Hamas’ Oct. 7 Attack Wasn’t Mainly About Israel, It Was About Defeating Its Palestinian Political Rival
The Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel—and the subsequent Gaza war—are rarely understood in their primary political context, which is the power struggle among Palestinian factions.
The near-universal assumption is that Hamas viewed its surprise offensive as another phase in a long-term war against Israel. There’s some truth to it, but that misreads why Hamas decided now to deliberately provoke a massive Israeli response—which is the long-standing power struggle between the Islamists in Hamas and their smaller ally, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), against the secular nationalists of Fatah who control the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and, more importantly, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) which represents Palestinians diplomatically.
Fatah, of course, knows this full well, but a surge of nationalist sentiment and shared outrage at the mass killing and suffering of the 2.2 million Palestinian civilians in Gaza muffled nationalist leaders like President Mahmoud Abbas (also the chairman of the PLO) in publicly acknowledging Hamas’ breathtaking cynicism.