The Palestine-Israel nightmare won’t end until we accept these basic truths | Israel-Gaza war

History is long, and short. For many supporters of Israel, history appears to have commenced on 7 October 2023. For me, and for many others steeped in the acid bath of Palestine-Israel, history is a long brine. Conversations with ourselves begin to change in texture. In time, our arguments are prone to spoilage.

As a Palestinian American who has lived in both Gaza and the West Bank and has observed the unfettered encroachment of settlements first-hand, I’ve long been a proponent of a single shared state in Palestine-Israel – an idea that many have rejected as unworkable. Now, as we observe what scholars have described as a genocide in Palestine, the question resolves to whether it’s even thinkable for Israeli Jews and Palestinians to live as fellow citizens in a shared society.

But a two-state outcome is equally hard to envisage – Israeli settlements have made partition impossible.

What is clear is that the Palestinians, who have faced brutality for 100 years, need a resolution. And perversely, the carnage may present a new chance at redirecting history.

The war has sundered the status quo. Israel, a small country, is isolated, perhaps permanently. Mass global anti-war rallies, the international court of justice’s genocide hearings, and the international criminal court applications for arrest warrants – which put Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, in league with Slobodan Milošević – represent meaningful changes.

But they’re not enough. Truly moving forward requires policymakers to accept several basic truths they have largely refused to recognize – the most fundamental preconditions to ending the Palestinian-Israeli nightmare.

Hamas won’t be eliminated

The question of what should happen in the immediate future is clear: we need a permanent ceasefire. Gaza needs to be rebuilt and the Palestinians who live there must be permitted to return home. The territory should be free to conduct trade, its residents able to travel for study or any other reason.

Yet there is little reason to believe that this will be Gaza’s future. All along, Israel has claimed that it seeks the wholesale destruction of Hamas, a goal shared by Biden, who has said the group should be “eliminated”. But as Stephen Walt, an international relations professor at Harvard University, explained, “you’re not going to eliminate Hamas and that fraction of the Palestinian community.”

The latest ceasefire proposal, which falls short of committing Israel to a permanent halt to its activities in Gaza, seems designed to fail. A temporary cessation of hostilities, which will, judging by Israeli statements, be followed by more massacres and death in Gaza, is no ceasefire. And so we are left to consider the likelihood of a protracted Israeli presence in Gaza.

A prolonged reoccupation will see a committed Palestinian insurgency of the kind that Hamas is waging nine months into the carnage. The Israelis, conscripts or reservists with other things to do, are harried and disorganized, lacking political leadership or a vision for the future. That lack of leadership appears to be the main reason Benny Gantz – a centrist by Israeli standards, rightwing by any other – has pulled his party from Netanyahu’s government. The history in Lebanon, where Hezbollah waged a fierce and successful fight against Israeli occupation from 1985 to 2000, is instructive – the Israelis will be bled by the armed resistance if they do not withdraw.

Yet that scenario – a native, grinding insurgency – seems to be willfully ignored in policy discussions about Gaza. Instead, the conversation in Washington and Brussels seems to reject the possibility that Hamas will continue to play a role in Gaza or in the politics of Palestine-Israel generally.

Hopes for a Hamas defeat on the battlefield, followed by political capitulation, are unrealistic – like hoping that Netanyahu’s Likud, Gantz’s Israel Resilience, or Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party will have no future in the land. As Michael Milshtein, former head of Palestinian affairs in the Israeli military, explained to the Wall Street Journal: “There is no vacuum. Every place that is evacuated by the [Israeli army], Hamas fills it … Right now there is no alternative, other than Hamas.”

Indeed, the group’s battlefield success, measured by its staying power and capacity to continue to inflict meaningful losses on the occupying Israelis, carries portents for any eventual resolution. It’s a lesson the French learned in Algeria when they sought to eliminate the Algerian National Liberation Front, at enormous cost to Algerian civilians. The Americans, for their part, learned in Vietnam that the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam had more staying power than they did, even as more than 2 million civilians were killed in that war. And the Taliban in Afghanistan succeeded in defeating both American and Russian troops decades apart.

Hamas is an indigenous movement in Palestine. It draws support from civilians; its combatants can disappear and find sustenance among other residents of Gaza. Evidence shows Israel’s unbridled assault has caused an increase in support for the Islamist movement among Palestinians, enhancing its resilience.

Polls conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) indicated that in September 2023, Hamas was only supported by 12% of Palestinians in the West Bank and 38% in Gaza. In May of this year, support for Hamas in the West Bank had increased to 41% while in Gaza – where the polling data is less reliable due to the prolonged Israeli assault – the figure remained unchanged at 38%. On average, support for Hamas increased from 22% in September to 40% in May, with a +/-3% margin of error.

It remains the case that many Palestinians view the Islamist parties Hamas and Islamic Jihad as among the only actors committed to their right to self-defense. That right is self-evident to the Palestinians and their supporters, no matter their views of either party. As Hanan Ashrawi, member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and former spokesperson of the Palestinian delegation to the 1991 Madrid peace conference, told me: “People under occupation have the right to defend themselves. It is enshrined under international law.”

Hamas’s assertion of Palestine’s right to self defense – in defiance of Israel, the United States, Britain and Germany – also acts as one of the few points of leverage available to the Palestinians after decades of a failed “peace process”.

Israel’s partisans may argue that the Islamist group has signaled unyielding intent to eliminate Israel through words and actions, particularly through its deadly rampage on 7 October, and that the organization cannot be negotiated with for that reason. The argument fails on several counts. First, its corollary is that Israeli leaders cannot be negotiated with in light of their putatively genocidal actions in Palestine. Yet the Palestinians have indicated a willingness to negotiate with Israel for decades now, and they continue to do so.

Then there is Hamas’s 1988 charter, which called for the destruction of Israel – but was significantly modified in 2017 to express a willingness to pursue a state within Palestine’s 1967 borders.

The group has also repeatedly indicated interest in a long-term ceasefire with Israel, hudna in Arabic, as reported by the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Dag Henrik Tuastad, the report’s author, writes: “The purpose and details of Hamas’s hudna do not appear to differ substantially from the political positions of the [Palestine Liberation Organization] during the Camp David talks in 2000.”

Finally, there is the question of tactics. Both Hamas and Israel – and the Haganah, which preceded Israel’s army – have used terrorism to advance policy goals. But as the Irish Republican Army, which pursued its political program in part through bombings in London, and the African National Congress in South Africa have shown, the only path to eliminating terrorism is through a political agreement. “Governments and insurgents generally negotiate even though they say they never will,” the political scientists Brendan O’Leary and Andrew Silke note in their study of insurgency and terror tactics. Indeed, the Good Friday Agreement, signed in 1998, successfully brought calm to Northern Ireland. The end of apartheid in South Africa brought one chapter of that struggle to a close.

Palestinian unification is essential

The Palestinian national movement is in a state of disarray, hollowed out and fractured by an unending “peace process”. The framework that was supposed to have seen the emergence of a Palestinian state really only compelled the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank to do the work of enforcing Israel’s occupation, even as the apartheid regime metastasized throughout the territory.

The fact of the PA’s control by Israel, and its commitment to protecting occupation forces, is a fundamental obstacle to a meaningful resolution. In every comparable struggle – in Ireland, South Africa, Bosnia and Vietnam – representative national leadership was instrumental in producing an end to the conflict.

Today one may ask: who speaks for the Palestinians? The answer is that no one does. But that wasn’t always true.

The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), a coalition of various Palestinian movements, was founded in Cairo in 1964 to act as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, wherever they may be. Its goals changed over the years: the PLO called initially for a Palestinian state in all of Mandate Palestine, or what is now known as Palestine-Israel. It endorsed the two-state solution as part of the process that preceded the Oslo talks in 1988 after decades of armed struggle.

“The PLO is a reservoir of the Palestinian history of the resistance and the people; it represents the Palestinians as a whole. It embodies an identity and a history of struggle,” Ashrawi, of the Palestinian Legislative Council, explained. Yet the PLO is not fully representative – Hamas and Islamic Jihad are not members.

The Oslo Accords – which were not supported by all members of the PLO – were signed on 13 September 1993. The agreements formally split the representation of the Palestinians: those in exile would continue to be represented by the PLO, but those in the occupied territories would have their interests represented by the newly formed PA, a proto-institution that was, in the most generous interpretation of history, intended to precede a Palestinian national government in the state of Palestine.

Today, the PA is corrupt, led by 88-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, who has succeeded in resisting calls for presidential elections since 2005, when he was elected. Rather than occupying the role of liberation movement, the Abbas PA has become an administrator of paltry favors granted by the occupying authority, Israel. The corruption and impotence have led nearly 90% of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank to desire Abbas’s resignation. In Ashrawi’s view, “we need elections” to reorder the national movement.

Palestinian divisions can be traced in part to the last legislative elections, in 2006, which Hamas won. Fatah, the opposition, attempted a US-backed coup, which failed. Fatah ended up in control of the PA in the West Bank; Hamas administered Gaza. The intervening years have seen repeated efforts by Palestinians to produce a representative unity government come to nothing, in part because of American and Israeli pressure designed to keep the Palestinians fragmented.

The manic, joyful killing in Gaza has united Palestinian society more than at any other time in recent history. The May PCPSR poll found that 79% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza sought either a “reconciliation or reunification” of Gaza and the West Bank or “the formation of a national unity government” that would be empowered to negotiate with Israel. For her part, Ashrawi has renewed calls for the inclusion of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the PLO. “If we want comprehensive representation, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, everybody should be a part of the PLO. Otherwise it’s not representative,” she said.

Talks to achieve unification are ongoing; China, in an effort to grasp the mantle of leadership from the United States, recently brokered talks among Hamas and Fatah representatives. That unification is essential to a just resolution to the conflict, since only a representative body can negotiate on behalf of all Palestinians.

Jewish Israelis must relinquish their privilege

Western leaders pronounce their faith in the two-state solution at every turn, despite a peace process that has been effectively dead for decades. It’s clear that Zionism – with its focus on the need for Jews to engineer and maintain a numerical majority, with superior rights, in all of Palestine-Israel – is what killed the proposal for two states. The settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem, which are home to 700,000 Jewish Israelis, many of them among the most extreme exponents of Zionism, have made it impossible to imagine a state on that land.

Those of us who supported the one-state solution argued the demographic reality would result in the end of Zionism and equal rights for everyone.

But we struggled for years to make our case. “I long thought the one-state solution was unworkable,” Walt, the international relations professor, said. “But I’m now beginning to wonder if … that turns out to be the only mechanism.” For a long time, equal rights in Palestine-Israel seemed like the only possible way to square geographically mixed populations and an emerging Palestinian majority with a non-expulsionist, non-exterminationist policy.

But one or two states are not the only proposals offered by those seeking to fill the breach. Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli political analyst, supports a confederation – a union of countries with a central authority. “I do think Jews have a right to self-determination as a people and that Palestinians have a right to self-determination and those two are interdependent,” she explained.

Ashrawi, the Palestinian politician, lives in Birzeit, a small, historically Christian town, in the occupied West Bank. She is less focused on technical questions, and more on the fundamental principles. “We have to stay united and remain focused on the objective: a free and united Palestine for all Palestinians. We need the right to self-determination,” she said.

“I don’t worry about one state versus two states – the real issue is we have the right to live in freedom and dignity and sovereignty on our own land.”

Ashrawi dismissed the negotiations that have yielded so little for the Palestinians. “Are we going to sit down and work out borders? That’s not the issue now, frankly speaking. We have to assert our rights.”

The Palestinians will remain at war against apartheid and Jewish supremacy for as long as they exist. But what justice for the Palestinians looks like, after so much death, and so much injury, is hard to say.

In an ideal world, one in which 15,000 Palestinian children – an unfathomable number – hadn’t been killed, the war in Palestine would end through true liberation. More than 8,000 Palestinians languishing in Israeli prisons and 120 Israelis trapped in Gaza would be released and permitted to return to their families.

Equal rights in Palestine-Israel would act as the basis for a strong parliamentary democracy, safeguarding the rights of the individual in a pluralistic society. Or, in an alternative future, the confederation promoted by Scheindlin, Palestinians and Israelis would live in a country grounded in “two people’s self-determination, [each claiming] a territorial environment where they feel culturally expressive of who they are”, as she described her vision.

But whatever the configuration, Jewish Israelis must relinquish the extraordinary privilege they’ve secured for themselves in Palestine-Israel. They cannot be counted on to do so without massive external pressure, however. As the journalist Peter Beinart said to me, South Africa didn’t change until the “status quo [became] untenable for the elites”.

The last nine months have changed many of us, making ideas that once seemed attainable feel distant, unreal. It seems reasonable to believe that the horror meted out by Israelis, orders of magnitude larger than the crimes perpetrated by Hamas on 7 October – with the overwhelming support of their society – has been inscribed for ever upon the hearts of many people.

Diana Buttu, a former Oslo negotiator who lives in Haifa, described her physical insecurity, the personal relationships that have curdled, and the casual incitement to genocide by her Jewish neighbors. “Everywhere you go, you see these signs that say ‘Finish them’.”

“When you talk to people about what the army is doing they shrug it off … 15,000 kids killed, and this is the response: ‘Eh, it’s the price.’”

So many young men have posted so many videos of themselves committing crimes of war that they are unavoidable. So many young people – children – have sabotaged efforts to deliver flour to Gaza.

It is impossible to imagine a future in which Palestinians and Israelis live side-by-side in a single state or a confederation without some reckoning. For my own part, I cannot conceive of a future that does not require the reconstruction of the Israeli left in a new form – anti-Zionist, honest about history, aligned with the global movement for Palestinian rights. It is simply the precondition for working together, towards any outcome.

The showy parades in Tel Aviv that preceded October 2023, demanding democracy for Jewish Israelis alone, have nothing to do with Palestinian liberation, and Palestinians regarded them with aloofness or scorn. The vast majority of the families of Israeli soldiers and civilians who are protesting the Netanyahu government are not calling for an end to the genocide, or for Palestinian freedom. There is little common cause there; we do not see our humanity reflected in their eyes. Many Palestinians watched the celebrations that attended the Nuseirat massacre – four Israeli hostages were freed, measured against the murder of nearly three hundred Palestinians – in shock, overwhelmed by feelings of total revulsion.

Yet Palestinians and Israelis are not unique. Rwanda and South Africa, where genocide and apartheid were perpetrated, have sought a return to life through truth and reconciliation commissions, which seek to identify harm and repair it.

As O’Leary, the political scientist, noted to me, this requires, first, a brand-new political order. “The empirical pattern is that a regime that is not defeated does not concede a comprehensive truth commission, followed by legal processes in which state officials are … sentenced.”

And so hope for the future, such as it is, is fixed in a vision that requires the end of Jewish supremacy in Palestine.

In reality, we are light years from truth and reconciliation commissions, a harrowing effort in the best of times. Today we are Rwanda in 1994, bathing still in frothy blood.