October 7th: Two Years Later

Two years after the October 7th, 2023 Hamas attack, Mookie Spitz strips the conflict down to its brutal, geographical bones. No pundit spin, no partisan or tribal bias he hopes — just Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel refracted through the most combustible square mileage on Earth. Mookie dissects how Israel’s tiny, boundaryless topography, its interlocked demographics and religions, and its barren resources make perpetual conflict inevitable — not moral, not cultural, just inevitable.

From Yahya Sinwar’s cynical timing of “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” to Trump’s transactional foreign policy and Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition steering Israel toward full annexation, Mookie unpacks how history, geography, and human stubbornness form a feedback loop that swallows diplomacy whole.

Why Peace Remains an Illusion

• No Physical Separation: Israel and Palestine share a New Jersey-sized patch of land with no natural barriers — no mountain ranges or deserts to enforce distance, just overlapping towns and competing flags.
• Demographic Compression: Two highly concentrated, intermingled populations — Jews, Muslims, and Israeli Arabs — leave no room for psychological or political breathing space.
• Asymmetry of Power: Israel’s military dominance ensures that every skirmish ends with overwhelming force, breeding permanent resentment rather than resolution.
• Mutually Exclusive Aims: Hamas seeks Israel’s eradication from the river to the sea; the current Israeli government openly pursues total annexation of Gaza and the West Bank. Both positions make compromise structurally impossible.
• Religious Absolutism: Jerusalem isn’t just real estate — it’s divine territory claimed by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, ensuring that every concession feels like sacrilege.
• Geopolitical Incentives: Gulf states and Western powers treat the conflict as a chessboard — trading alliances, arms, and tech access — while Palestine’s fate remains negotiable collateral.
• Internal Political Traps: Netanyahu’s coalition is held hostage by ultra-right ministers Smotrich and Ben Gvir, whose power depends on perpetual war. Hamas’s power likewise depends on never laying down arms.
• Cycle of Retaliation: Each Israeli bombing guarantees the birth of more militants; each militant attack guarantees harsher retaliation — an emotional and demographic perpetuum mobile.
• Collapse of the Two-State Myth: The so-called “solution” is a corpse politicians still prop up to look humane while both sides pursue total control.
• Foreign Mediation Farce: The Trump-brokered security deal and its “20-point peace plan” read like theater — too complex to succeed, designed to fail slowly enough to look like progress.
• Economic Futility: Gaza’s isolation and surveillance ensure that even reconstruction projects double as containment strategies; there’s no viable path to self-sufficiency.
• Psychological Entrenchment: Each side views the other not merely as an enemy but as the negation of its own survival — a zero-sum identity conflict immune to reason.

The end result is where empathy collides with cynicism, and Mookie Spitz dissects why “peace in the Middle East” is, sadly, less a goal than a comforting delusion.