The true lesson of October 7 is that Israel cannot be reformed

As we come up to the first anniversary of Israel’s war on Gaza, I think back to 1948, when Israel was first created. Our family lived in Jerusalem, where I was born. But, like most of Palestine’s population, we were forced out from our homes in 1948 to make room for the state of Israel being created in our place.

Learning to live in exile, people’s one comfort was the thought that Israel would not last. Such gross injustice could not prevail, they said, and the rag-tag collection of immigrants who came to Palestine from a variety of countries and were artificially assembled into something they called a ‘state’ would soon return to the places from which they came.

It never happened, and Israel has grown from strength to strength ever since. Today, it rules the whole of historic Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. It has loyal, even fanatical, supporters throughout Europe, and it dominates the U.S. political system. For 76 years it has worked to subdue the Middle East region, aiming to leave not a single foe capable of vanquishing it. We are currently seeing it trying to disable its longtime enemies, Hezbollah and Iran, through its weaponization of antisemitism it cleverly keeps the rest of the world at bay.

In Palestine, Israel completely controls Gaza and the West Bank, and is rapidly judaizing Jerusalem. Palestinian resistance to these outrages has flared up many times, always easily managed by Israel. With a pacified Palestinian population unable to fight its occupier, the situation over time had become comfortable for Israel and its western backers, including many Arab states wanting a quiet life.

One year ago, on October 7, this cozy set-up came crashing down. It is a date that will go down in history as the day when the Middle East, and perhaps the world, changed for good. Hamas broke out of the giant prison that is Gaza and attacked Israel on its own soil. Vilified as ‘terrorism’ by Israel and its friends, it was in fact a bid for freedom and autonomy, familiar to all prisoners who long for release.

Whether those Hamas fighters knew it or not, their actions that day exposed the edifice of lies, hypocrisy and ruthless tyranny Israel and its western allies have used to oppress Palestinians since Israel’s creation.

Whether those Hamas fighters knew it or not, their actions that day exposed the edifice of lies, hypocrisy and ruthless tyranny Israel and its western allies have used to oppress Palestinians since Israel’s creation. The genocidal war Israel is waging on Gaza and the West Bank since October 7, has only rammed this exposure home.

For all those who liked to see Israel as a liberal democracy, it has been revealed as a nasty, brutish colonizer with fascist tendencies; for those who thought that Israel was a military superpower no one could defeat, it’s shown itself incapable of fighting a single war without U.S. arms and funding; and most of all, for anyone who saw Zionism as a moral project, justifying Israel’s creation as a “light unto the nations’,” its inhumane conduct towards the Palestinians since October 7 should have abolished any notion of morality applicable to Israel.

It was not news that Israel enjoyed massive U.S. and western support from the start. But October 7 showed us how far and how deep it went. Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the multiple atrocities it has committed against civilians, especially children, and the indescribable cruelty of its soldiers, all brazenly conducted in broad daylight, have been unashamedly tolerated and aided by the west. Not a single Israeli outrage has earned western condemnation.

And the same is now true of Israel’s recent assault on Lebanon. The mass terrorist attack of the Israeli-manipulated pagers and walkie-talkies on September 17 killed 37 and injured 3,000 people mostly in Beirut. Relentless Israeli bombing and assassinations of Hezbollah leaders have raised the number of Lebanese dead and wounded to many thousands, with a million people displaced from their homes. Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanese territory on October 1 in pursuit of Hezbollah has depopulated villages and destroyed the infrastructure, with reported U.S. approval.

Having disabled Hezbollah, as Israel imagines it will do, its next target is Iran, where it aims to draw the U.S. into a war on its behalf. Its fantasy is to smite its enemies once and for all in order to attain hegemony over a new Middle East – one reconfigured as a series of defeated states, dominated by Israel and wholly subservient to the west.

Whether any of this can happen is unknown. But one thing is certain: there is no place for an apartheid, genocidal, supremacist state like Israel in the Middle East – or anywhere else. Since its inception, it has been a violent, bellicose, and expansionist focus of regional instability. It has inflicted untold misery on countless generations of Palestinians and other Arabs, and plans for more to come.

When the Arab states, which had fought against the formation of Israel in 1948, eventually came to accept its presence in the region after 1967, Israel rejected every peaceful approach they made. At the end of September, Jordan’s foreign minister offered a guarantee of Israel’s security from Arab and Islamic countries, which Israel ignored.

The truth is Israel can neither be accommodated nor reformed. It must be dismantled as a state, its policies and system of government discarded, and its citizens set free to learn how to live with others on a basis of cooperation and equality. Zionism, which has been at the core of Israel’s existence as an exclusivist, supremacist ideology, will also have to end.

If that were to happen, and the Palestinians regained their homeland to live normal lives, it would finally alleviate their terrible ordeal over 76 years. And in that lies the true lesson of October 7.

Ghada Karmi
Ghada Karmi was born in Jerusalem. Forced from her home during the Nakba, she later trained as a Doctor of Medicine at Bristol University. She established the first British-Palestinian medical charity in 1972 and was an Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs. Her most recent book is One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel, and her previous books include the best-selling memoir In Search of Fatima.