Two years after Oct 7, all Palestinians have gained is more tragedy - opinion

It was not their finest hour, but it was their boldest day.

More than a century after launching their struggle, the Palestinian people waged their war’s most brazen attack. The political effort that began in 1919, when the First Arab Palestine Congress rejected the Jewish people’s right to any part of its homeland; and the violence unleashed in 1920, with anti-Jewish riots in Jerusalem, reached their unpredicted climax.

Militarily, however, that violence was mostly performed by squads of fewer than 10 people. The Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, by contrast, unleashed thousands of gunmen arriving by land, air, and sea, who attacked military installations as well as entire communities, triggering a protracted, regional war.

Now, as this war winds down, the question is whether the Palestinians gained anything from the war their leaders spawned. And the answer is they achieved nothing, other than to extend their tragedy and multiply their despair.

Militarily, the war ended in Palestinian defeat. Unlike its engineers’ assumptions, Israel recovered from its initial surprise, pursued its invaders, and conquered their turf. Moreover, the Palestinian strategists’ hope that their Lebanese and Iranian allies would complete Israel’s defeat ended with both of those allies floored.

Politically, too, the attack was a failure. The war hinged the Palestinian cause to the Islamist zeal that guided the October 7 massacre’s masterminds. Consequently, the Palestinians emerged with a new tragedy of displacement and more fatalities than they had ever sustained.

Yes, the war made many governments recognize Palestinian statehood. Yet that changed not one Palestinian’s life, and also did not create a Palestinian state. What the war did change was most Israelis’ mindset.

Three generations of Israelis, lynch-pinned by the majority that voted repeatedly for the two-state solution by electing Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert – no longer believe the Palestinians want peace. They chose jihadism, and they got jihad.

The result of this choice – leveled cities, thousands of deaths, and massive displacement – has not produced leaders with the guts to shout in Hamas’s face “not in my name.” Maybe such leaders do exist, but until they emerge, speak up, and confront the zealots who hijacked their people, they won’t matter. What matters is that most Israelis don’t believe such Palestinian leaders exist.

The war was a turning point in Palestinian warring, but in terms of Palestinian hope, it added up to a huge leap backward.

The tragedy of the Palestinian people has been that their leaders, besides choosing violence and cultivating hatred, nurtured a culture of denial.

The war changed none of this. The number of Jews in Israel has grown by 0.5 million during this war. The Palestinian response to this consolidation has been to intensify the lying, shouting they are the victims of colonialism, apartheid, and genocide, instead of questioning their own choices’ assumptions, realism, and morality.

The war also retained the Palestinian pattern of making dreadful diplomatic choices.

It started with Nazi Germany. Logic suggested that the Palestinians would realize Hitler was actually accelerating Jewish immigration to Palestine, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that the Nazis hated the Jews. So blinding was the Palestinian leaders’ hatred that they didn’t reverse course even when the German tiger they rode raced to colossal defeat.

The syndrome then repeated itself during the Cold War, when a new generation of Palestinian leaders sided with the Soviet Union. Then, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, they took Iraq’s side even when it faced the West, the East, and the entire Arab world.

Now the pattern repeated itself, as the Palestinians who waged this war cultivated a strategic alliance with the world’s biggest leper, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

To see the light, the Palestinians will have to do what the early Zionists did, when they told the Jews that their abuse is the fault of their own leaders; the leaders who for centuries told the Jews that their defeats and misery were God’s will, and that salvation will come through divine miracle and religious faith.

The defiance of these axioms meant turning where most Palestinians refuse to turn, even after their most disastrous war: introspection. The willingness to ask not where everyone else wronged us, but where we were wrong: tactically, strategically, and morally.

A day will come when remorse, reason, and accommodation will prevail, but the chances that it will come during this two-state advocate’s lifetime have never been lower. Yes, the Palestinians, too, will someday challenge the leaders who led them where they have arrived – but until that day, denial will blossom, hatred will rage, despair will fester, and violence will rule the day.