"Well What SHOULD Israel Have Done After October 7?"

October 7 was entirely a response to generations of abuse against the Palestinian people by the state of Israel, a fact that many of us can not see clearly. (screengrab)

The short answer: Israel should have done what it always should have done: right the wrongs of the past and make peace.

by Caitlin Johnstone, reposted from Caitlin’s Newsletter

People often object to criticisms of Israel’s ongoing mass atrocity in Gaza by saying, “Well what SHOULD Israel have done in response to October 7 then?” They say it like the question should confound you, as though it’s some kind of thought-terminating unanswerable Zen koan or something.

But it isn’t. The question is very answerable, and the most correct answer is that Israel should have done what it always should have done: right the wrongs of the past and make peace.

October 7 was entirely a response to generations of abuse against the Palestinian people by the state of Israel, so the correct response to it would have been to heal those abuses in a way that is agreeable to the Palestinians. This would likely include ceding large amounts of land, the payment of very extensive reparations from Israel (and ideally from its wealthy western allies as well), eliminating all unjust laws and apartheid systems, a comprehensive push to purge society of the toxins of anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia, the right of Palestinians in exile to return to their homeland, and the negotiation of a peace agreement which yields so much that even the most hardline factions in Palestinian society would be compelled to agree with it.

And when you say this the common objection is “Yeah well Israel was never gonna do that!” To which the most correct answer is: duh. Of course not. Israel is a murderous apartheid state built on racism and hate and trauma, and on the premise of existing in a continuous state of mass-scale violence at home and abroad.

That’s the problem here. Not Hamas. Not October 7. The problem is that Israel is a settler-colonialist project made of hatred and abuse and ceaseless violence. Which was why October 7 happened.

The fact that Israel would not have responded to October 7 by ending the abuses which caused it doesn’t change the fact that this would have been the correct thing for Israel to do. It just means the same depravities and injustices which gave rise to the state of Israel continue to exist and express themselves to this day. It means Israel itself is the problem.

Which means the real issue with the objection “Well what SHOULD Israel have done in response to October 7 then?” is that it’s asking the wrong question. The correct question to ask is, what should the world do about Israel? What should the world do about this murderous entity which keeps trying to drag us all into a horrific new war with Iran and its allies? What should the world do about this apartheid ethnostate whose relentless abuses were so egregious that Palestinians felt they had no choice but to carry out the October 7 attack?

And when you peel back the layers of this question you find that the question underneath it is, what should the world do about the US empire? What should the world do about this massive globe-spanning power structure which feeds into Israel’s abuses as a matter of policy to advance its own agendas of destabilization and division in a geostrategically crucial resource-rich region? What should the world do about the international power structure centralized around Washington which continuously terrorizes and abuses populations around the world with the goal of capturing them all under a single power umbrella?

I keep saying “the world” because this isn’t just an Israel problem or a United States problem. Clearly. We stand here on the precipice of what could easily become a massive new war in the middle east because of Israel’s actions and the US-centralized empire’s psychopathic facilitation of them, which means this affects all of us.

Even if we manage to avoid full-scale war this time, we know we’ll be on the precipice again in a few years. And even if Israel itself is fully disarmed and dismantled, without the dismantling of the US empire, another agent of destabilization will just be inserted into the middle east to take its place. As Joe Biden said, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.”

So really when you get right down to it, the correct response to October 7 and the genocidal atrocities which have followed it is for the world to begin working to dismantle the US-centralized empire. Gaza and the brinkmanship we’re seeing in the middle east right now are just some of the most high-profile symptoms of the depravity that the US hegemon and its allies and assets are inflicting around the world at the moment. Later on it will be something else. And eventually that “something else” appears likely to culminate in a hot war between major nuclear powers.

So what we’re seeing in the middle east today is just the current symptom of a profoundly diseased world order whose sickness will eventually get us all killed. We’re going to have to find some way to stop these freaks. This is an existential issue for all of us. Gaza is just the most glaring example of an illness which affects the health and wellbeing of the entire world, and which cannot be allowed to continue untreated.

Caitlin’s Newsletter is an ongoing collaboration between herself (Australian) and her husband Tim Foley (American). When asked to describe this project she often says, “I write about the end of illusions,” because from Caitlin’s point of view, all of the major problems our species now faces are born of a misperception of what’s really happening.

RELATED: