If Palestinians want representation, they must accept accountability for Oct. 7 - opinion

No serious post-conflict framework treats representation as an automatic right detached from responsibility. Post-war governance is not a reward for suffering; it is a mechanism for preventing recurrence. That distinction matters.

But what happens when those power structures enjoy overwhelming popular support?

In December 2023, polling by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research revealed a stark reality: approximately three-quarters of Palestinians supported Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023. Support was particularly high in the West Bank, where backing for the assault reached 82% – notably higher than in Gaza itself. More than 60% of respondents identified violence as the most effective means of achieving their political goals.

These findings were not anomalous. Subsequent polling showed sustained majorities backing the decision to launch the attack, with support remaining above 70% even months into the war. Perhaps most revealing: when asked in early November 2023 whether they felt pride as Palestinians considering the ongoing events, virtually all of them (98%) responded affirmatively – 94% saying they felt pride “to a great extent.”

This presents a challenge that cannot be resolved through euphemism or selective attention. We are not discussing isolated extremist sentiment: We are discussing a popular consensus endorsing an operation characterized by systematic atrocities against Israelis: mass civilian casualties, sexual violence, torture, and the abduction of 250 hostages including children and the elderly.

The standard framework for post-conflict governance assumes a meaningful distinction between a corrupt or violent leadership and a population held hostage to that leadership’s choices. This model guided reconstruction efforts in post-war Germany and Japan, post-genocide Rwanda, and post-apartheid South Africa. In each case, the assumption was that removing a criminally culpable elite would create space for alternative political forces to emerge from within the population.

But that framework depends on the existence of those alternative forces – evidenced by significant internal opposition, contested legitimacy, or at minimum, ambivalence about the violence committed in the population’s name.

The pride question is particularly significant: it reveals that October 7 was not merely tolerated or rationalized as a necessary evil but embraced as a defining moment of collective identity – something that, in the weeks following the attack, made Palestinians feel more proud of who they are, not less.

This is not an argument about collective guilt. Individuals within any population hold diverse views, and polling captures tendencies, not unanimity. But post-conflict governance is not constructed around individual exceptions – it is constructed around institutional capacity and political legitimacy. And legitimacy requires more than technical competence; it requires fundamental disagreement with the principles that animated the violence.

Here is the paradox: calls for automatic Palestinian representation rest on democratic principles – the idea that populations should have agency in determining their political future. But what happens when democratic sentiment produces an overwhelming mandate for violence against civilians? What happens when the “will of the people” is inseparable from the endorsement of atrocity?

Post-war governance cannot simultaneously honor democratic representation and prevent recurrence when the represented consensus actively supported the violence that necessitated intervention.

None of this argues against Palestinian civilian welfare or participation. Reconstruction, humanitarian access, economic development, and protection from violence remain moral imperatives rooted in basic human dignity. The framework appropriately includes Palestinians through the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) – a 15-person technocratic committee led by Ali Shaath tasked with restoring electricity, water, healthcare, and education.

But welfare and governance are not the same thing, and the NCAG’s mandate reflects this distinction. It has no political authority to represent Gazans internationally or set policy direction. As the White House makes explicit, the committee operates “under the guidance of the Board of Peace,” implementing rather than defining the vision for reconstruction. This structural choice is deliberate: managing infrastructure requires administrative competence and local knowledge.

The critique of this arrangement – that it denies Palestinians “agency” – misunderstands what this means in a post-conflict context. Agency is not the right to immediate political control regardless of recent conduct: it is the capacity to make choices and bear responsibility for their consequences. Palestinians made choices on and around October 7. Those choices included overwhelming support for an operation that systematically violated the most basic prohibitions of international humanitarian law.

The road to Palestinian political autonomy runs through moral accountability, not around it. Every shortcut that grants representation without requiring repudiation of October 7 delays rather than advances the day when Palestinians can govern themselves in a framework that their neighbors – and the international community – can trust will not produce another massacre.