Two Years after October 7:
Israelis and Palestinians Both at a Dead End

Oct 13, 2025

This article is translated from the October 10 issue #2984 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.

Two years have passed since October 7, 2023, when several thousand fighters from Hamas and other Palestinian groups managed to breach the supposedly impenetrable security barrier erected by Israel along the Gaza Strip. They attacked military bases and any Israelis they encountered.

More than 1,200 people were killed that day, mostly civilians, making it the deadliest attack in Israeli history. Hamas kidnapped 251 people, of whom 47 are thought to still be held hostage in Gaza, including 25 the Israeli military says are dead.

At the time of the attack, many Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and refugee camps in Arab countries felt avenged for the oppression and contempt they had been subjected to for years by the Israeli state. This overlooked the fact that, by randomly attacking women, men, and children, Hamas was resorting to the same methods Israeli leaders use against Palestinians. It also showed how little Hamas cared about the consequences for the people under its rule in Gaza, since it was predictable that the action would be followed by a large-scale Israeli response.

The October 7 attack gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government a way to rebuild national unity to support his administration. At the time his rule was widely contested. For months, he had been dealing with a massive mobilization against a proposed judicial reform. By exploiting the trauma created within the Israeli population, Netanyahu was able to launch a war that became a mission to exterminate the inhabitants of Gaza. The territory has been reduced to a veritable field of ruins by two years of bombings, blockades, and indiscriminate massacres. Entire cities have been completely razed. More than 90% of its homes have been destroyed. The health system has collapsed. The population is literally dying of hunger.

The war’s outcome exposes the barbaric means employed by the Israeli state to subjugate and annihilate the Palestinian people. But it also exposes the failure of the policies pursued by Palestinian nationalist organizations.

The Palestinian Authority was created in 1993 by the Oslo Accords between Israeli leaders and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). But Israeli politicians only recognized the PLO’s legitimacy in order to turn it into an auxiliary of the Israeli police, tasked with maintaining order against the Palestinian population. This collaboration with the Israeli authorities gradually caused the Palestinian Authority to lose most of its credibility among Palestinians.

At the same time, Hamas controlled Gaza, beginning in 2007. Hamas wanted to project the image of a fighting organization, more radical than the PLO, for example by firing rockets at Israel and carrying out attacks of which October 7 was the most spectacular and deadly. The stated goal was to restore a Palestine “from the Jordan River to the sea (the Mediterranean Sea).” But Hamas’s leaders knew they did not have the strength to end the Israeli occupation. Still, they wanted to gain influence among Palestinians so as to impose themselves instead of the PLO as an essential middleman with Israeli and Western leaders.

The results of this policy have been disastrous for Hamas itself. What remains of its political and military apparatus today? But disaster has especially hit the Palestinian population, which has paid the highest price in every way.

The population of Israel also pays a high price. They have been drawn into a conflict with no end in sight. Some Israelis oppose continuing the war because it risks the hostages’ lives. Thousands of Israelis have been protesting for months. Reservists are now refusing to be called up. Many Israelis express their opposition to Netanyahu, who can only hold onto power by continuing the war. But this current impasse is also the consequence of the policies pursued by all of his predecessors. Since 1948, Israeli leaders have refused to recognize the rights of the Palestinians. They have deprived them of their property and their land and have forced them to live in refugee camps. No lasting peace is possible without ending the oppression of the Palestinians.

As for the Palestinian nationalist organizations, their real aim is to have their right to run a recognized government apparatus with a place in the sun in the imperialist system, no matter how small. In this way, they are the representatives of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, which would like to be treated as an equal to the other Arab ruling classes in the region. But the Israeli state has always opposed this. And Israel enjoys the unwavering support of the major imperialist powers that see it as a pillar of their control over the Middle East.

The only way out for the region’s populations, both Israeli and Arab, is a struggle to overthrow the various regimes which oppress them. Beyond that, the imperialist system must be overthrown—the system which pits peoples against each other in order to dominate all of them, all around the world. On the scale of the Middle East, only a socialist federation of peoples can recognize equal rights for all and allow all to coexist peacefully.