October 7, 2023: Greenlight for Genocide
Israel’s October 7 narrative struggles under scrutiny — revealing ignored warnings, friendly fire, and a propaganda campaign that turned tragedy into license for genocide.
At dawn on October 7, 2023, a long-maintained illusion of safety was shattered. With it, the barrier that had long divided a nation from its history was breached with a vengeance.
That morning, an unprecedented—if inevitable—operation began.
Resistance fighters from the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades breached the fence that for decades had separated Gaza from the so-called disputed lands, overrunning outposts, military bases, and residential communities along the border.
The Nova music festival — a celebration of freedom within the militarized border zone — became the stage where both the gates and the myth of their impenetrability first collapsed.
Music still echoed chillingly across the fields of Re’im when the first rockets struck, replaced almost instantly by sirens and alarms.
By midmorning, it became apparent, Israel’s defenses had faltered.
Surveillance systems went dark, communications failed, and the border—one of the most fortified in the world—was wide open.
For so long, the ethno-religious nation state had built its sense of permanence on control: control of land, of narrative, and of the very idea of safety.
On that morning, the facade collapsed in full view of the entire world — a world that would soon wake up to an ongoing apartheid of which it had been willfully kept unaware.
By nightfall, a new normal had begun to take hold. In a day, a story built on invulnerability unravelled, exposing failures, contradictions, and choices that seemingly defy official narratives, let alone any logic.
From Haze to Hindsight
Time has a way of providing clarity.
What first appears as chaos often, in retrospect, reveals a pattern. In this regard, the events of October 7 are no different.
In the two years since Al-Aqsa Flood, the Israeli government has insisted the assault came without warning — a tragedy that no one could have foreseen.
However, this carefully packaged narrative was soon undermined with evidence.
That December, a New York Times investigation revealed that Israeli officials had obtained Hamas’ operational blueprint for the attack—known as the “Jericho Wall” document—more than a year before October 7.
The plan outlined, in striking detail, the tactics later carried out: rocket barrages to overwhelm air defenses, drones to disable surveillance towers, and coordinated incursions into nearby settlements.
Analysts flagged the document’s precision, but senior officials dismissed it as speculative — an exercise in imagination rather than intention.
It was circulated and ultimately filed away.
Then, six weeks before the attack, an Israeli intelligence officer warned that Hamas appeared to be conducting a full-scale rehearsal of the Jericho Wall plan.
Her assessment, like others before it, was ignored.
“Conceptual blindness,” as one internal review later described it, had already taken hold.
Egyptian intelligence officials have since said they repeatedly warned Israel of an impending operation.
Cairo delivered alerts as early as September 2023, including one that specifically cited the likelihood of a “significant operation” during the first week of October.
These warnings were dismissed or downplayed by Israeli leadership — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu among them — who later denied ever receiving them.
According to Haaretz, Israeli soldiers stationed in nearby outposts detected unusual movement and requested permission to investigate, only to be ordered to “stand down.”
The command, relayed over military radio, instructed them not to approach the fence despite clear signs of infiltration.
Additional testimony later reported by Israel’s Channel 7 described a similar experience: one soldier said he was explicitly told not to go near the border on the morning of October 7, even as reports of movement and gunfire began to surface.
Other signals pointing to danger went similarly unheeded, even, apparently, by military personnel at the Nova site right before the attacks.
Just hours before the breach, Israeli analysts recorded a sudden surge in SIM card activations along Gaza’s perimeter — an anomaly that, in the past, would have triggered immediate alerts.
This time, however, it was logged and summarily dismissed.
Meanwhile, intelligence priorities had shifted north. Three days prior, two-thirds of the forces normally stationed around Gaza were redeployed to the West Bank to guard settlers amid rising unrest.
The tensions began after settlers stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound during the Sukkot holiday, an annual tradition, despite the area being restricted under Jewish law, “due to the sacred nature of the site.”
As tensions flared in Jerusalem, the southern frontier — one of the most surveilled borders on earth — was left at its weakest.
When the attack began, the billion dollar surveillance network failed in ways that remain unexplained.
“We spend billions and billions on gathering intelligence on Hamas. Then, in a second, everything collapsed like dominoes.”
-Former Israeli National Security Counsel Official Yoel Guzansky
Cameras transmitting live feeds from the border went dark. Sensors that once detected the slightest movement registered nothing as fighters massed at the fence.
Later, officials confirmed that large portions of the footage from that morning had been deleted. No credible explanation has ever been offered for how or why this evidence disappeared.
Subsequent findings have further complicated the official story.
According to Channel 12, Hamas fighters were initially unaware of the Nova festival; their primary targets were nearby military outposts and settlements.
Only after breaching the border did some units encounter the festival by chance.
Later reports revealed that Israeli intelligence had obtained detailed plans to seize between 200 and 250 hostages — a figure alarmingly close to the 251 eventually taken.
The inclusion of such specific numbers suggests that abduction, not mass killing, may have been at the center of the operation’s strategic design.
Hamas has a long history of using captives as bargaining leverage — most notably in 2011, when it secured the release of more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
In the days after October 7, Hamas’ armed wing reiterated that it held dozens of Israelis to “negotiate the release of all Palestinian detainees,” many of whom are held without charge.
Independent footage and eyewitness accounts strongly suggest that Israel’s own response may have multiplied the civilian toll later used to justify unrestrained vengeance.
Helicopter fire swept across the fields as people fled the festival grounds, blurring the line between rescue and attack.
Meanwhile, the surrounding kibbutzim experienced similar pandemonium.
Among the dead, at least thirteen residents were reportedly killed by Israeli tank shelling — an act doctrinally consistent with the reactivation of the Hannibal Directive, Israel’s unwritten order to prevent hostage-taking at any cost, even if it means killing Israelis in the process.
Remains of a kibbutz near Re’im, destroyed by Israeli RPG fire during the chaos of October 7. Forensic analysts and eyewitnesses later noted that the extent and angle of the damage were consistent with heavy munitions fired from Israeli positions, not the light arms carried by Hamas fighters.
The Hannibal Directive
First conceived in 1986, the Hannibal Directive was implemented after repeated abductions of Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah in Lebanon.
It wasn’t a rescue protocol, but rather a conceptual “cyanide pill” — a standing order that capture would warrant murder.
In effect, it redefined loyalty: a soldier’s value ended the moment he became a liability.
In 2006, after Hezbollah seized two IDF soldiers on the northern border, Israeli artillery and airstrikes pummeled the area under Hannibal. Both men were later found dead, likely killed by Israeli fire.
The directive reached a catastrophic expression in 2014, when Hadar Goldin was captured in Rafah.
Israel unleashed what witnesses described as a “fire belt” — tank shells, airstrikes, and heavy artillery across a densely populated city.
More than 135 Palestinians were killed within hours. Goldin’s body was later recovered, confirming that the operation had resulted in his death.
Given the precedent, combined with the facts, it’s hard not to look at the events of October 7 through the lens of the Hannibal Directive.
As a matter of fact, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has confirmed what many had already concluded.
In a televised interview, Gallant acknowledged the use of the directive on October 7 — a tacit admission that Israeli forces were authorized to kill their own citizens rather than allow them to be taken captive.
Gallant’s remarks echo precedent.
In its official account, the military points to retroactive defense measures such as Hannibal, as well as the so-called ‘Sword of Damocles’ deployments during the breach, targeting “anything that moved around the Israel-Gaza border.”
Months later, the pattern would repeat when Israeli forces conducted “rescue” raids in Gaza. Several hostages, some waving white flags, were killed by Israeli gunfire in a grim echo of Hannibal’s premise.
Once again, the line between rescue and execution blurred until it disappeared.
This doctrine — forged in occupation and perfected through repetition — reflects a deeper pattern in Zionist statecraft: survival achieved not through protection, but through control, even if it means consuming one’s own.
An Historical Precedence of Sacrifice
The use of the Hannibal Directive on October 7 didn’t mark the first time Zionist leaders accepted the deaths of Jews as collateral for political reasons.
Across the last century, precedents reveal a consistent willingness to sacrifice their own when it served strategic ends.
In 1940, the SS Patria tragedy set the tone. The ship, carrying Jewish refugees fleeing Europe, was sabotaged in Haifa harbor by the Haganah—the Zionist paramilitary group that would later form the backbone of the Israeli Defense Forces.
The intent was to disable the ship, forcing the British to allow its passengers to disembark in Palestine. Instead, the explosion tore through the hull, killing more than 250 Jews on board.
Haganah leadership described the event as a “tragic miscalculation,” but the decision to place explosives on a crowded refugee vessel was no accident.
It reflected a grim calculus: risking Jewish lives was preferable to losing the political theater of resistance against the British.
Individual deaths were acceptable so long as they served the Zionist narrative of struggle and sacrifice.
Six years later, in 1946, the King David Hotel bombing reinforced this pattern.
The Irgun, a Zionist terrorist militia led by yet-to-be prime minister, Menachem Begin, planted explosives beneath the British administrative headquarters in Jerusalem.
Ninety-one people were killed; among them, seventeen Jews.
The group justified the attack as a strike against colonial power, but it demonstrated a familiar indifference to Jewish casualties when political spectacle demanded maximum impact.
The bombing became a propaganda victory, signaling both ruthlessness and resolve.
The willingness to sacrifice Jewish lives extended beyond Palestine itself.
In Iraq, between 1950 and 1951, a string of bombings targeted Baghdad’s centuries-old Jewish community.
The attacks — attributed to Zionist agents — created the panic necessary to trigger a mass exodus of Iraqi Jews to the newly formed state under Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.
For Zionist leaders, such risks were acceptable so long as they served to benefit the establishment of Israel.
This illustrates an undeniable throughline: when survival of the state or expansion of its territorial ambitions are at stake, Jewish lives can be sacrificed and their deaths exploited in service of the narrative.
Disinformation as Narrative Weapon
If the breach itself exposed cracks in Israel’s defenses, the information war that followed revealed how quickly atrocity stories can be manufactured, amplified, and later discredited.
Within hours of the attack, headlines around the world carried claims of unspeakable brutality: infants massacred, women raped en masse, entire families mutilated.
They appeared in Israeli press briefings, were echoed on social media, and were quickly recycled into Western outlets eager to frame October 7 as unprecedented savagery.
The most infamous of these stories—that Hamas fighters had beheaded forty babies—was repeated by U.S. President Joe Biden in public remarks.
His statement gave the rumor official weight, transforming it from battlefield chatter into global truth.
When pressed, the White House quietly retracted his comment, conceding that neither U.S. intelligence nor Israeli officials could verify the claim.
By then, of course, the story had already hardened into collective memory.
Some outlets issued corrections, others silently edited headlines, but few confronted the failure with the transparency such a claim demanded.
A similar pattern followed mass rape allegations.
Early reports of widespread sexual violence were repeated uncritically by advocacy groups and humanitarian organizations that often operate under pressure to align with official narratives.
Months later, Israeli investigators themselves admitted that evidence for these claims remained thin or inconclusive.
Yet in the intervening time, the allegations had already achieved their effect, casting the attacks not just as military aggression but as a moral apocalypse that demanded unflinching retaliation.
ZAKA and the Misinformation Machine
Central to this machinery was ZAKA, the ultra-Orthodox volunteer group tasked with collecting bodies.
Its members were among the first quoted describing atrocities, including claims which, though later debunked, would spread across the globe within hours.
ZAKA has long existed in the uneasy space between public service and political theater—a religious-nationalist organization that mixes emergency response with ideological mission.
Its leaders are fixtures in far-right circles, and its fieldwork has often blurred the line between documentation and performance.
The same behavior played out at the Nova music festival, where Apache helicopters appear to have opened fire on the area, hitting not only militants but Israelis fleeing the scene.
Combined with accounts of ground fire, these reports raise the unsettling possibility that a portion of the bloodshed that day came not from Hamas, but from Israel’s own response.
Even the aftermath offered no clarity. Families reported inconsistencies in the identification and handling of bodies — instances where remains were moved, misattributed, or reclassified in ways that obscured the circumstances of death.
Independent observers noted discrepancies between official accounts and forensic evidence, including cases in which victims said to have died on-site were later found to have been inexplicably transported there from other locations.
As the events of October 7 come into focus, these cracks complicate the government’s preferred version of the attack as an unforeseeable act of barbarism.
They suggest instead a layered reality — one of disregarded intelligence, deliberate vulnerability, and narrative control — whose full scope remain obscured two years later.
Within days, ZAKA’s southern commander was recounting scenes of unspeakable horror—infants decapitated, pregnant women disemboweled, entire families mutilated.
None of these claims were ever substantiated. Israeli forensic authorities later confirmed that such acts could not be verified, yet by then the stories had already metastasized across international media.
The impact was immediate and measurable. Donations poured in from abroad, transforming a bankrupt organization into a multimillion-dollar enterprise almost overnight.
The moral authority ZAKA claimed on October 7 became both currency and cover, allowing it to occupy the center of Israel’s narrative about the attack.
Weeks later, its volunteers were formally incorporated into the state’s propaganda apparatus, publicly praised by Netanyahu for fighting the “battle for public opinion.”
The same spokespeople who had spread the false atrocity stories soon toured foreign capitals and television studios as “witnesses” to Hamas’ alleged depravity.
Their accounts followed a script long familiar from Israel’s communications playbook—a moral binary in which Israel stood as civilization’s last defense against barbarism.
In this telling, veracity no longer mattered. What mattered was function.
Every Accusation a Confession
Each falsehood served to anchor a moral premise, framing Israel’s war not as one of choice or policy, but of survival—an existential struggle between “light and darkness.”
Ironically, in the two years since the escalation of Israel’s ethnic cleansing, every debunked accusation.
The occupation accused Hamas of using “human shields,” yet it was its own forces who did that very thing.
After falsely accusing Hamas of operating under a hospital, it was revealed that one of its own military command centers was situated beneath Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center.
The Zaka reports of beheaded babies were indeed debunked, but the world watched as Israeli forces targeted Palestinian children with extreme prejudice, decapitating many through bombardment.
Similarly, stories of babies being cut out of pregnant Israeli women failed to pan out, but that hardly mattered to occupation forces, who themselves quite literally exploded fetuses out of pregnant Palestinian women.
Likewise, Zaka’s allegations ofd sexual violence were debunked, even as Israelis debated the merits of Israeli soldiers’ ability to rape prisoners, as they did at the Sde Teiman torture camp.
Of course, this is to say nothing of Zaka’s founder, Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, himself a notorious sexual abuser, or even the infamous pedophile pipeline for Jewish Americans seeking to evade justice for sex crimes against minors.
Unfortunately, by the time the fabricated war atrocities unraveled, consent had already been thoroughly manufactured for a genocide that would destroy whole cities and erase entire family lines from the national registry.
The Aftermath and Present Reality
Two years on, the consequences of October 7 are measured not only in the destruction of Gaza, but in the transformation of the landscape it enabled.
As was the case during Israel’s establishment, the rhetoric of survival and victimhood gave way once again to policies of conquest and genocide.
The breach was framed as proof that coexistence had failed, and from that premise, the machinery of annexation accelerated.
Just like the aftermath of 9/11—which Netanyahu once described as a “very good thing” for Israel in its swaying of U.S. opinion in its favor—October 7 offered its own grim dividend.
The attack, framed in the context of an existential war, created the perfect political weather for a project long in motion.
In the West Bank, settler violence surged with near impunity.
Armed groups, often operating with the quiet backing of the state, carried out expulsions and raids on Palestinian villages, displacing families who had survived decades of occupation.
What once were considered “fringe” settler militias now acted as extensions of state power, their attacks framed as defensive measures rather than ethnic cleansing.
Just as he’d outlined in his HaTochnit HaHachra’a (Decisive Plan) in 2017, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich presented a formal plan for annexation, treating Palestinian lands not as occupied territory but as reserves waiting to be folded into Greater Israel.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich holds a map outlining settlement expansion in the E1 corridor east of Jerusalem—a linchpin in his long-standing vision of Eretz Yisrael, or Greater Israel, that would permanently fracture the West Bank and preclude Palestinian statehood.
Today, hundreds of thousands of settlers now live on land expropriated during and after the Nakba — territory cleared and cordoned off to serve as placeholders for annexation, nodes in a system of spatial domination that stretches from Gaza to the Jordan Valley.
This isn’t speculation.
In 2001, Benjamin Netanyahu was caught on camera admitting to the strategy. He boasted of manipulating the Oslo Accords to define “military zones” so expansively that Israel could retain control of most of the occupied territories.
“I de facto put an end to the Oslo Accords,” he said, adding with chilling confidence: “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily — move it in the right direction.”
Watch: Netanyahu explains how he manipulated the Oslo Accords to block Palestinian statehood.
Occupation, Expansion, and Manipulation
The unresolved questions of October 7 cannot be separated from the territorial ambitions that have defined Israeli policy for decades.
From the earliest days of the Zionist project, settlement has been more than demographic growth; it has been a strategy of conquest, carried out parcel by parcel until the map itself reflects domination.
In Gaza’s aftermath, that ambition became sharper. The devastation wrought on the Strip was not framed as a temporary act of reprisal but as an opening for permanent transformation.
Israeli officials floated proposals to resettle the territory, while the political establishment shifted openly toward talk of “voluntary migration”—a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.
At the same time, expansion in the West Bank accelerated, with new outposts legalized, armed settler militias emboldened, and ministers like Bezalel Smotrich declaring plans to annex vast swaths outright.
October 7 offered both justification and cover for these designs.
The breach was cast as proof that coexistence was impossible, that Palestinians behind the wall could never be trusted as neighbors.
This framing made the erasure of their presence appear as a defensive necessity rather than an aggressive expansion.
In Gaza’s aftermath, that ambition has become expedited. The devastation wrought on the Strip was more than an act of reprisal, it was an opening for permanent transformation.
Israeli officials floated proposals to resettle the territory, while the political establishment shifted openly toward talk of “voluntary migration”—a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.
Bolder still, plans to transform Gaza into a luxury “Riviera of the Middle East” have circulated at the highest levels. The GREAT Trust proposal, for example, envisions clearing Gaza’s population and redeveloping it as an international resort and tech hub.
Donald Trump shared an AI-generated video depicting himself and Netanyahu relaxing on a “Gaza Riviera” — a dystopian beachfront fantasy built atop Palestinian ruins. The video, shared on Trump’s Truth Social account, mirrors his real-world proposals to privatize Gaza’s reconstruction.
Donald Trump himself has floated taking administrative control of Gaza and turning it into a beachfront paradise in which Palestinians would be relocated.
His fantasy isn’t isolated rhetoric; it reflects a broader ideological current shared by those closest to him.
His son-in-law Jared Kushner — architect of the so-called Deal of the Century — has continued promoting a vision of “peace through prosperity,” one that reduces Palestinian self-determination to an investment portfolio.
From the outset, Kushner’s proposals framed sovereignty as a financial transaction: trade land and dignity for infrastructure loans, tourism ventures, and “economic normalization.”
He’s even mused publicly about Gaza’s “waterfront property” potential, suggesting that Palestinians could be relocated to facilitate redevelopment.
Now, with a new ceasefire deal ostensibly in sight, the proposal for a so-called “Board of Peace” — a joint American-European conservatorship featuring figures like Tony Blair — brings that vision to the edge of realization.
Marketed as reconstruction, it would, in effect, place Gaza under Western trusteeship, reviving the logic of British Mandatory Palestine with updated branding and Israel’s American muscle to enforce it.
If implemented, the plan will formalize a colonial restoration — the replacement of direct occupation with international management, ensuring that Palestinians remain ruled, surveilled, and contained by proxy.
In Israel, Finance Minister Smotrich has called Gaza a “real estate bonanza,” while far-right politicians and settler activists met to sketch out maps for luxury cities rising from its ruins — a continuation of the same colonial project now swallowing the West Bank piece by piece.
That speculative fever isn’t confined to Israel.
Across the United States, a parallel real estate market has emerged—one where American investors openly trade in occupied Palestinian land as if it were a luxury commodity.
In 2024, property expos in New Jersey and Miami invited American Jews to purchase homes in illegal West Bank settlements, marketing them as “affordable opportunities” and “biblical investments.”
A flier promoting an Israeli real estate tour across the U.S. and Canada in March 2024, inviting American and Canadian Jews to purchase property in settlements built on occupied Palestinian land—effectively marketing colonization as “your chance to own a piece of the Holy Land.”
Despite protests, these events proceeded with full legal impunity, illustrating how the financial architecture of colonization extends well beyond Israel’s borders.
Major hospitality platforms like Airbnb and Booking.com have also been implicated, continuing to list and profit from rentals on stolen Palestinian land even after public pledges to withdraw such listings.
Taken together, these ventures reveal that colonization has become a global investment class.
The frontier of occupation now stretches from Silicon Valley to the West Bank, traded through hedge funds, real estate portfolios, and vacation rentals.
To this ilk, Gaza’s destruction is not a tragedy to be mourned but an opportunity to be monetized.
Crisis as Strategy
Settlement has always been the mechanism through which Israel extended sovereignty by stealth, and crises have long been exploited to entrench gains.
Central to this record is Netanyahu’s long-running policy of propping up Hamas. For years he argued, sometimes openly, that a divided Palestinian polity served Israel’s interests.
By allowing Hamas to remain strong in Gaza, he weakened the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and ensured that no unified leadership could press a credible claim for statehood.
“Whoever is against a Palestinian state must support transferring money to Hamas,” he reportedly told party colleagues in 2019.
In this light, October 7 is seen not merely an intelligence failure but the blowback of a deliberate strategy.
The plan: create an adversary in order to delegitimize Palestinian nationalism, only to find that adversary capable of breaching the fortress.
In 2025, revelations emerged that Israel was supporting Yasser Abu Shabab, a Bedouin from Rafah who leads a militia known as the Popular Forces.
Branded as rivals to Hamas, Abu Shabab’s men have been accused of looting aid convoys, engaging in myriad human rights abuses.
For Israel, however, their utility lies in undermining Hamas’ control of Gaza and reinforcing the narrative that Palestinians are ungovernable without Israeli oversight.
Proxy militias like these have added another layer, fragmenting Palestinian society as the ISIS-linked group prowls the ruins of displaced people, taking for themselves the riches left behind.
For their part, Israeli officials have admitted to backing these “Arab clans” against Hamas.
The same strategy has applied to the Palestinian Authority (PA).
While Netanyahu has propped up Hamas in Gaza, his government has also sustained the PA in the West Bank as a rival power center, ensuring Palestinians remained divided.
Billions in international aid, much of it funneled through Israeli oversight, kept the PA afloat even as its legitimacy collapsed among its own people.
In practice, the PA functions less as an embryonic government and more as a security subcontractor, policing Palestinian dissent on Israel’s behalf.
During the ongoing genocide in Gaza, PA forces cracked down on protests, arrested journalists, and targeted activists who dared to challenge collaboration with the occupier.
By backing both Hamas and the PA in alternating measure, Israel preserved a controlled fragmentation that weakened Palestinian unity while entrenching its own dominance.
These maneuvers illustrate a consistent pattern: Israel not only responds to crises but cultivates them.
Each splinter, whether tolerated or sponsored, becomes another reason to argue that Palestinian sovereignty is impossible, and that only Israeli control can bring order.
The ideological vision behind these tactics has never been hidden.
From Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” doctrine to today’s far-right coalition, the notion of Eretz Yisrael—Greater Israel stretching “from the river to the sea”—has persisted as both aspiration and strategy.
This vision does not merely reject Palestinian statehood; it requires its permanent foreclosure.
The land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean must be made Jewish in fact as well as in law, and Palestinians must be reduced to obstacles, either displaced or politically nullified.
Two decades later, October 7 provided the kind of rupture he once theorized about.
From an objective standpoint, the knowledge of a plan like Hamas’ Al-Aqsa Flood would be a godsend for someone like Netanyahu, who could use the event as political leverage to accelerate the realization of Eretz Yisrael.
The attack may have exposed Israel’s vulnerability, but it also cleared political space for policies that would have otherwise seemed unthinkable.
In the name of security, Gaza was reduced to rubble, while the West Bank was subjected to intensified annexation by decree.
In this sense, October 7 was a national trauma leveraged to advance a long-standing strategy of occupation and expansion, moving steadily toward the realization of Greater Israel.
History Beneath the Settlements
The settlements struck on October 7 were presented to the world as peaceful communities — pastoral enclaves detached from the violence that defined life beyond their fences. Yet their very existence tells a different story.
Kibbutz Nir Oz was built on the ruins of Maʿin Abu Sitta, whose residents, including Salman Abu Sitta, were expelled in May 1948 by the Givati Brigade of the Haganah — a Zionist militia comprised of Palmach members that would later become the Israel Defense Forces.
To the north, Kibbutz Be’eri occupies land that once belonged to the Wuhaidat clan of the al-Jabarat Bedouin tribe, who were also driven out in 1948 when the Haganah’s Negev Brigade “secured” the area for Jewish settlement.
Nearby, Kfar Aza stands on the lands of Simsim, a Palestinian village depopulated the same year by the Negev Brigade.
This settlement, whose own name translates literally to “Gaza Village,” was established during Israel’s campaign to clear the Gaza environs of its Arab inhabitants.
And just west of Be’eri lies Re’im, established in 1949 as a Nahal military outpost on the remains of al-Muharraqa, a village emptied in the 1948 war.
Like other early settlements, Re’im’s founding served both agricultural and strategic purposes: to entrench Jewish presence along the Gaza border and seal off the displaced population from returning.
Watch: Former Negev Brigade soldier describes how entire villages were “cleared” and how returning refugees were met with orders to “shoot to kill,” illustrating violent origins of the frontier later breached on October 7
From their inception, these kibbutzim were instruments of demographic engineering — outposts in a campaign to Judaize the Negev and erase its indigenous past.
Over time, these communities evolved into a militarized buffer zone — civilian in appearance, tactical in function.
Built atop the wreckage of Palestinian life, they were financed by U.S. taxpayers and protected by a state that deliberately blurred the line between homestead and fortress.
Many of these kibbutzim, especially those nearest Gaza, receive direct U.S. subsidies and government security support.
Today, settlers in similar outposts are armed by the state itself.
In recent years, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have distributed rifles, ATVs, and tactical equipment to settlers under the banner of “self-defense,” even as their assaults on Palestinian villages multiply.
Laws were rewritten, new outposts legalized, and infrastructure extended to bind settlements more tightly to the Israeli core.
Each step was justified as necessary for security, yet the cumulative effect was unmistakable: the permanent foreclosure of Palestinian sovereignty.
Meanwhile, the conditions of apartheid deepened. Checkpoints multiplied, movement was restricted, and Palestinians were pushed further into fragmented enclaves where survival depended on Israel’s permission.
Gaza, left in ruins, stood as both punishment and warning—a vision of what awaited those who resisted.
Even the cultural framing of October 7 reflected this arrogance.
The Nova music festival, staged within view of lands from which Palestinians had been expelled, embodied the illusion that life inside the settlements was detached from the violence that made them possible.
When that illusion was pierced, the response was not reflection but escalation.
The tragedy of the festival was transformed into a symbol of innocence under attack, even as the festival itself stood on ground haunted by displacement.
Yet none of this unfolded in isolation. Billions of dollars in U.S. military aid flowed without interruption, even as evidence of mass civilian deaths mounted.
Washington shielded Israel from international censure at the United Nations, wielding its veto to block calls for ceasefire and accountability.
European governments followed suit, echoing the language of Israel’s right to self-defense while supplying the weapons and diplomatic cover that made devastation possible.
The same powers that professed universal values of human rights carved out an exception when it came to Israel.
This is the present October 7 delivered: a West Bank under siege, Gaza obliterated, and the dream of Eretz Yisrael advanced under the cover of grief and fear.
Far from halting expansion, the attack accelerated it, offering Israel’s leaders the very rupture they needed to push forward with designs that would have otherwise been politically untenable.
They did so not alone, but with the complicity of allies who ensured that no act, however brutal, would be punished.
Stripping Away the Illusion
Two years after October 7, the narratives spun in the immediate aftermath remain as important as the events themselves.
Israel presented the breach as an unforeseeable tragedy, a civilizational struggle, and a justification for annihilation.
The United States and its European allies embraced that framing, ensuring that billions in aid and an unbroken chain of vetoes at the United Nations insulated Israel from accountability.
What that day revealed, however, was more than what the official narrative would have you believe.
It punctured the illusion that Israel’s settlements—many of them built on the ruins of depopulated Palestinian towns and subsidized by American taxpayers— could exist in isolation from the history beneath them.
For decades, the state relied on surveillance, military dominance, and propaganda to sustain that illusion.
When it collapsed, the response was not introspection but escalation: Gaza leveled, the West Bank engulfed by settlers, and apartheid conditions tightened to the point of suffocation.
The propaganda playbook ensured that atrocity stories filled the void, framing retaliation as necessity and dehumanization as common sense.
International institutions, from the ICC to the U.N., stood paralyzed as Western allies guaranteed Israel’s impunity.
Nevertheless, the illusion could never have lasted forever.
The Inevitability of Resistance
From the outset of Israel’s foundations, the struggle over this land was written in blood and betrayal.
Unsurprisingly, as long as there has been an occupation to resist, there has been resistance.
Throughout the 1928-30, Zionist marches and prayers at Jerusalem’s Western Wall ignited national unrest across British Mandatory Palestine — a revolt brutally crushed by British forces in coordination with Zionist militias.
Among the early resistance leaders was Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a Syrian-born cleric and anti-colonial fighter whose death at British hands in 1935 transformed him into a symbol of resistance.
While his rebellion was ultimately defeated, the conditions that produced it endured.
The Nakba of 1948 scattered hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into exile, their villages razed and names erased from maps.
Two decades later, the 1967 Naksa redrew the region once more as Israel seized the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan Heights — and immediately began settling places like Hebron, turning occupation into a permanent project.
Excerpt: 1976 news report films the birth of the Hebron settlement at Kiryat Arba, depicting settlers openly planning to encircle the Palestinian city, claiming divine ownership of the West Bank, vowing never to leave.
In the years that followed, Israeli power metastasized through invasion and proxy.
In 1982, Israeli-backed Phalangist militias massacred thousands in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps of Lebanon — a slaughter facilitated by then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, who, despite being found personally responsible for the massacre, would eventually become the 11th Prime Minister of Israel..
The pattern persisted: violence outsourced, denial institutionalized, accountability deferred.
The First Intifada of 1987 and the Second Intifada beginning in 2000 marked renewed attempts to reclaim dignity through resistance — each crushed beneath overwhelming force.
Even the moments marketed as peace, like Oslo, were engineered as containment: agreements that promised statehood while codifying subjugation.
Each generation carried the echo of the last, bound by the same unbroken chain of occupation, dispossession, and denial.
By the 2000s, Israel’s political and military establishment had normalized the language of cruelty: “mowing the lawn” for routine bombardments, putting Palestinians “on a diet” for engineered starvation.
This was not policy by accident but by design — a methodical effort to manage an imprisoned population into submission.
The slow violence metastasized into famine and culminated in 2023, the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since records began.
Settler militias, emboldened by ministers like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, roamed freely under army protection, torching homes and fields with impunity.
Four days before the attack, Israelis once again stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound to escort settlers praying under armed guard while Muslim worshippers were forced out at gunpoint.
The scene mirrored the provocation that ignited the 1930s revolt — as though history itself demands repetition until the lesson is learned.
Under such conditions, the events of October 7 were not the eruption of chaos but the inevitability of history.
If, as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “a riot is the language of the unheard,” then October 7, 2023 should quite easily be understood as the scream of a people held too long without a voice.
A people can be starved, fenced, and buried under propaganda for generations — but not forever.
Two weeks before the October 7 attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held up a “New Middle East” map at the United Nations—erasing Palestine entirely, presenting occupied land as Israel’s own.
The lingering uncertainty of October 7 lies not merely in the violence of that day, but in what it made possible.
At worst, Israel exploited or even allowed the attacks to occur. At best, its leadership collapsed at every perceivable level, resulting in spectacular abject failure. In either event, what legitimacy can Israel possibly hope to maintain?