Q&A: 'What happened in Israel on October 7 was a slave revolt'

Palestinians had never before launched such an assault on Israel - Hamas fighters crossed the border fence on foot, flew across on paragliders and used speedboats to target Israeli settlements and soldiers. It surprised Tel Aviv and defence analysts around the world.

The assault also had an impact on the renowned American political scientist and activist Norman Finkelstein, who’s spent much of his life researching and writing on Palestinian-Israeli relations.

He recently spoke with TRT World about his reaction, what Palestinians living in Gaza – under a 17-year-long illegal Israeli blockade – have been going through that precipitated the Hamas attack and how it squares with other historical moments that, depending on who you ask, are seen as heroic or threatening.

Finkelstein also opens up about why he, perhaps like others discouraged by Israel’s oppressive military might, lost confidence in a future for Palestine and how recent events have drastically altered that perception.

Here’s a transcript of his interview with TRT World.

TRT World: What was your initial reaction on hearing the news about the Hamas operation this past weekend?

Normal Finkelstein: Well, like everybody else, I was very surprised and still can't make sense of many aspects of it. I would say I'm trying to digest it, not at the political level of the regional ramifications or what was Hamas’ calculation. I'm trying to digest it in terms of the sheer human ingenuity of the people of Palestine – in this case Gaza, because it's among the most densely populated places on earth. It’s also tiny and subject to the most intense surveillance on earth. How could they [Palestinians] have managed to, first, assemble this operation and then conceal it? It’s totally bewildering. I mean, Israel has so many collaborators in Gaza. How could all of this have been hidden? Leaving aside distinctions that don't interest me at all – between signal intelligence, human intelligence, and so forth – Israel has supposedly the most sophisticated intelligence in its region, maybe in the world. Add to that the huge number of Palestinian Authority loyalists in Gaza, that within the territory everyone’s walking in each other's way, everybody is related to everybody. How [the uprising] wasn’t nipped in the bud is a real enigma.

TRT World: Comparison was made between the Hamas operation and the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

NF: I think the operation is rather different from 73. [Former Egyptian army officer and president] Anwar Sadat was saying from 1972, I'm going to attack Israel. And King Hussein [of Jordan] went to Israel to tell them that Syria and Egypt were going to attack. But the Israel response was dismissive, reflecting a deeply entrenched anti-Palestinian racism. They were of the view that “Arabs don't have a war option”. They couldn't imagine Palestinians engaging in warfare because they saw them as too “primitive”.

TRT World: How much is Israel to be blamed for the death and destruction caused by Hamas on October 7th?

NF: There are certainly possibilities that if Israel had allowed the results of the Palestinian elections of January 2006, allowed them to unfold, and not sealed off Gaza [from the rest of the world] because the elections showed popular support for Hamas, there would have been a normal – more or less – election cycle. Remember [former American president] Jimmy Carter called the elections completely fair and free, right? If Hamas proved to be a hindrance to the good life of the Palestinians they could have eventually voted the party out of power, as happens or should happen in any democratic society.

But that process was never allowed to happen. I can't predict what would have happened after the elections but what was pretty certain was that Israel’s sealing off Gaza, imposing a blockade on it, would create in the hearts and minds of Gazans a deep hatred of Israelis.

I could just imagine, speaking for myself, that if I were in a concentration camp like Gaza – and most of these folks, the Hamas militants in their 20s, were raised in that – I’d feel caged. Since Israel implemented the blockade [17 years ago], 99 percent of the people of Gaza have never left the territory. They've been trapped in that densely-populated hell hole – five miles wide, 25 miles long. Nobody's allowed in, nobody's allowed out. They've been trapped there for their whole lives. And as we saw on the weekend, when some of them break out of this hellhole, they see who they view as their incarcerators dancing at a music festival; they're celebrating a holiday. I can imagine feelings of desperate hatred overwhelming me. I can't say I wouldn’t be shocked.

TRT World: Many are describing the operation as an “attack” on Israel. What’s your take on that?

NF: In recent days I've been characterising what happened as a slave revolt. As a factual matter, it’s inaccurate to describe Israel under attack by a foreign entity or a foreign state, which is how Netanyahu has described it. Gaza is part of Israel. It's been annexed, as is the West Bank including East Jerusalem. They are integral parts of Israel, as a technical matter of law. Likewise, the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, two or three years ago now, said there is one state – from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, ruled by or built on a foundation of Jewish supremacy. So I think the closest analogy to what started in Gaza is a slave revolt.

We can draw parallels here with events of American history, like Nat Turner's revolt – something I’m reading about right now. It's the most famous of American slave revolts. They [former American slaves] killed a lot of white people, civilians in a rampage. And Turner is celebrated in American history. As a journalist you may want to interview others opposing Hamas or Palestinians more generally and ask whether they would condemn Turner. I’d be interested to know what they say. I'm not happy with what happened, terrible things occurred in those revolts, but I won't condemn it.

Turner by the way was religious, a fanatic just like Hamas. Similarly, slavery abolitionist John Brown imagined himself the instrument of God's will, and he had that crazed look in his eyes. And guess what? He's among the most honored figures in American history. In fact, he's probably one of the only figures after whom a song was written, “John Brown's Body”. And that was sung by the Union Army troops during the Civil War: “John Brown's body lies a-moldering in the grave…”

TRT World: You’ve referred in this interview and elsewhere to Gaza as a “concentration camp”. Some might take exception to that?

NF: Well, we need to start off with the important distinction between concentration camps and death camps. Some of the concentration camps in the Holocaust were both concentration camps and death camps, for example Auschwitz and Majdanek. But then there were separate camps like Treblinka and Chelmno – they were strictly death camps. In the case of Gaza, however, the distinction is collapsing. Israel has announced that it will not allow any food, water, fuel into the occupied territory.

Use your own rational faculty: if for a protracted period of time, maybe running into months – similar to the last major Israeli assault on Gaza, Operation Protective Edge that lasted 51 days in 2014 – you withhold those essentials to life from a population, what do you have? Genocide. It’s no secret. Israel is broadcasting its plans. It's not as if we have to tease them out. No, they've said it very clearly and that they want to decimate Gaza.

TRT World: You had for a time “given up” on their being any hope for Palestine. Has anything changed for you?

NF: Last Saturday morning.

Yes, I had given up. And I was not happy with that. I was held, taken to account for it by many Palestinians. But I was at a loss of what to do.

I'm nearly 70 years old. I invested the whole of my adult life into this [the Palestinian struggle for justice], though I reached a point where I believed these people [Palestinians] are just going to die, they're going to go the way of the American Indians. And there was nothing to be done. Saturday obviously changed my mind. I could never have anticipated that.

TRT World: What does the future hold for Palestine and Israel?

NF: Not enough time has passed since Saturday for me to have any clear idea. My guess is, judging from past Israeli operations, as they're called, Israel usually bombs Gaza for about a week until it has exhausted all of its targets, including civilian targets. If the Hamas rockets persist, then Israel usually launches a ground invasion in order to stop the so-called “rocket attacks”. Given how unprecedented the current moment is, I can’t say with much confidence if the Israeli cabinet has decided whether it's going to attempt to occupy Gaza. Since Saturday, Israel has talked about dismantling Hamas, but that’s nothing new. They've talked about that in the past as well.

In a way things are quite simple.

Israelis – I'm not saying this positively or negatively, just factually – like to live. They do not want to die in Gaza, and so they do not want to launch a ground invasion. Once the Israeli troops enter Gaza, the 2.1 million of its inhabitants will do everything in their power – as a unified force – to exact their revenge on their persecutors.

Likewise, the Israelis who like nightclubs, who like vacationing, who like the “good life”, won’t want to enter Gaza because a lot of them know they won't return. Hamas militants, on the other hand, who’ve been trapped in Gaza so long don’t fear dying.

They’ve got nothing to lose.