• Steven A. Cook

October 6, 2025, 7:00 AM View Comments ()

Let’s imagine for a moment a counterhistorical regarding the Oct. 7, 2023, attack. What if Israel had responded with a fierce but limited war in Gaza, prioritized the release of Israeli hostages, and continued pursuing a peace agreement with Saudi Arabia that had been on the table since well before the Hamas attack? How would Israel have fared, and how many Palestinian lives would have been spared? What would the region look like today?

Instead, Israel made a series of quick decisions that set its trajectory, as did other players in the region as well as then-U.S. President Joe Biden. This is what social scientists call “path dependencies”—the process by which decisions shape subsequent decisions. In poetry, of course, it sounds more elegant. “Yet knowing how way leads on to way, // I doubted if I should ever come back,” Robert Frost wrote in his classic poem “The Road Not Taken.”

As President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan for the Middle East appears to be getting some traction, this is a good time to look back and ask: Were there roads taken and not taken that have prolonged the war in Gaza? The answer is yes, of course—the catastrophe that has unfolded in Gaza was not inevitable. But the answer is also no, because some of those roads were not necessarily available to leaders in the United States and the Middle East at the time, given the magnitude of the Oct. 7 attack. The resulting political fallout, especially in Israel, set Israelis, Palestinians, Americans, and others on the tragic path they now find themselves.

Of course, the accumulation of terrible things that have happened in Gaza and to Palestinians in the last two years began with Hamas’s invasion of Israel on Oct. 7. The attack may have resurfaced the Palestinian issue globally, undermined normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and further improved Hamas’s position in relation to the Palestinian Authority—but at the cost of thousands upon thousands of Palestinian lives, untold numbers maimed, massive physical destruction, and a historic, perhaps permanent, setback for the Palestinian cause. In the grand scheme of the Palestinian question, what happens within the Spanish prime ministry, the U.K. Foreign Office, or actor Mark Ruffalo’s living room matters little. More significant are the developments in Gaza City, where the Israeli military is now operating; the 3,400 new housing units slated to be built for Jewish settlers in the E1 bloc of the West Bank; and the fact that fewer and fewer Israelis now countenance the idea of a two-state solution, if only because the conclusion they drew from Oct. 7 was that Palestinians had little interest in peaceful coexistence.

Once Hamas launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, politics immediately began to shape the subsequent battlefield. Clearly, Biden—an old-time Democratic centrist who never shied away from declaring his support for Zionism—believed that morality, his legacy as a statesman, and his politics would be best served if he visited Israel soon after the attack. Israelis and their supporters around the world were deeply moved. As Americans expressed solidarity with Israel—along with many others around the world—Biden’s visit on Oct. 18 seemed like a political win and an opportunity for him to provide leadership to a reeling Israel and a distraught Jewish community.

Yet it was also the seed of the miscommunication and recrimination between the United States and Israel that followed. Biden clearly believed that his bear hug would buy him influence in the way that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) pursued Hamas. Instead, Israeli leaders regarded the visit as a signal that they had a free hand in Gaza. When it became evident that Biden had misapprehended Israel and vice versa, the war was already well into its fourth month. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisors basically ignored the United States throughout the rest of the president’s term. Rather than generating political benefits for Biden and his administration, the visit sowed discord among Democrats, soured many supporters of Israel on the Democratic Party and its standard-bearer, and tarnished the legacy of the president, who will forever be accused of enabling genocide.

So that was Biden’s path dependency—his early decision that shaped subsequent ones. For Israel, it was the war plan.

In recent months, supporters of Israel have responded to criticism of the IDF’s campaign in Gaza with a question: “What should Israel have done?” The implication is that there was no alternative to Israel’s operations and therefore the criticism is illegitimate.

About a year after the war began, former Israeli officials relayed to me in private conversation that Israel had actually considered a devastating three-month operation targeting Hamas, which would have been consistent with 1) Israeli military doctrine, 2) what Israel’s Arab partners could support, and 3) ensuring maximum U.S. support both within Congress and among the American people.

But the politics of the moment—marked by rage, revenge, and importantly the long-term political strategy of Netanyahu’s coalition partners, which represent Israel’s far right—came together to drive Israel’s military strategy. The goal of destroying Hamas intersected with the desire of Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and other government officials to reoccupy and resettle the Gaza Strip.

Whether Netanyahu shares the views of his coalition partners on the far right is irrelevant because the durability of his government is dependent on them. The result is a prolonged, agonizing campaign that has killed more than 66,000 Palestinians, stretched the IDF to its limits, torn Israeli society, and undermined Israel’s global standing. Now boxed in by the military campaign it pursued, the IDF is once again assaulting Gaza City and risking the lives of Palestinian civilians and Israeli soldiers for uncertain strategic benefits. Still, the coalition has not cracked.

A longer list of politicians—constrained or incentivized by their politics—made choices that have prolonged the war. Yet the decisions that Hamas, the United States, and Israel have made stand out. They are almost a perfect representation of how the parochial interests of leaders can lead to suboptimal outcomes for everyone else. It is in this unsettling moment that U.S. President Donald Trump has presented a 20-point plan to bring the war in Gaza to an end. He enjoys a prestige in the Middle East unlike any of his predecessors in recent memory. Yet he faces the same problem with which previous U.S. presidents struggled: how to alter the political incentives and constraints of Israelis and Palestinians so they can end the current conflict and eventually live in peace. There was a lot of optimism after Trump met with Netanyahu on Sept. 29. The Israeli leader still needs to overcome the opposition of the same people on which his government’s tenure depends. That is why, when he appeared before the press with Trump last week, he emphasized that the U.S. plan would achieve all of Israel’s military and political objectives. That is true only if Hamas actually releases the remaining hostages—the only leverage the group has—disarms, and drops its claim to be the exemplar of resistance. In other words, accepts defeat.

No one will ever know where the other possible roads would have led Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians. Perhaps Trump has set the region on a new path, but even if he has, his plan says little about Palestinian aspirations for self-determination and justice—virtually guaranteeing yet another long and uncertain road.