The Road to October 7 – Yahya Abdullah

The title above is the title of the latest publication by Adam Raz, an Israeli political historian who belongs to the radical left according to Israeli classification. The book was published by Pardis Publishing House shortly after the outbreak of the Gaza War in 2024 AD. Raz has written on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Israeli nuclear program, and political theory, among other subjects. His most important publications include: “Struggle for the Bomb” (2015), “Herzl: His Struggle at Home and Abroad” (co-authored with Igor Wagner, 2017), “The Kafkaesem Massacre: A Political Biography” (2018), as well as “The Iron Fist Regime: David Ben-Gurion”, “Official Controversy and Political Disagreements over the Israeli Nuclear Program” (2019), “The Plunder of Arab Property in the 1948 War” (2020), “Military Administration 1948-1966, a Collection of Documents” (2021) and “Demagogues: Mechanisms of the Use of Power” (2023 AD).
The basic premise of the book, The Road to October 7, is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is systematically seeking to deepen and entrench the conflict in the region rather than resolve it or reach a peaceful settlement. This is a well-known axiom. No two people disagree. It is as clear as the midday sun. The author attempts to demonstrate the validity of his premise by explaining the means Netanyahu has adopted to perpetuate the conflict.
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There is room for disagreement or agreement with the author’s arguments here. Some approaches seem logical and consistent with the course of events, while others appear imaginative. One of the most prominent arguments reviewed in the book is one that is often repeated in Israeli public discourse, but no one dwells on the details as much as Raz does, which states in the book that Netanyahu is committed to strengthening the authority of the Hamas movement in Gaza by depriving it of, in return, weakening the Ramallah Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen).
Regarding the first point, namely strengthening the authority of the Hamas movement, the book mentions a number of measures taken by Netanyahu in this regard. However, before introducing the procedures listed in the book, I must point out that what is stated in the book is not necessarily a matter of course, but an interpretation that may be right or wrong.
These measures include: Netanyahu allowing the so-called “bags of dollars” to continue to enter the Gaza Strip from Qatar, thereby strengthening the so-called “extremist elements” in the movement. At this time, the book cites Netanyahu’s withdrawal of the decision made by former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin before his assassination (November 5, 1995), in which he asked the United States of America to extradite former Israeli Prime Minister Moussa Abu Marzouq. Political Bureau of the Hamas movement, because according to Al-Kitab, the most radical faction of Hamas led by him is committed to fighting Israel and opposing settlements.
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The book’s authors claim that over the past fifteen years – with the exception of the year (June 13, 2021-June 6, 2022) when the governments of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid were known as the government of change – Netanyahu has resisted every military or political attempt that could have led to the elimination of Hamas rule in the Gaza Strip, the book’s authors claim.
The book states that in response, Netanyahu turned a blind eye to the smuggling of weapons into the Gaza Strip, froze the construction of the separation fence in 2019, and leaked to the media a report submitted by the army to the Council of Ministers on the consequences of ground military operations in the Gaza Strip during the Protective Edge campaign, in order to create public opinion against the ground invasion of the Gaza Strip and thus prevent actions that endanger Hamas rule. I think the author made a major oversight in this regard, because Netanyahu did not make decisions alone, but acted within the institutional framework.
On the other hand, what the author says is self-evident is that Netanyahu is against any political reconciliation between the Fatah and Hamas movements. In fact, he seeks to perpetuate the division between the two movements so that there will be no cohesion between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which would form the basis of a future Palestinian state. The book claims that in exchange for strengthening Hamas, Netanyahu ignores the moderate approach of the Palestinian Authority and undermines it politically, making peace impossible. In this regard, the author quotes Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, a member of the Central Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization and one of the people who played an important role in the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation negotiations: “Every time we, the Palestinians, move towards … unity, Netanyahu launches a campaign claiming that Abbas is working with terrorists … But every time he is asked why he does not negotiate with Abbas, he says: I cannot negotiate with the Palestinian Authority because it does not represent all Palestinians.”
Netanyahu thus uses the Palestinian division card to justify his absolute opposition to any negotiation of a peace agreement. Against the background of Netanyahu’s lack of desire for peace, the book shows his complete disregard for the strong signals sent by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who in 2012 issued a statement that Israelis often long to hear to ensure a Palestinian peace partner, in which he explicitly declared the renunciation of the practice of resistance and the right of return, as he said in the text: “We will not return to terrorism and violence… We will work only through diplomatic and peaceful means (…) Palestine for me is the 1967 borders, including East Jerusalem. The rest is Israel. I am a refugee (from the city of Safed in 1948) living in Ramallah. “I will return to Safed only as a tourist. ”
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The author concludes that the Palestinian moderates are Netanyahu’s real enemies and that Netanyahu is unwilling to compromise. In the book, the author reviews Netanyahu’s attempts to obstruct the resumption of peace talks since he returned to power in 2009, including: stepping up settlement construction in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, demanding that Palestine recognize Israel as a state that serves only the Jewish people, and political persecution, and accusing it of political terrorism. In view of his stubborn stance, the Palestinian Authority was forced to take unilateral diplomatic measures.
The book contains quotes from senior Israeli military and security officials in which they warn against the policies of Netanyahu’s leadership, but some of them appear in the context of political wrestling, others in the context of revelations and coming clean with the people. The book states that Netanyahu – and this is true – also insults “moderates” and those who seek compromise on the Israeli side, depriving them of political legitimacy, which in turn strengthens extremists, normalizes political violence, and gives legitimacy to the supporters of the extreme racist Rabbi Meir Kahn whom he appointed to senior government posts – Minister of Finance, Minister of National Security, Minister of Heritage, etc.
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There is a point in the book where fiction trumps facts. It has a lot of conspiratorial spirit, which is related to the relationship with Iran and its nuclear program. The author links Netanyahu’s efforts to prolong the conflict with his behavior towards Iran. The book once again returns to the ideas of Yitzhak Rabin, who asserted that Israel had a “window of opportunity” to sign a peace agreement with its neighbors before the Middle East became nuclear. Since Netanyahu does not want peace, the author points out that he “carried out a deliberate policy aimed at provoking and intensifying the nuclear dimension of the conflict in the region”. The book accuses Netanyahu of pushing the United States of America to withdraw from the nuclear agreement with Iran signed in 2015 AD (the “5+1”) during the Trump administration, and preventing representatives of the Israeli security services from helping the Americans to work out another agreement with Iran, which allowed Iran to continue to develop its nuclear program and get closer than ever to possessing nuclear weapons, despite its frequent and loud opposition to Iran.
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Another approach taken by Netanyahu to perpetuate the conflict, according to the book, is the approach to managing the war in Gaza, but this seems unrealistic to me. The author argues that the way Israel fights in the Gaza Strip is motivated by a “lust for revenge”, which is indisputable, but what we differ from the author of this book is that he claims that Netanyahu does not want to resolve the fighting in Gaza and bring Hamas to its knees, because, simply put, he would do so if he could. He uses all the destructive weapons in the army’s arsenal, but according to the admission of senior Israeli military officials themselves, Hamas remains so firmly opposed to him after nearly ten months that it is impossible to eliminate it.
The argument the author makes at this point is that eliminating Hamas would destroy Netanyahu’s project. Since eliminating it means replacing it, and replacing it means handing over control of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority, how can Hamas continue to stand in the way of peace without it? Therefore, the author argues, the only solution is to allow the conflict and the Gaza war to continue forever. As I mentioned before, there are some realistic, intuitive points in the book, but there are also some imaginative points imposed by the historian’s ideological tendencies.