It’s Halftime in Israel

Is Hamas sacrificing the denizens of Gaza as a way of forestalling a durable peace between Israel and Gulf states?

Why now?  And cui bono (Who benefits)?

As readers will know, our friends over at Hamas World Headquarters organized attacks all along the Gaza/Israel border on the morning of October 7.  Attackers penetrated a few miles into Israel.  They raided communities, going house to house in many instances, shooting up whomever they might find. They even raided a music festival—kind of a Burning Man in the Negev—killing hundreds, abducting others, and abusing those others. Various reports suggest that “abuse” would amount to obscenely antiseptic understatement. It’s a bad business.

The how of this remains a question, as in “How did raiders manage to massively and systematically breach a highly patrolled and monitored border?”  Less of a question might be the why of it.  There are, for example, credible suggestions out there in the meme-o-sphere that both the Iranian leadership and hardline Palestinians perceive value to instigating a war with the Israelis.  Principally, the “Israeli-Palestinian issue” had been fading into the cliched dustbin of history.  It was being resolved in a way that did not suit either the hardliners or the Iranians.  Specifically, the Saudis were moving towards formal recognition of the state of Israel.  Such recognition would amount to implicit rejection of Palestinian claims, and it could render Iranian adventurism in the Levant less politically viable.

Sure enough, the Saudis have come out and condemned the Israelis, but Hamas and the denizens of Gaza may yet pay a great price for launching this gambit.  We will see.

Let me pose four ideas.

The first one should be obvious, but cheap-and-easy calls for “peace” suggest that it never is:

(1) Achieving an enduring peace involves cutting deals, but not everyone will be satisfied with any one solution. There may be people willing to fight implementation of any one given solution.

Achieving an enduring peace means resolving the “Israeli-Palestinian issue,” but getting a critical mass of people to go along with a candidate solution has proven to be difficult. Consider, for example, two of the traditional solutions.  These solutions amount to “one-state” solutions.  One of them amounts to driving the Israelis into the sea.  Palestinian hardliners demand that one.  Nothing less will satisfy them.  The other one amounts to driving all of the Arabs out of Palestine.  That solution would suit Israeli hardliners.  Then there is the fantasy of simply opening up all of Palestine to genuinely democratic rule.  Like, why not just get everyone to commit to constitutional governance and to democratic electoral processes?  In other words, why not allow Israel to annex the West Bank and Gaza and allow competition to unfold not on the battlefield but in the ballot box?

This sets up the second idea:

(2) It is no accident that Israel has declined to annex either the West Bank or the Gaza strip, because annexation would require them to extend citizenship to everyone on the West Bank and Gaza.  But that could afford the Palestinians a winning coalition in electoral politics.

Note that no one talks about that third “one-state” solution. Indeed, I would suggest that it is no accident that the Israelis have opted not to annex the West Bank and Gaza, because demographic trends may not suit them.  Under such a scheme, Palestinians might find themselves ultimately capable of outvoting the Israelis.  So, simple solution to that problem: do not annex the West Bank or Gaza and thus do not extend full citizenship to the Palestinians in those territories.

Then there are flavors of the “two-state solution”: Can’t we divide up Palestine in a way that enables two states, a Jewish state and a Palestinian state, to peaceably coexist?  Perhaps, but this leads to the third idea:

(3) Palestine already operates under a de facto two-state solution, and the Israeli leadership may be happy with that.

Note the contrast with the Golan Heights.  No one lives up there, because there is no water, but the Heights overlook northern Israel.  Israel has been happy to annex the Golan Heights, because there is obvious value to denying one’s adversaries the option of situating artillery there.

Now, the fourth idea.  Admittedly, this one is a little more ambitious, but it amounts to a retort to folks who insist that it is inconsistent to criticize support for Ukraine but then to extend support to Israel over Hamas.

(4) The Israelis will endeavor to vanquish Hamas.  The Saudis may then be compelled to see Iran’s gambit as nothing more than a crazed bid to prevent Saudi Arabia and Israel from cutting a deal.

Or put it this way: If the United States were to compel its agent in Ukraine (Ukraine) to cut a deal with the Russians or the Russians themselves, through force of arms, were to compel the Ukrainians to cut a deal, then an enduring peace may yet obtain.  Similarly, were the Israelis to compel Hamas to cut a deal, or were the Iranians to call off their agent (Hamas), then the path to an enduring peace between Israel and other Gulf states may yet be reopened. Specifically, would the Saudi demonstration of solidarity with the Palestinians prove to be superficial and short-lived?

But, before we get to that: Will the Israelis vanquish Hamas?  And what would it mean to vanquish Hamas?  Would it involve taking over the Gaza Strip?  I pose that as a distinct possibility, but, admittedly, governing a restive population makes for a fraught business. Unless the most combustible members of that failed, quasi-state could be destroyed or compelled to leave—and where would they go?—it is not obvious that Israel would want to find itself managing Gaza. But, we will see.

*     *     *

I can remember, as a much younger person, being very pleased with the news in 1993 that the Norwegians had mediated settlement of the Oslo Accords.  The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) would recognize Israel, and the Palestinians would be granted autonomy in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.  The two parties held out the prospect of coming up with a two-state solution, meaning autonomy in the occupied territories would eventually give way to nationhood.  The Palestinians, however, would have to demonstrate some capacity for self-rule.

The Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and PLO chairman Yasir Arafat both had a hand in going along with, if not shepherding, the process.

That process came along after the United States had suspended its own efforts to broker peace.  In 1991, an exasperated American Secretary of State, James Baker, expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of commitment of both sides to the latest “peace process”.  He ended up telling them to call a particular 202 phone number (a Washington DC number) if and when they would be ready to talk seriously.

The Oslo Accords seemed like the biggest breakthrough since the Carter Administration had mediated a deal between Israel and Egypt in 1977-1979.  Israel would return to Egypt control over the Sinai peninsula, control that Israel had seized during the 1967 war. Egypt would recognize Israel.

Islamic Jihad assassinated Sadat in 1981.  An Israeli hardliner assassinated Rabin in 1995.

By 2000 or so, it became obvious that the Israeli government had taken up a new approach with respect to the West Bank, if not the Gaza Strip.  The Israelis would support the construction of settlements on the West Bank.  The idea seemed to be that, over time, encroachments on the West Bank would whittle away at the effective foot print of Palestinian authority.  That process of whittling away has fitfully continued to date.

By 2006, Hamas had taken up new tactics of its own.  It would launch home-made rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel, all as a way of raising the costs to Israelis of living in Israel.  Hamas would thus engage in a project of whittling away of its own.  But, it turned out, the Israelis would make periodic incursions into Gaza in attempts to neutralize the threat.  Hamas and Israeli forces have been shooting at each other in fits of rocket fire and reprisals ever since. These days Hamas has upgraded from home-made rockets to missiles imported from (possibly) Iran.

Shocking to me, back in 2006, was a shift in opinion on American university campuses.  Monolithic “support for Israel” is one thing, but the Israelis started to take much criticism for responding to rocket attacks. The acceptable alternative being what?  Just taking it?

The next big innovation in Israeli/Palestinian affairs seems to have been the initiative of the Trump administration to get more Arab states to formally recognize Israel.  Hence the Abraham Accords.  And, like it or not, the Israeli/Palestinian matter started to fade.  Yes, the Israelis had continued to build settlements on the West Bank.  (There has been much diversity of opinion in Israel itself about this matter.)  And, I would suggest, observers who label the West Bank an “apartheid state” do have something to go on given the fact that the West Bank does not afford to its residents the status of full citizenship that would come with belonging to a state, whether a separate Palestinian state or the state of Israel.  Which leaves us where we are: The Palestinian issue was being marginalized.  The Palestinians in the West Bank and the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, would find themselves having to … maybe start governing themselves like Palestinian states instead of like what they are, supplicants to the UN and to various sponsors in the Gulf. The Palestinians have been governed by corrupt officials-for-life who live off the largess of those Gulf sponsors and UN sponsors. Nothing was changing until the Trump Administration started to make them change. The Biden Administration has reversed course, denigrating the Abraham Accords and restarting payments in the $billions to the Palestinian authorities. That has delivered neither peace nor justice to anyone.