On October 7, Hamas’s invasion shocked Israel. While complaining that Israel’s blockade strangled Gazans, Hamas amassed over 20,000 rockets and built a maze of tunnels with 5,700 shafts, crisscrossing up to 450 miles in an area 25 miles long. One Hamas official, Mousa Abu Marzouk, told Russian TV that Hamas reserved the tunnels for Hamas fighters: “it is the responsibility of the United Nations” and “the occupying forces,” meaning Israel, to protect Gazans. This lethal, urbanized fortress mocked the peace President George W. Bush and the international community promised in 2005 – if only Israel withdrew completely from Gaza, which it did.

Gaza: A Short History

Human habitation in Gaza dates back millennia. In the Bible, Samson was imprisoned and died there. In Hebrew, Gaza is “Azzah” – “strong city.”

The Ottomans ruled Gaza from the 1500s until 1917 – with occasional interruptions, including Napoleon’s conquest of Gaza City in 1799. In 1920, following World War I, the League of Nations gave England a Mandate to rule Palestine, including the Gazan coastal strip. The League of Nations recognized “the historical connection of the jewish people with Palestine,” and encouraged “close settlement by Jews on the land.” A British census counted 72,095 Gazans – 98.41 percent Muslims.

A small number of Jews had lived in Gaza for centuries. But, as with the larger Jewish community of Hebron, that long, rich story ended with the Arabs’ 1929 massacres. On August 25, 1929, British police escorted Gaza’s Jews onto the train to Tel Aviv to save them. The British then banned Jews from Gaza to mollify Arab radicals.

Tensions grew as Zionism, the Jewish movement for national liberation rooted in core Jewish values, progressed. Zionism recognizes that Jews are a people as well as a religion, that Jews have deep, historical ties to their national homeland, and that Jews have the right to establish a state on that homeland. Before establishing the State of Israel in 1948, the Zionist movement focused both on building a New Jew – strong, proud, free – and establishing a Jewish-democratic state in the historic homeland. Today, Zionism is a movement to defend the Jewish state and the Jewish people when necessary – and to build, be rebuilt, and perfect Israel always.

As they built a Jewish state before 1948, Zionists defined the emerging border with settlements, not just lines on maps. Building a “stockade and watchtower” created facts on the ground – while helping the desert bloom. In 1946, Zionists established eleven southern settlements essentially overnight. One of these “11 points in the Negev,” Kfar Darom, was in Gaza. Other kibbutzim established that Yom Kippur night, 1946, include Be’eri and Nirim, which Gazans invaded on October 7.

The Talmud mentions a Kfar Darom from centuries ago. In 1930, Tuvia Miller purchased the site from Arabs to establish a fruit orchard. Miller sold the land to the Jewish National Fund, after the 1936 to 1939 Arab riots. Kfar Darom survived from 1946 to 1948, until the Egyptians besieged it.

On November 29, 1947, as the British prepared to withdraw, the League of Nations’ successor, the United Nations, proposed a compromise between the Palestinian Jews and the Palestinian Arabs who kept clashing. UN General Assembly Resolution 181 again recognized Jews’ right to their homeland in the Land of Israel – which the Romans renamed Palestine, to try stripping the Jews of their ties to the land. The resolution partitioned the land, incorporating the “Gaza Strip” into the “Independent Arab State” the UN proposed alongside a Jewish State.

Many Jews anguished over dividing their homeland and internationalizing their capital, Jerusalem. But, their future prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, insisted that half a loaf is better than none – especially after the Holocaust. Most Zionists accepted the compromise. Most Arab leaders rejected it. These radicals, spurred by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin-al-Husseini, squelched Arab moderates. Those Arab extremists left “Palestine Betrayed,” the historian Efraim Karsh argues.

The Arab rejection – and mass invasion when Israel declared its independence in May 1948 – invalidated the UN compromise. The CIA World Factbook notes: “Following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Egypt administered the newly formed Gaza Strip,” which Egypt carved out of the territory covered by the rejected partition plan.

Following the war, 160,000 Palestinian Arabs expanded Gaza’s population to about 240,000 inhabitants. Some fled the new state voluntarily – expecting to return triumphantly after the Jews lost. Some fled in fear. Some fled after being expelled. Similarly, on the West Bank of the Jordan River, in the biblical regions of Judea and Samaria, which Jordan seized, the population jumped from about 420,000 to 764,900.

The UN established UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, in December 1949. There were approximately 700,000 Palestinian Arab refugees – a small percentage of the millions of refugees World War II and its aftermath created. UNRWA was expected to help Palestinian Arabs resettle within three years, then disband.

Instead, UNRWA helped Palestinians resist resettling, while Arab governments refused to resettle them too. Palestinians became the first displaced people treating refugee status as hereditary. UNRWA grew increasingly anti-Israel. By 2020, UNRWA lesson plans included grammar exercises saying, “Jihad is one of the doors to Paradise,” with math exercises adding up terrorist martyrs. UNRWA schools and facilities hid terrorist bases. In January 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported that American intelligence estimated that at least ten percent of UNRWA’s 12,000 Gaza employees joined terrorist groups.

The IDF identified at least 14 UNRWA employees who rampaged on October 7. Israeli intelligence released audio recordings of Mamdouh al-Qali, an UNRWA teacher and Islamic Jihadist, boasting: “We have female hostages, I captured one!” In another recording, an UNRWA teacher and Hamas terrorist told a friend he captured a “sabaya,” an Islamic State Jihadist term for sex slaves. In January, 2024, these revelations finally prompted some Western countries to suspend their UNRWA funding.

Egypt mostly ruled Gaza from 1949 through 1967 – without international legitimacy. That leaves Israel the right to establish a buffer zone in that territory, because Jews still have rights to settle there under the British Mandate.

In 1967, following its Six Day War of self-defense against invading Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian armies, Israel seized Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. Egypt estimated Gaza’s population at 442,100 people. Some Israelis felt inspired by Kfar Darom’s Talmudic roots. Most were wary of the hostile population. Israel’s Prime Minister Levi Eshkol called Gaza “a bone stuck in our throats.”

The Egyptians didn’t want Gaza either. During the Camp David peace negotiations in 1978 between Israel and Egypt, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat demanded the Sinai back, without Gaza. The treaty left Gaza for the Palestinians and Israelis to manage… or fight over.

The Israel-Egypt treaty of 1979 established an 8.7-mile-long buffer zone for Israel’s military to patrol along the newly drawn Egyptian border. The IDF hoped this awkwardly nicknamed “Philadelphi Corridor,” would stop smuggling between Egypt and Gaza.

Israel ultimately built over 140 communities – called “settlements,” for security along the Jordanian border, out of religious excitement in returning to biblical Judea and Samaria, and for commuting ease, near Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Israel also established 21 settlements in Gaza – including reestablishing Kfar Darom.

Seventeen villages in Gaza’s southwest formed Gush Katif, Hebrew for Harvest Bloc. The Israeli government encouraged these communities hoping to establish a security presence in Gaza too.

Many Gazans worked with the Jews. Eventually, two hundred Gush Katif farmers generated exports of over $200 million annually, 15 percent of Israel’s agricultural exports. But Palestinians kept attacking these settlements. When an IDF truck driver accidentally ran over four Gazans in December 1987, Palestinians rioted. Known as the “Intifada,” the shaking off, in Arabic, this upheaval spread to the other territories. It lasted until 1991. The violence spawned a radical Islamist movement, inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, the Arabic acronym for “the Islamic Resistance Movement.”

Hamas’s founding charter vowed “to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine,” from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The preamble promises to “obliterate” Israel. Article 15 calls for Jihad, holy war, against the Jews. Article 11 affirms that “The land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf, holy possession” and “No one can renounce it or any part.” Hamas made the longtime terrorist and Palestine Liberation Organization leader, Yasir Arafat, look moderate. In 1993, Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Accords with Arafat, planning phased IDF withdrawals from Palestinian cities, amid a long-term peace process. The Accords established the Palestinian Authority (PA), led by Arafat. In May 1994, the PA began administering Gaza.

The Oslo years proved to be rocky politically and diplomatically. Israelis’ harsh debates about how to stay safe inspired one Oslo opponent to assassinate Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Israel’s government kept clashing with President Bill Clinton as he demanded more concessions. But Israeli anxiety only grew as the divisions within the Palestinian national movement proved ever more lethal – and Hamas terrorists started targeting Israeli civilians. Arafat’s PA was dictatorial and corrupt. As American diplomats pressured Arafat to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, Hamas gained popularity among Palestinians by attacking the PA and “the Jews.”

In July 2000, President Bill Clinton hosted Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David, the presidential retreat. Barak’s offer to Arafat was so sweeping, most Cabinet members dissolved Israel’s government in protest. But Arafat never even counter-offered. In his final White House visit, Arafat tried charming Clinton. “You are a great man,” Arafat said. “The hell I am,” Clinton recalls snapping. “I’m a colossal failure and you made me one.”

Clinton felt like a failure because the region was ablaze. The Palestinians had launched what they called the Second Intifada. Suicide bombers were blowing up buses and cafes throughout Israel. Eventually, terrorists killed over 1,000 Israelis. Hamas and Islamic Jihad kept attacking Gaza’s Jews. The Israelis often needed army escorts whenever they left their villages.

In March 2001, Ariel Sharon became prime minister. Sharon had long championed settling Gaza to defend Israel. By April 2002, after terrorists murdered 130 Israelis in a single month, Sharon counterattacked. Operation Defensive Shield succeeded militarily, eventually calming the daily assaults. But Sharon faced condemnations worldwide as a mass-murderer.

Sharon also worried about protecting 21 separate settlements in a sea of hostility. He considered disengaging from Gaza – withdrawing all Israelis, to separate Israel’s Gaza corridor from the Palestinians.

In 2004, President George W. Bush encouraged Prime Minister Sharon, writing: “Palestinians must undertake an immediate cessation of armed activity and all acts of violence against Israelis anywhere, and all official Palestinian institutions must end incitement against Israel.” Bush affirmed Israel’s “right to defend itself against terrorism.”  And the president vowed to launch an international effort “to build the capacity and will of Palestinian institutions to fight terrorism, dismantle terrorist organizations, and prevent the areas from which Israel has withdrawn from posing a threat.…”

In August 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza, dismantling all 21 Jewish communities, uprooting 8,500 Israelis. Israel was bitterly divided. The army had to dislodge Jews from their homes, destroy businesses, raze 38 synagogues, relocate 48 graves. Strategically, the fiercest debate surrounded the Philadelphi Corridor. That 8.7-mile boundary separating Gaza from Egypt would become a major flashpoint in 2024: Israel insisted it must reconquer it to stop the weapons flow to Gaza, but the world feared a humanitarian disaster in neighboring Rafah.

Sharon’s generals feared Palestinian smuggling from Egypt would make Gaza an armed camp. Tragically, 2005’s greatest doubters never imagined the Hamas buildup now menacing Israel.

Ariel Sharon overruled his advisers. He withdrew completely, to avoid the already-ahistorical accusation that Israel was “occupying” Gaza. Sharon gambled on a secured border, and worldwide applause.

Even before Hamas seized power in its 2007 coup, both hopes had vanished. As Gaza pounded Israel with rockets, cries of “occupation” and “blockade” continued. In October 2006, an International Herald Tribune reporter, Patrick Seale, mocked Israel’s fight against the Gazans’ Qassam rockets.  “These are highly irritating but largely ineffectual weapons,” he scoffed, ignoring Israelis’ trauma, while not acknowledging that America would never tolerate such assaults. Seale accused Israel’s Chief of Staff, Dan Halutz, of “making lurid statements to the effect that Hamas and other Palestinian groups have smuggled millions of dollars’ worth of weapons into Gaza from Egypt – including antitank and antiaircraft weapons as well as tons of explosives – and have built a whole underground city to store their arsenal.”

Halutz underestimated. Still, three new Gaza-related claims against Israel gained currency. First, Palestinians labeled Gaza “the world’s largest open-air prison”, belying its shopping malls, its mansions, its border with Egypt, its seashore which could have made Gaza a Middle Eastern Riviera. Second, reporters sitting in skyscrapered jungles like Manhattan, with a population density of 73,000 residents per square mile, labeled Gaza, with its 14,000 people per square mile, “one of the most densely populated places on earth.” Gaza’s population density parallels London’s – above ground, without taking into account Hamas’s vast tunnel network.

Finally, whenever Israel defended itself, critics cried “genocide”, which means the mass targeted destruction of a people. Yet Gaza’s population almost doubled between 2000 and 2024, while the young age average of Palestinians in all the territories – under 20, suggested many more births than deaths.

Hamas pummeled the PA. In January 2006, Hamas won 42.6 percent of the votes in the Palestinian parliamentary elections. These “elections” occurred without free speech, civil society institutions, or basic civil liberties for anyone under Palestinian rule.

In June 2006, Hamas terrorists breached Israel’s borders via tunnels, killing two soldiers, wounding two, and kidnapping another, Gilad Shalit. Five years later, Israel released 1,027 Palestinian prisoners to free Shalit. Collectively, these prisoners had killed at least 569 Israelis. Many of these terrorists helped plan the October 7 assault, including Hamas’s most notorious military leader, Yahya Sinwar.

In June 2007, Hamas violently seized control of Gaza, effectively seceding from the PA.

With Hamas ruthlessly crushing dissidents and outsiders, the international community nevertheless pressured Israel to adjust. After becoming prime minister again in 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu asserted that encouraging Hamas rule in Gaza would weaken the PA and minimize international pressure for a Palestinian state.

Israeli peaceniks and most Western diplomats insisted that Israeli moderation would encourage Hamas’s pragmatism. Robert Malley, a Democratic foreign policy guru, claimed in 2006 that “Hamas wants the ability to govern.” Malley often led the chorus demanding Israel “cease fire” whenever it defended itself.

Meanwhile, Hamas built military bases under hospitals, amassed weapons in mosques and kindergartens, and masked its war preparations behind ambulances, UN workers, and UNRWA facilities. And it indoctrinated Gazans, from childhood, to hate “the Jews.” Such totalitarian terrorism flourished, especially after Israel withdrew. Israel wavered, imposing a blockade to stop the arms flow, while allowing humanitarian materials – fuel, food, international aid, and Qatari cash into Gaza – which Hamas commandeered. Periodically, tensions erupted into mini wars. Israeli authorities called these clashes “mowing the lawn,” assuming that periodic military pushback would constrain an increasingly “pragmatic” Hamas.

This Israeli doctrine developed under insistent calls for Israeli “ceasefires,” whenever it tried dismantling Hamas’ infrastructure – especially in 2008-2009, 2012, 2014, and 2021. Even after October 7, few American policymakers acknowledged their role in this cycle. By contrast, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did take responsibility. She admitted in November: “Remember there was a ceasefire on October 6 that Hamas broke by their barbaric assault on peaceful civilians…. Hamas has consistently broken ceasefires over a number of years.”

Israel also succumbed to international pressure – and assumptions of reasonableness – by allowing more Gazans to work in neighboring kibbutzim and villages. From 2021 to 2023, the number of work permits jumped from 7,000 to 17,000. Some of these Gazans helped plan the assault and participated zestfully. And despite its blockade, and the open secret that Hamas was stealing resources, an average of 425 trucks and 20 fuel tankers entered Gaza from Israel daily.

Hamas’s Ali Barak boasted to Russia Today TV on October 8, as translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI): “We made them think that Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians [there]. All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack…. The thing any Palestinian desires the most is to be martyred for the sake of Allah, defending his land.” Ali Barak continued: “We have been preparing for this for two years. We have local factories for everything. We have rockets with ranges of 250 kilometers, 160 kilometers, 80 kilometers, 45 kilometers and 10 kilometers.”

Today, many Israelis bitterly realize that, just as many Palestinians exploited the Oslo Peace Process to arm themselves in the West Bank, Gaza’s terrorist groups exploited the disengagement to threaten Israel. Americans must examine the West’s “conceptzia” too. After 18 years of shouting “occupation” and “blockade,” critics acknowledge that, somehow, Hamas dominated Gaza. Detailing the tunnels serving as “bunkers” and “command centers,” the New York Times reported that Hamas’s underground “maze” extends “across most if not all of Gaza, the territory they control.” Being “occupied” while controlling territory is as logical as being “blockaded” while importing tons of armaments.