Why did October 7 happen?

The Problem: Hamas’ waning support

Hamas has expressed a number of motives for planning and executing the October 7 massacre.

Revitalize Arab support for Hamas: For a number of years their Arab allies had been losing their patience with Palestinian intransigence after repeatedly rejecting offers of statehood multiple times, Over the years, Israel was becoming an economic force in the Middle East and Iran was expanding its regional influence, building a bridge of vassal states toward the Mediterranean. Improving relations with Israel would help these Arab states counter Iran’s influence and provide an opportunity for economic betterment through trade with Israel. The Abrahamic Accords gave tangible evidence that such talk had evolved into action.

Revitalize Western support for Hamas: The Russo-Ukrainian War had not only diverted the West’s attention but also diverted much of their appetite for financially supporting the Palestinians as the need to re-arm grew to meet the Russian threat.

Revitalize domestic support Hamas: Hamas like all authoritarian regimes maintains its control through intimidation and repression. Despite receiving considerable foreign aid, it diverts most of it to the prosecution of its winner-takes all, fight to the death war and into its leader’s private bank accounts. Hamas’ cruelty and deteriorating living standards meant growing public dissastisfaction.

The Solution: To start a war and survive.

To rebuild support it must win hearts and minds.

To win hearts and minds, it must build an effective propaganda campaign from a one-off attack on a scale that makes it impossible for Israel not to ignore it.

In developing an attack to solve these problems, Hamas does not need to win a conventional military victory. A conventional military victory is beyond its reach anyway.

All it needs to do is to survive to win.

Just in case the killings were not sufficient, Hamas instructed its people to record their acts and post them widely on social media.

The extensive 500-700 km of tunnels and its human shields tactic would ensure its survival.

Unlike Hamas’ attack which was over in a day or two, the tunnels would ensure Israel’s campaign would be comparatively long and arduous.

This dynamic leans into the nature of the news cycle where audiences have relatively short memories and great sympathy for underdogs and the downtrodden.

The wokes would then pick up the underdog story and amplify it.

The enduring nature of any Israeli campaign and the inevitable civilian casualties that urban warfare brings would produce more than enough nightly images of wounded, dying and dead children.

These nightly images would serve to spark, fuel and reinforce the horror and anger that Western audiences will inevitably feel over Israel’s perceived cruelty.

Teams of Hamas operatives were charged with taking photographs of wounded, dying and dead children and making them available to “accredited” Gazan photo-journalists contracted to mainstream media outlets such as CNN, BBC and Aljazeera.

Indeed, the greatest risk Hamas faced was the chance that not enough victims would be killed on October 7 to incite a war.

Hamas’ propaganda campaign looks to build the following key idea:

That Israel is callously killing civilians out of homicidal revenge on a scale that minimizes the October 7 attack.

Key ideas to support this base idea includes:

“Israel is fighting a war on children”

“Israel is callously victimizing innocent Gazan civilians through horrendous collateral damage and withholding humanitarian aid causing famine.”

“Israel has stolen our land.”

“All Jews are white settler colonialists.”

Thousands of Western citizens are being convinced that Hamas’ messaging is credible.

That credibility is built on public trust in Western media.

Unfortunately, Western mainstream media often do not inform their audiences that much of the information they present has not been independently verified and quote information supplied by the Gaza Ministry of Health without question.

So far (May 2024), Hamas’ propaganda campaign has been remarkably successful. Thousands have marched in support of Gaza’s “innocent” citizens, and in so doing fall into Hamas’ trap.

In so doing, they knowingly and unknowingly side with and enable perpetrators of tyranny, mutilation, rape, torture and massacres of innocent civilians to prolong their religious mission to destroy all Jews.