What Palestinians Really Think about the 1948 October 7 Atrocity in the West Bank, as Observed by the The New York Times
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Any kind of shared future is most likely a longer way off than it was a month ago. Palestinians were aware of that. Did Hamas have peace on the day of their attacks? Maybe for Israelis it was, but for Palestinians it wasn’t.
The Palestinians have a right to return to villages that they were removed from in the 1948 war, which is part of the reason that so many are still refugees. In Gaza, refugees make up two-thirds of the population. This status affects more than where people live and what they go to school for.
The state of play was disrupted by the October 7 attacks. The occupation’s unsustainable nature was laid bare for all to see, as was the impossibility of governing two peoples but privileging one of them over the other.
Israeli officials point out that Hamas is also active in the West Bank and say that many of those clashes resulted from the military’s efforts to root out militants. Three Israelis have been killed by Palestinians.
Many Gazans have parents and grandparents who grew up only a few miles from where they live now, in areas they are now, of course, forbidden to enter. They still invoke rich memories from their childhood or adolescence, when they walked through citrus groves in Yaffa or olive fields in Qumya — the latter of which, like many villages whose people were expelled into Gaza during the 1948 war, was later transformed into a kibbutz.
The settlement council in the northern West Bank is giving hundreds of assault rifles to civilian groups, as part of an effort by the National Security Minister to arm them after the October 7 attacks. The ministry has bought over 10,000 rifles for such teams. It’s part of the atmosphere of escalating violence that has killed more than 130 Palestinians living in the West Bank since Oct. 7.
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Normal life has been disrupted in Ramallah for the past month due to conflicts in the West Bank.
The debate over the bounds of acceptable speech in Israel has opened since the proliferation of such language by Israelis. Itamar Ben-Gvir, a right-wing settler who went from fringe figure to minister of national security in Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet, has a long history of making incendiary remarks about Palestinians. He said in a recent TV interview that anyone who supports Hamas should be “eliminated.”
Amichay Eliyahu, the right-wing minister, raised the subject of a nuclear strike on Gaza last week, when he told a radio station there were no noncombatants in Gaza. Mr. Netanyahu suspended Mr. Eliyehu for making comments that were not in line with reality.
The prime minister says the Israeli military is trying to avoid harm to civilians. Even though the death toll has increased to over 11,000, those claims are being met with skepticism in the United States, which has pressed Israel to allow daily four-hour humanitarian pauses in the combat.
“You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible — we do remember,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, referring to the ancient enemy of the Israelites, in scripture interpreted by scholars as a call to exterminate their “men and women, children and infants.”
“These are not just one-off statements, made in the heat of the moment,” said Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer and author of “The Wall and the Gate: Israel, Palestine and the Legal Battle for Human Rights.”
The director of Ofek in Jerusalem, Yehuda Shaul, has collected more than 250 statements since October 7 looking for statements that could cause harm to others. His list includes Eyal Golan, an Israeli pop singer; Sara Netanyahu, the wife of Mr. Netanyahu; and Yinon Magal, a host on Israel’s right-wing Channel 14.
“I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals,” Ms. Netanyahu said during a radio interview on Oct. 10, referring to Hamas.
“It’s time for Nakba 2,” Mr. Magal wrote on X on Oct. 7, a reference to the mass displacement and flight of Palestinians before and after Israel’s creation in 1948, which Palestinians refer to as the “nakba,” or “catastrophe.”
According to several academics and officials in the West Bank, Mr. Eliyahu’s comments about dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza indicate Israel’s desire to clear the enclave of all Palestinians.
Professor Eran Halperin argued that the use of inflammatory language by Israeli leaders is unsurprising and understandable as a direct result of the trauma caused by the Hamas attacks on Israelis.
Israel’s survival hangs in the balance, for the first time since 1973, according to him. There is a potential conflict between Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as a possible uprising in the West Bank.
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Professor Halperin said people look for very clear answers in this situation. You can’t have the mental luxury of complexity. You want a world of good guys and bad guys.
Prof Halperin said that by casting the Hamas threat in such a way, the government can ask people to make sacrifice for the war effort: the compulsory mobilization of 360,000 reserve soldiers and the relocation of 126,000 people from border areas.
In the long run, Mr. Sfard said, such language dooms the chance of ending the conflict with the Palestinians, erodes Israel’s democracy and breeds a younger generation that is “easily using the language in their discussion with their friends.”
He said that a lot of education is needed when turning the wheel back. There is an old Jewish proverb, which says that a hundred wise men will have a hard time taking out a stone that one stupid person dropped into the well.
“We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly,” said Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, two days after the attacks, as he described how the Israeli military planned to eradicate Hamas in Gaza.
Inflammatory language has also been used by journalists, retired generals, celebrities, and social media influencers, according to experts who track the statements. The Hebrew posts on X had been mentioning calls for Gaza to beflattened,erased or destroyed thousands of times. The phrases were only mentioned 16 times in the year before war.
The cumulative effect, experts say, has been to normalize public discussion of ideas that would have been considered off limits before Oct. 7: talk of “erasing” the people of Gaza, ethnic cleansing, and the nuclear annihilation of the territory.
Incendiary statements are not limited to Israel, of course. On 24 October 2007, a senior leader of Hamas made a statement stating that the group would wipe Israel out, and appeared to praise the actions of the group against Israeli civilians. “We are not ashamed to say it with full force,” he said. We will teach Israel a lesson again and again.