Why Hamas Really Attacked Israel on Oct. 7 | Episode 12

October 7, 2026, marked the third anniversary of Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel. Considerable attention was devoted to commemorating that event in Israel and throughout the West. The focus was mainly on three questions: 1) What happened that day? 2) Why was Israel caught by surprise? 3) What have been the consequences of that momentous day? 
 
Much less attention was paid to a fundamental question: Why did Hamas launch the attack in the first place? Indeed, this relative neglect of the attack’s root causes has characterized much of the public discussion of October 7 from the beginning.
 
Israel and its supporters, however, have a straightforward explanation. According to Prime Minister Netanyahu, Hamas and its allies are “the new Nazis,” and October 7 was an unprovoked attack that Israeli leaders and much of the Israeli public have repeatedly compared to the Holocaust. In other words, the attack is understood primarily as an expression of genocidal antisemitism.
 
In this episode, I examine that explanation and argue that it is fundamentally mistaken. The historical record and a careful examination of Hamas’s motives point toward a very different story, which I believe is why Israel and its supporters have paid little attention to discussing the political and strategic calculations that led Hamas to attack Israel on October 7, 2023.

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CHAPTERS

0:00 Intro
0:26 The question nobody asks: why did Hamas attack?
2:01 The Israeli story: Hamas as "the new Nazis"
5:08 The old story: "a land without people"
8:28 The new historians rewrite the record
9:53 The real Zionist goal: a Greater Israel
11:00 The numbers: a land full of Palestinians
13:57 "They're going to have to steal the land"
15:34 Palestinian resistance, from 1936 to Gaza
17:56 Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion: "We have stolen their country"
20:45 A Palestinian population that never went away
24:21 Option 1: the Iron Wall
26:00 Option 2: ethnic cleansing
28:54 Option 3: Bantustans and ghettos
30:38 The myth of the two-state solution
32:45 Gaza: occupation, settlers and Sharon's pullout
36:30 The blockade: Gaza on a diet
38:34 Assassinating Gaza's leaders
40:22 "Mowing the lawn": Cast Lead and Protective Edge
44:25 October 7th: the inmates break out
46:22 Hamas wants its land back
49:46 Read the history
51:11 Was the attack legal under international law?

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MUSIC

"The Ice Giants" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Music modified (edited/remixed) from the original.