Mousa Abu Marzouk is a longstanding member of Hamas leadership. He doesn’t exactly lead from the front: he’s based in Qatar while Palestinians in Gaza face the consequences of his movement’s bloodlust. But he said something last month that gave me déjà vu.
Unlike some of his colleagues, who have said they would repeat Oct. 7 again and again (and for what it’s worth, I think we should believe them), Abu Marzouk told the New York Times that had he known what the ramifications of Oct. 7 would be, he wouldn’t have supported the attack. “If it was expected that what happened would happen, there wouldn’t have been Oct. 7,” he said.
This isn’t the first time someone in the Arab world has attacked Israel, brought horrifying consequences upon their people, and then expressed regret. After the 2006 Lebanon War, which started when Hezbollah invaded Israel, killed eight soldiers and captured two, its leader, Hassan Nasrallah told Lebanese TV “We did not think, even 1%, that the capture would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. If I had known… that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.”
Not that Nasrallah learned from his mistake. Hezbollah’s response to Oct. 7 was to rain down thousands of missiles on Israel before facing terrible consequences itself. This time, it wasn’t just the Lebanese people who suffered: Nasrallah’s funeral was a couple of weeks ago.
For decades, Arab and Palestinian leaders have made the same mistake: attack Israel with dire consequences, regret it, only to repeat that mistake and attack Israel again a few years later. Egypt and Jordan have been notable exceptions. When it comes to the Palestinians, terror has been less a consequence of their circumstances than their circumstances have been a consequence of their terror.
Abu Marzouk’s comments recall the origin of the word Nakba itself: the Arabic word for “catastrophe.” First coined by the Syrian historian, Constantin Zureiq, the term is now weaponized against Israel, but in Zureiq’s 1948 short book, “Ma’na al-Nakba” (“The Meaning of the Catastrophe”), he says the defeat of Arab nations was entirely self-inflicted. One mistake, he argues, was underestimating the strength of their enemy.
In the 1960s, the Palestinian cause was adopted by the Soviets. The KGB developed anti-Zionist propaganda that lingers to this day, creating the contemporary meaning for the word Nakba, which reflects a refusal to accept the permanence of Israel’s existence. It insists that those self-inflicted wounds of 1948, and all those since, will one day be triumphantly overturned through one final attack. The result is that every year, the Palestinian reality gets grimmer.
Why for example, 77 years later, are Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza and elsewhere in the region still called refugees? I’m not talking about those suffering from the current war Hamas imposed on them. But why are permanent towns in Palestinian territories still called “refugee camps”?
The assumption is: Israel is temporary, and we are therefore refugees until its destruction. But that assumption has not destroyed Israel. It has merely held back the Palestinians. In 2025, the path to prosperity and progress for Palestinians will not be paved by fantasies of undoing the outcome of the war of 1948, yet another war that Israel did not start but had to win.
Time and again, the Palestinians have been sacrificed by their leaders in self-created Nakbas, and their fake friends keep cheering, consciously or subconsciously influenced by both old Soviet propaganda and age-old tropes of theological antisemitism. But none of that does any good for the Palestinians themselves.
The so-called “resistance” movement has failed. Israel and Jews around the world suffer as well, as antisemitism surges to record levels. But no one suffers more for these self-inflicted catastrophes than Palestinians themselves.
And in 2023, just as the prospect of a regional peace deal building on the Abraham Accords looked within reach, Hamas, backed by Iran, carried out the biggest slaughter of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust. The consequences of that were predictable.
What is clear is that attacking Israel and seeking its destruction has not brought a single tangible gain for Palestinians, only self-inflicted Nakbas. Those in the West who support the Palestinians need to stop cheering on self-inflicted destruction and get real. Israel is not going anywhere. Attacking it has only made Palestinian reality worse with every passing year.
Tishby is a two-time New York Times best-selling author and served as Israel’s first-ever Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism and Delegitimization.