The war in the Middle East has not (yet) metastasized into a broader regional conflict, but the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust and Israel’s subsequent declaration of war has entered every boardroom, classroom, and living room. CEOs around the globe instantly issued messages of solidarity with Israel, while students at America’s top colleges, particularly Harvard, issued messages of solidarity with Palestine. On both sides, such statements have drawn criticism for being discriminatory—either anti-Semitic or Islamophobic.
There is money and reputational risk at stake. Harvard, in particular, has been roiled, as one of Israel’s richest men withdrew from the executive board of its Kennedy School of Government in protest over the university’s response to the students’ actions. American Jewish billionaires including Bill Ackman and Les Wexner have been outraged, too, and some Harvard seniors have already lost high-profile job offers for putting their name to a pro-Palestinian statement.
Decades of contentious arguments between Arabs and Jews, Israelis and Palestinians, right and left, and hard-liners and moderates all coalesced in early October with a cross-border terrorist attack from Gaza into Israel that left 1,400 Israeli civilians dead. CEOs fear they can’t support Israel without blowback, and students feel they can’t support Palestinians without fear of damaging their nascent careers. The thorny history of the region engenders deeply held opinions among both supporters of Israel and Palestinian causes.
At the risk of wading into such a difficult subject, Fortune looked into the recent past to try to help business leaders, employees, and even students speak about this urgent issue in a respectful and diplomatic way as tensions rise. First, there’s the question of what exactly is Hamas, the organization that shook the world with its surprise attack.
What is Hamas?
Hamas is the Islamist militant organization that controls Gaza. It’s had a contentious recent history with Israel and more moderate Palestinian leaders.
Without getting into the long and tangled history of the region, which dates back over 100 years to the British Empire, the 19th-century Zionist movement to create a Jewish homeland, and the aftermath of World War II, the most urgent thing workers and business leaders need to know is the context of the past two decades, since Hamas came to power in 2006. That year, Hamas won a surprise victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections by taking a majority of the seats. Fatah, the secular and until then dominant party in Palestinian politics, and Hamas opted to create a unity government.
Hamas’s newly central role in Palestinian politics presented challenges to the latest in many years of peace talks at the time. “Israel can’t accept a situation in which Hamas, in its present form as a terror group calling for the destruction of Israel, will be part of the Palestinian Authority without disarming,” the acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Joe Biden, who was then a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
By June 2007, after several months of escalating disputes, Hamas fell out with Fatah. In what effectively amounted to a coup d’état, Hamas seized control of Gaza with brute force. In an act that presaged the viral, on-the-ground footage that would characterize war in the social media age, several armed Hamas commandos filmed themselves in Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Gaza office. “Hello, Condoleezza Rice. You have to deal with me now, there is no Abu Mazen anymore,” an armed militant joked, referring to Abbas’s nickname, while pretending to place a call to the then U.S. Secretary of State.
How Israel’s blockade divides the pro-Israel and pro-Palestine camps
Israel reacted to the power grab with intense concern, implementing a blockade of Gaza. “Our whole policy is to work with moderate pragmatic Palestinians who believe in peace, and Hamas hegemony in Gaza is not good for Israel, for the Palestinians, or for peace,” Mark Regev, a spokesperson for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, told the New York Times in June 2007.
Israel’s military, worried about the security risk of a Hamas-controlled Gaza, closed off the small coastal strip with help from Egypt, which controls Gaza’s southern border. This limited the flow of goods into Gaza, restricted the movement of Gazans into Israel, and took control of essential utilities like water and electricity. Critics of the strategy, including the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, say the siege amounts to collective punishment, and other NGOs have called Gaza an open-air prison. It’s also had devastating consequences for Gaza’s economy, impoverishing its residents. A United Nations report estimated Israel’s blockade cost Gaza’s economy $16.7 billion through 2018. Israel maintained this was essential to limiting Hamas’s ability to increase its military strength.
Since 2008, Israel and Hamas have fought four wars (including this one) and countless skirmishes. The Israeli government has always claimed it has acted in self-defense against an enemy that insists Israel has no right to exist. Much of the calls to “free Palestine” focus on ending the blockade. Israel, though, maintains it cannot lift its blockade while Hamas is still in power, ensuring a circularity to the debate.
In 2017, Hamas released an updated political charter revising its previous stance of waging war against Jews, to a war against Zionism. The revised charter, which continued to oppose Israel’s existence, did little to ease Israeli national security concerns. A spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “Hamas was trying to fool the world.”
The pivotal, controversial figure of Benjamin Netanyahu
Political commentators have speculated that Netanyahu will almost certainly be out of a job when the war is over. The Oct. 7 terrorist attacks are considered one of Israel’s biggest intelligence failures ever.
He was already one of the most embattled prime ministers in Israeli history, facing four separate police investigations into corruption, favor-trading, and efforts to influence news coverage of his administrations. He only returned to power in November, after he was ousted in June 2021 by a coalition that included some of his right-wing political allies after he was indicted in three cases. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving prime minister, has touted himself as the leader most capable of ensuring the country’s national security. That reputation is now in tatters, given the military failures that led to the deadliest day in Israeli history.
Netanyahu has often pointed to Hamas’s stated antipathy toward Israel as a major security concern that made a two-state solution highly unlikely. Over the years Netanyahu paid lip service to the idea of a two-state solution before ultimately abandoning it altogether, on the eve of Israel’s 2015 elections. Netanyahu then ignored the issue as he pursued normalized relations with other Arab countries—Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Sudan—during the Abraham Accords, negotiated by the Trump administration. Netanyahu and much of the Israeli right welcomed President Donald Trump’s openness to largely leave out discussions over the fate of a Palestinian state in Israel’s new diplomatic agreements as evidence the Arab-Israeli conflict could be solved without addressing it.
The American context: Trump and Netanyahu’s soured relationship
The relationship between Netanyahu and Trump was so strong that Netanyahu’s 2019 reelection campaign used billboard ads showing him posing alongside Trump. However, the ties between the two have since soured. Trump is reportedly furious with Netanyahu for acknowledging Biden won the 2020 election, contradicting Trump’s claim that he was the victim of election fraud. “F**k him,” Trump reportedly told Axios about Netanyahu in 2021.
Earlier this month at a campaign event in Florida Trump reiterated those sentiments. Trump said Netanyahu had been unprepared for the attack and criticized him for not joining the U.S. airstrike that killed Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani in 2020. “I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down. That was a very terrible thing, I will say that,” Trump said.
Netanyahu is no stranger to strained relationships with U.S. leaders. In the past, he and Biden, who have known each other since the ’80s, have had a tense relationship. When Biden was vice president in President Barack Obama’s administration, he expressed considerable disapproval of Netanyahu’s plans to build more settlements in East Jerusalem. “Quite frankly, folks, sometimes only a friend can deliver the hardest truth,” Biden said during a 2010 speech at Tel Aviv University. And more recently, while president, Biden was reportedly unwilling to host Netanyahu at the White House because of the right-wing politicians he had invited into his latest governing coalition. This month’s terror attacks, though, pushed the two leaders closer than ever, with Biden pledging unwavering support to Israel during his visit on Wednesday.
