Was Hamas’s massacre the Middle East’s Franz Ferdinand moment?

Travelling through the Gaza border area on the morning of October 8, 2023, I was struck by a sense of familiarity. The scenes of destruction, the burnt buildings, and the smashed-up cars by the side of the road were, of course, profoundly shocking. But they were not, at least to me, unfathomable. Unlike most of my fellow Israeli citizens, I had spent a good part of the preceding decade in close proximity to the wars in Syria and Iraq. I knew then, immediately, what had just happened in the kibbutz of Israel’s southern region was what happens when a Sunni jihadi organisation finds a way through to the helpless civilian population of one of its enemies.

The day after the massacre, the border area, where so many Israelis had lost their lives, was a place of ruin and destruction. The terrorists had only just been subdued and the Israeli authorities had taken care to collect the bodies of the victims first. The