The October 7 Lesson

Translated by Al-Ahed News, Al-Akhbar Newspaper

Mahmoud Darwish once joked about the speeches of the late Yasser Arafat, saying: “It’s a good thing ‘Israel’ doesn’t believe him — otherwise they would have bombed us every day and left none of us alive!”

The story here touches on the nature of the “Israeli” mindset — one built on immense superiority toward Arabs and Muslims in general, and Palestinians in particular. It is a complex mentality: on one hand, it views these people as unworthy of life itself; on the other, it believes they are incapable of fighting back.

In every war “Israel” has fought since its establishment, its goal has been to remind Arabs and Muslims that they are inferior — that they have no right even to dream of Palestine. Its brutality has not changed from one battle to the next, except in its intensity, which in truth has aimed not merely to erase the idea of a Palestinian state or an Arab right, but to eliminate existence itself.

But over the past quarter century, “Israel” has been confronted with different realities. It discovered there was no “solution” to the Lebanon problem. It thought that withdrawing would, over time, weaken the very idea of resistance. Yet, as “Israeli” experts argued endlessly about the meaning of their defeat, they failed to consider — perhaps unintentionally — the impact that this achievement would have on the Palestinians. Within less than a year, the people of Palestine acted as though the proof had been laid before them: resistance was the only realistic path to reclaim their rights.

Even Yasser Arafat himself — who believed he had outsmarted “Israel” through the Oslo Accords — eventually realized that the enemy had no intention of granting him anything, nor was anyone interested in securing his fragile rule. He saw with his own eyes “Israel’s” project to take full control of all Palestine. So he decided to unleash the fighters of Fatah and to reestablish ties with the resistance forces in Lebanon and Palestine.

He declared, to those who cared to listen, that Hezbollah’s victory in Lebanon had ignited the Second Intifada. In doing so, Arafat told his people and the world that it was time to return to armed resistance — even though he knew that “Israel” had placed every armed faction within the Palestinian Authority under suspicion, killing and arresting hundreds, until it killed Arafat himself.

But fate — the Palestinian fate — took center stage, and the enemy could not resist it. In Gaza, “Israel” repeated what it had done in Lebanon five years earlier, withdrawing in a way it thought would end resistance.

What actually happened was that the resistance continued its struggle to reclaim all rights, while the enemy turned against itself, mourning the very idea of “peace”. It pressed on with its expansionist project and the eradication of all Palestinian presence, while also seeking revenge against those who had humiliated it on the northern front. This culminated in the 2006 July War — a war that not only thwarted but also crippled a much larger American project for the entire region.

“Israel” then reverted to its original logic, adopting a daily strategy of oppression against all Palestinians everywhere. It practiced every form of apartheid against the Palestinians of 1948, launched massive settlement projects in the West Bank, and carried out relentless military operations against Gaza. At the same time, it waged its most extensive security campaign ever against its enemies — those building what became known as the Axis of Resistance — assassinating figures in Lebanon, Syria, Iran and elsewhere, and preparing intensively for a possible northern front war.

However, while “Israel” remained highly alert toward Hezbollah, it reverted to its arrogant view of the Palestinians inside. It interpreted Mahmoud Abbas’s submission as a sign of popular exhaustion, and saw the struggle to lift the blockade on Gaza as merely a humanitarian demand, not a strategic challenge — and so it sought to exploit and manipulate people’s suffering.

What “Israel” never imagined was that in Gaza there were those who thought differently. The enemy that failed to learn from the lessons of 2000 also failed to learn from 2006. It persisted in denial and arrogance, refusing to seriously assess what Gaza’s resistance had learned from Hezbollah’s experience in Lebanon — nor did it study the lessons of resistance against the US occupation in Iraq, dismissing it as merely an American problem.

Then came Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, which struck a devastating blow to every assumption that had shaped “Israel’s” thinking about Palestinian resistance.

When the leadership of the Qassam Brigades decided to launch the operation, it was not a spur-of-the-moment surprise. Alongside the many security and military indicators that the enemy later revealed, Hamas’s political rhetoric and mobilization strategy — developed since 2014 and refined after 2017 — carried clear signals that it had chosen a path completely at odds with the prevailing one. Even the nature of the operation itself was not beyond the imagination of professional analysts.

But the problem — for the enemy first, and for the dull Arab mind second — lies in the chronic inability to believe that the weaker side can devise ways to hurt the enemy at its points of strength, not just its weaknesses.

What Hamas did that glorious day was not a mere security operation targeting a site, a person, or a specific military post. It was an assault on the entire defense system that Israel had built around Gaza and fortified for 18 years. Within a few hours, Hamas managed to break through those very lines, to pull off one of the greatest deceptions against “Israeli” intelligence and to blind all its assessment apparatuses.

Beyond that, there was the tactical brilliance — the exceptional fire coordination by Hamas fighters — an extraordinary feat given their limited resources, especially amid heightened political tensions on all other fronts.

Today, there are those who want us to evaluate the operation in light of the massacres that followed, as if to say: “Anyone who thinks this way must accept this price.” Yet those same people never pause to consider what actually happened to “Israel” that day — nor do they examine the unprecedented collapse of the very concept of security on which “Israel’s” entire identity of deterrence is built.

The people who think this way are the same ones whose consciousness has been seared since the 1982 invasion, when they accepted “Israel” as an inevitable fate that could not be resisted. They submitted, making one concession after another — and today, instead of blaming themselves for standing on the wrong side of history, they blame the resistance for daring to do what had to be done to reclaim what is rightfully theirs.

So today, our praise for the heroes of Gaza is not mere admiration — it is a reminder to ourselves, and to the enemy, that life, with all its trials, offers very few great choices. And anyone who believes that the Battle of Gaza will end in a surrender sparing “Israel” from the punishment it deserves is once again misreading history.

But time alone will teach the lessons — for those willing to learn.