John Mearsheimer on Why Hamas Really Attacked Israel on Oct. 7

From John Mearsheimer’s new YouTube channel : October 7, 2026, marked the third anniversary of Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel. Considerable attention was devoted to commemorating that event in Israel and throughout the West. The focus was mainly on three questions: 1) What happened that day? 2) Why was Israel caught by surprise? 3) What have been the consequences of that momentous day? Much less attention was paid to a fundamental question: Why did Hamas launch the attack in the first place? Indeed, this relative neglect of the attack’s root causes has characterized much of the public discussion of October 7 from the beginning. Israel and its supporters, however, have a straightforward explanation. According to Prime Minister Netanyahu, Hamas and its allies are “the new Nazis,” and October 7 was an unprovoked attack that Israeli leaders and much of the Israeli public have repeatedly compared to the Holocaust. In other words, the attack is understood primarily as an expression of genocidal antisemitism. In this episode, I examine that explanation and argue that it is fundamentally mistaken. The historical record and a careful examination of Hamas’s motives point toward a very different story, which I believe is why Israel and its supporters have paid little attention to discussing the political and strategic calculations that led Hamas to attack Israel on October 7, 2023. If you liked this article, please support Antiwar.com. We are 100% reader-supported.