What if the catastrophe of October 7th wasn’t the beginning—but the result of decades the world chose not to hear?

For Norman Finkelstein, the tragedy isn’t that the world was shocked on October 7th.
The tragedy is that the world shouldn’t have been shocked at all.

For him, October 7th was not an eruption out of clear skies. It was the moment a long-sealed pressure chamber finally burst—a place so suffocated, so trapped, so deliberately broken that an explosion was not just possible, but inevitable.

To understand the eruption, you must confront the decades of ignored warnings that came before it.

Gaza’s story did not begin with blockade or rockets—it began with displacement.

Since 1948, observers from across the political spectrum have used language today’s commentators hesitate to: they called Gaza a “concentration camp.”

Different eras. Different politics. Same warning.

And still, nothing changed.

Throughout the 1990s, Israel sealed Gaza off from the West Bank. By 2006, the blockade became so meticulously engineered that officials calculated the minimum calories Gaza’s population should receive to stay alive but not healthy.

Electricity rationed.
Movement banned.
Water contaminated.
Airspace, borders, and sea controlled.
The economy intentionally strangled.

By October 6th, 2023, international bodies—from the UN to the Economist—openly called Gaza “unlivable,” “a rubbish heap,” and “a toxic slum.”

Finkelstein emphasizes a truth many quickly forget:
Palestinians tried everything else first.

They tried diplomacy—including long-term truce proposals that Israel ignored.
They tried international law—cooperating fully with UN investigations like the 2009 Goldstone Commission, while Israel refused to cooperate at all.
They tried political engagement with the ICC and human rights forums.

And when all institutional avenues collapsed, ordinary Gazans turned to the most morally demanding path: nonviolent mass protest.

In 2018, during the Great March of Return, tens of thousands marched toward the fence—families, kids, medics, journalists—armed with nothing but flags and signs.

The response? Sniper fire targeting children, medics and journalists.

For Finkelstein, this was the breaking point.
If peaceful resistance was crushed and ignored, what path was left?

By 2020, Gaza had fallen out of global politics entirely. Arab states normalized relations with Israel. Western governments looked away.

Gaza was left to rot, silent and abandoned.

Finkelstein argues the October 7th attacks were not a meticulously engineered master strategy.
They were a roll of the dice—a desperate, chaotic, last-gasp rupture by people who had no future, no exits, and no remaining hope.

He compares it to the 1831 Nat Turner slave rebellion:
brutal, morally fraught, but born from a system that was infinitely more brutal than anything the rebels did in return.

Condemning the violence is meaningless without condemning the conditions that produced it.

Israel’s response—flattening neighbourhoods, cutting off food and water, forcing mass displacement—did not come from shock or emotion, he says.
It came from policy and precedent.

And this is crucial:
Violence against Palestinian children is not new and not an aberration.

During the First Intifada in 1987, Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin explicitly ordered soldiers to “break their bones.”
Human rights groups documented widespread beatings of minors as a strategy of control.

The pattern stretches from the 1980s to sniper fire in 2018 to the bombardment in 2023.

October 7th didn’t trigger a new logic. It revealed an old one.

What emerges from Finkelstein’s analysis is not a justification of October 7th.

It is a command to confront the truth:

Nothing built to crush people can avoid eventual rupture.
Nothing that traps an entire population can expect permanent quiet.
And nothing labelled a “concentration camp” for 75 years will remain calm forever.

The real question is:

Why did we expect Gaza—starved, sealed, bombarded, forgotten—to remain silent for so long?