Why Did Hamas Attack Israel on October 7?

An Examination of the Historical and Political Roots of the October 7 Attack Through the Perspective of Professor John Mearsheimer

Introduction: A Question That Receives Too Little Attention

In discussions of the October 7, 2023 attack, much of the attention in Israeli and Western media and political circles has focused on three questions: What exactly happened? Why was Israel caught off guard despite its intelligence and security apparatus? And what consequences would the events have for Israel, the Palestinians, and the wider region? However, according to Professor John Mearsheimer, one of the most important questions has received far less attention: What historical forces developed over time and ultimately led to Hamas's attack on October 7?

In his presentation titled Why Hamas Really Attacked Israel on Oct. 7, Mearsheimer argues that the underlying causes of this event cannot be properly understood without examining the history of Israel's establishment, the dispossession of Palestinians, and the conditions of life in the Gaza Strip. In his view, the dominant Israeli narrative, echoed by its Western supporters, largely explains the October 7 attack by comparing Hamas to the Nazis and linking the event to the Holocaust. This approach, he argues, fails to address the historical and political circumstances underlying the conflict.

The significance of Mearsheimer's argument lies in his decision to begin the analysis not on the day of the attack, but by looking back into history, to a time when the Zionist movement sought to establish a Jewish state in a land whose population was predominantly Palestinian. He maintains that unless this history and the power relations that emerged from it are examined, any explanation of the roots of the October 7 attack will remain incomplete.

1. The Establishment of Israel and the Erasure of Palestinian Demographic Reality

One of the central themes of Mearsheimer's analysis is his criticism of the historical narrative that Palestine was "a land without a people for a people without a land." This phrase, he argues, was used for years to explain Zionist immigration to Palestine and the establishment of Israel.

Mearsheimer cites demographic figures to challenge this narrative. According to his account, around 1900, approximately 96 percent of Palestine's population was Arab and Palestinian. By 1947, one year before Israel's establishment, Palestinians still accounted for approximately 70 percent of the population, while Jews represented roughly 30 percent. He also emphasizes that when Israel was established in 1948, Jewish and Zionist ownership of the land in the region amounted to only about 6.6 percent, according to the figures he presents.

These figures play a fundamental role in Mearsheimer's argument. From his perspective, the issue was not simply the migration of one group of people to another land. It was the creation of a new state in a territory with a substantial indigenous population that owned the vast majority of the land. Consequently, realizing the project of establishing a Jewish state required confronting a people who not only lived in that territory but also regarded it as their home and homeland.

In this part of his analysis, Mearsheimer emphasizes the work of the New Historians in Israel and other scholars who, from the 1990s onward, used access to historical documents to present alternative accounts of how Israel was established. According to him, this research challenged the simplified narrative in which the Zionists sought peaceful coexistence while the Palestinians alone stood in the way of achieving it.

For Mearsheimer, understanding this history also requires recognizing another fundamental reality: Palestinians were never going to willingly surrender their land and homes, and their resistance cannot be understood separately from this historical context.

2. Zionist Leaders' Acknowledgment of the Roots of Palestinian Resistance

To strengthen his argument, Mearsheimer draws on statements by two prominent figures in the history of Zionism: Ze'ev Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion. These statements are significant because they demonstrate that even some of the principal leaders of Zionism understood that Palestinians would resist losing their homeland.

Jabotinsky, a prominent right-wing figure in the Zionist movement, argued in his famous 1923 essay, The Iron Wall, that any native population, regardless of its level of development, regards its land as its national home. For Mearsheimer, this view demonstrates Jabotinsky's clear understanding of a reality that simplified narratives sometimes overlook: Palestinians were not going to willingly abandon their homeland.

Jabotinsky believed that Palestinian resistance could be crushed through military force and the establishment of an "iron wall," compelling Palestinians to accept the new political reality. Under this approach, Palestinian resistance was not a temporary misunderstanding but a predictable consequence of two competing political aspirations over the same territory.

Mearsheimer also cites two statements attributed to David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel and its first prime minister. Ben-Gurion asked why the Arabs should make peace with Israel, adding that if he were an Arab leader, he would never reach an agreement with Israel. In another statement, he described the Palestinian perspective on the conflict: "They only see one thing. We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?"

For Mearsheimer, these remarks are particularly significant because they demonstrate that awareness of the roots of Palestinian resistance was not limited to later critics of Israel. Prominent Zionist leaders themselves understood that people who believed they had lost their homeland would have compelling reasons to oppose the new political order.

Mearsheimer therefore argues that Palestinian resistance cannot be explained solely in terms of hatred toward Jews or extremist ideological motivations. Within his analytical framework, dispossession, the denial of political rights, and the historical experience of displacement are essential elements of the context in which this resistance developed.

3. Displacement, Occupation, and Strategies for Controlling the Palestinians

Another part of Mearsheimer's analysis examines the methods that Zionist leaders and, later, the Israeli state employed to deal with the Palestinian population. He identifies three main strategies: using military force to crush resistance, carrying out ethnic cleansing, and concentrating Palestinians in isolated territories under strict control.

First, Mearsheimer returns to Jabotinsky's concept of the "Iron Wall," a strategy based on the assumption that overwhelming military pressure could force Palestinians to accept the imposed political order. However, Mearsheimer argues that such an approach cannot necessarily produce permanent submission because the underlying causes of resistance remain unresolved.

The second strategy is the displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Mearsheimer recalls that during the events of 1948, approximately 700,000 to 750,000 Palestinians were displaced. Many fled to the Gaza Strip, and subsequent generations of Gaza's population included descendants of those refugees.

In his analysis, this transformation had a profound consequence: the demographic composition of the territory that became Israel changed dramatically. Yet the Palestinian question did not disappear with this displacement. Following the 1967 war and Israel's capture of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the issue of the Palestinian population reemerged on a much larger scale.

Using the concept of "Greater Israel," Mearsheimer considers Israel as established after 1948 together with the West Bank and Gaza. He argues that within this area, the Palestinian and Israeli Jewish populations have become approximately equal in size. In his view, under these circumstances, controlling the Palestinian population has become one of the most difficult structural challenges facing the Zionist project.

The third strategy involves confining Palestinians to separate territories. Movement, communication, and political coordination between the inhabitants of these areas are restricted. Mearsheimer compares this arrangement to the system of isolated territories in apartheid-era South Africa and identifies Gaza as a prominent example of this model.

He also challenges the prevailing Western narrative surrounding the two-state solution. In Mearsheimer's view, contrary to the picture sometimes presented of peace negotiations, Israeli leaders have not consistently demonstrated a serious commitment to accepting an independent Palestinian state. Consequently, based on the historical analysis presented in his speech, he does not regard the two-state solution as an alternative that can simply be assumed to have been seriously pursued by Israel at all times.

The significance of this part of Mearsheimer's argument lies in the connection he draws between history, structures of power, and the persistence of resistance. When a population is displaced from its homeland, placed under occupation, or confined to restricted and disconnected territories, the resulting political conflict cannot be reduced solely to isolated events or the decisions of a single armed group.

4. Gaza: Blockade, Deprivation, and the Continuation of Violence

To explain the circumstances underlying the October 7 attack more directly, Mearsheimer focuses on the history of the Gaza Strip. Israel took control of Gaza during the 1967 war and established settlements in the territory. In 2005, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew Israeli settlers from Gaza. Two years later, in 2007, Hamas took control of the territory, and Israel imposed a blockade.

Mearsheimer rejects the conventional narrative that presents the 2005 withdrawal as a benevolent move intended to create the conditions for an independent Palestinian state. He cites statements by Dov Weisglass, Sharon's senior adviser, who, according to Mearsheimer, described the policy's objective as freezing the political process and maintaining the status quo.

Within this framework, the withdrawal of settlers did not mean an end to Israeli control over Gaza's political and economic future. Mearsheimer argues that after 2007, the blockade became a means of restricting the daily lives of Palestinians. He points to policies concerning the amount of food and the number of calories permitted into Gaza, arguing that the objective was to impose severe pressure on the population without allowing it to starve to death.

This part of Mearsheimer's presentation portrays Gaza not simply as a territory caught in a military conflict, but as a society subjected to extensive and prolonged restrictions. In his view, the blockade, limited access to resources, and the absence of a clear political future created conditions in which social frustration and anger could not be separated from the system governing people's lives.

Mearsheimer also refers to the assassination of Palestinian leaders by Israel, including Ahmed Yassin, one of Hamas's founders, who was killed in 2004. He considers these actions part of a broader pattern in which military pressure and the elimination of Palestinian leaders have been employed alongside the blockade.

Another central element of his analysis is Israel's military operations in Gaza, which Mearsheimer describes using the term "mowing the lawn." He uses this expression to refer to periodic attacks intended to weaken Palestinian resistance capabilities and maintain Israel's military superiority.

To illustrate his argument, Mearsheimer cites two major operations: Operation Cast Lead in 2008–2009 and Operation Protective Edge in 2014. According to the figures he presents in his speech, 1,391 Palestinians were killed in the first operation and 2,251 in the second. He compares these figures with the approximately 1,100 Israelis killed in the October 7 attack to illustrate the difference in the scale of casualties across these events.

Mearsheimer's purpose in making this comparison is not to diminish the deaths of Israelis on October 7. He explicitly states that he does not wish to trivialize the suffering of Israeli victims. Rather, he wants to emphasize that Palestinian casualties in previous Israeli military operations must not be overlooked either.

This point is central to the broader logic of his presentation: if the historical and political significance of the October 7 attack is to be assessed, the conditions that preceded it and the history of violence in Gaza must also be included in the analysis. Focusing exclusively on a single day without examining years of blockade and military operations provides an incomplete picture of the conflict.

5. October 7 Within the Context of Palestinian Resistance

In the final section of his presentation, Mearsheimer states his central argument explicitly: understanding the October 7 attack requires examining it within the historical context of Palestinian dispossession and the conditions imposed on Gaza, rather than explaining it from the outset solely by comparing Hamas to the Nazis.

In this regard, he refers to Norman Finkelstein's analysis, which compares the October 7 attack to a prison breakout or a slave revolt. Mearsheimer places this comparison within the context of the conditions under which the people of Gaza were living: a blockade, severe restrictions on freedom of movement, economic pressure, and the absence of a clear prospect for political change.

From Mearsheimer's perspective, the first objective of Hamas, within this analysis, was to break out of its confinement and attempt to escape the existing conditions. Another objective was to reclaim land that Palestinians believe was taken from them. Here, he returns to Ben-Gurion's statements, arguing that if Zionist leaders themselves understood that Palestinians viewed their homeland as having been taken from them, Palestinian resistance to this situation cannot be considered entirely inexplicable.

However, in Mearsheimer's account, explaining the historical causes of the attack does not mean ignoring what happened during it. In the concluding section of his presentation, he distinguishes between the right to armed resistance against occupation and the killing of civilians. He makes clear that his legal defense of resistance is not an endorsement of the killing of civilians.

Mearsheimer also argues that, under international law, people living under occupation have a right to engage in armed resistance. He applies this argument to the situation in Gaza, distinguishing between the principle of resisting occupation and the manner in which a military operation is conducted. This distinction is essential to understanding his position: explaining the causes of an attack, assessing its legality, and examining the conduct of the parties involved are related but separate questions.

Ultimately, Mearsheimer urges his audience to study the history of Israel's establishment and examine the conditions that existed in Gaza before October 7. In his view, without this context, any analysis of the attack remains at the level of describing the event rather than answering the fundamental question of why it occurred.

Conclusion: Without Understanding the Past, We Cannot Understand the Present

The central message of Professor John Mearsheimer's presentation is that no historical event can be properly explained by separating it from the circumstances in which it developed. The October 7 attack is no exception.

By revisiting the history of Israel's establishment, Zionist leaders' statements about Palestinian resistance, the mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948, the occupation that followed the 1967 war, and the blockade of Gaza after 2007, Mearsheimer seeks to demonstrate that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has roots far deeper than a military confrontation on a single day.

Within his analysis, Palestinians are not a people whose resistance can be explained without reference to their history, the displacement they experienced, and their political deprivation. Mearsheimer argues that policies based on dispossession, military force, blockade, and restrictions on an entire population cannot be implemented without political and social consequences.

He also warns that constantly comparing Hamas to the Nazis, when such comparisons replace an examination of history and political circumstances, prevents a deeper understanding of the conflict's roots. In his view, understanding the October 7 attack requires asking what Palestinians have experienced historically, what conditions have governed their lives, and why the existing system has failed to bring the conflict to an end.

The significance of Mearsheimer's approach lies in his emphasis on historical analysis. Rather than limiting the discussion to condemning or justifying a particular event, he seeks to examine the power relations and circumstances that led to it. From this perspective, understanding the historical roots of violence does not mean denying the suffering of its victims. Rather, it is an effort to examine all dimensions of the conflict and prevent a complex historical issue from being reduced to a one-sided narrative.

The final message of this presentation is clear: anyone seeking to understand October 7 and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must examine the history of Israel's establishment, the displacement of Palestinians, and the conditions of life in Gaza. Without such an examination, it is impossible to fully understand the historical roots of Palestinian resistance or provide a comprehensive account of the factors that led to one of the most significant events in the modern history of this conflict.