October 27 , 2023
How to End the Israel-Palestine Conflict
Two weeks since Hamas’ surprise attack against Israel, the conflict appears in suspended animation. Two hundred hostages are being held in Gaza, while credible reports of rather gruesome actions by Hamas gunmen from the day they stormed into Israel have been transmitted by multiple media sources. Biden has offered Israel a lot of verbal support, but with the Republicans in the House paralyzed by their lack of a Speaker, Congress has not taken any action. Behind the scenes Biden has been restraining Netanyahu. He has asked for aid to enter Gaza, and has opposed the cutoff of food and water that Israel initially imposed. But Israel has fully mobilized its army and it cannot keep itself on a war footing indefinitely. At some point it will have to either stand down or go into Gaza in an attempt to destroy Hamas.
An Israeli invasion will be successful in the short term, although at a horrific cost of civilian casualties and damage to infrastructure. But in the long term, even if the entire leadership of Hamas is killed or captured, and the rocket factories and tunnels are destroyed, Israel still will be left oppressing and occupying two million Palestinians in Gaza. They will naturally have bitter feelings about this war and little trouble reconstituting another organization similar to Hamas with the aim of taking the fight back to the Israelis. Israel can destroy Hamas, it cannot destroy the Palestinian desire to live freely.
But who does Hamas actually stand for? In reality, it has never subjected itself to democratic accountability. This attack on Israel would not have been approved by the majority of Gazans as they know what Israel would do in response would be even more death and destruction.
Hamas in fact has its roots in Israel’s policy of trying to weaken the Palestinians politically. Going back to the 1980’s, when Gaza was completely docile, Israel encouraged fundamentalist Islamic movements linked to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood as a way of splitting the Palestinians and weakening the PLO run by Yasser Arafat. This was the origin of Hamas. Unlike the PLO, Hamas has never accepted Israel’s right to exist, nor is it willing to accept a two-state solution to end the conflict. Their goal is to recreate a single state that would be dominated by Palestinians and would grant the Palestinian refugees and their descendants the right of return to the villages and towns they were ethnically cleansed from by Israel in 1947-1949. What place Jews would have they don’t say, but the fewer the better would be a reasonable guess.
Hamas has always pursued terrorism and done so at the most opportune times to derail any chance of a resolution of this conflict. After the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Jewish extremist, Israel went to the polls in 1996 to elect a new Prime Minister. Many thought that Rabin’s ally Shimon Peres would win, and the Oslo process would proceed to a final peace deal. But just before the vote, Hamas carried out a series of suicide bombings on Israeli buses, which scared enough voters to elect the virulently anti-peace Benjamin Netanyahu. Hamas had killed the peace process.
In 2000, when Arafat and Prime Minister Barak conducted the final peace negotiations at Camp David with President Clinton, the two sides made significant progress, but a final deal could not be reached. But more progress was made with Clinton’s offer in December 2020, and at the Taba Negotiations in January 2021. By this time, a second Intifada was underway, and Hamas took the lead with even more suicide bombings. Again, Israeli voters turned to the right wing and elected hardliner Ariel Sharon, putting an end to the peace process. At every turn, Hamas has played a destructive role.
Once Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007, it has gotten itself into military conflicts off and on with Israel. The Israelis respond with air strikes, limited incursions, and stiff blockades on all sorts of imports, even food. Life in Gaza is miserable and essentially an open-air prison for two million people. Hamas cuts short-term ceasefires, but their longer term goal of war with Israel continues, even though they are completely overmatched in any military sense.
For now, even more misery is in store for the Palestinians in Gaza. For the Israeli hostages, they are in a tough spot. Israel cannot simply stand by and do nothing, but a full-scale ground invasion obviously puts the lives of the hostages in jeopardy.
The only good thing to come out of this whole mess is the end of Netanyahu’s strategy of supporting Hamas for the last decade. Netanyahu’s main goal is to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state and a just end to this conflict. To pursue that, the most logical thing is to keep the Palestinians divided among themselves so that he can credibly claim that there is no negotiating partner for a two-state solution. This is why Netanyahu has been very willing to prop up Gaza by allowing tens of millions of dollars from Qatar to flow there, and to slightly relieve the economic misery of Gazans by handing out a few thousand work permits to work in Israel. Meanwhile, he keeps a harsh lid on the West Bank and goes out of his way to humiliate and weaken the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah. This cynical game is now up.
For over a decade the world has ignored the plight of the Palestinians and the conditions they live under in occupation. To end this conflict the Israelis have to finally understand that they must give up the settlements they illegally built housing over 500,000 Jews on the West Bank. A two-state solution can be reached using the 1967 borders. The Palestinians conversely need to be honest with their refugee population. The best they will get is financial compensation, but no actual return to their ancestral homes.
Netanyahu has escaped a multitude of political traps over the last decade, but this time he may finally be finished. When this most recent Gaza war is over, the world needs President Biden to step forward and push Israel to accept a two-state solution.
The Palestinians are too weak and divided to negotiate such a deal. The best partner is the Arab League, led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The Arab League peace proposal of 2002 is still on the table. Israel gets peace and acceptance by all 22 Arab states in exchange for a return to the 1967 borders. The refugees get compensation and the settlers either move out or agree to live as Jewish citizens of a Palestine.
