Did Oct. 7 Transform the Middle East?

On Monday, the world marked one year since Hamas inflicted the worst attack on Israel since its founding. But amid remembrances for those who died on Oct. 7, 2023, there is growing concern about Israel’s retaliations in Gaza and Lebanon, the rising death toll in those places, and the possibility of an even bigger conflict against Iran.

One year on, where do things stand, and where are they headed? I spoke with Aaron David Miller to reflect on changes in the Middle East since Oct. 7. Miller is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and previously served in the U.S. State Department, where he advised several Republican and Democratic administrations on the Middle East. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or listen to the free podcast. What follows here is a condensed and edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: On the one hand, today marks a year since Hamas’s attack on Israel and the massive trauma of that. On the other hand, it also marks the start of a new trauma for large populations in Gaza and Lebanon. Personally, I’ve been struck over the last year by how it is difficult for so many people to reflect the pain on each side, to show empathy, to humanize these traumas. To some degree, the mix of protests and memorials around the world right now reflects the spectrum of this reality. So before we really get into specifics, I wanted to give you an opportunity to open with your reflections one year on from Oct. 7.

Aaron David Miller: I’ll never forget—I was woken by CNN on Oct. 7. And since that moment, I’ve tried to default to the position of analyst. I’ve also tried to hold in my head and in my heart the suffering, pain, and trauma of Hamas’s terror surge on Oct. 7 and the Israeli response to the degree that is humanly possible for someone who is not an Israeli and not a Palestinian. My critics may disagree with that. I don’t play an Israeli or Palestinian on TV.

Both working on these issues and now trying to analyze them, I’ve long tried to understand that people have two choices. You can make a judgment that you’re going to root for one side or the other. Or you can acknowledge the reality that this conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s definition of a tragedy. It’s two competing justices. It will be resolved or won’t be resolved based on leaders who are prepared to recognize that each side has mutual needs and requirements which need to be satisfied.

I’d also offer my judgment that there is no objectivity on this conflict. We are all sum totals of our experiences, of our backgrounds, of our sensitivities, of our sensibilities, and of our prejudices. What is a prejudice? It’s a prejudgment. I would argue that the best you can do is make allowances for the prejudgments that you have, set them aside in an effort to try to understand the narratives and the motivations of Palestinians and of Israelis.

This is critically important if we are going to ever have a chance, , to resolve and to work toward what I call a conflict-ending solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

RA: You’ve written several essays for Foreign Policy in the last year, and one of them challenges the conventional wisdom that Oct. 7 changed everything in the Middle East. The case for that conventional wisdom is well known: an unprecedented attack on Israel, a regional war, direct attacks by Israel and Iran against each other. So, what is the case against? Why do you think the new Middle East, however it emerges, will look like the old one?

ADM: I’ve become less of a believer in transformations. Oct. 7 had historic and violent and bloody firsts that went beyond anything we’ve experienced. The Israeli response went far beyond the Nakba or the Naksa—the setback—of 1967. You have the beginning phases of what Amos Harel called the first Israel-Iranian war, which in itself is extraordinary.

When I look at this corner of the Middle East, I see the three conflicts that continue to persist: Israel versus Hamas, Israel versus Hezbollah, Israel versus Iran. None of the problems in this region pertaining to Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Israel have been resolved. Resolution seems to be further away than ever before.

Every breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli conflict (with the exception of the Abraham Accords, which belong in a different category outside of conflict zone agreements) was preceded by terror, insurgency, and war. The 1973 war ultimately laid the groundwork for two disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt, which paved the way for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s peace initiative with Israel. The 1991 Madrid peace conference was preceded by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. And the Oslo Accords, which now lie broken, were preceded by the First Intifada as well as Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s calculation that, in fact, there was an opening here for at least the beginning of an Israeli-Palestinian process of negotiation.

It’s clear that the [past year’s] traumas, which went far beyond any of these, will produce pain. But the status quo changes when pain is married to gain. I think it’s morally unconscionable to say that there will never be a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I occupy a tiny space on the planet for a very short period of time. I wouldn’t say never.

But I think the space for Israelis and Palestinians has narrowed to almost an optical zero now. And the takeaway here is going to be quite clear: Israelis and Palestinians are going to say to one another, “You know, the problem is not that we don’t understand one another. The problem is that we understand one another only too well.”

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RA: But there is another element of change here, and that is how Israel is perceived around the world. There’s also the element of how the United States is perceived around the world and the blow to its soft power for supporting Israel this past year. It has faced accusations of double standards in how it perceives what’s going on in the Middle East versus, say, the war in Ukraine. How are you looking at that aspect of this?

ADM: The international response to Oct. 7 and, very quickly, to Israel’s prosecution of war has created a situation that Israel has never experienced before.

Will the Israeli brand recover? Will Israel be now forever identified as an outlier in the international community, a pariah among nations? But while Oct. 7 and the Israeli prosecution of the war reached a new level, is that a headline, Ravi, or is it a trend line? I’m not sure I can answer that question.

I could speak more authoritatively on the U.S.-Israeli relationship. The question I get asked most frequently is why the Biden administration has been reluctant and/or refused to impose a single cost on Israel that normal humans would regard as sustained pressure. The takeaway is that the U.S.-Israeli operating system continues to operate normally.

Below that, there are three critical elements for a nation to be an ally of the United States without treaty obligations, and we have no treaty obligation with the Israelis. One is a high coincidence of values. A second is a high coincidence of interest. And the third is a broad and sustainable basis of domestic support. As vibrant as the U.S.-Israeli operating system is, these three fundamentals are more fraught, more at risk, and under more stress than at any time in the 40 or 50 years that I’ve been interested in and worked on this conflict.

I am an advocate of a strong U.S.-Israeli relationship that is special but not exclusive. It is when the U.S.-Israeli relationship becomes exclusive that we cannot use it to the benefit of the Israelis, American interests, and Israel’s peace partners.

I think generational changes are afoot. I see it in my own kids and ask, is that a headline or is it a trend line? That remains to be determined.

RA: Aaron, in an FP piece about the impact that the Biden administration has on Israel, you admit that the White House has leverage. But there’s another component, and that is Biden’s own very deep emotional commitment to Israel. I think you called him a “preternaturally pro-Israeli” president. So, could a different president have done more? How would you contrast Biden with a hypothetical President Kamala Harris on this issue?

ADM: It’s a fascinating question. Having spent a fair amount of time in Washington around Republican and Democratic administrations, there’s a notion that foreign policy is based purely on what you and I might describe as the American national interest and shouldn’t be polluted or contaminated by domestic politics.

The reality is that the sensibility, sensitivities, and prejudgments that a president brings to the office are so important to the way that the policy is conceived and ultimately formulated. Biden’s love affair with the idea of Israel, the security of Israel, the people of Israel, is apart from the Netanyahu government.

Biden began to understand midway that he was no longer dealing with the risk-averse Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He’s dealing with that risk-ready Netanyahu, whose desire to be in power politics, the drive to remain prime minister, exceeds any other Israeli politician on the scene today. His capacity to do most anything to remain in power, with the constituency being not the United States, certainly not the international community, not the hostages or the hostages’ families, not the 500,000 Israelis on the streets, but the 68 [seat majority of his coalition government].

Biden ultimately understood this, but it was not within his capacity to draw from the three sorts of pressure points that he could have used. He could have restricted or conditioned U.S. military assistance to Israel. He didn’t do that. He could have introduced a series of U.N. Security Council resolutions critical of Israel or voted for someone else’s. He didn’t do that. He could have joined the 140 or so nations, including the Spanish, the Irish, and the Norwegians, in unilaterally recognizing a Palestinian state.

Or he could have abandoned the whole mechanism that they tethered themselves to of an Israeli-Hamas cease-fire to de-escalate in favor of a call for the cessation of hostilities. He didn’t do that. Frankly, we gave Biden the test that he could not possibly have passed.

I would only point out one other thing. We do not leverage or pressure our allies. I cannot identify a single case in recent years, when a U.S. ally believed that the stakes of the struggle were politically existential or a national security risk, that the United States brought sustained and serious pressure on its ally.

We’re less than 30 days away from one of the most consequential elections in modern U.S. history, and people are still asking me, “Why doesn’t the United States stop this? Why doesn’t the United States suspend its military assistance to Israel now that it’s expanded its campaign to Lebanon?” And I just don’t know where to begin to answer this question because I’ve answered it so many times and it seems so foundational if you look at the way we are constructed.

RA: What would a President Harris do differently? How much do we know about what her views are on Israel and Palestine? And if you have a President Donald Trump three months from now, how does that change things? You said the United States has never effectively pressured its allies, but Trump did exactly that, if you look at the pressure he put on NATO by threatening to pull out. He adds a layer of unpredictability that could upend much of what you’re describing.

ADM: Well, he does, when it comes to easy lifts with respect to alliance management, when it comes to issues that play well with the Trump base: America First. How long that would last under a Trump administration is unclear to me.

I see Trump continuing the sugar high that he created for the Israelis between 2016 and 2020 with one exception, and that is the ATM machine that the Trump administration believes is Saudi Arabia. If Trump thought that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was actually inclined to pursue a normalization agreement with Israel and what was standing in the way was Netanyahu’s refusal to recognize or acknowledge Palestinian statehood, I could see a moment of friction and tension there. But other than that, I see very little to convince me that should Trump win, it wouldn’t be more or less the same as 2016.

Harris is another story. Should she win, it won’t be the second Biden administration. It’ll be the first Harris administration. Governing’s about choosing. She will inherit the same grinding conflict and the same Israeli prime minister that seems to prize his own constituency above, for sure, the interests of its closest U.S. ally. How would she deal with this?

I think there’s a generational difference. She’s not going to describe herself as a Christian Zionist. She’s not going to say that if there was no Israel, we’d have to create one. She’s certainly not going to say, “Bibi, I don’t agree with a damn thing you say, but I love you” anyway,” as Biden has. Would she break with the operating system and risk a political backlash? It’s awkward. It’s messy. It can be politically costly.

I think she understandably has a greater sensitivity to Palestinian suffering. I just don’t think what she’s going to inherit will allow her to capitalize on the kinds of opportunities that, if discreet pressure were applied and necessary, she’d be able to provide.

That’s where the United States has actually succeeded, when an American president was prepared to fight with the Israelis and their domestic constituencies in the United States. So unless the fight with Israel could actually produce something, I think a Harris administration is likely to go to great lengths to avoid an open break or breach with the Netanyahu government.

RA: A subscriber question now. This is from Gary Ostrower, and he asks, “Genocide? Or not genocide?” Where do you fall?

ADM: I mean, genocide … I don’t know what the exact definition of the 1948 Genocide Convention was for the term. The willful intentional destruction of an entire people, literally. An effort to extinguish their culture, their language, physically, psychologically, to end an entire people, to—for example—deport the entire Jewish community of Rhodes, Italy, 1,200 miles from the Third Reich.

Is what the Israelis did genocide in in Gaza? No. I don’t think that’s genocide.

The gap between genocide and the destruction that Israel’s prosecution of this war has caused—scores of thousands of Palestinian civilians killed. And children. Some 40,000 or 50,000 children injured. The obliteration of entire families. The destruction of a society and its institutions. Is that genocide? I don’t think so. Maybe there’s another name for it in this debate, as the other terms that have emerged during the course of this conflict, to divide instead of bring people together.

I think this is about the future. And I think we have to figure out a way, if we can, to hold in our heads and hearts the futures, the pains, the hopes, the traumas, and the sufferings of both Israelis and Palestinians. Do I believe that a two-state solution is still possible? Do I believe that separation through negotiations can create a conflict-ending solution that Israelis and Palestinians would accept?

Yes. I’ll say it again and again and again. I do believe.

It requires the one thing that has been missing from this conflict. It is the one thing that has always been present when—in effect, Israelis and Palestinians, and Arabs and Israelis—have managed to come together. And that is leadership. Leaders who are masters of their political houses, not prisoners of their ideologies. Leaders who are not extractive. They really do care about giving more than taking. And leaders who are prepared to recognize that the so-called other has legitimate needs and requirements that need to be satisfied.

The reality is, you can’t see what’s in front of us. And history bends in ways that none of us can predict. We can sit back and complain and whine and moan. Or we could basically argue that we all have a responsibility to try to bend the arc in the right direction.

I was in Jerusalem on Oct. 6, 1973 [when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel]. Within four years of that trauma, I watched on the White House lawn as Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and Sadat signed a full treaty of peace. And I was sitting on the White House lawn when the first Oslo Accord was signed on Sept. 13, 1993, convinced that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was over.

In the first instance, trauma turns to hope. In the second, hope turns to trauma. But it shows you that making predictions, pronouncements in the face of history’s exigencies, and the way that it bends to and fro? None of that makes any sense. The only thing that matters is, what are you going to do about it?