Israel needs to retaliate but in a measured way. They can try to wipe out Gaza but it will only perpetuate the 75 year long circle of violence. They have peace with Egypt and Jordan because brave people were willing to negotiate. The Palestinians are not going away. A two state solution will remove most of their rationale for continued attacks. Terrorists will still try to stir the pot but a Palestinian homeland will greatly mitigate the issue. What Israel is doing now has never worked. It is a sop to the right wing but wil do little to solve the problem. It certainly will give Hamas and Hezbollah recruits for the foreseeable future. Sadly, I believe my grandchildren will be reading the same headlines in another 75 years.
With a two state solution, who is going to lead the second state? Mahmoud Abbas? People who accept the leadership of a Holocaust denier have ruled themselves out as trustworthy negotiating partners. The example pf Egypt and Jordan is there for the Palestinians to follow, but regrettably they have not. Furthermore, a Palestinian homeland is not supposed to mitigate the issue-it is supposed to completely resolve it. The possibility that a Palestinian State would allow this violence to continue even in a "greatly mitigated" form, is, of course, something that no Israeli government could accept. Under current circumstances the two state solution is dead, and the United States government should not hesitate to say so. After the events of this weekend it would take at least a generation of unstinting Palestinian commitment to peace for Palestinian statehood to return to the realm of possibility. The sooner we face this fact, the better.
> With a two state solution, who is going to lead the second state?
Doesn’t matter, because Netanyahu’s vision of a two-state solution would deny the Palestinians sovereignty over their own territory. Nobody would accept such an arrangement. It would simply be codifying the status quo.
And even that vision is probably just something he floated because he knows they won’t accept it.
Joe writes, "Rather than examine the strategic and tactical failures that left the country vulnerable, Israeli officials are force-feeding the crisis into their existing paradigm. They are blaming Iran."
I have no evidence that Iran was behind Oct 7, other than to point out who benefited from that attack, Iran and Russia. Maybe they just got lucky, that could be it.
Iran benefits because Oct 7 makes it nearly impossible for Arab countries to make a formal alliance with Israel against Iran. Nearly the entire world is pointing the finger of blame and shame at Israel, which must make the mullahs smile.
Russia benefits because the majority of global press coverage is now focused on Gaza instead of Ukraine. Instead of coverage of Putin's many atrocities, the media is instead focused on Israel (backed by the US) bombing all of Gaza in to rubble.
Either Russia and Iran got really lucky, or they pulled off a highly successful operation against the West. I'm guessing the later, but I really don't know.
"There is no justification whatsoever for Hamas murdering innocent civilians with machine guns and grenades. Nor is there any justification for Israel murdering innocent civilians with planes and missiles."
Is the implication that Israel should be forced to conduct a ground invasion of Gaza, if the situation calls for it, in order to destroy Hamas?
Joe- Deja vu all over again. Dr. Lawton would love to assign this debate topic to us. Sadly, the names have changed, but the topic remains the same, 50+ years on for us.
What a deplorable situation. It is surprising that the IDF didn't have foreknowledge of this and was prepared for it, though. However, given the prospect of a Saudi-Israel peace deal that held little hope for the Palestinians and the tenor of the current government in Israel, someone should have been expecting something to happen.
The powder keg of keeping 2.3M people penned into a congested area with no visible relief has only grown worse since you and I debated this in 1970-71. There are many, many more Palestinians.
I look at the desperation in this maneuver; they knew that many of them would die in action and that many more would die in the aftermath. It could only be desperation that would drive them to do anything so foolish.
What the world doesn't see is the West Bank, home to many Palestinians. They are aggrieved but living peacefully in close proximity to Israel. Of course, Hamas is not the controlling authority there. and the relationship between the West Bank and Gaza is tenuous, at best.
if the two state solution is dead, what then? The world's largest refugee camp armed to the teeth as a neighbor? I'd not want to live in that neighborhood. To those who believe that conferring statehood on Palestine is anathema, I say "What's the alternative?" What has been happening for 75 years isn't working.
I agree, Tom. In particular with you point about the West Bank. There are 3 million Palestinians living there. Hamas explicitly called for them to rise up as part of its October 7 assault. They did not. But we cannot expect that calm to last.
Netanyahu, along with other hard-liners, explicitly encouraged the growth of Hamas as a means of dividing the Palestinians. in 2019, he said that “whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for” transferring funds to Gaza, so as to weaken Palestinian unity. That strategy has proved a lethal failure.
I don't expect Netanyahu to survive. I know he is a political master of survival, but there is already a wave of calls for his resignation. The new unity cabinet will allow him to stay if for a while, but it cannot save him. His removal is a necessary step in moving Israel back its efforts drive Palestinians from the West Bank and perhaps towards a new period of serious negotiations. This will be extremely difficult, but tit must be done. We have just seen what happens when you believe that you can ignore the just demands of Palestinians for dignity and self-rule and just make deals with regional Arab leaders. Israel's security depends on Palestinian security. Like you, I see no other choice.
Your article raises many important points but omits many others. For example, you do not mention that in 2000, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat rejected an Israeli offer to recognize an independent Palestinian State. Insufficient emphasis is placed on the fact that Palestinians have already received much of what they claimed to want in the peace process that the world has been hearing about since 1967. Israeli control of the Gaza Strip began in 1967 and ended in 2005. Israel did not do a partial withdrawal of troops, and it did not insist on a power-sharing arrangement. Instead Israel completely withdrew its troops, allowing us to test the principle of land-for-peace in practice. On Saturday we saw the result. Finally, you did not mention that just last month, Mahmoud Abbas stated that the Holocaust was caused not by antisemitism but by Hitler's legitimate distaste for Jewish money lending and usury. When the supposedly moderate and responsible Palestinian leader says something like that, why should any Israeli politician, from the most liberal to the most conservative, believe that Israel has a reliable partner in the peace process? Given Hamas' adamant rejection of any peace process and commitment to the destruction of Israel, what alternative does Israel have to the invasion and re-occupation of Gaza?
Ehud Barak offered Arafat everything he wanted except Jerusalem and the right of return for refugees, with those final status issues deferred for negotiation with an independent Palestinian State in 2-3 years. "Barak Proposes Land Deal; Arafat Rejects Offer," ABC News, November 30, 2000, accessed October 10, 2023 at 9:34 am. Such a generous offer, even if not accepted, should have been enough to guarantee peace in the Middle East for the next 50 years. The fact that violence has continued despite this offer, despite full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and despite the creation of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, shows that the violence is being driven not by disappointment over the details of peace proposals but by the murderous desire of Palestinian leadership for the complete destruction of Israel. A generation long effort to replace these violent attitudes with the way of peace will be necessary to solve this dilemma, not a mere calibration of whether the advantages and disadvantages of specific peace offers can justify terrorist violence.
It is well established that both Israeli and Palestinian leaders missed opportunities to make a lasting peace several times in this long history. There is no sustainable military solution to the problem. Despite the formidable difficulties, negotiations towards a two-state solution offer the only viable path.
The problem lies in the time frame. After Saturday's atrocities, it will take at least a generation before even the most dovish Israeli government is able to cut a deal involving Palestinian statehood. Failure to be honest about this now will only raise false hopes that can fuel the cycle of violence when unrealistic expectations are not met. The Palestinian people need to understand that atrocities like this will set their cause back by decades, not advance it.
It is equally important to remember that true peace requires hard work at the grassroots level. The Israelis need trustworthy partners for peace not just across the conference table but also in the streets and marketplaces. With Palestinians and their supporters around the world celebrating the mass murder of civilians, such trustworthy partners do not exist in sufficient numbers and influence. If another Gandhi emerged in the West Bank tomorrow and replaced Mahmoud Abbas, nothing would change because no one in Israel would trust the Palestinian community to deliver on his peaceful intentions. Until the Palestinian population reaches the point where Holocaust denial by a politician triggers his immediate resignation, then Israelis cannot be expected to negotiate deals involving Palestinian statehood. Honesty about these points now will hopefully begin the hard work of peace so that the "viable solution" you speak of does not continue to recede into impossibility.
There are many articles out today on the abject failure of the Netanyahu government. Many Israelis are furious as the complete incompetence of this government. You may be interested in a very good article up on Foreign Policy today by. Michael Hirsch. He says, in part:
"Second, for decades, Netanyahu pursued what Novik called the “illusion” that even under his draconian policies—which turned Gaza into what Human Rights Watch calls “the world’s largest open-air prison”—Hamas would abstain from the kind of attacks on Israel that might jeopardize its hold on power in Gaza, said Novik, who is currently a fellow with the Israel Policy Forum.
“His so-called ‘separation strategy’ rested on two legs: one, solidify Hamas control over Gaza, so that we have ‘an address’ and a governing entity with which to reach understandings over easing of closure in return for cease-fire. Second, weaken the Palestinian Authority, lest it emerges as a viable partner for negotiations, something Netanyahu has been determined to avoid,” Novik said. An Israeli official did not respond to a request for comment."
"To be fair, the prospects for any serious negotiations with the Palestinians, and a two-state solution, have been grim since Hamas took power in Gaza in 2007. But critics say that Netanyahu didn’t even try to negotiate. (The two sides did engage in U.S.-mediated talks under Netanyahu in 2013-2014 but made no real progress.)
"On the contrary, it seems clear that since his first stint as prime minister in the late 1990s, Netanyahu has sought to undermine the Oslo Accords—and any prospect for a Palestinian state—even as he pretended to go along with the agreement at first (for example, by signing the Wye River Memorandum in 1998, which edged along the implementation of Oslo). Netanyahu even boasted in remarks that he didn’t realize were being recorded in 2001 that he had “de facto put an end to the Oslo Accords.” Then came a series of disasters that set back, even paralyzed, any prospect for a two-state solution and made Netanyahu’s project of destruction even easier—including the second Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and the aggressive Israeli response.
"In 2005, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. The next year, the George W. Bush administration, pursuing its quixotic democracy agenda in the Middle East, insisted on Palestinian elections. The vote brought Hamas to power, dividing the Palestinian population up until the present day. And then, after Netanyahu won reelection in 2009, he set about completing the work he’d started in the 1990s, frustrating every effort by U.S. President Barack Obama to push for peace while continuing to create new “facts on the ground” in the form of West Bank settlements. Those settlements ensured that the Palestinians would get less and less territory in any final agreement.'
The best I’ve read around such a thorny and divisive subject. Thank you.
Thank you.
I agree.
Israel needs to retaliate but in a measured way. They can try to wipe out Gaza but it will only perpetuate the 75 year long circle of violence. They have peace with Egypt and Jordan because brave people were willing to negotiate. The Palestinians are not going away. A two state solution will remove most of their rationale for continued attacks. Terrorists will still try to stir the pot but a Palestinian homeland will greatly mitigate the issue. What Israel is doing now has never worked. It is a sop to the right wing but wil do little to solve the problem. It certainly will give Hamas and Hezbollah recruits for the foreseeable future. Sadly, I believe my grandchildren will be reading the same headlines in another 75 years.
With a two state solution, who is going to lead the second state? Mahmoud Abbas? People who accept the leadership of a Holocaust denier have ruled themselves out as trustworthy negotiating partners. The example pf Egypt and Jordan is there for the Palestinians to follow, but regrettably they have not. Furthermore, a Palestinian homeland is not supposed to mitigate the issue-it is supposed to completely resolve it. The possibility that a Palestinian State would allow this violence to continue even in a "greatly mitigated" form, is, of course, something that no Israeli government could accept. Under current circumstances the two state solution is dead, and the United States government should not hesitate to say so. After the events of this weekend it would take at least a generation of unstinting Palestinian commitment to peace for Palestinian statehood to return to the realm of possibility. The sooner we face this fact, the better.
> With a two state solution, who is going to lead the second state?
Doesn’t matter, because Netanyahu’s vision of a two-state solution would deny the Palestinians sovereignty over their own territory. Nobody would accept such an arrangement. It would simply be codifying the status quo.
And even that vision is probably just something he floated because he knows they won’t accept it.
Joe writes, "Rather than examine the strategic and tactical failures that left the country vulnerable, Israeli officials are force-feeding the crisis into their existing paradigm. They are blaming Iran."
I have no evidence that Iran was behind Oct 7, other than to point out who benefited from that attack, Iran and Russia. Maybe they just got lucky, that could be it.
Iran benefits because Oct 7 makes it nearly impossible for Arab countries to make a formal alliance with Israel against Iran. Nearly the entire world is pointing the finger of blame and shame at Israel, which must make the mullahs smile.
Russia benefits because the majority of global press coverage is now focused on Gaza instead of Ukraine. Instead of coverage of Putin's many atrocities, the media is instead focused on Israel (backed by the US) bombing all of Gaza in to rubble.
Either Russia and Iran got really lucky, or they pulled off a highly successful operation against the West. I'm guessing the later, but I really don't know.
"There is no justification whatsoever for Hamas murdering innocent civilians with machine guns and grenades. Nor is there any justification for Israel murdering innocent civilians with planes and missiles."
Is the implication that Israel should be forced to conduct a ground invasion of Gaza, if the situation calls for it, in order to destroy Hamas?
Joe- Deja vu all over again. Dr. Lawton would love to assign this debate topic to us. Sadly, the names have changed, but the topic remains the same, 50+ years on for us.
What a deplorable situation. It is surprising that the IDF didn't have foreknowledge of this and was prepared for it, though. However, given the prospect of a Saudi-Israel peace deal that held little hope for the Palestinians and the tenor of the current government in Israel, someone should have been expecting something to happen.
The powder keg of keeping 2.3M people penned into a congested area with no visible relief has only grown worse since you and I debated this in 1970-71. There are many, many more Palestinians.
I look at the desperation in this maneuver; they knew that many of them would die in action and that many more would die in the aftermath. It could only be desperation that would drive them to do anything so foolish.
What the world doesn't see is the West Bank, home to many Palestinians. They are aggrieved but living peacefully in close proximity to Israel. Of course, Hamas is not the controlling authority there. and the relationship between the West Bank and Gaza is tenuous, at best.
if the two state solution is dead, what then? The world's largest refugee camp armed to the teeth as a neighbor? I'd not want to live in that neighborhood. To those who believe that conferring statehood on Palestine is anathema, I say "What's the alternative?" What has been happening for 75 years isn't working.
Tom
I agree, Tom. In particular with you point about the West Bank. There are 3 million Palestinians living there. Hamas explicitly called for them to rise up as part of its October 7 assault. They did not. But we cannot expect that calm to last.
Netanyahu, along with other hard-liners, explicitly encouraged the growth of Hamas as a means of dividing the Palestinians. in 2019, he said that “whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for” transferring funds to Gaza, so as to weaken Palestinian unity. That strategy has proved a lethal failure.
I don't expect Netanyahu to survive. I know he is a political master of survival, but there is already a wave of calls for his resignation. The new unity cabinet will allow him to stay if for a while, but it cannot save him. His removal is a necessary step in moving Israel back its efforts drive Palestinians from the West Bank and perhaps towards a new period of serious negotiations. This will be extremely difficult, but tit must be done. We have just seen what happens when you believe that you can ignore the just demands of Palestinians for dignity and self-rule and just make deals with regional Arab leaders. Israel's security depends on Palestinian security. Like you, I see no other choice.
Your article raises many important points but omits many others. For example, you do not mention that in 2000, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat rejected an Israeli offer to recognize an independent Palestinian State. Insufficient emphasis is placed on the fact that Palestinians have already received much of what they claimed to want in the peace process that the world has been hearing about since 1967. Israeli control of the Gaza Strip began in 1967 and ended in 2005. Israel did not do a partial withdrawal of troops, and it did not insist on a power-sharing arrangement. Instead Israel completely withdrew its troops, allowing us to test the principle of land-for-peace in practice. On Saturday we saw the result. Finally, you did not mention that just last month, Mahmoud Abbas stated that the Holocaust was caused not by antisemitism but by Hitler's legitimate distaste for Jewish money lending and usury. When the supposedly moderate and responsible Palestinian leader says something like that, why should any Israeli politician, from the most liberal to the most conservative, believe that Israel has a reliable partner in the peace process? Given Hamas' adamant rejection of any peace process and commitment to the destruction of Israel, what alternative does Israel have to the invasion and re-occupation of Gaza?
> PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat rejected an Israeli offer to recognize an independent Palestinian State
This is disingenuous. Israel’s offer was highly advantageous to Israel, and highly disadvantageous to the Palestinians.
Ehud Barak offered Arafat everything he wanted except Jerusalem and the right of return for refugees, with those final status issues deferred for negotiation with an independent Palestinian State in 2-3 years. "Barak Proposes Land Deal; Arafat Rejects Offer," ABC News, November 30, 2000, accessed October 10, 2023 at 9:34 am. Such a generous offer, even if not accepted, should have been enough to guarantee peace in the Middle East for the next 50 years. The fact that violence has continued despite this offer, despite full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and despite the creation of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, shows that the violence is being driven not by disappointment over the details of peace proposals but by the murderous desire of Palestinian leadership for the complete destruction of Israel. A generation long effort to replace these violent attitudes with the way of peace will be necessary to solve this dilemma, not a mere calibration of whether the advantages and disadvantages of specific peace offers can justify terrorist violence.
It is well established that both Israeli and Palestinian leaders missed opportunities to make a lasting peace several times in this long history. There is no sustainable military solution to the problem. Despite the formidable difficulties, negotiations towards a two-state solution offer the only viable path.
The problem lies in the time frame. After Saturday's atrocities, it will take at least a generation before even the most dovish Israeli government is able to cut a deal involving Palestinian statehood. Failure to be honest about this now will only raise false hopes that can fuel the cycle of violence when unrealistic expectations are not met. The Palestinian people need to understand that atrocities like this will set their cause back by decades, not advance it.
It is equally important to remember that true peace requires hard work at the grassroots level. The Israelis need trustworthy partners for peace not just across the conference table but also in the streets and marketplaces. With Palestinians and their supporters around the world celebrating the mass murder of civilians, such trustworthy partners do not exist in sufficient numbers and influence. If another Gandhi emerged in the West Bank tomorrow and replaced Mahmoud Abbas, nothing would change because no one in Israel would trust the Palestinian community to deliver on his peaceful intentions. Until the Palestinian population reaches the point where Holocaust denial by a politician triggers his immediate resignation, then Israelis cannot be expected to negotiate deals involving Palestinian statehood. Honesty about these points now will hopefully begin the hard work of peace so that the "viable solution" you speak of does not continue to recede into impossibility.
There are many articles out today on the abject failure of the Netanyahu government. Many Israelis are furious as the complete incompetence of this government. You may be interested in a very good article up on Foreign Policy today by. Michael Hirsch. He says, in part:
"Second, for decades, Netanyahu pursued what Novik called the “illusion” that even under his draconian policies—which turned Gaza into what Human Rights Watch calls “the world’s largest open-air prison”—Hamas would abstain from the kind of attacks on Israel that might jeopardize its hold on power in Gaza, said Novik, who is currently a fellow with the Israel Policy Forum.
“His so-called ‘separation strategy’ rested on two legs: one, solidify Hamas control over Gaza, so that we have ‘an address’ and a governing entity with which to reach understandings over easing of closure in return for cease-fire. Second, weaken the Palestinian Authority, lest it emerges as a viable partner for negotiations, something Netanyahu has been determined to avoid,” Novik said. An Israeli official did not respond to a request for comment."
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/10/09/israel-hamas-war-netanyahu-palestine-united-states-diplomacy-alliance/
Hirsch continues, as if directly to your point:
"To be fair, the prospects for any serious negotiations with the Palestinians, and a two-state solution, have been grim since Hamas took power in Gaza in 2007. But critics say that Netanyahu didn’t even try to negotiate. (The two sides did engage in U.S.-mediated talks under Netanyahu in 2013-2014 but made no real progress.)
"On the contrary, it seems clear that since his first stint as prime minister in the late 1990s, Netanyahu has sought to undermine the Oslo Accords—and any prospect for a Palestinian state—even as he pretended to go along with the agreement at first (for example, by signing the Wye River Memorandum in 1998, which edged along the implementation of Oslo). Netanyahu even boasted in remarks that he didn’t realize were being recorded in 2001 that he had “de facto put an end to the Oslo Accords.” Then came a series of disasters that set back, even paralyzed, any prospect for a two-state solution and made Netanyahu’s project of destruction even easier—including the second Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and the aggressive Israeli response.
"In 2005, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. The next year, the George W. Bush administration, pursuing its quixotic democracy agenda in the Middle East, insisted on Palestinian elections. The vote brought Hamas to power, dividing the Palestinian population up until the present day. And then, after Netanyahu won reelection in 2009, he set about completing the work he’d started in the 1990s, frustrating every effort by U.S. President Barack Obama to push for peace while continuing to create new “facts on the ground” in the form of West Bank settlements. Those settlements ensured that the Palestinians would get less and less territory in any final agreement.'