Yes, Bad Policies Paved the Way to October 7. But What If They Were the Only Policies Available?

I agreed with almost every word of Shany Mor’s essay, which was characteristically insightful and enlightening. Nevertheless, I think it suffered from a fatal flaw, because it is pointless to blame certain policies for contributing to a disaster unless you can convincingly argue that better policies were available. On most of the issues he addresses, better policies were both self-evident and readily available. But on one of the four issues, though better policies were available in theory, I’m not convinced they were available in practice.

The third and fourth issues he discusses, both of which relate to the international community’s handling of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, fall into the self-evident category, so I won’t waste words on them. On the second issue, ideology, he and I have a fundamental disagreement, since I believe the settlement movement generally does serve Israel’s interests. (I explained one reason why in Mosaic in 2022, but there are others.) Nevertheless, I agree with him that many settler leaders focus single-mindedly on expanding settlements at the expense of all other issues, even when those issues deserve to be higher priorities. That isn’t a major problem when settlers are merely one of many single-issue interest groups trying to influence the government. But it becomes a problem when they are dominant players in the government yet still behaving like single-issue activists, which has frequently been the case with this government (the same is true of the Haredim). Like Mor, I think this has been to the country’s detriment, including by helping to divert attention from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank prior to last October.

To be clear, the main reason for the security services’ focus on the West Bank was an upsurge in terrorism there that began long before this government took power, coupled with the virtual consensus in these agencies that Hamas was mainly interested in improving Gaza’s economy rather than attacking Israel (talks on increasing the number of Gazans working in Israel had been going on for months), that the organization couldn’t pose a serious threat in any case, and that the Gazan border was adequately protected by physical and technological barriers. Consequently, I think settler ideology—or more accurately, some officials’ single-minded focus on this ideology, to the exclusion of all else—played much less of a role than Mor ascribes to it. Nevertheless, stunts like Zvi Sukkot’s sukkah and many more serious incidents certainly didn’t help.