
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