The outcome of the war in Gaza is already clear. Israel is so strong relative to Hamas that it can both defeat Hamas and establish almost any new security structure in Gaza that Israel wants. It does face limited threat from attacks by Palestinians in Israel and in the West Bank, but they are unlikely to rise above sporadic incidents of violence. In practice, Israel will be able to create almost any security structure in Gaza that it wants to limit Palestinian action in Israel and the West Bank to demonstrations and small acts of violence or terrorism.
As for the rest of the Arab world, Israel does not seem to face any major direct military threat from its Arab neighbors. Lebanon is in chaos. Hezbollah can raise the ante in terms of missile attacks and cross-border infiltration but is vulnerable to far superior Israel air and missile attacks. Egypt is strong in military terms but is no longer organized and prepared to fight Israel and is caught up in its own economic crisis and political problems. Jordan now has only limited military forces, is not organized to fight Israel, and has its own internal economic and political challenges. Syria’s Assad regime and its military forces are still caught up in its own civil war, and an unstable Iraq lacks the capability to project meaningful forces into the Levant.
The Arab Gulf states are not a meaningful military threat. In an odd way, Iran may actually add to Israel’s regional security. Iran can threaten and provoke Israel and provide money and limited arms supplies to Palestinian fighters. It might carry out limited raids against some Israeli targets. But, Iran cannot project meaningful military power other than long-range missile strikes to challenge Israel and faces the threat of far higher levels of Israel retaliation.
More importantly, and despite some recent diplomatic contacts, Iran does present a serious military, political, and sectarian threat to the Arab Gulf states. This threat forces them to focus on Iran and limit any support of Hamas and the Palestinians. The Arab Gulf states may provide some aid money and political support, but they will continue to focus on Iran and not take any serious military action or risk a major political confrontation with Israel or split with the United States.
As Hamas’s invasion demonstrates, Israel’s most serious current threat is internal and to some extent self-inflicted. It is driven by Israel’s failure to offer Palestinians either real statehood or security and equal economic and political opportunity. Instead of statehood, Palestinians are divided into four Israeli-controlled enclaves, each with different causes of tension between Israel and the Palestinians and somewhat different pressures on its resident Palestinians.
In fairness to Israel, the threat or reality of Palestinian violence, terrorist acts, Intifadas, and a long cycle of wars have created many of these limits and restrictions. It is easy to talk about Israeli “abuses” of human rights, but there has never been a clear line distinguishing between war and peace since at least 1948, and the sheer violence of Hamas’s recent attack on Israel has almost instantly made it focus on war rather than peace.
The two-state solution may not be dead, but it is close enough to death to make efforts to resuscitate it little more than zombie diplomacy. The Palestinian government in the West Bank is a hollow shell of a real and effective government. The Palestinian Authority has become a failed democracy with a weak and ineffective leader who has stayed in office for far too long. It has serious levels of corruption, lacks the ability to reshape a weak and crippled economy, and its efforts to create effective security forces have not been effective enough to deal with even its current challenges.
As for Hamas, it came to power in Gaza in 2006 and 2007, in large part because of the ineffectiveness and corruption of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The result, however, is that Hamas’s militancy and attacks on Israel from 2007 to 2023 have led Israel to take security measures that made the plight of ordinary Gazans far worse. As a result, Israel must fight a war where there now is no clear alternative to Hamas in Gaza or indication that Gazans would want to be governed by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
As for Israel, the hardline nature of the Netanyahu government, its support of new settlements, and hardline anti-Palestinian positions make it all too likely that Israel’s solution to “peace” will be to isolate or occupy Gaza, to exert even more economic and security pressures on Gaza’s population, introduce new security restrictions on Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank, expand Israeli settlements and the Israeli presence in Jerusalem, and take only cosmetic diplomatic steps toward a true political and solution to creating a viable peace.
The end result is all too likely to be futile outside efforts to continue the failed approach to peace that has been shaped by the negotiating efforts to create a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict ever since the Camp David Accords in 1978. This series of “wars to end all peace” has now gone on for nearly half a century, and every effort to negotiate a real two-state solution has ended in failure, a new round of fighting or Intifadas, and more tension between Israel and the Palestinians.
All diplomatic good intentions and rhetoric aside, continuing to focus on the two-state solution will only continue a history where every effort to create such a lasting peace since 1948 has led to new wars and new tensions between Israel and the Palestinians. If anything, such efforts have so far helped prevent the creation of a stable political and economic structure for the Palestinians and helped create a lasting threat to Israel.
This does not mean that a more meaningful effort to negotiate more meaningful and practical peace efforts is not worth trying. What it does mean is that it may be far more important to try to create immediate steps to create a more stable “no-state” solution.
One such option is to put international pressure on the Israeli government to halt the expansion of settlements and ease restrictions on the civil life of some estimates indicate around 1.9 million Palestinians in Israel proper and more than two million in the West Bank. Another is to exert pressure on Israel to limit its postwar economic isolation of Gaza’s two million residents while recognizing that Israel does have very real new internal security needs. It seems equally important to ensure that the present arrangements for Jordan’s role in support of the Al Aqsa Mosque continue, along with the restrictions on Israeli religious ceremonies on the Temple Mount.
At the same time, it will be critical to minimize any “blame games” by the U.S. and international community that hold either Israel or all the Palestinians to blame for the current crisis. U.S. and international community need to focus on steps that will limit the impact of Hamas’s invasion and Israel’s war in Gaza and this aftermath.
The key near-term approach to such an effort to ease the risks of a “no-state solution” may be international efforts to offer major new postwar aid and opportunities to the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank on a conditional basis. Offering such aid to the Palestinians, supported by active efforts to ensure human rights in ways that did not cripple Israel’s internal security programs, would at least offer a tangible way to move toward a more stable peace.
The present levels of poverty and unemployment in Gaza have made popular support of Hamas and violence all too serious, and Israel’s future wartime and postwar security efforts will almost certainly make this situation far worse. The same may be true to a lesser extent of the war’s impact on Israeli and Palestinian actions in the West Bank. Once again, the gap between Israel and West Bank incomes and employment opportunities is a key source of its tensions and violence.
At the same time, such international aid must be conditional on Palestinian non-violence, on ensuring that it is independent of Israeli political and security interests, and on providing effective outside international management and planning that ensures such aid is used honestly and effectively.
Such efforts clearly will not shape a lasting peace but can have a quick practical and political impact. They deal with the most urgent practical concerns of most Palestinians without affecting the security and income of Israel’s Jewish citizens. In a world where the “no-state” solution seems to be the only practical near-term outcome of the present war for at least several years in the future, aid at least is a potential step forward and a way of bringing a more productive pause in the fighting.