The New Yorker:

How deceit, delusion, and the inexorable pull of the past have transformed an idea once seen as a possible means to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a dangerous gimmick.

By Hussein Agha and Robert Malley

The war that has engulfed Israel, the Gaza Strip, and well beyond since October 7, 2023, has confronted the world with much on which it had never set eyes before. In scope and brutality, Hamas’s assault on Israelis exceeded any prior Palestinian act. Israel’s military attacks and forced starvation in Gaza are an onslaught governed by unusual rules, in which the death of Palestinian fighters seems like collateral damage, while the widespread, indiscriminate slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians, many of them women and children, appears the main event. Killing is the purpose. Death is everywhere, its victims uncertain when or where it will strike next. Horror also has come at the hands of the West’s collusion and Arab governments’ indifference, which is no different from complicity.

October 7th turned relations between Israelis and Palestinians upside down. How much of this matched Hamas’s planning and calculation, how much the chaotic, bottled-up frustrations and furies of fighters and civilians of all stripes, is debatable. Confined to the Strip, captives for years, often from birth, because of the Israeli blockade, Gazans could set eyes but not feet on lands from which parents and grandparents had been forced to flee. When Hamas breached the fence that separated Israel from Gaza, many followed the organization’s deadly script; others seized the opportunity to flood into what they considered stolen territory, to brutally lash out at those they deemed their captors, and to kidnap those they could hold as prisoners. In the short distance from Gaza to southern Israel, they were transformed in little time from conquered to conqueror, victim to perpetrator, detainee to abductor.

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