THREE ATTEMPTS TO UNDERSTAND OCTOBER 7
Explanation, Error, and the Possibility of an Open Future
4 October 2026
For the next three days, beginning tomorrow, I will publish three essays around the third anniversary of October 7, 2023.
They are not three versions of the same argument.
They are three attempts to approach one problem from different directions: explanation, error, agency, and the possibility of an open future.
The first begins far from the anniversary itself, inside the cockpit of Flight FZ1073. It asks how invisible explanations become visible physical realities—and what allows human beings to interrupt them before they become irreversible.
The second is the most personal. It asks what October 7 did to my own thinking, and why the question that now follows me from Anfal to Sinjar, from Israel to Gaza, is no longer simply who was right or wrong, but: Where does the error go?
The third turns to the Palestinian who refuses to disappear inside Hamas, Israel, Iran, Arab governments, or the explanations of Western activists. It asks what Palestinian agency would mean if it included the freedom to say that October 7 was a catastrophic error for the Palestinian people—and to create a different political future.
That means the trilogy moves:
October 5 — How explanations become physical reality.
October 6 — What October 7 did to my explanations.
October 7 — Who must regain the power to correct the explanation.
Or, in my own conceptual vocabulary:
Invisible Reality → Protected Error → Restored Agency.
The first essay asks how an explanation enters the world.
The second asks what happens when reality tells us that the explanation is wrong.
The third asks who must possess the freedom to correct it.
These essays do not offer a final explanation of October 7.
That would contradict the argument running through all three.
They are conjectures.
They are attempts to preserve distinctions that catastrophe tends to destroy: between explanation and excuse, between people and the ideas claimed in their name, between memory and destiny, between suffering and infallibility, between protection and closure.
And beneath all three lies the same question:
How do we preserve the possibility of creating a different future before a bad explanation becomes irreversible?
Tomorrow, October 5, I begin with:
The Axe Was Visible. The Explanation Was Not.
