KQED

As any veteran Middle East peace process observer will tell you, it is often darkest before the dawn in the most intractable bilateral conflict on Earth. Our own foreign policy sage Jeremy Kinsman looks at the implications of the most recent low points in the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic and the possibilities for moving forward.

By Jeremy Kinsman

December 16, 2023

The war in the Middle East has returned the territorial conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to the top of the international news lineup. It had been, sporadically, a lead story and an enduring geopolitical friction point for more than 75 years, but lapsed as Israel prospered and the power dynamic shifted.

In Israel, the fates of the 1200 citizens murdered October 7 by Hamas fanatics and the 240 hostages taken back into Gaza broke the country’s heart. Israel’s grief, anger, and pain compelled the government to commit to eliminating the maniacal terrorist threat forever, while exacting justice today. It explains the massive bombing campaign that the Financial Times estimates has done more damage to Northern Gaza than WWII allied bombing did to Dresden.

As Robert A. Pape detailed in Foreign Affairs in December, the bombing campaign will likely fail to eliminate Hamas, while further alienating the Palestinian people. Apart from the need to respond to the nightmarish assault of October 7 by trying to eliminate a murderous enemy forever, Israel’s strategy has no clear path beyond the military campaign.

President Joe Biden had advised Israel not to overreact hastily in its military response. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin cautioned Israel about the costs of gaining a tactical military victory but failing strategically to address the root causes of the conflict.

The question, then, is “What next?”

However it is accomplished, a pathway is needed to a real process toward a viable Palestinian state adjacent to Israel, either the two-state solution, or, more exotically, some kind of confederation. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has fought his whole career against a Palestinian state. Though 76% of the Israeli population wants him to resign his office once the military campaign against Hamas is resolved or tempered, the complexities of Israeli politics may keep him in power.

A peace process will need a different Israeli leader. It will also need a viable and responsible Palestinian partner. Hamas is excluded from that status by belief and behaviour. The corrupt and unelected Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank is not up to it, though individuals associated with Palestinian participation in the moribund peace process such as Hanan Ashrawi, who has been an invaluable interlocutor of Canadian foreign ministers, certainly are.

That process needs to be reinvented, revitalized, and meaningfully internationalized. Impetus and insistence will have to emerge from international involvement to administer an outcome that provides a path to a Palestinian state while enabling Israel’s overarching need for national security. Internally, Israelis will need to reckon with their current extremist coalition government, which has clearly failed in its responsibilities.

However it is accomplished, a pathway is needed to a real process toward a viable Palestinian state adjacent to Israel, either the two-state solution, or, more exotically, some kind of confederation.

The IDF campaign against Hamas in Gaza has reportedly killed several thousand militants who seek defensive refuge among the general population, or in tunnels. Tactical Israeli bombing has collaterally killed about 17,000 civilians at this writing, including more than 5,000 women and 6,000 children (the US State Department says the toll may well be higher). The IDF claimed to heed the US injunction to spare civilians, but the civilian mortality toll has been frightful. About 80% of Gaza’s dense population of 2.2 million have been displaced by the violence. The situation is a humanitarian catastrophe. At this writing, there is no longer a humanitarian program, since there is now no longer electricity or energy in Gaza, and barely any clean water or food.

An Israeli essential minimum objective to decapitate Hamas leadership in Gaza may well partly succeed, but Hamas’ top-down control over Gaza will likely be broken. Still, Israeli bombing is almost certainly “producing more terrorists than it is killing,” as Americans (who learned the lesson in Vietnam and Iraq) had warned them it would. As Pape reminds us, the bombing of civilians never succeeds in causing them to revolt against their own government. Accordingly, Hamas may be curtailed as an actively resistant organization, but its mythology will endure as the Palestinian militants who “stood up to Israel”.

Polling in mid-November depicted 76% of Palestinians as viewing Hamas positively, considerably higher than previous polls. However, given that Hamas will be out of the political picture as an organization, Palestinian opinion will now be shaped by what happens next on the Palestinian issues, including to Gaza.

Apart from its homicidal intention, the strategic Hamas objective of its terror attacks October 7 was to revive support for the more or less sidelined Palestinian cause internationally, and to make the issue again an overriding obligation of Arab states, and specifically to derail the Israeli-Saudi accord that was emerging under Biden’s leadership. In these aims, the appalling attack largely succeeded. Many analysts have concluded that Hamas cynically hoped to prompt a massive Israeli military attack that would cost many Palestinian lives.

The most productive outcome of this disastrous conflict for the people of Gaza would be the decisive rejection by all Palestinians of the core malign aim embedded in the Hamas charter, to undo the creation of the state of Israel and restore the land to Palestinians displaced in 1948 by the Nakba, their “catastrophe” of expulsion and exile.

On Gaza’s future, though Netanyahu declared his expectation the IDF will occupy the territory “for an indefinite period,” the reality is that this would only deepen the Gazan population’s collective hostility toward Israel. At the same time, despite having been supported by Biden, there is little chance that the Palestinian Authority, which nominally administers the non-contiguous and semi-autonomous West Bank territory, will replace Hamas as administrator of Gaza. The PA, which has not held an election in over fifteen years, is controlled by Fatah, the secular political descendant of the PLO, that has been a dire rival of Islamist Hamas. Israel under Ariel Sharon withdrew in 2005 from Gaza, which it had occupied since the 1967 War, and Fatah moved in, only to be displaced by more militant Hamas in the 2006 Gaza election. The Palestinian Authority/Fatah could not now credibly re-assume control in Gaza as the political outcome of an Israeli military operation.

Any objective observer, including the Biden administration, now recognizes that the need for a Palestinian state is more urgent than ever. If that need is not accommodated, this cycle of violence will never end. Eventually, it will ignite wider war with unknown but ominous international consequences, which adds to the need for international engagement in a solution.

A plan for a pathway has to be more convincing in effectiveness than anything the UN has ever done. It must be US-led, backed by viable security guarantees.

The pathway to a solution cannot be set by the two entrenched antagonists, either the irridentist hard-liners in Palestine who refuse the legitimacy of Israel’s existence, or those in Israel who refuse to recognize the authenticity and legitimacy of the Palestinian people and their aspiration to have their own sovereign state.

It collides with the counter-aspiration of “eretz Israel,” the outright incorporation of the biblically mandated provinces of Judea and Samaria that compose the Palestinian West Bank, which constitutes a core belief of many in Likud, and which has heavily influenced government policy since Menachem Begin won power for Likud in 1977. At that time, there were scarcely 4,000 Jewish settlers on what was the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which the United Nations declared in 1967 should be divested. Successive Israeli governments have pursued a policy of creating “facts on the ground” in defiance of these edicts. Today, there are over 500,000 settlers whose enterprise is at the centre of Israeli politics, creating a major impediment to a conflict resolution. As a leader of the settler movement told the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen, “You cannot occupy your own land. Israel is not an occupier because that’s the land of Israel.”

With the internationally brokered, aspirational and incrementalist Oslo Accords of 1995, a peaceful conclusion seemed possible. But that hope was scuttled by repeated failures, including Camp David II in 2000. The intransigent components of both sides to the conflict resumed their inter-dependent cycles of harsher terms of occupation, terrorism and violent protest, including the second Intifada that began in the fall of 2000.

It would be unrealistic not to recognize that prospects for a Palestinian state that has real autonomy are superficially even lower than they were before the Hamas attack of October 7th based on the obliteration of already depleted trust on both sides. Israelis are less inclined to take any risk with their security and hostility to Israel from Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza has deepened, with incalculable impacts on younger generations from both sides.

Decades of effort have been spent by civil society on joint people-to-people bridge and confidence-building initiatives between Israelis and Palestinians — in culture, as by conductor Daniel Barenboim, or in health care, as with the international Rozema Project led in Canada by former Ambassador Jon Allen, or in day-to-day life, as pursued by Canadian peace activist Vivian Silver, slaughtered by Hamas assailants October 7th. But despite such efforts, the two-state solution fell by the wayside. Netanyahu promised utmost security to a modernizing Israel. Much of the Israeli population normalized the static and oppressive Palestinian conditions under occupation. The notion of a two-state solution became an empty slogan.

It will be a stretch for many Israelis to accept that the goal of a two-state solution has to be revived as the price of peace, and that it needs to be overseen internationally. A plan for a pathway has to be more convincing in effectiveness than anything the UN has ever done. It must be US-led, backed by viable security guarantees. An advantage is that there are now six, mostly wealthy, Arab states that have diplomatic relations with Israel and they can contribute to rebuilding Gaza and support the West Bank.

Will the US be able to bring Israel behind such a serious peace project? If international engagement is to work, it obviously has to be with Israel on-side. As Peter Baker of the New York Times and others report, the US has played an intense dual diplomatic role in this crisis, giving Israel maximum public support while counselling restraint and reflection in private, including to other key countries in the region. Netanyahu has publicly ignored US advice. Would a change in Israeli leadership — to ex-defense chief Benny Gantz, for example, who is preferred according to polls – make a meaningful difference provided a new approach is not re-packaged from the past? It will require serious pressure from the US, a tough ask of the US in an election year, already disrupted by a weakening of resolve in Congress over Ukraine.

The US political scene is at least as roiled as Israel’s, the Democratic Party particularly so over the Gaza issue itself (Gallup reveals that 63% of Democrats oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza). The US diplomatic effort in the crisis has been commendable. But the path ahead can only be cleared by more than nudges to both sides. Joe Biden may see this leadership challenge as the value proposition for his re-election, or his legacy cause if he does decide to complete his service with just one term. Either way, the resolution could be epic, or a costly failure in an already dangerously combustible region.

Contributing Writer Jeremy Kinsman served as Canada’s Ambassador to Russia, the European Union, Italy and as High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian International Council.