CROSSPOST/HIGHLIGHTED: ROBERT FARLEY: Three Years After October 7, 2023: & Now Everything Is Worse
October 7 locked us into this Bad Timeline: Robert Farley reflects on the political economy of catastrophe three years after October 7, & why everything got worse in Gaza, Israel, Iran, & America, as maximalist narratives beat compromise-minded potential governing coalitions; and people paid the price…
I found this very affecting when I read it last year, so I am hoisting it here today.
Three years on from October 7, 2023—and after the spiraling aftermath of massacre, retaliation, and stalemate—the dismal truth is that path dependence has won.
The initial atrocity set the menu of feasible outcomes, and the worst actors on every side have been remarkably adept at choosing the worst options from that menu. Robert Farley provides a sober inventory of how incentives, institutions, and narratives have interacted to produce a steady worsening in Gaza, Israel, Iran, and the United States. There is a counterfactual in which shock produced bargaining space, leadership pivoted, and institutions updated.
We did not get that counterfactual.
We got a dynamic in which each escalation tightened constraints, shrank coalition room, and raised the domestic political price of compromise. The number of Palestinians killed—now probably more than one hundred thousand—coexists with starvation risk and infrastructural ruin.
Meanwhile, Israeli society is bitterly divided over the conduct and aims of the war, yet politically locked by coalition arithmetic and by the logic of deterrence. In the U.S., bad actors seized upon the episode to fracture the Democratic coalition along generational, ethnic, and ideological lines—hurting not just foreign policy coherence but domestic political capacity at the margin. Perhaps because they believed an ethic of ultimate intention is all. Perhaps in some Naderite view that we individually flourish when politicians we sorta disagree with less are out of power.
Perhaps for some other reasons, like being hypnotized by the idea that today’s Israelis, even the youngest, are descended from “settler colonialists”. In a world in which the only people with any claim not to be descended from settler colonalists are the KhoeSan of southern Africa. And probably not even them.
Certainly because they have not learned the lesson from Ernest Renan back in 1882. He applied it to the French nation. But it applies to all human communities that hope for peace and prosperity—not justice, because justice is not a feature of human intitutions and communities, while peace and prosperity can be…
Forgetfulness, and I would even say historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation.… Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things. No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgundian, an Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth, yet every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, or the [Albigensian Crusade] massacre that took place in the south in the thirteenth century…
If you are hunting for a master theory, it is not “ideology explains all.” It is the simple, ugly mix of incentives in weakly accountable wartime executives, the difficulty of reversing mobilization once sunk costs are high, and media ecosystems that reward maximalist narratives while punishing the middle.
Call it the political economy of violent commitment: once leaders, movements, and publics buy into a high-salience conflict with identity stakes, the feasible policies tilt toward prolongation rather than settlement.
Some will say: this is what moral clarity requires.
Perhaps.
But moral clarity that multiplies casualties and destroys institutions is catastrophe.
Farley’s closing line—“horrible people are in charge in Jerusalem, deep in the tunnels under Gaza, and in Washington DC”—stings. The wrong people, empowered by the wrong incentives, making the wrong choices.
The necessary work remains the same: build the channels that can carry compromise even when the currents flow against it. Farley’s essay documents the failure of those channels over the past three years. Read it as an audit of how our systems broke—and as a prompt for how they might, someday, be repaired.
& Now Everything is Worse
Robert Farley
<https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/10/and-now-everything-is-worse>:
It’s [three] years since October 7, and everything is worse:
“All told, Hamas killed some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took about 250 more captive. It was the bloodiest day in Israel’s history and the deadliest for Jews anywhere since the Holocaust.
“But a shocked Israel mobilized to unleash a devastating military response that has killed more than 67,000 Palestinians, including both civilians and combatants, according to the Gaza health ministry. It has wounded tens of thousands more, flattened thousands of buildings and reduced much of the territory’s infrastructure — and its landscape — to rubble, shrapnel and sand.
“The war has forced Palestinians in Gaza into a punishing cycle of fleeing Israeli attacks by taking shelter in a supposed haven in another part of the territory, only to have to flee again. And food shortages and obstacles to supplying and distributing humanitarian aid to Gaza residents led an international group of experts on hunger crises to declare in August that part of the enclave was suffering from famine.
“In Israel, the war and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure to end it in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages — despite polls showing broad support for that — have bitterly divided society and exacerbated fissures that existed before Oct. 7. Many Israelis contend that he has extended the war, forgoing opportunities for a cease-fire even after the decapitation of Hamas’s leadership to keep his right-wing coalition together and extend his hold on power.
October 7 happened on a Saturday. By the time I taught my undergraduate class on Monday, at least one undergrad was already prepared with a set of arguments justifying Hamas that would have also justified the murder of every person of white, black, and Asian heritage living on the North American continent. Other students were angry, but for me this was a teaching moment, not an anger moment. We talked things through, discussed some parallels with Ukraine (I had just returned from my trip two weeks previous) and I made the point that what was going to happen next was going to be worse than anyone could possibly imagine, a prediction that has unfortunately come true.
Over the week that followed a lot of folks who should have known better decided that they most defiantly would refuse to know better. I saw protestors making straightforward arguments that would have justified the murder of my own children, wherever they could have been found. At this early stage I saw not nearly enough grappling with the fact that Hamas had set in motion a series of events that was going to result in horrific outcomes in Gaza and elsewhere. It was evident from me early on that there might be an imaginable world where earnest protest could constrain Israel’s retaliation, but that world was not the world we lived in.
And so for [three] years the worst people in the world have played out the script that was written on October 7, and everything is worse for the Palestinians. Everything is worse for the Iranians, and everything is worse for Americans, too; one need not invest too deeply in the factional conflicts around “Genocide Joe” or the continuing debates on swing-state polling to recognize that the Democratic coalition was badly fractured by October 7 in ways that were difficult to redress by November 2024. And today horrible people are in charge in Jerusalem, deep in the tunnels under Gaza, and in Washington DC…
Negative-sum escalation won after October 7. It tightened constraints, raised the domestic price of compromise, and shrank coalition space for compomising. Palestinian suffering deepened; Israeli and Iranian politics hardened; American politics splintered further. Media ecosystems amplified absolute certainties; sunk costs and hostages locked strategy; accountability eroded. Ernest Renan’s grim lesson about the necessity of historical forgetfulness applies not just to nations but to all human communities seeking peace an proserity: memory weaponized becomes a veto on human prosperity, peace, and life.