On psychological barriers – Amjad Iraqi in LRB:

“By the time the Israeli authorities realised what was happening, ‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’, as Hamas has called it, had already inflicted a bloody toll. Horrifying stories are emerging of the shootings and kidnappings, with children among the victims. Abu Obaida, the Hamas spokesman, threatened to execute hostages if Israel carried out air strikes with no warnings to civilians. As of yesterday evening, nine hundred Israelis have been reported killed, more than two thousand wounded, and about a hundred abducted to Gaza. Among everything else, this was a disastrous Israeli intelligence and operational failure, regarded as the worst since the Yom Kippur War: it’s surely no coincidence that Hamas launched its incursion on the fiftieth anniversary of that conflict. News is still coming in, but it’s evident that, in terms of non-combatants, this is one of the deadliest massacres in Israeli-Palestinian history.”

(…)

“Many residents, afraid to speak out against Hamas, which has ruled the strip with an authoritarian grip since 2007, are fuming at the Islamist group for exposing them to Israel’s deadliest rampage since at least 2014. Inside Israel, Palestinian citizens are dreading a rerun of the events of May 2021, when Jewish mobs and police forces attacked Arab areas and arrested hundreds of people. A fresh surge of settler attacks, which have been escalating for months, is already underway in the West Bank, all under the army’s watch.
A number of analysts are describing Hamas’s assault as a ‘game changer’. This isn’t an overstatement. The attack will probably do little to roll back Israel’s siege of the strip, which will surely be reinforced with even more cruelty. What it has done, however, is shatter a psychological barrier as consequential as the physical one. Since the end of the Second Intifada, and especially under Netanyahu, Israeli society has tried to insulate itself from the military occupation it has imposed for more than half a century, maintaining a bubble that was only occasionally punctured by rocket barrages or shootings in southern and central Israeli cities. Israel’s mass protest movement, which has been agitating since January against the government’s plans to overhaul the judiciary, has consciously kept the Palestinian question off its agenda. Apart from a small bloc of anti-occupation protesters, most still clung to the illusion that the current structures of permanent rule could deliver safety for Israelis and remain compatible with their claim to democracy.”

Read the blog here.

Again, a couple of years after the Jom Kipur war we had Sadat and Begin, but even that then so hopeful development didn’t do much to solve basic problems, also because most of the Arab world including the Palestinian leadership rejected the peace agreement.

I’m not sure that after thos bloodbath Palestinian or Israeli civilians will be ready for another peace project.

Also, any peace process in the past has always been successfully hijacked by (small or not so small) violent groups, violence makes a population usually ready for more violence not for peace.
Sure enough, Israeli governments added sometimes to this process with extrajudicial killings and other measurements that helped the agenda of the so-called extremists.

Hope is extremely limited. But as they say, as long as there is life.