Three years on October 7: A whirlpool, not a flood

Three years after Al-Aqsa Flood operation, it can be said to have proved more whirlpool than flood. It has drawn the whole region into endless cycles of military conflict and political enmity, each feeding the next.

Here I am trying to arrive at a critical position on October 7, one I see as lying at the very heart of commitment to the Palestinian cause. It is neither a neutrality toward that cause nor a disavowal of it, nor, of course, a denial of it. Modern history tells us that settler-colonial projects were dismantled only against a backdrop of protracted struggles that combined armed resistance with nonviolent forms, and that this usually came at an exceedingly high and painful human cost.

Backing the resistance, and scrutinizing it

So a critical stance is not a quarrel over principle, and it does not deny the reality of Palestinians living under occupation for some 60 years. Nor does it deny them any action on the grounds that it will worsen their situation, which in practice would mean asking them to accept a reality that deteriorates slowly so that it does not deteriorate quickly.

In my view, the critique does not turn on the principle of resistance, or even on its strategy, for a people living under settler occupation and apartheid, to which ethnic cleansing and genocide have since been added. It turns on the decision itself, the context in which it was taken and carried out, and its consequences. Framing the critique this way is not a blanket apologia for armed resistance movements in Gaza or beyond. That would run directly against the intellectual effort and moral commitment that a critical position demands.

What struck me most about October 7, within a few weeks of its launch, was the absence of any political horizon among those who decided to carry it out. The one exception was derailing the Abraham Accords, above all by stopping Saudi Arabia from joining them, along with the Arab and Islamic regional normalization of the occupation that this would have brought, and its perpetuation at minimal cost to Israel.

Beyond that, events have shown the operation’s bets to be misplaced: from the feasibilty of defeating Israel militarily, with the so-called Axis of Resistance entering alongside Hamas with its full weight from the start, to the assumption that the United States would not align itself wholly with Israel in a prolonged military campaign whose declared aim is ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the northern West Bank, and then in southern Lebanon and southern Syria too.

Add to this, of course, a gross misjudgment of Israelis’ staying power in a long, multi-front conflict. Quite as serious was the neglect of the question of Gaza’s capacity to endure humanly, given a geographic, demographic and political position that denied it any real strategic depth, whether to sustain armed resistance effectively or to feed its people. Its residents were driven from their homes again and again, and then subjected to a famine, engineered by Israel, that lasted months.

The price of the gamble

Seen in this light, Al-Aqsa Flood was a suicide operation in Israel in which Hamas blew itself up, and Gaza’s population with it. Its aim was to blow apart the region’s established order, not the Abraham Accords alone, and at that it succeeded brilliantly, at everyone’s expense. The first to pay was the Axis itself, which took painful and perhaps fatal blows in Lebanon, Syria and, of course, Gaza.

The Flood even carried the war to Iran itself, though the strategy of the Tehran regime had been built around avoiding direct confrontation. And all of it came at the Palestinians’ expense, of course. In Gaza, more than 10% of the population have been killed or wounded, and Palestinians have lost 60% of the territory, which is now under Israeli occupation. Meanwhile settlement expansion and forced displacement in the West Bank have accelerated to levels unseen in the six decades of occupation.

The cost did not stop there. It reached the so-called Arab “moderates.” Since the US-Israeli war on Iran began in February 2026, the security and economic environment in the Gulf has deteriorated as at no other point in contemporary history. That war exposed the limits of the Gulf states’ earlier security arrangements with Washington, and it puts real question marks over the economic and political future of this part of the world.

The regional order was blown apart for Egypt and Jordan as well, the two states with the most durable peace treaties with Israel. Their future relations with it now hang on whatever arrangements for ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank may come. If they do, they can only come at the expense of those countries’ national security, and perhaps of the very existence of a political entity like Jordan.

Israel’s fall

As for Israel, its internal crisis, already acute before October 7, has deepened. Ideological and ethnic fault lines have fused with its struggle as a state built on active settler colonialism, one that seeks to eliminate the native population, or reduce its presence as far as possible, as a condition of survival. This has shown in the fight over drafting the Haredi community, and in attitudes toward the Arab parties, amid deep division among Jewish voters over Netanyahu’s political future as general elections approach.

The permanent conflict Israel has entered has also eroded its global standing. Its pre-Flood image, which promised to normalize occupation and settlement within the region and beyond, has been thoroughly destroyed. That showed in the global consensus on the principle of a Palestinian state at the two-state conference led jointly by France and Saudi Arabia, on the heels of a run of European recognition of Palestine that Britain, Canada and Australia joined. Meanwhile Arab and Islamic normalization has stalled absent a solution to the Palestinian question. The exception is Kazakhstan, which joined the Abraham Accords in November 2025, a country of little weight beyond Central Asia.

Within the United States, the political consensus behind Israel has visibly begun to crack. The stance on the genocide has moved to the center of ideological polarization, with hints of a possible consensus against Israel if one considers where anti-Zionist positions are heading, on the left of the Democratic Party and on the right of the Republican Party.

The Flood, and the Iran war that followed it, also blew apart America’s own security architecture in the region, on matters of acute sensitivity: freedom of navigation, global energy security and its military presence overseas. They have also deepened Europe’s crisis, given its over-reliance on imported energy, especially since Russia’s war in Ukraine began in 2022.

Among the worst habits of historical analysis is reading history backward, judging the past by what came after rather than by the context in which events occurred. In all likelihood there is no single governing logic behind what we call the movement of history. The plans and assessments of those who make decisions matter little, since they too are often mistaken, or lead to outcomes that were never in the minds of the people making events in the first place.

October 7 may be a case study in these limits. And yet, if its purpose was to blow apart the settled arrangements and relationships that some imagined could endure while the Palestinians’ life under permanent occupation was normalized, then that purpose was achieved, with unrivaled success.

As for what will replace those arrangements, not just in the region but, it seems, in a world order shifting under the weight of conflicts in the Gulf and Eastern Europe, and soon, perhaps, the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, the drama has yet to throw up its heroes.