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by Daniel Lazare
Despite
certain shortcomings, Erik Skare’s Road to October 7 (Verso Books, 2025), is a
fair, objective, and well-balanced account of the rise of Hamas, Palestinian
Islamic Jihad, and other such Islamist groups, no small achievement at a time
when tendencies like these are igniting furious controversies across the globe.
In contrast to all too many Hamas apologists, 10/7 “truthers,” and other denialists, Skare does not minimize the horrors that occurred on Oct. 7, 2023, when Palestinian militants ripped down fences separating them from Israel and tore into civilian settlements on the other side of the divide:
Clear visual records showed a Thai worker was decapitated with a garden hoe. Another clip depicted and father and his two sons hunted down in their pajamas. ... In a separate incident, Palestinian militants found a girl – no more than nine years old – hiding under a table. They executed her after briefly consulting one another. With the killing of the elderly, with parents shot in front of their children, and with ‘bloody rooms crowded with massacred civilians’ [to quote the Arab-Israeli intellectual Azmi Bishara], the attacks caused global shock and outrage. These were acts ... that cannot be defended by the legitimate right to resist. If anything, October 7 reveals how suffering does not turn the victim into a moral agent.
Neither does Road to October 7 shrink from the violence and far-right politics that characterized such movements from the start. Beginning in the 1970s, members of the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, forerunners of Hamas, distinguished themselves by:
...torch[ing] cinemas, coffee shops, newspaper offices, billiard halls, and bars. They attacked shops selling alcohol, libraries spreading atheist literature, and ran intimidation campaigns against competitors. Wedding celebrations deemed inappropriate – with alcohol, gender-mixing, singing, and dancing – were similarly assaulted. ... Women were banned from swimming on the beach and those who refused to follow orders were, like political opponents, reportedly sprayed with acid.
When members of the local Red Crescent, the Muslim equivalent of the Red Cross, re-elected a pro-Communist leadership in December 1979, Skare says that Muslim Brotherhood members took revenge by ransacking the group’s offices and launching yet more attacks on cafés, movie theaters, and bars. Upon gaining control of the Islamic University of Gaza in 1983, they established separate entrances for men and women, paid doormen and porters to grow their beards, and firmly repressed leftists or liberals daring to speak out.
They also gave vent to crude anti-communism worthy of any pro-Trump rightist here in the US. Skare quotes a Hamas member named Muhammad Abu Tayr denouncing Marxism on the grounds that it allows people “to live unrestrained and without the controls that Islam has long cared for and preserved.” He cites a member named Ibrahim al-Maqadma, a preacher and activist who would perish in 2003 when an Israeli helicopter fired a missile at a car in which he and three aides were riding. Declared al-Maqadma some 15 years earlier:
“Communism is found to be intimately linked to Judaism. It is no coincidence that Karl Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and other leaders of Communist thought were Jews ... [The Jews] depended on Freud to demolish morality by attributing all human behavior to instincts, like animals. They used Marx to eradicate the remaining restages of religion with his comprehensive system, which reduced human beings to materialistic beings solely concerned with seeking sustenance.”
Finally, Road to October 7 doesn’t shrink from the class nature of the Muslim Brotherhood – “the movement had from the onset an elitist and thus an urban appeal” – or from the blinkered worldview it reflects and reinforces. Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas’s long-time rival, issued a communiqué in 1987 stating:
“You must be aware that you have two options, and there is no third. You can either obey God and His messenger, and continue your blessed intifada until it bears fruit and you are victorious, or you can obey the generals of the [Israeli] enemy and its leaders, remain silent and calm, ‘and you will then become losers’ [surat al-‘Imran: 149].”
A PIJ politburo member named Anwar Abu Taha told an interviewer that the only proper response to western aggression was “conversion ... Islamization of the entire world.” Al-Maqadma, for his part, said that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “is not a national or ethnic conflict ... nor is it a class conflict ... it is not a conflict between the oasis of democracy in the Middle East, as the Americans and Westerns claim, and the backward Arabs who refuse the development and progress offered to them by the Jews!” Rather, “the conflict between us and the Jews, Christians, and polytheists is eternal and will continue until God inherits the Earth and everything on it.”
Jihad was thus the only solution, victory was ordained, and once Muslim holy warriors defeated Israel, God would see to it that they subdued the entire world. Or so Islamists told one another in their isolated seaside redoubt. Needless to say, that is not what history had in store. The Hamas-PIJ military offensive on Oct. 7 led to a massive Israeli counter-attack that reduced broad portions of Gaza to rubble and dust while creating hellish conditions for millions of ordinary Palestinians whom both Islamist groups claim to represent.
Skare, a specialist in Palestinian history at the University of Oslo, paints a vivid portrait of Islamism’s ultra-reactionary rise and fall. He notes that Israel’s smashing victory in the Six Day War in 1967 demolished Arab nationalism as a credible political force while the overthrow of the shah a dozen years later seemed to create an alternative in the form of Islamic revolution. For growing numbers of Palestinian militants, the message was clear. Yasser Arafat and the PLO had surrendered to the phony Oslo “peace” process because they were corrupt. The Iranian mujahideen were successful because they were not. Therefore, Palestinian holy warriors should purify themselves and devote themselves to God so that victory would finally be achieved.
Skare argues that the break with secular nationalism was less clear-cut than many believe since “Palestinian nationalism was never of a republican type divorced from religion.” To the contrary, Fatah, the main component of the PLO,
“...was from its inception a conservative movement sensitive to religious feelings, and religiously laden concepts such as ‘jihad,’ ‘mujahidin,’ or ‘fida’iyyin’ featured heavily in Fatah’s declarations and manifestoes. Its leader, Yasser Arafat, often relied on references from the Quran and, occasionally, also provided oral teachings from the Hadith. Fatah’s youth movement was organized in separate structures for boys and girls in the 1970s, and its student movement organized events with religious content to commemorate dates on the Islamic calendar. Fatah never employed the term ‘secular’ in its public discourse, and Arafat openly dismissed the DFLP’s [Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s] idea of a ‘secular democratic state in Palestine.’”
Still, there is no doubt that Iranian events pushed politics in a new direction. This was true across the Middle East in general, but it was especially true in Gaza, which was already an ideological hothouse. Gaza is very different from the West Bank some 260 miles to the east. It is 15 times smaller, its population density is 11 times greater, while it was overwhelmed to a far greater extent by refugees fleeing the Nakba in 1948. It also came under the control of Egypt, which banned labor unions, political parties, and other local organizations, whereas the West Bank came under the control of the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan, which was more liberal and allowed Palestinians greater freedom to organize and engage in a degree of self-administration. “Because the Gaza Strip never experienced the same institutional development as in the West Bank,” Skare says, “the political culture there turned more confrontational and aggressive.” As a result, he adds, quoting the Israeli historian Avraham Sela, the various factions “consistently used violence rather than debate to mediate conflict and political action.”
Gaza was a sealed bottle filled with volatile gases waiting to explode. After the Israeli takeover in 1967, the Jewish state added to the combustibility by sowing the strip with a dense network of informers, collaborators, and “fifth columnists.” Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas commander killed in a clash with Israeli Defense Forces in October 2024, got his start some 40 years earlier by organizing a Hamas internal security force known as Majd whose purpose was to root out infiltrators and spies. As Sinwar himself recalled:
“The hunt for collaborators began spreading through the streets of the homeland where groups from all factions began tracking them down, arresting them or kidnapping them. ... Then, some of these groups would kill these collaborators and throw their corpses on garbage dumps or in public squares to spread fear and create deterrence. Occasionally, a collaborator was brought to a public square where people gathered. He was tied to an electricity pole and flogged, or his hand or leg was cut off. Sometimes he was shot.”
Majd also targeted “moral collaborators,” as al-Maqadma called them, who supposedly undermined resistance by introducing “nudity, adultery, bribery, drug and alcohol trafficking, as well as music bands.” Since liberation and purification were one and the same, activities like these were intolerable. With thousands of young men jobless due to a shrinking economy, violence and fanaticism had nowhere to go but up.
Skare paints a picture that is detailed and convincing. Nonetheless, it suffers from the narrowness typical of academic specialists. 1979, for example, was not just the year of the Iranian revolution. It was also the year that Afghanistan exploded in an Islamic fundamentalist revolt and Sunni militants seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, holding it for two weeks before being bloodily suppressed. The consequences were sweeping. The first convinced Washington that it now had “the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war” by pouring resources into the Afghan counter-revolution, to quote Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser.[1] The second persuaded a deeply-shaken House of Saud that it would have to take urgent measures to shore up its religious standing. The two goals ended up dove-tailing quite neatly since the Saudis not only spent billions to spread Wahhabism, an austere local form of Sunnism, throughout the Dar al-Islam, but they also spent billions financing religious warfare in Afghanistan in partnership with the US.
Skare has little to say about either country. He also has little to say about oil as well even though it’s what led the US to intervene in Afghanistan – the Americans were terrified that the Soviet takeover had placed them within striking distance of the Persian Gulf – and what enabled the House of Saud to finance its jihadist campaign. The result was not only the rise of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, both of which benefited from heavy Saudi support, but the introduction of yet another explosive element in Gaza. This was Saudi-style Salafism, a purity movement aimed at returning to the seventh-century austerity of Muhammad and his followers, which Skare says began making big inroads following the Hamas takeover of 2006.
A broad array of capitalist forces were thus bearing down on a parcel of land smaller than New York’s borough of Queens. Skare writes that the Salafist influx added to “a flourishing, yet loosely established ecology” composed of “militants, firebrand clerics, and media outlets ... [who] attacked symbols of ‘immorality and decadence’ in Gaza like internet cafés, video shops, Christian bookstores, hotels, and UNRWA.” Faced with stepped-up competition, Hamas responded with stepped up measures of its own, “imposing proper dress code, preventing gender-mixing, banning women from riding motorcycles, requiring female lawyers to wear hijab in court, preventing male hairdressers from working in women’s hair salons, and banning females from smoking water pipes.” The more the Islamist vise tightened, the less there was for Gazans to do other than pray and prepare for the next military adventure.
Then there was 9/11. The attack on the Twin Towers placed both Hamas and Islamic Jihad in a quandary. Desperate to distance themselves from Al-Qaeda in order to retain a degree of western support, they had to somehow explain why killing American civilians was impermissible while killing Israeli citizens was not. Writes Skare:
One way to reduce cognitive dissonance was by negating the status of Israeli non-combatants as civilians by analyzing Israeli society as a militarized outpost with no distinction between civilian and military.
Or as a senior PIJ member named Abdallah al-Shami put it:
“He who is not a soldier in combat zones is a reservist, whether man or woman. ... It is, then, a society of war. Its civilians are, moreover, even greater usurpers than its soldiers are. They usurped our homes, houses, and arable land after they displaced our people with the force of arms and with the threat of slaughter and massacre.’”
Hamas and PIJ were thus free to kill as many civilians they wished as long as they were Israelis. Skare says the groups trusted that suicide bombings would demoralize the Jewish state and send its citizens packing. But the opposite was the case:
National identity among Israeli Jews strengthened throughout the Second Intifada as Israeli public opinion was driven to the right, and the Israeli government received overwhelming support. More than 60 per cent of Israelis ‘consistently backed targeted assassinations’ of Palestinians as a means to stop suicide bombings, and, instead of dividing Israeli society, Palestinian armed factions manufactured an Israeli commitment to military escalation.
Attacking Israelis qua Israelis merely insured that Israelis would fight back on the same basis. Instead of undermining Israeli national unity, it strengthened it. To be sure, Israel dealt out plenty of nationalist reprisals of its own. But it was stronger, it had the unquestioned backing of US imperialism, and it was therefore in a position to inflict far greater damage. The more Hamas and PIJ mobilized their forces for war, the more they insured their own defeat.
Skare tells much of this story well, but he ends his book on a note that is distinctly unsatisfying:
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not commence with the foundation of Hamas, nor with the emergence of Palestinian Islamism. In the hypothetical absence of Hamas, other outlets of Palestinian nationalism will necessarily appear. Although external drivers will always influence preferred choices and tactics in the Palestinian resistance, whether opting for violence or non-violence, such nationalism will persist if these grievances remain unaddressed. And it will do so with or without the phenomenon to which we refer as Palestinian Islamism.
What’s the problem? Simply that Skare, unable to conceive of an alternative to bourgeois nationalism, can only imagine a future in which it reappears in new form. Oppression leads to renewed national or Islamic resistance, which leads to renewed defeat, which leads to renewed oppression and resistance, and so on. It’s a formula for a cycle of violence that will not end until it leads to “the common ruin of the contending classes” (to quote the Communist Manifesto). But Marxism sees it differently. Rather than endless national warfare, it sees a way out via proletarian internationalism in which Palestinians look to Israeli workers not as enemies to be killed or kidnapped, but as potential class allies. Admittedly, any such alliance seems exceedingly far-fetched at the moment. But the fact is that Palestinian and Israeli workers face forces that are far from dissimilar. Whether it’s Jewish zealots like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich or Islamic jihadists like Hamas and PIJ, the goal on both sides is the same: to impose ethno-religious supremacist regime that can only lead to militarism and dictatorship across the board. This is a fate that workers can avoid only by working together.
[1] The full
text of Brzezinski’s much-discussed 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur
is available at https://dgibbs.arizona.edu/content/brzezinski-interview-2.
