Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu certainly wants to believe that the Israeli Defence Forces’ ongoing assault on Gaza City, the last unchallenged redoubt of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, will finally destroy the jihadist outfit, solve the hostage crisis, and allow the IDF to return most of its young men and women to Israel: all with minimal Israeli efforts over the longer term. The odds of this happening are poor.
The Israelis are trapped in Gaza. No matter who the Israeli prime minister, no one is going to save Jerusalem from being responsible for the Palestinians. Neither Americans nor Europeans nor, as former Secretary of State Tony Blinken recently dreamed in The Wall Street Journal, Gulf Arabs, are coming to rescue Israelis from garrisoning and feeding the Strip.
All the European self-flagellation about unconditional recognition of a Palestinian state, and the Democratic Party’s canonical embrace of the two-state solution, spring from a conviction that Israel can’t be a liberal, democratic society and the Palestinians won’t stop killing Israelis, and vice versa, until Palestinians have a country of their own. This conviction persists even though the possibility of a Palestinian homeland in the West Bank and Gaza died when Yasser Arafat, in response to Bill Clinton’s and Ehud Barak’s arduous and pretty generous diplomacy, unleashed the Second Intifada in 2000.
Its suicide bombers destroyed Israeli hopefulness and the Labor Party; it also fuelled Israeli territorial ambitions — a deeper defence through settlements — and Right-wing Jewish revanchism about a Biblical homeland including so-called Judea and Samaria. Two-state dreaming in the West persists even though it does an enormous disservice to Palestinians, who have to live with far stronger Israelis, who can, if they choose, seize yet more land on the West Bank.
There is no historical reason to believe that the premise about a Palestinian homeland delivering “justice and peace”, as French President Emanuel Macron recently put it, is likely to be true. Both European and Middle Eastern history strongly suggest that nationalism and, even more so, nation-state creation, often intensifies a willingness to kill neighbours and minorities precisely because such a state has the capacity to do so.
Old-fashioned liberalism, not nationalism, is what tempers the bloodlust that rises easily in men. Israelis’ basic decency towards non-Jews inside Israel is rooted in liberal Western roots and their unparalleled, centuries-long history of being on the receiving end of both exclusionary nationalism and Christian antisemitism. That liberalism is under siege by the Israeli far-Right, especially among those aligned with Itamar Ben-Gvir who want to expel Arabs from Gaza, the West Bank, and even from pre-1967 Israel. Netanyahu’s fragile parliamentary majority has given this faction an outsized role in politics and outsiders’ conception of where the Jewish state might be going. The general Israeli affection for Donald Trump — he did move the embassy to Jerusalem and bomb Iran — further disinclines many in the West to think well of Israeli intentions.
But the liberal canary in the coal mine has always been Israel’s own minorities: Druze, Christian, and Muslim Arabs haven’t done poorly in Israel; many have prospered, rising in both private and public professions. Palestinian Arab Israelis, who number about two million, could have become a fifth column, ripping the country apart. They haven’t.
At the same time, an unavoidable reality is that the most basic security requirements for Israel would keep any Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza truncated, without control of its border, air space, trade, and defence. Blinken and many others know that the Palestinian Authority is a mafia, guilty of rapacious malfeasance, cruelty, and, to put it politely, mixed emotions about dealing with Israelis. It has often encouraged, not restrained, violence. But how is the authority going to be “reformed”, as Blinken and many Europeans have urged, unless the Israelis figure out some way to do it?
In their more optimistic moments, Americans and Europeans envision the PA somehow even helping out in Gaza. Yet it’s been only Israel’s continuous intrusions into the West Bank, openly and clandestinely, that has kept Hamas from eating Fatah, as it did in Gaza in 2007 after Hamas narrowly won parliamentary elections in 2006, but was denied power by the PA, Israel, the US and Jordan.
Reflexively concerned about Israeli military actions against Palestinians, Europeans seem far less concerned about how Palestinians have governed themselves, even though limited self-government — whether in the West Bank and Gaza; or on the East Bank in 1969-1970, when Arafat made a violent play for a Palestinian state in Jordan; or in exile in Lebanon and Tunisia — has been disastrous, costing tens of thousands of Palestinian lives. With East Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital, the European political class and many in the Democratic Party would like us to believe that the Palestinian ruling elite will somehow do better. There’s a broader issue here too. Westerners have always been selective in their choices of who deserves sovereignty: Tibetans and Kurds, two proud people with ancient identities, don’t really merit that much attention. Would Western guilt about the Palestinians even exist if (Muslim) Jordanians and (Muslim) Egyptians were the ones denying Palestinian “sovereignty”?
Unfortunately for the Palestinians, their identity has since birth been hopelessly intertwined with violent opposition to the Jews. Even for the modern Arab Middle East, where the death of Muslim and European empires brought forth immiserating, ruthless men, Palestinian founding fathers have been awful. It’s not hard to imagine Arafat or Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the British-appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who found virtues in Hitler, nodding in approval at the atrocities committed on October 7. The horrors of that day sprang from an Islamic Palestinian society that sees itself in a guerre à outrance against the Jews. That animus has obviously been diminished within Israel, where the Jewish identity of the state isn’t really questioned, at least not violently, by the vast majority of the two million Israeli Arabs. But in other circumstances, if Israeli Arabs outnumbered Israeli Jews, that peaceful cohabitation might collapse. Either way, the socialisation of Israeli Arabs certainly appears to have fundamentally altered the blood feud that, in the West Bank and Gaza, has led many Palestinians to praise terrorism against Jewish women and children.
This antipathy has surely become worse as Gaza under Hamas became a hothouse for Islamic militancy — and as Israeli settlements increased on the West Bank. As became painfully obvious after October 7, the most hideous behaviour wasn’t beyond the pale for many Palestinians, even for those who weren’t members of Hamas.
All the while, growing Western hostility towards Israel likely reinforces Middle Eastern distaste for Zion. The PA’s long-standing refusal to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, which if it happened, would contravene the holiest parts of both the secular and religious sides of the Palestinian national movement, ought to tell outsiders that Palestinian resistance to Jewish nationalism remains resilient. This isn’t a chip to trade only at the end of a long, exhausting diplomatic process. Go ask Bill Clinton.
Netanyahu’s current plans to occupy all of Gaza may be ill-advised and beyond Israel’s military capacity, but it at least recognises that Israeli and Palestinian fates are intertwined. An Israeli strategy aiming to extirpate Hamas, which sees itself as the truest expression of the Palestinian-Muslim identity, couldn’t possibly work unless the IDF took full control of the terrain and kept it. This “ink-spot” approach takes manpower and patience, however, and a willingness to absorb high-casualty rates, both for the IDF and Palestinian civilians, as sustained house-to-house, tunnel-to-tunnel fighting and deadly ambushes are unavoidable. All the hostages would likely die. Israel was unprepared to do this at the beginning, when its spirit was undimmed by two years of hard fighting and most of its Western allies hadn’t yet had meltdowns about Israeli actions. It seems impracticable now. Moreover, such an approach needed, eventually, a Palestinian partner — someone willing and capable to kill Hamas fighters and other militants who might surface after the Israelis reduced their occupation.
Now, without a Palestinian partner, the Israelis will have no choice but to choose some form of indefinite, partial occupation where, ideally, they and the Palestinians lose less. As the reality sets in that an Israeli ground presence centred on three corridors — Netzarim, Morag, and Philadelphi — that slice up the Strip, isn’t disappearing, the Israelis certainly will hope that they can find Palestinian partners who hate Hamas as much as they do Israelis. It’s a long shot bet at best. Even if the IDF finds Palestinians who can reduce Jerusalem’s burden, if those “partners” are to survive the IDF and the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, will have to be far more engaged in Gaza proper than just manning its corridors.
More likely, most Israelis probably believe that they can still wall off Gaza from their society, banning the issuing of work permits that could be used by Hamas or others to plan attacks. Rather, the theory goes, Israel should just control the Israeli-Egyptian border to interdict weapons and other war matériel; build better barriers reinforced, when necessary, with enfilading fire; dump food at the border crossings — and let others figure it all out.
This minimalist vision might even work in Gaza. But it surely can never work on the West Bank, where the proximity of Arab and Jewish settlements and the potential for turmoil paralysing the Israeli heartland, as well as neighbouring Jordan, is too great. As the recent terrorist attack at a Jerusalem bus stop again showed, just a few Palestinians resident in Israel, if aligned with terrorists on the West Bank, can bring havoc quickly into Israeli society. Jerusalem’s counterterrorism forces are probably the best in the world, but their margin of error is very small.
For the Israelis, the Gaza War has been a public-relations nightmare, probably more corrosive in its impact than all the wars before it. This was unavoidable when Netanyahu and the IDF tried, however incompletely, to destroy Hamas. Lightning, repeated commando raids, which the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recommended, might have spared Israel some of the opprobrium that it has earned for demolishing much of Gaza. This would have, however, only dented Hamas and likely left most of the leadership intact. Israel’s intelligence penetration of the Lebanese Hezbollah was vastly more effective than its efforts against Hamas, which were clearly wanting on October 7.
To kill large numbers of Hamas’ men meant that Israel would need to kill at least an equal number of civilians, which appears to be what has happened; that this number isn’t several factors higher, which one could have expected given the usual losses in urban warfare, tells us clearly that Israel’s assault on Gaza, however destructive it has been, could have been far worse. The constant suspicions of Netanyahu’s intentions are merited. But war is ghastly. Urban warfare is shocking in how quickly it shreds human decency. Europeans, who have routinely obliterated and burned their cities to the ground in their wars, should perhaps judge Israelis less harshly.
History matters another way here too. For if Israel is trapped in Gaza for all kinds of security reasons, it also can’t escape its victory in 1967. Following the IDF’s triumph in the Six-Day War, Egypt lost Gaza and Jordan lost the West Bank. They don’t, so far, want them back. It’s reported that the United Arab Emirates offered Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt’s president-for-life, tens of billions of dollars to let Gazans move into the Sinai: and Sisi refused. (President Trump’s dreamscape of a seaside Las Vegas in Gaza is just an American variation on this reported offer.) If true, it just shows that Sisi, who’s greedy, isn’t a fool. Thumping on Palestinians would be a very bad, and potentially convulsive, look for the Egyptian military.
“Israel can’t escape its victory in 1967”
Such an Emirati proposition would be better aimed at Jordan’s King Abdullah to reabsorb the West Bank. The king likes to pride himself as a legitimate ruler over Palestinians. And Jordan, perpetually broke, could certainly use West Bank Palestinians’ greater economic dynamism. Culturally, the distance between East and West Bank Palestinians is less than between Gazans and Egyptians. Israelis could sweeten the deal by offering cohabitation and a Jordanian flag on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.
But Abdullah is too careful and conservative. Unlike his father, he doesn’t seem to have an emotional and religious connection to East Jerusalem. The Hashemites, who aim most of their internal intelligence resources at disgruntled East Bank Palestinians, wouldn’t likely want to tempt a redo of Arafat’s Black September in 1970 by adding three million West Bank Palestinians to the unstable mix. Besides, why would Abdullah want to deal with Israeli settlers, many of whom would fiercely resist giving up most of Judea and Samaria, land they think was given to them by God, back to Jordan?
In other words, then, an indefinite Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, no matter how unjust this may seem to some, is the only genuine option. If nothing else, it would mean that the Jewish state has truly joined the Middle East, where lots of ethnic and religious groups live close to each other, often despising the arrangement, sometimes for centuries. For their part, Israelis certainly do themselves no favours by seeing the West Bank as an essential part of their historic homeland. The Negev, not the West Bank, is where Israelis should seek cheaper land for a growing population.
Since 1967, the principle question for Jerusalem should have been — and sometimes was — how to run a humane occupation that tries hard to improve Arab lives. Today, Israelis should take more interest in how Palestinians treat each other and how they govern themselves, as well as how Israelis treat and govern Palestinians. This is obviously a never-ending, thankless balancing act, which Palestinians, and many Americans and Europeans, will castigate. But this kind of Israeli intrusion, compared to the alternatives tried since Arafat’s thugs set up shop in Ramallah, might make things eventually better. Palestinians don’t need to reform the PA; they need to rebuild it from scratch. They can’t do that unless Jerusalem, preferably with its Western allies, makes that a priority.
The alternatives through jihad, or dead-end, European declarations about Palestinian statehood, will just further the distance between dreams and reality and leave Palestinians in worse shape. In Gaza, which for the moment is more important than the West Bank, Israelis should try to do what not even Americans have ever attempted with their undefeated enemies: protect the common citizenry who loathe them. And, on the West Bank, Israelis should, just for a start, rein in the territorial acquisitiveness and violence of settlers.
Israelis and Palestinians will never be brothers. But they can, as has often been the case in the Middle East among antagonistic peoples, muddle through. Given how brutal much of the region has been since 1945, and how modern ideas have usually reinforced old antagonisms and the dark side of human nature, that alone would be quite the achievement. Such deeply unsatisfying progress can’t happen, however, unless a political majority of Israelis realise that Palestinian internal affairs are unavoidably their business. They should want Palestinians to be governed as they would want to be governed themselves.