Ivy grows on barbed wire surrounding Kibutz Beeri near the border with Gaza. Photo by Getty Images

Editor-in-Chief Jodi Rudoren October 25, 2023

My husband’s favorite question is: “What if?” He’s an architect, comedy writer and improviser, so his “What ifs” tend to be about creativity. What if we looked at this upside down? What if we flipped the couch and the TV? What if we put these four people who’ve never met at the same table at the wedding?

Over the last 18 days, sandwiched between my sorrow and anger, I’ve been thinking: “What if Hamas broke through that wall from Gaza into Israel but didn’t kill or kidnap anyone?”

I know. Hateful terrorists massacred 1,400 people in a brutal attack. They beheaded babies, raped women, burned families in their homes, filmed one grandmother’s murder and posted it to her own Facebook page, slaughtered young people at a music festival devoted to peace and abducted more than 200 innocent souls, including some who rely on wheelchairs — or baby strollers. 

Bear with me. What if they’d breached the fence that everyone thought was impenetrable — and rushed toward the nearby kibbutzim carrying only Palestinian flags? 

What if instead of 3,000 armed militants they’d brought 30,000 peaceful protesters, or 300,000? What if they filled the agricultural fields of southern Israel and formed human chains across its highways? What if instead of sneaking into the army bases and eliminating young soldiers asleep in their underwear, they surrounded those army bases holding “Free Palestine” banners?

What if instead of terror, instead of barbarism, instead of inhumane violence, Hamas had deployed non-violent resistance? If this were about occupation and not antisemitism, why not fill the land with Palestinians, plant a thousand or a million flags, sit in, lie down, occupy it yourself? 

I’ve been thinking about this as I’ve read the Cornell professor’s apology for saying he was “exhilarated” to see Hamas invade Israel. “Hamas has shifted the balance of power,” the professor, Russell Rickford, had exulted at an Oct. 15 rally on campus. “Hamas has punctured the illusion of invincibility.”

I’d heard Arielle Angel, the editor of Jewish Currents, say something similar at a Stanford University talk we did together Oct. 11. She said she understood why Palestinians who had suffered for years under Israel’s thumb, and their American allies, would celebrate images of Hamas breaching the fence as a moment of triumphant liberation. She also said she thought many who’d done so regretted it after learning of the slaughter that followed — I would like to hear more of them say so.

I get it — sort of. I have interviewed scores of people in Gaza with heart-rending stories of how Israel’s control of travel and trade suffocates them. There was the young bride from the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis prohibited from going to the West Bank for her own wedding. The marathon runners prevented from competing in Bethlehem. People who forged doctor’s notes because that was the only reliable way to get out of Gaza.  

There is the daily struggle of fuel supplies being severely restricted — even during the relative calm between wars with Israel — so electricity is available only certain hours each day.

“I don’t know if you can imagine the situation in darkness,” Andalib Adwan Shehada, a Gaza feminist who described life there as a “psychological siege,” told me in 2012. “It’s very, very difficult to just sit and wait for the electricity to come. It’s very difficult to walk on the streets while the generators are running. I cannot breathe from the pollution. I cannot hear the person walking with me.”

I understand the yearning for freedom. I do not understand vengeful, heinous, serial assassination of innocents. 

Angel, the Jewish Currents editor, also told our Stanford audience she thought the attack was “inevitable” given Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. This stunned me — to paint such horrific atrocities as an “inevitable” response to anything seemed inhumane in its own right. Inevitable that there would be a response, sure. But not like this. Not with pure terrorism.

Palestinian non-violent resistance predates the establishment of the state of Israel: There were protests against the Ottomans and during the British Mandate, most notably a six-month general strike in 1936. It took root when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 and, importantly, was the defining characteristic of the First Intifada, or uprising, that began in 1987.

Led by unions, student groups, women’s committees and political parties, Palestinians engaged in economic boycotts of Israel, work stoppages, refusal to pay taxes and other acts of civil disobedience. In many cases, Israelis responded with violence: Jean-Pierre Filiu’s 2016 book on Gaza says that in Gaza alone, 77 resisters were fatally shot and 37 died from inhaling tear gas during the uprising’s first year, while no Israelis were killed. 

More recently, in 2018 and 2019, thousands of Gazans protested at five points along the border fence with Israel every Friday for more than a year. Some rushed the fence, burned tires, hurled rocks or sent flaming kites toward the Israeli soldiers on the other side of the fence, but most stood peacefully, or huddled in prayer tents. Israeli forces killed more than 200 of those who approached the fence over numerous weeks. 

“What if?” is a question pollsters ask all the time. What if the election were today, who would you pick? 

I’ve seen a lot of news outlets cite the latest survey from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, conducted in September, to show that a majority of Palestinians, especially in Gaza, support Hamas. Which it sort of does. 

The polls said 56% of Palestinians (and 65% of Gaza residents) would vote for Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, over President Mahmoud Abbas of the rival Fatah faction, in hypothetical presidential elections. It also says that only 46% would vote in such an election.

What if there were other candidates in the mix? Well, when asked about a matchup between Haniyeh and Marwan Barghouti — a rival to Abbas within the Fatah movement, who has been imprisoned in Israel for two decades — the results flipped. Barghouti would beat the Hamas candidate, Haniyeh, 57% to 38% (and the percentage who would participate would also jump to 61%). 

Barghouti is not exactly Gandhi. He was a leader of Tanzim, Fatah’s paramilitary wing, and Israel convicted him of involvement in the murders of at least four civilians. He was a leader of the violent Second Intifada, or uprising, and Israel considers him a terrorist, too. 

But Barghouti was also a leader of mass non-violent uprisings in the occupied West Bank during the First Intifada. He was a strong supporter of the peace process and the Oslo Accords, and while he has clearly supported armed resistance to the occupation, he has also said that he opposes “attacks and the targeting of civilians inside Israel, our future neighbor.”

What if there’d been a candidate in that poll who was fully committed to non-violence? 

What if Israel was not right now bombarding Gaza with retaliatory strikes but struggling to control an endless wave of thousands upon thousands of civilians with their hands up, walking through that fence and stating their case? What if Palestinians tested Israeli discipline and resolve and humanity rather than wiping it out?

What if?

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