It is said that wars end when both sides conclude they have nothing more to gain by fighting. By that logic, Israel and the Palestinians should have long ago agreed to the only solution that makes sense: separate states side by side. They’ve tried, again and again, but in this cauldron of religious passion and competing grievances, peace has always lost out. Is there any chance that things will be different when the guns fall silent this time? On the face of it, it does not seem promising. The attack by Hamas on Oct 7 and the Israeli retaliatory assault on Gaza have already led to too much death and destruction and have ignited communal hatreds in the United States and beyond. Every eruption in the past — whether war, intifada or military raid — has only demonstrated that neither side can achieve its longed-for security, dignity or peace through violence. On the contrary, every eruption only hardens divisions and ensures more bloodshed next time.
In fact, what peace might look like is not a mystery: The shape of a Palestinian state has been explored in minute detail by successive peace conferences, meetings, negotiations and private initiatives, collectively known — or derided, in their apparent futility — as the peace process. The Oslo Accords of the 1990s were a major breakthrough in bringing hardened Palestinian and Israeli commanders to the table and establishing basic principles of coexistence. In 2000, Ehud Barak, Israel’s prime minister at the time, put a significant offer on the table to the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat for a two-state solution, which he rejected as insufficient and failed to meet with any serious counteroffer.
Several years later, Barak’s successor Ehud Olmert and the Palestinian Authority leader, Mahmoud Abbas, met 36 times over nearly two years to hammer out a detailed plan that involved swapping some land, sharing Jerusalem, creating a free passage between the West Bank and Gaza and cooperating on business and resources.
That initiative foundered, as they all did, through violence, politics and circumstance: the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a clash with Hamas in Gaza, Olmert’s resignation and Benjamin Netanyahu’s victory, the ouster of the Palestinian Authority from Gaza. Extremists — be it Palestinian Islamists determined to destroy the Jewish state or Israeli settlers determined to push Palestinians out of the West Bank — knew they could undermine any effort toward peace through provocation or terrorism.
The victims, as they always are in this cruel war, are the children, women and men who just want to live in peace. The victors, as always, are the zealots who pursue their absolutist goals by murder, provocation and deception, demonising the other side. It is likely that Hamas launched its attack on Oct. 7 in part to undermine the movement toward an Israeli deal for normalising relations with Saudi Arabia.
This board has called many times for an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, and we have called for mercy and reason in the current conflict. We have based this on the presumption, the hope, that there are still enough people who see the futility and horror of the endless cycle of violence on both sides and that the United States, which has invested so much treasure and diplomatic effort into resolving the crisis and has given Israel unstinting support through the decades, still has some clout. We have to believe this, because the alternative is anarchy and blood.
How the current fighting ends will shape much of what happens next. There is no telling whether a truce and hostage-prisoner exchange mediated by Qatar and the Biden administration will hold or, if it does, for how long. But there is still every reason to think beyond the fighting, if only because the terrible cost it is exacting demands sanity. These are areas that bear deliberation:
The fact that no Arab states have openly endorsed the Hamas invasion and two — Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates — denounced it outright while expressing concerns for the impact on Gaza’s civilians is important. It shows that the last thing Arab leaders want is for Hamas, backed by Iran and long dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state, to be strengthened by the current war with Israel.
That said, these states — mostly out of frustration with the Palestinian Authority’s corruption and unwillingness in past negotiations, with Barak and with Olmert, to agree on a painful, end-of-all-claims compromise with Israel — began to wash their hands of the Palestinian cause. These states needed and wanted their own direct ties to Israel, primarily to counterbalance Iran. So in the Abraham Accords and subsequent discussions about normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the Palestinians were effectively left aside. If one outcome of this war is a still moderate Palestinian Authority with better leadership, the natural partnership between it and the Arab states can be renewed. This could, in turn, revive a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians, as well as widening normalisation between Israel and Arab or Muslim states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Indonesia. The Palestinian Authority under Abbas has largely stayed clear of the Gaza eruption. The role of Biden administration in mediating the truce, whatever it was, is, at the least, evidence that the United States, however divided, remains a go-between to be reckoned with. These factors suggest there is still a foundation for future negotiations.
But we have no illusions: Through its use of terrorism, Hamas has destroyed whatever legitimacy it had as a governing force. For these negotiations to be meaningful, the Palestinian Authority has to be overhauled. It needs new leadership and institutional reform. To generate and maintain any stable peace with Israel, the authority needs to be able to demonstrate that, in comparison with Hamas, it is more capable of governing Gaza and the West Bank effectively. In its present condition, it cannot.
At the same time, Israel and its supporters must accept that this is not an equal contest. Israel is the dominant power here, and in the current conflict, Israel will once again need to be first to move toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. For many Israelis, their primary concern is finding security, or bitachon, a Hebrew word that also encompasses trust and faith, and it requires a leap of both to believe that this will come from an independent Palestinian state. But the alternatives — continuing the occupation and incorporating occupied territories into Israel — are demonstrably worse. To make that choice, Israel must jettison the government of Netanyahu, which has steadfastly worked against a settlement with the Palestinians.