Why Al-Aqsa Flood happened: Ilan Pappé revisits October 2023
Ilan Pappé writes in The Palestine Chronicle on 23 September 2026:
As we reach the three-year mark since the Al-Aqsa Flood operation and the onset of the Gaza genocide, we can benefit from the passage of time and see more clearly some of the aspects and crucial issues connected with that fateful date that remained blurred or invisible when examined in the immediate aftermath of the operation and the genocide that followed.
It is important to ponder these issues and aspects, as they also relate to the fact that too many people in the world, including some of those who have shown support for the Palestinian struggle, believe that this horrific chapter is behind us. The genocide continues, albeit incrementally, in the Gaza Strip and has now spilled over into the West Bank, where the intensification of the army and settlers’ violence is aimed at turning the West Bank into another Gaza Strip.
The passage of time enables us to learn much more about the motives of the small group of leaders in Hamas who planned the operation. It is important to analyze these motives in a professional way in order to refute the deceptive and fabricated narrative spun by Israel about an operation that was conceived in Tehran as part of a plan to destroy the Jewish state.
This narrative was already successfully challenged as one that willfully ignores the historical context of the long history of Zionist oppression and the more recent inhuman blockade of the Strip. But it also conceals a more intricate reality that evolved in the years immediately preceding Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, and that was also glossed over by Palestinian and pro-Palestinian commentators.
This more focused look at that particular period sheds light on the dilemmas facing Hamas and the Palestinian liberation movement more generally in their existential struggle against the Zionist project of elimination.
The reconstruction of this immediate background reminds me of the way the historiography of the 1948 Nakba benefited from the declassification of the Israeli archives. The fusion of Israeli archival material with Palestinian oral and written history provided a fuller picture of that catastrophe. We now have a better understanding of the developments that led to October 2023 through the erudite work of some Israeli journalists who have access to material most of us are currently unable to see.
Their research sheds light on the difficult choices that faced Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar—and, indeed, that face any leading figure in the Palestinian resistance movement—in the face of seventeen years of blockade of the Gaza Strip and oppression in the West Bank.
It helps refute the common image of Sinwar in the West as a fanatical and messianic leader who embarked on an operation meant to establish an Islamic Caliphate on the ruins of Israel. Such a depiction is born out of the racist and Orientalist approach to Palestine in general and to Palestinians who put their faith in Islamic political movements.
Sinwar confronted Israel in a manner similar to that adopted by Arab leaders such as Anwar Sadat in 1971 and Palestinian leaders such as Yasser Arafat in 2000. Sadat warned the Israeli leaders that if they did not return the Sinai to Egypt through diplomacy, Egypt would go to war, while Arafat warned Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton that if he was unable to return from the Camp David summit in 2000 with a promise to reduce the oppression of the Palestinian people, another uprising would be inevitable.