The Origins of 10/7

Following up on Erik’s comments on the interesting document dump at the New York Times:

For more than two years, Yahya Sinwar huddled with his top Hamas commanders and plotted what they hoped would be the most devastating and destabilizing attack on Israel in the militant group’s four-decade history.

Minutes of Hamas’s secret meetings, seized by the Israeli military and obtained by The New York Times, provide a detailed record of the planning for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, as well as Mr. Sinwar’s determination to persuade Hamas’s allies, Iran and Hezbollah, to join the assault or at least commit to a broader fight with Israel if Hamas staged a surprise cross-border raid.

The documents, which represent a breakthrough in understanding Hamas, also show extensive efforts to deceive Israel about its intentions as the group laid the groundwork for a bold assault and a regional conflagration that Mr. Sinwar hoped would cause Israel to “collapse.”

The documents consist of minutes from 10 secret planning meetings of a small group of Hamas political and military leaders in the run-up to the attack, on Oct. 7, 2023. The minutes include 30 pages of previously undisclosed details about the way Hamas’s leadership works and the preparations that went into its attack.

The timing of this release seems to coincide with a public relations campaign to justify Israeli attacks on Hezbollah and a (possibly forthcoming) attack on Iran, but as Erik points out it’s pretty weak tea regarding Iranian involvement, and in any case no one has successfully disputed the provenance of the documents. For me, the important bits regard the clarification of Hamas’ intentions regarding 10/7. It has not been uncommon to see arguments that Sinwar did not expect the raid to go as well as it did and thus was surprised by the extent of the Israeli response, a position that would at least to some small degree ameliorate Sinwar’s responsibility for the ensuing destruction of Gaza. These arguments now appear to be nonsense; Sinwar was actively campaigning with Hamas’ allies to inflict as much damage as possible, a project that these allies generally did not regard as particularly sensible or well thought-out.

And the fact is that Yahya Sinwar and the men around him care about as much for Palestinian lives as does Bibi Netanyahu. People are responsible for the things that they do and Israelis are responsible for what they have done to Gaza. But on 10/8 folks had a lot of choices with respect to public reaction, and way too many folks associated with Palestinian activism decided to circle the wagons around vague defenses of “resistance to settler colonialism,” rather than engaging with the fact that Hamas is a murderous right-wing death cult that expected, planned for, and ultimately desired the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.