In 2004, following Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, foreign minister Silvan Shalom said the only question was why it had not happened sooner.
We should keep this question front of mind in thinking about the events of 7 October 2023. The vicious Palestinian breakout from Gaza that day and Israel’s ongoing neo-genocidal retaliation might shock in its scale and brutality. But it was long in the making. Reading Erik Skare’s insightful and richly detailed new book, Road to October 7: A Brief History of Palestinian Islamism, is therefore akin to sitting through a disaster movie — seemingly powerless to change the script, we can but watch in sickened horror.
“So Gaza could not be contained after all” is the singularly apt opening sentence of the book. Gaza had been under blockade (Egyptian as well as Israeli) for sixteen years. Nearly 80 per cent of its population of around 2.2 million people depended on aid and more than half of them (and 70 per cent of its young people) were unemployed. According to the UN Relief and Works Agency, Israeli security forces had damaged or destroyed around 300 of Gaza’s water wells, and more than 80 per cent of the water extracted from the territory’s aquifers did not meet the World Health Organization’s water quality standards.
By 2023, Skare writes, the majority of Gazans under thirty had never seen the world outside, and a sixteen-year-old would have experienced four wars and countless skirmishes, airstrikes and armed cross-border confrontations. Add to this the gloomy political reality. October 7 happened, Skare argues, because the moderates in Hamas had few, if any, victories to show since the movement’s success in the legislative elections of 2006.
Hamas had not brought Palestinians any closer to liberation. The political and geographic split between Gaza and the West Bank persisted. The occasional violent flare-ups with Israel did little to disturb Israeli daily life “or shake the Israeli perception that pacifying and containing two million Palestinians indefinitely was feasible.” Continuing international isolation deepened a conviction that the experiment by Hamas moderates had been in vain and no political or diplomatic solution was in prospect.
Skare is a historian at the University of Oslo and has published extensively on Palestinian Islamism and the resistance to Israeli occupation. Armed movements, he writes, including Palestinian Islamist ones, reflect broader political and societal developments. So the emergence during the 1970s and 1980s of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or PIJ, reflected a loss of faith in the Palestine Liberation Organization, led by the quixotic Yasser Arafat and his Fatah party. It also pointed to what Skare terms the “desecularisation” of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
The majority of the founders of both Hamas and the PIJ were either born in or forced into refugeehood. How then, Skare asks, could they possibly recognise the legitimacy of the state that had displaced them and taken everything from them? Where the PIJ had a singular focus on armed struggle, the much larger and influential Hamas encompassed “moderates” and “hardliners.” It also faced the sometimes difficult challenge of reconciling the views of “insiders” — those located in the occupied territories themselves — and “outsiders,” located in the Gulf states, Syria, Jordan or elsewhere.
Such categorisations can be fluid and very much in the eye of the beholder. On several occasions, including just before Israel killed him in a targeted missile attack, Sheikh Yassin held out the prospect of a long-term truce, dependent on Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. Skare also cites the example of Mahmoud Zahar, now seen as one of Hamas’s leading hardliners. In the 1990s Zahar was regarded as a dove, so much so that he faced death threats from Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades. His stance changed dramatically after Israel tried to assassinate him in 2003 by dropping explosives on his house, killing his twenty-year old son and maiming his daughter.
Hamas vacillated in its approach to electoral participation but eventually contested the 2006 elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council, the legislature of the Palestinian National Authority, winning seventy-four of the 132 seats. Hamas moderates gambled that electoral participation “would underscore the movement’s democratic intentions and its acceptance of shared political norms,” writes Skare. They were demonstrably naive; relations between Hamas and Fatah rapidly deteriorated and Hamas forcibly took over the Gaza Strip in 2007.
Skare is scathing about the European Union’s role. It had encouraged Islamist participation in the political process then “refused to accept the outcome of the people’s vote.” The so-called Quartet, made up of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia, aspired to weaken Hamas as a whole but succeeded mainly in undermining the moderates who had urged participation in the 2006 elections in the first place.
No examination of Hamas is complete without some discussion of its value to Israel in helping to divide the Palestinian nationalist movement. In 2015, Bezalel Smotrich, currently Israel’s finance minister and an outspoken advocate of “burying” Palestinian statehood, described the Palestinian Authority as “a liability” and Hamas “an asset.” Although Skare says there is no evidence that Hamas was the creation of Israeli intelligence, it is a pity his book doesn’t explore the Hamas–Israeli link in more detail.
Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, Israel’s military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the PLO and the Fatah party. In 2009, Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal that “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”
Skare argues that Israel’s regular assassinations of Palestinian leaders were “seldom guided by cost–benefit calculations.” They were the result of “opportunity rather than necessity… emotion rather than cold reason.” The choice of target was sometimes bizarre. Ismail Abu Shanab, a prominent Hamas moderate committed to working with the Palestinian Authority, once declared: “Let’s be frank, we cannot destroy Israel. The practical solution is to have a state alongside Israel… When we build a Palestinian state, we will not need these militias.” Shanab was assassinated by Israel in 2003.
The appeal of Islamism, Skare argues, was never its religious doctrine but “as a prism through which Palestinian nationalism is expressed.” In 2025, despite genuflections from “moderate” countries including Australia, we seem further away than ever from the logical expression of that nationalism — a viable Palestinian state. Skare’s book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the toxic mix of history, inhumanity and hubris that has shaped the scene before us. It points to further agony ahead. •
Road to October 7: A Brief History of Palestinian Islamism
Erik Skare | Verso | $28.50 | 222 pages
