A new book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Road to October 7 - a brief history of Palestinian Islamism, by Erik Skare, shows how the seeds of the Gaza war were sown over decades.

In 2004, following Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, its 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. Skare’s insightful and richly detailed book, is therefore akin to seeing 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 16 years. Nearly 80% of its population of about 2.2 million people depended on aid and more than half of them were unemployed (70% for its youth population). According to the UN Relief and Works Agency, Israeli security forces had damaged or destroyed about 300 of Gaza’s water wells and more than 80% of the water extracted from the territory’s aquifers did not meet the World Health Organisation’s water quality standards.

By 2023, Skare writes, the majority of Gazans under 30 had never seen the world outside, and a 16-year-old would have experienced four wars and countless skirmishes, airstrikes and cross-border armed 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 from 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 the Hamas moderates had been in vain and there was no political or diplomatic solution.

Skare is a historian at the University of Oslo and has published extensively on Palestinian Islamism and the resistance against Israeli occupation. Armed movements, including Palestinian Islamist ones, he writes, reflect broader political and societal developments. So the emergence during the 1970s and 1980s of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad reflected a loss of faith in the Palestine Liberation Organisation, led by the quixotic Yasser Arafat and his Fatah party. It also pointed to what Skare terms the “de-secularisation” of the Israeli Palestinian conflict.

The majority of the founding fathers 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 a state that had displaced them from their original homes and taken everything from them? 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 possibly 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 upon Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. Skare also cites the example of Mahmud 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). Zahar’s stance changed dramatically after Israel tried to assassinate him in 2003 by dropping explosives on his house, killing his 20-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 74 of the 132 seats. Skare writes that Hamas moderates gambled that electoral participation “would underscore the movement’s democratic intentions and its acceptance of shared political norms”. They were demonstrably naïve; 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”. Skare writes that the so-called Quartet, made up of the UN, the US, the EU and Russia, aspired to weaken Hamas as a whole, but succeeded mainly in undermining the Hamas 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 as “an asset”. Skare says there is no evidence that “Hamas was the creation of Israeli intelligence”. That may be so, but it is a pity his book does not explore the Hamas-Israeli link in a bit 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 Palestine Liberation Organisation and the Fatah party. In 2009, Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told T_he Wall Street Journal_, “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”

Skare argues that Israel’s regular assassination of Palestinian leaders was “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.

First published by Inside Story on 11 September 2015