Al Aqsa Flood, blessed be that obscure thing!

The uphill path is stronger than their arms.

And yet they tried to climb it.

The sea is vaster than they had ever sailed.

And yet they tried to cross it.

The star is closer than their homes. 

And yet they tried to rejoice.

The earth is narrower than their concepts.

And yet they tried to dream.

Blessed be that obscure thing: 

Blessed be that which has not yet come. 

They broke its code and it tore them to pieces. 

And therefore my chronicle begins with their steps. 

And I became part of their vision.

— Mahmoud Darwish, “The Palestinian Wedding” (*)

On the morning of October 7, I woke up hours after the event, and could not quite take in what I was seeing in the flood of footage the resistance’s media arms had released of the attack on Israeli military positions around Gaza. In that I was like everyone else: even Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah was caught off guard by an operation he had known nothing about.

No doubt Nasrallah needed to call his aides and think through what to do. As for me, holed up in my house on the outskirts of Cairo, stripped of any capacity for political or military action, what occupied me was understanding rather than acting: trying to grasp what it all meant.

Resistance: birth by accretion

Resistance, any resistance, begins as individual acts against an occupier. People on social media in Egypt still circulate the scene of Khaled Alwan carrying out the Wimpy operation, rendered in Mohamed Salah Abu Seif’s film “Hero from the South (2000),” set after the Israeli occupation of the Lebanese capital in 1982.

Khaled was not yet twenty when he did it. He opened fire on Israeli soldiers in a café, killing one and wounding others. The film preserves the popular account of the event: as the café’s patrons fled in terror at the sound of gunfire, the teenager walked home, strangely unhurried.

Alwan belonged to the Lebanese National Resistance Front (‘Jammoul’), formed by the Lebanese Communist Party together with the Communist Action Organization in Lebanon. This is how resistance develops: individual fighters come together in organizations that usually draw on nationalist, religious or internationalist ideologies. And when their small, limited operations force the enemy to evacuate land, the resistance becomes a small army, or a militia. Jammoul never became one. The rise of Hezbollah cut off that road, and Hezbollah too began with a handful of individual fighters. Lebanese researcher Bashar Al-Laqis tells of Fuad Shukr, then a teenager, who pledged with ten other young men from the Beirut suburb of Al-Ouzai to fight Israel to the death, before they threw themselves into the famous battle of Khaldeh during the siege of Beirut. Decades later, Shukr was chief of staff of a militia whose size and arsenal exceeded those of some regular armies.

Groups tied to the emerging party took part in the assassination of a number of leaders of the Communist Party and the Action Organization, at the urging of the Syrian regime and out of religious extremism. That was before the Lebanese communists drew close to the party itself on the ground of resistance, and before the party grew out of the excesses of its social radicalism.

Fatah took shape in the same pattern: a group of Palestinian students in Arab exile, then limited fedayeen raids into the occupied territories, beginning with the Eilaboun operation of January 1965.

A few years later, the Al-Asifa forces, along with the other Palestinian factions formed in those years, varied in ideology and in their sources of backing and funding, had become an army deployed across southern Lebanon. It held heavy weapons, among them Hungarian tanks that were used in the 1982 war.

Hamas on the same path

Hamas in the Gaza Strip began the same way. It started as an initiative of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in the early 1980s, after a number of the Strip’s young men gathered around him. An Israeli security crackdown soon ended it. It revived with the outbreak of the First Intifada at the end of 1987, backed by the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, which in 1985 had formed the “Palestine Apparatus,” later the political body of Hamas outside the Strip.

Hamas’s military wing took the name Al-Qassam Brigades early in the 1990s, but it kept working as a system of secret cells until the end of the Second Intifada. Only then did the outlines of an organized militia begin to appear in Gaza, in the run-up to Israel’s unilateral disengagement of 2005.

In his memoir “An Insecure Life: A Generation of Dreams and Failures,” Palestinian academic Shafiq Ghabra recounts joining Fatah and its military wing in Beirut.

The young academic had returned from the United States with a degree in political science and spent years at a forward position on the southern Lebanese front with Israel, as an officer in the Student Battalion. Dreams of liberation caressed him; doubts gnawed at him: about the prospects under a hesitant leadership, in hostile political conditions, against a military balance badly tilted toward the enemy. And all around him were legendary feats of heroism, in front of which a fighter was ashamed even to feel doubt.

Ghabra decided to end his military service a year before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut in 1982.

Individual resistance grows into secret cells, and the secret cells gather in liberated zones to form militias that accumulate medium and sometimes heavy weapons, military experience, formations and ranks. At that point it becomes hard to keep them off the field of battle for long; otherwise they fragment or split.

The inevitability of the Flood

Having built a large armed militia, Hamas in Gaza had no choice but war or fracture. After October 7, Hezbollah likewise had no choice but to join the event lest it wither away, as Fatah had. But the military capabilities and the regional and international political context left no choice, which is why the decision of October 7 required a great deal of dreaming and very little realism.

October 7 could not have led to liberation, just as Gaza could not have gone on being the stronghold of a resistance militia. It was at once the peak and the end of the militia model of resistance in Gaza and southern Lebanon, as the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982 had been. This is the model of small armies that cannot rest content with defensive positions and cannot, at the same time, fight wars of liberation on their own strength, and so their course ends in epic wars at enormous cost.

Was October 7, then, a strategic mistake? In December 2023, less than three months into the glorious battle of Gaza, I wrote that “October 7 has two faces. One is the military operation, which will long remain a subject of review and criticism, perhaps even indictment. The other is the face of the Palestinian fighter’s revolt, in which October 7 appears as a singular event, where human will played a role far beyond, and rising above, the givens of historical context.”

I have in mind here the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s concept of “the Event.” Not every occurrence is an event. An event is something new, a cut in the fabric of history, followed by a reality unlike the one before it. Faced with an event, I do not think the useful or rational course, as many Arab realists would have it today, is strategic review for the sake of condemnation or glorification. It is to recognize the break, accept it, and start from there.

An analyst needs little effort to see that we are living through a regional moment that began on October 7. In some way, October 7 was the moment a new era revealed itself on the international level, one whose roots we might trace a little further back, to the invasion of Iraq, the global financial crisis, or the rise of Trumpism and the new right.

It will do no good here to condemn Yahya Sinwar or Hassan Nasrallah, or to review what happened on October 7. What’s done is done. We face a new world, born on October 7, and we have to deal with it.

In this new world, the militia model of resistance has fallen. That does not mean resistance itself will end. Israel dreams of that, through displacement and buffer zones, but every Israeli policy to crush resistance dialectically generates effects that provoke new forces and new models of resistance. Look at Israel’s conduct in Syria and Lebanon, and ask what it can lead to other than provoking resistance in both countries.

Perhaps history will repeat itself: individual initiatives, then secret cells, then Israeli withdrawals, then militias or small armies filling the vacuum of the withdrawal and contending with Israel until a new moment of confrontation. Or perhaps we will see a new regional reality, with the violent convulsions now shaking the region’s regimes as a whole pushing Arabs, Israel and the neighbors of the region into more radical confrontations.

But on October 7, I decided to return to Mahmoud Darwish’s words in “The Palestinian Wedding,” and to reckon the beginning of the present moment from the first steps of the fighters that day.

(*) This translation appears in “The Palestinian Wedding: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Resistance Poetry,” collected and translated by Abdelwahab M. Elmessiri, originally published in 1982.