The war will end. The leaders will shake hands. The old woman will keep waiting for her martyred son. That girl will wait for her beloved husband. And those children will wait for their heroic father. I don’t know who sold our homeland. But I saw who paid the price.
The war that has engulfed Israel, the Gaza Strip, and well beyond since October 7, 2023, has confronted the world with much on which it had never set eyes before. In scope and brutality, Hamas’s assault on Israelis exceeded any prior Palestinian act. Israel’s military attacks and forced starvation in Gaza are an onslaught governed by unusual rules, in which the death of Palestinian fighters seems like collateral damage, while the widespread, indiscriminate slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians, many of them women and children, appears the main event. Killing is the purpose. Death is everywhere, its victims uncertain when or where it will strike next. Horror also has come at the hands of the West’s collusion and Arab governments’ indifference, which is no different from complicity.
October 7th turned relations between Israelis and Palestinians upside down. How much of this matched Hamas’s planning and calculation, how much the chaotic, bottled-up frustrations and furies of fighters and civilians of all stripes, is debatable. Confined to the Strip, captives for years, often from birth, because of the Israeli blockade, Gazans could set eyes but not feet on lands from which parents and grandparents had been forced to flee. When Hamas breached the fence that separated Israel from Gaza, many followed the organization’s deadly script; others seized the opportunity to flood into what they considered stolen territory, to brutally lash out at those they deemed their captors, and to kidnap those they could hold as prisoners. In the short distance from Gaza to southern Israel, they were transformed in little time from conquered to conqueror, victim to perpetrator, detainee to abductor.
Yet for all that it changed, the war was neither new, anomalous, nor aberrant. Not an abnormal deviation from traditional Israeli-Palestinian dynamics but their culmination. Not the wave of the future but the past’s formidable revenge. Amid the vagaries of the decades-old clash between two nations vying for the same plot of land, one constant has been violence, perpetrated and endured, on minor and colossal scales. If Palestinian attacks against Israelis never before reached the recent toll, it has not been for lack of trying but for lack of success. If Israeli military operations against Palestinians have fallen short of this ferocity, it has not been for lack of desire so much as for lack of opportunity.
For a while, Israeli and Palestinian leaders invested in diplomacy, gambled on its effectiveness, and trusted in its primacy over force, out of political calculation, tactical considerations, or both. A majority of Israelis and Palestinians have at times favored a negotiated resolution and resigned themselves to necessary compromises. Each diplomatic venture ended in failure. Each failure rekindled the gravitational pull of an existential, pitiless struggle. In the end, what mattered was the balance of power and brute force. Those who mattered most knew it best.
October 7th and its aftermath provide the starkest of reminders. Gaza played host to the conflict’s multiple historical layers of enmity, rage, and revenge. Strip away the occasional ceasefires and peace deals that turn out to be neither; what remains is a naked contest that originated long ago and stubbornly refuses to go.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies may have been more vocal about their determination to crush Gaza; with time, internal cracks have begun to appear in Israel, as many of its citizens wish for a ceasefire to bring the remaining hostages home, or as images of starving Gazans shock even the most hardened. But the forcible dispossession and displacement of Palestinians, the deprivation of their basic rights, has been a hallmark of the Zionist movement and of Israeli governments. There were differences among them, some of which mattered deeply to Israelis. None fundamentally affected the condition of being Palestinian. Many outsiders openly dream of an Israeli government without Netanyahu and his partners, one led by those they hope would replace them. That dream was not of an imaginary future; it had often been yesterday’s reality. It did not bring Palestinians any closer to fulfilling their aspirations, nor did it truly soften the blows they endured. It is convenient to personalize this affair, to turn it into the story of a single individual and his loathsome associates. Netanyahu is the ideal offender, one whose ouster would set things right. He makes it so much easier to exonerate previous Israeli governments that also sought to liquidate the Palestinian cause, eliminate its leaders, and deepen Israeli dominion; to absolve his political rivals who seldom challenged those actions; and to clear the United States, which most of the time obediently abetted them throughout. He makes it easier to look away.
There is convenience, too, in conscious efforts to single out Hamas. October 7th was neither uniquely Hamas nor distinctively Islamist. It was Palestinian through and through, so much so that even Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, so critical of violence, so convinced of its futility, took a long time before he could bring himself to utter a single negative word about it, and then primarily for other political motives. Hamas’s religious doctrine, not its resort to violence, is what sets it apart from Fatah, its chief rival for leadership of the Palestinian national movement. From the start, Fatah’s defining trait was armed struggle, often with scant heed to whether its victims were civilian or military. Both Fatah and Hamas are sprouts of the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational organization dedicated to the Islamization of Arab societies. But whereas Fatah’s founders broke ranks with the Brotherhood in the nineteen-fifties when they decided to engage in guerrilla warfare, Hamas’s future leaders at first concentrated on domestic matters, prioritizing the religious transformation of Palestinian society over an armed confrontation with Israel. Of the two, paradoxically, Fatah has the more militaristic pedigree, and Hamas was the latecomer to violent struggle. Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who designed the October 7th operations, in this sense bore more in common with the Fatah of old than with the Muslim Brotherhood of today.
October 7th was entirely unforeseen and wholly unsurprising. Little about it was original: not the violence or thirst for revenge; not the focus on Gaza; not the attempt to kidnap Israelis; not the goal of releasing Palestinian prisoners; not the aspiration that it might trigger more sweeping regional change; not the overwhelming Israeli response much of the world views as disproportionate and most Israelis perceive as necessary; not Israel’s methodical, systematic assassination of any Palestinian it deems complicit; not the labelling of Israel as a colonial state, of Zionism as racism, of Palestinians as modern-day Nazis; not America’s collusion, confusion, and impotence. This latest iteration of the conflict was also among its most primitive. Now shorn of the pretense of a hollow peace process, it could revert to its original form.
Hamas’s onslaught and Israel’s war of destruction were not one-offs or historical exceptions. They were reënactments. They made quick work of years of a peace process that had become a sore farce. They reached deep into each side’s collective memories and then let loose their most abiding emotions. Hamas did not invent anything; it reclaimed a Palestinian past. Israel’s reaction was not unusual either, but a concentrated, magnified version of a long Zionist tradition of how to deal with the land’s Arab inhabitants. Palestinians and Israeli Jews also came to regard the other side’s actions as fulfillments of their own national nightmares, ethnic cleansing for one and extermination for the other. It is no surprise that they both so freely bandied about historical metaphors of yesteryear: a reprise of the 1948 Nakba for Palestinians; another Holocaust for Israelis. Residents of southern Israel paid for all the pain and humiliation Palestinians had suffered at Israeli hands. The people of Gaza paid not only for Hamas’s actions but for Nazi crimes as well. History does not move forward. It slips sideways. And, in the darkest of ways, repeats itself.
The Gaza war shattered notions that, for years, have been activated on behalf of a peace-process mythology. They exposed myths that surrounded the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: about the role of history and violence; the nature of Israeli and Palestinian sentiments; the promise of bilateral negotiations; the realism of partition between two states; the motivation and efficacy of American policy. This was not the first time that they had been exposed, and being exposed in no way guaranteed that they would be dismissed once and for all. But surely it should have proved harder after Hamas’s lethal operation and the Israeli government’s cataclysmic response; in light of sweeping Palestinian support for the former and overwhelming Israeli backing for the latter; in the wake of violent settler activity in the West Bank that conjures up prospects of ethnic cleansing and displacement, and of the nascent resumption of Palestinian attacks after a two-decade lull; against the backdrop of America’s unwillingness or helplessness to do much of anything about any of it, of European spinelessness and uselessness, of the gap between the indignation and the apathy of Arab governments—surely, it should have proved harder after all that, to blithely repeat bromides about the peace process, the two-state solution, or the central role of U.S. diplomacy. Whatever certainties had taken refuge in American minds, now would come time for their retirement. It was not to be. The world after October 7th was built on lies.
Some were expected, as when Israelis described how humanely they treat Palestinians, spoke of their Army as the world’s most moral, and claimed that military pressure would get the hostages out, or when Hamas denied the horrors that happened on that day. America’s falsehoods were most startling because they were least necessary. Joe Biden’s Administration presented Hamas’s attack as disconnected from history, the expression of “unadulterated evil,” the work of “animals;” praised Netanyahu for holding back unhinged extremists in his Cabinet, resisting their “enormous political pressure;” claimed that America was determined to stop the killing and was doing all in its might to that end; made repeated announcements of imminent deals for a ceasefire that left Israel, Hamas, and even its two co-mediators, Egypt and Qatar, baffled by the groundless optimism; placed the entirety of the blame for the failure of those ceasefire and hostage negotiations on Hamas even as Israeli officials, some in boast, others in lament, ascribed copious responsibility to the Israeli government, and even as several American officials privately blasted U.S. tactics. Eventually, in a gutsy historical rewrite, some U.S. officials sought to portray its post-October 7th policies as resounding successes. The failure to achieve a lasting ceasefire, release the hostages, prevent a humanitarian catastrophe, and avoid the war’s regional expansion—all of which the Biden Administration had identified as core goals—was a necessary precursor to Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s downfalls, Iran’s defanging, and the Syrian regime’s collapse. Warts and all, the outcome was according to plan.
These assertions go beyond guile, opportunism, cruelty, despair, or self-preservation. No one believes them. Those who utter them must know that no one believes them. They make little sense, their objective hard to discern. Yet they inevitably have a cost. The earnestness with which they are spoken is not redemptive. It is confounding, which makes them the more destructive. They breed cynicism. They are the kind of falsehoods that erode any support for any endeavor undertaken in their name. Words still matter but in unintended ways. The more the falsehood is told, the more it invalidates the point made. Its only lasting impact is to accentuate disbelief. That happens when the universal accountability for which the United States calls exempts Israel, pretending it can be counted on to judge its own. It happens when the United States arms the Israeli hand that strikes the victim and then pleads with it to stop. “To kill someone and walk in his funeral” is an old Arabic saying that says it all: America delivers weapons that kill women, children, and the elderly, that destroy homes, schools, and hospitals; it provides meagre humanitarian aid to sustain Palestinians who survived the latest U.S.-enabled attack only to await the next one. It happens when America assumes the maddening pose of moral conscience of the world and helpless bystander to its horrors. The air of anger, grief, and mourning that accompanied every American pronouncement on Gaza’s fate fooled nobody. Actions matter, not words that, in their perversity, made matters worse. Palestinians compared this to the old Mafia tradition of caring for those you are about to liquidate and to Rome’s gladiators saluting Caesar before proceeding to be slaughtered. Avē Imperātor, moritūrī tē salūtant.
Of all the falsehoods dispensed during the war, one of the more perplexing was the Biden Administration’s repeated homage to the two-state solution. The malady is not America’s alone; in recent weeks, President Emmanuel Macron announced France’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state, a step toward a putative two-state solution that he describes as the “only” path to peace. He was followed in short order by the U.K., Canada, Australia, and others. This is where the story passes beyond demagoguery and deceit and heads for the absurd. The two-state solution is dead, has been for some time prior to October 7th, and has been made all the more illusory in its aftermath. It is not about to be revived by virtue of another collective incantation or recitation of the mantra. The idea of partition has been around for more than eighty years. In terms of longevity, creativity, and the rotating cast of characters involved, it would be hard to fault the quest for its achievement. Yet regardless of setup, content, personality, or style, the result did not vary. Plans were met with questions, reservations, rejection, bewilderment, violence, and, more recently, a yawn.
Efforts to achieve two states failed under far more auspicious circumstances. They failed when the Palestinians were still unified; Israeli public opinion, by and large, could live with the outcome; settlements were a fraction of what they are today; and the two peoples could imagine some form of peaceful coexistence. At the height of America’s post-Cold War power, with leverage to spare, a phalanx of U.S. Presidents designated Israeli-Palestinian peace a priority but proved incapable of bringing a two-state solution any closer. When, under Barack Obama’s Administration—which included officials more understanding of the Palestinian cause than ever before—the effort sputtered and stalled, President Abbas seemed to lose faith. In a caustic remark to one of us, he suggested that even were America’s team to one day become staunchly pro-Palestinian and the Israeli government to be led by Meretz, the country’s most left-wing Zionist party, still, there would be no Palestinian state.
Yet the two-state solution enjoys persistent, international backing that nothing—not the years of trying and failing; not mounting Israeli rejection nor growing Palestinian indifference; not developments on the ground that stubbornly move in opposite directions and leave the idea of partition ever further behind—has been able to challenge. Proponents grasp for reasons to still believe in its possible realization. Today, they might look to dramatically altered local and regional circumstances—Israel victorious and self-confident; Arab states forced to reassess their stance; an unpredictable and atypical American President who can turn on allies and warm up to foes; a battered, isolated Palestinian leadership. They cling to the hope that, combined, these circumstances may lend life to the idea of two states on terms that Palestinians previously would not have countenanced and that Israelis currently see no reason to endorse. They cling to it even as they are incapable of describing a realistic pathway to its achievement. Queried for a road map to two states, Martin Indyk, the late American diplomat, veteran peace processor, and a staunch advocate of its inescapability, told one of us a few weeks before his passing, “I don’t have one, but we should persist.”
