Overdue nuance on October 7th and what's happened since (pt 1)
We must learn to condemn and empathize at the same time.
When my welcome post described exasperation with U.S. political discourse, our national reaction to October 7th was front of mind. Across my feeds, the thorniest conflict in 100 years was crammed into dueling narratives of good vs. evil: pure antisemitism, or textbook genocide and settler colonialism.1
Nine months of catastrophic violence funded by your tax dollars later, Hamas has reportedly agreed to a U.S.-backed ceasefire plan that will hopefully pause the bloodshed. But the broader conflict remains no closer to resolution and has major implications for U.S. foreign policy, domestic politics, free speech, and racial equality. So before the election fully distracts us, I want to share five thoughts on the tragedy that might have produced healthier discussions and better outcomes.
For brevity, I’ll break these five thoughts into two posts. Part one will focus on the 7th itself, while part two will focus on all that’s happened since. The thrust of part one is that when cycles of violence tragically escalate, we need the clarity and charity to hold two ideas at the same time:
1. October 7th was abhorrent and inexcusable, and it's important that this be the first and loudest thing we say after the mass murder of innocents—especially given the history of mass murder against Jews in particular.
There is no persecution so severe that it justifies the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians. “Ackshually, the reports of rape may have been exaggerated” is not a good response to the montage of carnage Hamas fighters were caught on tape enjoying. This would be true even if the attacks were strategically beneficial to Palestinians, but they were not, so they should have been even easier to condemn.2
Contrary to what right-wing pundits suggested, I saw very few people actually celebrate or justify the attacks. But I did see several bypass condemnation and, while blood was still fresh on the ground, dive straight into their broader views on why victims were on the wrong side of history. That was insensitive at best, and a losing strategy for winning hearts and minds to the Palestinian cause.
In just the past century, Jews have been systematically slaughtered on at least three continents. Antisemitism remains a big enough problem that violence against Jews is a rational thing to fear in the aftermath of violence against Jews. Progressives priding themselves on empathy for persecuted minorities should be more sensitive to that. To start, they should probably not respond to the murder of 1,000+ Jews by chanting phrases commonly mistaken as a call to kill even more.3
Millions of Americans had tuned out this issue for years, then suddenly saw shocking images of cruelty they could not fathom. Millions more have family in Israel, or feel a personal connection to it that made the attacks especially traumatic. Sometimes decency requires you to spare a sentence affirming the obvious—that killing kids at a concert is about as bad as it gets—even when that’s not all that needs to be said.
Also. That’s not all that needed to be said.
2. The attacks were also a foreseeable and widely predicted response to Israel's intensifying brutalization of Palestinians in recent years, which should have informed Israel’s response.
It is impossible to understand these attacks outside their political context, as if indiscriminate violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began or suddenly resumed in October. It is tellingly selective to only remark on that violence in one direction. And it is morally unserious to ignore the attackers’ grievances, their utter desperation, and the massive imbalance in education and power between the two sides.
Palestinians did not start this war in October. In fact, they did not start this war at all, and were not solely to blame for its escalation. For complicated, understandable, but ultimately unjustified reasons, uninvited guests showed up at their doorsteps, kicked them out of their homes, and gradually herded them and their descendants into a squalid open-air prison with intolerable conditions. They did this with outside help, through lies and brute force, and in 2023 it got worse.4 The October 7th attacks were unspeakably evil—and also, an utterly foreseeable response to this reality.
On October 6th, Gaza was one of the poorest and most densely populated places on Earth. Its residents had no political representation, economic prospects, or control over their borders, water, or energy sources. They were dominated by a hostile foreign military that destroyed their schools and infrastructure at whim—yet also prevented them from leaving, killed them for protesting, and raided their offices if they organized. With every generation their population multiplied, but their land shrunk, until they were two million sardines packed in 140 square miles. A near consensus among reputed, independent human rights groups (including Israeli groups) described their conditions as apartheid. The average resident was 18 years old with a 9th-grade education, and several family members dead by Israel’s hand.
Did you grow up like that?
If not, how can you demonize these people for cheering anyone who claims to fight on their side, when no actual government will?
How discerning can we expect the worst of their moral compasses to be about just which of their oppressors they shoot back at?
How hypocritical is our President to arm their oppressors, shield them from any consequence in the international community, turn a blind eye to hundreds of civilian killings per year, and then mock surprise when that tinder box explodes?
And whatever your answers to these questions, can you truly not understand why we could not end the conversation with condemnation of Hamas?
This is the cognitive empathy I mentioned in my welcome post: the skill of understanding and accounting for other tribes' views and behaviors, without justifying or agreeing with those views and behaviors. The skill is crucial to predicting outcomes and securing peace, in Gaza and a dozen contexts beyond, from Afghanistan to Ukraine to Taiwan. Sadly, such empathy is rarely rewarded in our polarized discourse, and politicians face unique pressures to be performatively bad at it in ways that set our foreign policy up for failure.
Too many people confuse empathy with exoneration, causation with culpability, and focus on U.S. policy choices with denial of others’ agency. Cognitive empathy does not deny Palestinians' agency; nor deny Hamas accountability for its atrocities; nor deny Israel the right to defend itself, which I'll address in part two. It merely acknowledges connections between Israel's policies and the threats it faces, which ought to inform its policy choices. It acknowledges the humanity of two million suffering people, at a time when too many bellowed for their collective punishment.
My next post will explain why that punishment has been so predictably futile and catastrophic, and what to prioritize when both sides do bad things.
Were these narratives confined to the bots and blowhards of social media, I might have just closed the apps and lowered my blood pressure. Alas, I was working on the Hill at the time, for a centrist Democrat up for reelection in a purple state. Congress’ overwhelming cowardice, complicity, and bad faith on this issue finalized my decision to find work elsewhere.
In the short term, October 7th predictably resulted in the decimation of Gaza, the death of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, and the severe suffering of two million more. In the long term, they made an already distant Palestinian state even further from foreseeable, prolonging Palestinian suffering.
I am not among those who pretend the phrase “from the river to the sea” is innately antisemitic or a call for genocide (and I plan to write more on that soon). But many Jews do genuinely hear it that way, in part due to valid, historically rooted fears of genocide we should not trivialize. A conversation on the phrase is needed, but October was not the time.
Because I spent last year on the Hill, I was treated to almost daily mail campaigns providing detailed accounts of Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians. In 2023 alone, Israel announced plans for thousands of new settlement units in the West Bank, all illegal under international law, continuing its de facto annexation of the territory. It tolerated rampant settler violence there without punishment or investigation. It froze Palestinian construction in Area C, demolished hundreds of Palestinian homes and schools, and evicted Palestinian residents in towns like Masafer Yatta. It banned the display of Palestinian flags in East Jerusalem. Before October 7th, Israeli forces had already killed 227 Palestinians in 2023, most of them civilians and many of them children. They conducted massive raids in Jenin, harassing Palestinians with no legal rights.
Far from punishing Israel for this conduct, if anything the international community rewarded them for it. The Biden administration embraced Trump’s Abraham Accords, cutting the Palestinians out of Arab-Israeli normalization; accepted Trump’s move of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognition of the annexation of the Golan Heights; and let Israel into the Visa Waiver Program. Israel was about to normalize ties with Saudi Arabia before the attacks—something the attacks likely intended to prevent by goading Israel into an excessive response that outraged the Arab world.