Please note – very important – nothing I am about to say is meant to endorse, support or oppose anything or anyone. All I am trying to do is talk about what the reality of the situation is, no matter how unpalatable that reality may be. As the writer Philip K. Dick once said “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”. If anybody wants to make the world better they have to start with what is real and not some preferred imaginary world. When your theory conflicts with reality, you should create an alternative theory, not an alternative imaginary reality.
I want to start with this very perceptive quote from Ernest Renan the 19th century writer who said: ““Forgetting, and I even say historical error, are an essential central factor in the creation of nation”
In order to work out how to fix the Palestinian – Israeli conflict you have to understand the political reality and to do that you first – and most importantly – have to forget the history. When it comes to fixing this conflict, and making the future of the Palestinian and Israeli peoples better, history really doesn’t help. It’s not just that history doesn’t matter it’s that looking for solutions by obsessively investigating and thinking about the history is actually a hinderance. Thinking too much about history in these sorts of situations of ethnic and national contest for land is usually a big part of the problem.
When the Jews and the Arabs started fighting over land nothing out of the ordinary happened. From the end of WW1 until the end of WW2 the very same sort of conflicts over land, nationality and ethnicity were happening across Europe and throughout the debris of the collapsed Ottoman Empire. In every such conflict very deep histories were invoked on both sides to justify whatever land grab, violence or atrocity was unfolding. Modern history writing was originally invented largely as a way to construct deep mythological origin histories for what were in fact very new nation states. The job of history in nation building was to project the existence of a modern nation state back deep in to the past and thus define its existence as an inevitable fact of the present. This process of projecting nations back in time is always invoked when, as there always are, disputes over territory, boundaries, borders and ethnicities. Open a map of central and eastern Europe, pick any spot and then try to excavate a deep history that explains why it is inevitable that it is inside its current nation state. Then construct another history that shows why it should be another country. Surprisingly often both histories will work equally well.
WW2 largely ‘cleaned up’ the ethnic map of Europe, populations were moved around (and pause for a moment to consider the horrors that ‘moved around’ entailed), or killed in unimaginably large numbers and then the borders were mostly frozen. Almost everywhere the resulting postwar national populations were much, much more ethnically homogenous compared to pre-war populations and the post WW2 borders were mostly just accepted. Even though one can, for example, easily construct equally valid multiple histories to explain which different countries a city like Lviv (also known as Lwów, Lemberg, and Leopoldstadt) should ‘belong to’, nobody in Europe (other than Putin) wants to open these sorts of cans of worms again. Nobody wants more piles of rotting corpses. Modern Europe works because of historical forgetting. So what if Gdansk within living memory used to be called Danzig and was full of people that spoke German – nobody cares anymore. After wading through a sea of blood and bodies by the middle of the 20th century most of Europe, outside of the Kremlin and the Balkans, had learnt the crucial lessons about forgetting history.
I would strongly argue attempts to ‘fix’ the injustices of the national past as a way to fix the present usually just turns the present into hell. Instead the way to fix the present and make the future better is to focus on the reality of now, of what is possible and what is impossible, to work out what can really be done today to make tomorrow better. Sometimes that’s a bitter pill to swallow when all a people can think about are the wrongs done to them in the past. But you just can’t fix the past. Only by forgetting is peace possible.
So when it comes to fixing things for Palestinians and Israelis the issue of who lived in the territory “between the river and the sea” two thousand years ago, or two hundred years ago or hundred, doesn’t matter. Neither does what happened in 1929, or 1936, or 1948, or 1967. Getting the history ‘right’ won’t fix the present. Usually trying to ‘fix’ the past just leads to suffering in the present, ask the people of Northern Ireland where a protracted attempt to ‘fix’ the 1920s ended up just making the years between 1968 and 1998 hellish.
What is the reality now ”between the river and the sea”? Without going into the details of the past, which as I have argued, leads nowhere good, the reality of today is pretty clear. Israel won the fight for land and went on to build a very successful and very strong nation state. That nation state now cannot be defeated militarily nor, short of an Iranian nuclear strike, can it be destroyed. It cannot be wished away. It is economically and socially strong, it has a fully functional democratic political system, a working state apparatus and strong civil institutions, it’s military is the most powerful in the middle east, it has very strong and powerful allies, it has somewhere in the region of 200 nuclear warheads and plenty of ways to deliver them.
By comparison the Palestinians are weak, dispersed in a diaspora or concentrated in two territories, one of which Israel effectively controls and the other which Israel can, as it has shown, occupy and smash to smithereens if it so chooses. The Palestinians have no economy to speak of and are more or less wholly dependent on the charity of others. Their military power, compared to Israel is tiny. They have no single political or state body that can speak for them, their institutions are weak. They no longer have any allies (in the sense of those who would actually fight alongside them) in the Arab middle east. In fact from what I can gather the Palestinians and their leaders are mostly despised and disliked across the Arab middle east. Their only ally in the region is Iran a non Arab country that is hated by the majority Sunni Arabs and which uses the Palestinians as disposable tools in its own unpleasant games of regional power. In the west Liberal Left opinion favours the Palestinians and hundreds of thousands march and shout slogans about fixing history but that counts for nothing on the ground in the middle east, meanwhile tellingly Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain have banned such demonstrations.
Palestinians are utterly subordinate to and much, much weaker than, Israel. That may feel like a seemingly unendurable reality for Palestinians but it is nevertheless the reality and so it is the reality from which political calculation by the Palestinian leadership should start. How under these circumstances can the lives of Palestinians be made better and how can the conditions be created so they can live good lives? One answer is for them to have a state of their own alongside Israel (the two state solution), another is for them to become full citizens of Israel with equal political and civil rights (the one state solution). How could either of those solutions come about? Who can make that those things happen? Who controls the fate of the Palestinians?
The people who control the fate of the Palestinians are the Israelis.
Some may dream of an imposed solution based on ‘historical justice’ which can somehow bypass Israeli resistance but who would do the imposing? The Europeans? There is zero chance any European country would put troops on the ground in any circumstances let alone in a deal opposed by the Israelis. Ditto the USA, can anyone imagine America using force against Israel to force compliance to a deal? An alliance of Arab states? The Arabs tried imposing a solution by force, they tried several times in fact, and that didn’t work out well for them and they won’t be doing that again. Some think if they campaign strongly enough in those countries that aid Israel, especially the USA, they can be forced to change policy and this will force the Israelis into a deal against their wishes. Leaving aside whether Israel really can be punitively isolated (I very much doubt it) they would rather survive by eating sawdust that be forced into a deal that they felt endangered them and their nation. The simple stark truth is that any deal, and hence the future fate of the Palestinians is in the hands of Israelis.
While the fate of the Palestinians depends on the Israelis, at the same time the possibility of Israel living without fighting a constant insurgency in the West Bank and endless dangerous attacks across its borders depends on the Palestinians. But those two fates are not equal. The Palestinians have a lot more at stake than Israel, their situation is already much worse and the huge disparity in power and might means that the Israelis can hurt the Palestinians a great deal more than the Palestinians can ever dream of hurting Israel. The Palestinians certainly have some power to hurt the Israelis but October the 7th was probably the largest hurt that they could ever inflict. When it comes to hurting the disparity is very, very big. The people with the most to lose if the conflict continues is the Palestinians.
In order for the Palestinians and the Israelis to come to terms, make peace and find a mutual way out of this endless cycle of conflict requires certain minimum necessary preconditions. Because the Israelis are by far the stronger side they, and only they, can dictate whether a one or two state solution ever comes to pass. That simple unavoidable fact is the pivot upon which all political calculation by the Palestinians, and their supporters, should turn. Under what circumstances would Israel decide to grant a one or two state solution? The absolutely essential thing that has to happen before the Israelis will grant a one or two state solution is that they must feel completely safe doing so. If Israel thinks that a one or two state solution is going to, or even might, create dangers for their citizens, or that territorial or citizenship concessions will be used as a mechanism or base for carrying out attacks on its people, then nothing will ever be conceded. This central fact – that making Israel feel safe is the only way to move forwards towards a solution – is absolutely crucial to understanding what must be done but it remains currently completely unacceptable to Palestinians and their supporters.
In practice making Israelis feel safe will be really hard to achieve because it means inducing a feeling of safety, trust and ultimately empathy for Palestinians amongst the Israeli population. That will take a very long time of Palestinians not doing anything to make the Israelis fear or hate them so in practice it will feel like a political surrender or at best a strategy of quietism and demobilisation. But there is no way around it. If Israel does not feel safe nothing will be conceded, and the Palestinians can bring nothing to the table that can compel the Israelis to make concessions, in which case the conflicts, wars, atrocities and attacks will go on. Most of the victims of the conflict will continue to be Palestinians.
I have written as if Palestinians and Israel were just one thing but of course each side has its own complex internal politics. Because Israel is a working democracy it is fairly easy to see the balance and the shifts of its politics unfold in more or less real time. Inside Israeli politics there is a Left and a Right, there are secularists and religious zealots, and there are also distinct currents of irredentism and racism. The balance of Israeli politics is not fixed and it shifts in response to events and external pressures. But nobody can succeed in Israelis politics unless they can convince the Israeli electorate that they can make them safe in a world of hostile neighbours.
The balance of Palestinian politics is harder to read because there have been no elections amongst Palestinians since 2006 when Hamas won 44% of the vote (and a majority in Gaza) while Fatah won 41% (and a majority in the West Bank). This was followed by a civil war amongst Palestinians (with the usual stuff common in civil wars like street fighting, assassinations, kidnaps and torture) which left Fatah running the West Bank and Hamas running Gaza. I am fairly sure that if free elections were held tomorrow that Hamas would do well, probably winning in the West Bank and I suspect still getting a surprisingly high vote in Gaza. I would expect Fatah to lose heavily in an election, mostly because Fatah is deeply and horribly corrupt. Other parties might gain votes but they would, I expect, be closer to Hamas than Fatah. Palestinian political culture is deeply irredentist in general, with quite a bit of explicit racism, and it has been very deeply interfered with by malevolent external players like Iran. We can only speculate about the balance of Palestinian political opinion because there will be no elections soon. Oddly there have been no urgent calls or campaigns for free elections for Palestinians from those who campaign in their support in the West even though it is claimed they suffer under a system analogous to apartheid, whereas in the case of South Africa the entire campaign against apartheid was focussed on demanding free and fair elections.
Needless to say continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians empowers those on both sides who thrive on conflict and so a sort of feedback loop is created where each side shapes the other in ways that justifies more conflict, and conflict in turn increases support for those political forces that campaign for war.
Given all the above about the inherent disparity between the power between the two sides, and the unavoidable fact that only Israel can concede a two or one state solution, the obvious thing would have been been for the Palestinians to have worked hard over time to reassure the Israelis that they are safe and that they would make either good neighbours or good fellow citizens. That’s unfortunately not what has happened. The explicit words, ideologies and demands of pretty much all the popular Palestinian political leaders has always included strong statements about how the land of Israel is occupied by usurpers and must be taken back. This gibes well with modern western leftist post-colonialist ideology so Palestinians once again have ended up with allies that act as echo chambers for the least helpful sort of Palestinian politics. All this didn’t make Israelis feel safe, so since its withdrawal from Gaza in 2007 Israel has made no concessions or offered any deal. October 7th was an inflection point though. For Israelis Gaza and October 7th showed what you got if the Palestinians ran their own affairs. My sense of internal Israeli politics was that prior to October 7th there was still a large minority of Israelis willing to cede some sort of two state solution for the Palestinians in order to achieve peace. After October 7th support for a peace deal has collapsed in Israel, and although there are plenty of Israelis who hate Netanyahu and there is still a Left and Right in their political arena now it’s people as a whole are reconciled to war not peace, and they want victory. Even when the Israeli opposition demands a ceasefire (note not a peace deal) in order to get the hostages back they also want victory in the war. My reading is that having watched Iran build it’s Axis of Resistance for decades that culminated in October 7th the current Israelis leadership is now committed to a sustained high intensity and probably quite long war with the aim of destroying as much of Hamas and Hizbollah as they can and then smashing up Iran as much as they can. I can’t see how they can be stopped from doing that. If they are thinking ahead to a post war world I think it is possible the Israeli leadership is once again thinking it can go back to its pre-war strategy which was to not concede a deal but instead more comprehensively wall off Gaza and fight a manageable low intensity insurgency in the West Bank whilst nibbling away relentlessly at the land. I presume their hope is that with Hamas and Hizbollah decimated and Iran shattered or at least neutered there will be no more October 7th’s and the whole thing can be managed better and for forever. No doubt some of them hope that maybe after this brutal war the Palestinians will grow weary of war but I don’t suppose the Israelis are banking on it.
Postwar there will of course still be Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank amongst the rubble and graves, and I expect that amongst them will still be young men waving Kalashnikovs around, more calls for the human sacrifices of martyrs, more babbling of medieval theocratic nonsense, more little rockets will still be fired into Israel, and Islamists will still shout about driving the Jews out. Honestly – is that the best strategy? Should the allies of the Palestinians in the West just parrot back such obviously self defeating slogans and strategies? Away from the eye of the storm wouldn’t it be better if the pro-Palestinians activists and thinkers in the West were perhaps trying to shift Palestinian political culture away from doing things like October 7th?
