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Notes -
But how we define the boundaries of "the most recent conflict" is itself a subjective, political decision. Hamas supporters would argue that there is no such thing as a peaceful state of affairs between Israel and Palestine, and thus no such thing as a "recent" conflict than began on Oct 7th - there were simply the periods when the Israeli boot was grinding them down so overwhelmingly as to make large-scale resistance efforts impossible.
I have little sympathy for Hamas myself, but as a point of principle I do think it's worth debating. If I keep someone as a slave in my basement under constant threat of beating them to a pulp if they escape - and one day, I carelessly leave the door unlocked, and the slave tries to stab me in my sleep - I don't know that you can state for an objective fact that the escaped slave has initiated violence.
One can characterise the Israel-Palestine conflict as a cold war which periodically gets hot. I don't think anyone is disputing that there was a war in Gaza in 2014, and that the situation in Gaza looked very different before that war began and afterwards. I don't think anyone in Gaza would claim that they didn't notice any difference in their day-to-day experiences before and after that war began. Equally, I don't think anyone would dispute that the 2014 war was just the latest instance of a cold war going hot in a long, long line of them.
By the same logic, I don't think it's controversial to state that the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict went hot in October 2023 and the catalyst for it going hot was the invasion of Israel by Hamas squaddies. Accepting that fact does not require you to sympathise with Israel, believe that Israel aren't committing a genocide, believe that Israel has the right to defend itself, believe that Israel has a right to exist etc. But I don't think it's open to dispute that the most recent instance of this cold conflict going hot was prompted by an action freely undertaken by Hamas.
The characterization I was putting forward is not of a cold war that goes hot, but of a single uninterrupted conflict that moves very slowly because one opponent is much stronger than the other, and keeps the weaker opponent in a headlock for years or decades at a time before said weaker opponent can get their next punch in. I am proposing that at no point in time were a critical mass of Palestinians not trying to destroy Israel, nor Israel not doing things to Palestine that Palestinians perceived as acts of war - Oct 7th was simply the first Palestinian attack in a while that managed to pierce the skin. This is a wholly different question from who's actually morally justified in all of this!
Similar to how Germany and France/England were engaged in "war" for a decent period of time after the fall of Poland (the Phony War, or Sitzkrieg) prior to the successful German invasion of France?
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