Steven A. Cook
Let’s imagine for a moment a counterhistorical regarding the Oct. 7, 2023, attack. What if Israel had responded with a fierce but limited war in Gaza, prioritized the release of Israeli hostages, and continued pursuing a peace agreement with Saudi Arabia that had been on the table since well before the Hamas attack? How would Israel have fared, and how many Palestinian lives would have been spared? What would the region look like today?
Instead, Israel made a series of quick decisions that set its trajectory, as did other players in the region as well as then-U.S. President Joe Biden. This is what social scientists call “path dependencies”—the process by which decisions shape subsequent decisions. In poetry, of course, it sounds more elegant. “Yet knowing how way leads on to way, // I doubted if I should ever come back,” Robert Frost wrote in his classic poem “The Road Not Taken.”
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