Only a Political Settlement Can Bring Middle East Peace

Like many other people in Israel and across the world, my first reaction to the attack on 7 October was of shock and horror. But that initial reaction was accompanied by rage, not only at the appalling massacre perpetrated by Hamas on women and children, the elderly and the handicapped, even babies, but also at those who could have prevented this act of violence, many that preceded it and the brutal retaliation that would come in its wake.

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Without clearly defined political goals, war tends to devolve into endless destruction and annihilation. The only way out of this conundrum is for Israel to declare that it seeks a peaceful resolution of the conflict with an appropriate and willing Palestinian leadership. Making such a statement would dramatically transform the situation and clear the way for intermediate steps to be taken on the ground, starting with a halt to the mutual killing and a return of all surviving hostages.

Any political path to resolving this crisis must include steps toward ending the occupation. Two months before the attack by Hamas, I helped craft a petition pointing out that the Israeli government’s attempted legal “overhaul” was being pushed by an extreme rightwing settler faction whose goal was to annex the West Bank. Yet the impressive protest movement against the judicial coup had refused to confront this “elephant in the room”, the occupation of millions of Palestinians.

On 7 October, this repressed reality literally exploded in the country’s face. This was an event waiting to happen. If you keep over 2 million people under siege for 16 years, cramped in a narrow strip of land, without enough work, proper sanitation, food, water, energy and education, with no hope or future prospects, you cannot but expect outbreaks of ever more desperate and brutal violence, inexcusable as those atrocities were.

For a long time, Israeli politicians and generals had believed that they could “manage” the conflict with the Palestinians rather than resolve it. Indeed, Benjamin Netanyahu’s many administrations chose to keep Hamas just strong enough, and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank weak and unpopular enough, that the Israeli prime minister and his allies could argue that no political pact with the Palestinians was possible. Meanwhile, settlements kept proliferating in the occupied territories, making any territorial compromise increasingly unfeasible.

That political stalemate, enforced by Israel, ultimately led to this violence. And while Hamas does not represent an existential threat to Israel, the current war in Gaza may bring about greater involvement by Hezbollah, Iranian militias and Shiite Houthis. Growing settler and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) violence in the occupied West Bank may ignite another Intifada, followed by an attempt to ethnically cleanse that territory, triggering in turn communal violence in Israel’s “mixed” Jewish and Palestinian cities. Israel may thus be unleashing a conflict on a scale not experienced since 1948, with unpredictable but surely profound regional and internal consequences.

Denying the deeper causes of the current crisis only makes things worse. Israel has presented itself as the only democracy in the Middle East, yet this applies only to its 7 million Jewish residents. Israel’s 2 million internal Palestinian citizens have never enjoyed full democratic rights; the 3 million Palestinians living under a 56-year-long Israeli occupation in the West Bank have almost no rights at all, and almost half of Palestinians in Gaza have lived their entire lives under an Israeli siege. It is because of the denial of this reality that Israel is currently balanced over a precipice.

Since 7 October, the IDF has displaced 1.7 million civilians – the majority of whom are Palestinian refugees of the 1948 Nakba and their descendants – from the northern part of Gaza to the southern part, and reduced a vast number of their homes to rubble. By most accounts the Israeli military strikes on Gaza have killed well over 10 times as many Palestinians, including numerous children (who make up 50% of the overall population there), as the number of Israelis killed by Hamas. This policy is creating an untenable humanitarian crisis. The population of Gaza has nowhere to go, and its infrastructure is being demolished.

Meanwhile, Israeli political and military leaders have made deeply troubling pronouncements that appear to prepare the ground for what may result in ethnic cleansing. The potential outlines of this undertaking have been revealed by the arch-conservative Kohelet Policy Forum, previously engaged in the judicial overhaul plans, which advocates the “relocation” of refugees from Gaza to other countries, allowing Jewish settlers to take over.

Many other members of the Israeli government, parliament and military would like to see the Palestinian people, as such, disappear from the map and from consciousness. For that reason we must urgently warn against the potential for genocide before it happens, rather than belatedly condemning it after it has already taken place. Evidence suggests that the Israeli military is already in breach of the Geneva Conventions on the laws and customs of war, which has led to growing international censure and rapid loss of support in the US.

To avoid boxing itself further and further into a corner, Israel must define a clear political endgame that will create conditions to end this conflict. While removing Hamas’s political and military control of Gaza is desirable, it may not be entirely feasible. Even if Hamas were somehow removed from Gaza – as the Palestine Liberation Organization was removed from Beirut – there is no known plan by the Israeli government as to what would happen next. The Israelis do not want responsibility for governing an additional 2 million Palestinians; nor does Egypt. And the Palestinian Authority, greatly weakened by Israel, will be seen as its agent if it is brought to Gaza.

Yet a policy course striving for a peaceful settlement appears highly unlikely under Israel’s current political leadership, which is just as extreme as it is incompetent. It is therefore crucial for moral and political pressure to be brought to bear on Israeli policymakers and the public to desist from actions that may result in war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and even genocide.

As a historian of the Holocaust, I have urged my colleagues to speak out against the dehumanizing rhetoric in Israel directed at the population of Gaza and to condemn the escalating violence on the West Bank. But for now, all we hear from most of these scholars is either silence or whataboutisms.

The current atmosphere on US campuses and in other intellectual forums is just as unhelpful. Some self-styled leftists and supporters of the Palestinian cause have praised the heinous massacre of 7 October and rejected Israel’s right to defend its citizens by attacking Hamas, which is sheltering in densely populated areas. Others have shown a remarkable lack of empathy with the hundreds of Jewish victims and hostages. Many condemnations of the Israeli bombing of Gaza often do not even mention Hamas’s initial terror attack, or refer to with it the sort of opaque or obfuscating language that pro-Palestinian activists rightly condemn when applied to Palestinian suffering.

Conversely, supporters of Israel, many of them Jewish, feel deeply betrayed by liberal colleagues who show no sympathy for Hamas’s victims. But while they may be ambivalent about the immense destruction of Gaza, they generally refuse to recognize the deeper political causes of this state of affairs and often resort to familiar clichés, all too common in Israel, of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim barbarity, and of eternal and universal antisemitism, which they also detect among some of their own liberal colleagues.

We lack any real conversation between these two groups, which persist in mirroring the same inability to communicate that characterizes the region itself, even though they are mostly unaffected by the violence directly. Striking postures of supporting a just cause while paying a minimal price for it, this lamentable self-righteousness on the cheap has reached new heights since the current outbreak of violence.

Despite the terrifying violence and destructive intransigence on both sides, the objective must be a peace settlement. There are roughly equal numbers of Jewish people and Palestinians in the territory between the Jordan River and the sea. Neither group is going away. They can either keep killing each other or find a way to live together. That must be the goal. All dreams of making the other side disappear or submit to perpetual oppression will only produce more violence and brutalization of both groups.

The very assertion of a will to reach an agreement has the potential to transform the situation. The ongoing killing will only make it worse. No internal governmental coup, and no external political deal – whether in the previous normalization pacts with the Gulf states, or peace with Saudi Arabia, or otherwise – will obscure the urgent need for a political settlement between Palestinians and Israelis.

For now, all we can do is plead with our own governments to use this moment of deep crisis and horrifying bloodshed as a lever to compel Israel to end its occupation of another people and to seek creative solutions for coexistence – be it in two states, one state, or a federative structure – that will ensure human dignity, equality, justice and liberty for all.

• Omer Bartov is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University and the author of Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis

• This article is adapted from an essay first published in different form on the website of the Council for Global Cooperation