Hamas’s greatest victim is the prospects of a two-state solution

We are on day 18 of the war against Hamas. The dangers of a multifront confrontation grow, as Hezbollah attacks in the North escalate. Two hundred and twenty-two hostages, including infants and the elderly, remain in Hamas’s gruesome hands. Just last week, the additional charred remains of a mother and son were discovered in Kibbutz Be’eri, a once beautiful village almost completely wiped out. 

The world obsesses over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, but doesn’t worry about Israel, in which hundreds of thousands are living in shelters and many others have been displaced and forced to leave their homes. The critical difference between the two is that while Israel does everything possible to defend and take care of its people, Hamas uses its civilians as human shields, intentionally placing its weapons among them and urging them not to move out of harms way. 

Most of the international media still refer to the perpetrators of Hamas’s indescribable crimes as “militants,” incapable of making the moral judgement to label them the heinous terrorists they are. As in so many previous cases, most of the media immediately reported Palestinian claims that the attack on the hospital in Gaza was conducted by Israel, without making any attempt to check their veracity.

Despite overwhelming evidence that the horror was the result of an errant Palestinian rocket – one of hundreds that have fallen in Gaza itself since the war began – much of the media continue to spout self-righteous justifications for their biased rush to condemn Israel. 

Horrific mistakes are made in war. Weapons are subject to technical glitches; exhausted soldiers make errors in the heat of battle. With thousands of munitions fired, it could have been (but wasn’t) an errant Israeli missile, but to attribute intent to Israel, to even engage in any speculation beyond human or technical error, is to be party to a monstrous blood libel. 

The Palestinians, in contrast, the eternal victims, are never held accountable.

Generations of young people around the world, including journalists, have grown up with little or no understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict, beyond a uni-dimensional caricature of the settlements and “occupation” as the source of all evil. 

The fact that Israel made three dramatic proposals for peace with the Palestinians, which would have given them a state on almost 100% of the West Bank, a capital in east Jerusalem, and unlimited return of refugees to the new Palestinian state, has long been forgotten or denied by Palestinian propaganda. So too has the Palestinian rejection of these offers – and the fact that the Palestinians have yet to present a single comprehensive peace proposal of their own.

The essential truth, however, is that the peace process did not fail because of the settlements and “occupation,” but due to Palestinian insistence on all of the territory and a complete return of the refugees (and descendants of refugees) to all of Jerusalem and Israel itself – in essence, a rejection of Israel’s right to exist. 

Had a Palestinian state been established some two decades ago, as Israel proposed, the settlements and “occupation” issues would have become moot long ago. 

One military option today would be to carry out yet another operation limited in time and scope, akin to Israel’s responses to Hamas attacks in the past; maybe somewhat more forceful. This option would, however, essentially guarantee that another round would recur in the near future and is, understandably, no longer unacceptable to the Israeli public.

A second option would be to seek Hamas’s destruction as a coherent military force. This option would entail weeks and even months of brutal house-to-house fighting to root out and destroy the tens of thousands of rockets hidden around Gaza, the hundreds of miles of tunnels that Hamas has dug under it, and a significant percentage of its fighters. It would, however, provide a respite for some time, until Iran rebuilds Hamas’s military capabilities once again.

A third option adds to Hamas’s destruction as a military force, the even more ambitious objective of toppling it as the governing body in Gaza. Assuming that this is feasible, it raises the even-thornier questions of who is to take over from it and how the new governing body can be propped up against attempts by Hamas to reconstitute and regain control. 

On the surface, the obvious candidate would be the Palestinian Authority (PA) which rules in the West Bank, and which Hamas overthrew in Gaza in 2007, but the PA has never been an effective government, even in the West Bank, and is widely discredited among Palestinians today. 

Lots of bad options

There are other possibilities, including some Gazan strongman, or an international body, but the challenges to installing one of them and keeping it in power are even greater. Very few countries will be willing to send the forces needed to prop up the new government and enforce peace. 

Following the worst massacre in the history of the State of Israel – and the first time that Israeli communities have been overrun since the 1948 War of Independence, Israel has little choice but to launch a major ground operation in Gaza. A failure to do so would further embolden Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, and essentially ensure additional attacks in the future.

In practice, option two, Hamas’s military defeat, is the minimally acceptable one for Israel, for both strategic and political reasons. However, its political demise should also be pursued, if at all feasible. The pictures coming out of Gaza, as the ground operation unfolds, will be ugly. War, at its “best,” is the ugliest of human behaviors. There are, however, just wars.

Given the political realities in Israel, however, significant progress on the peace process, beyond this, will not be feasible until the war’s likely political fallout leads to the formation of a new government. It is also unclear if the Saudis would wish and be able to play their part and if so, the extent to which the whole scheme is even feasible.

More fundamentally, we will all have to reconsider many of the basic beliefs that have long guided our strategic thinking. Recent events have proven that both the Israeli Right and Left were correct in some ways and devastatingly wrong in others.

The painfully long “peace process” that began after the Yom Kippur War and led to the dramatic peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, stalled ever since, precisely because the advanced negotiations underway with the Palestinians in the 1990s and early 2000s reached the core issues of the conflict. 

The Left must recognize that a two-state solution was in grave doubt not just because of the Netanyahu governments’ hardline positions, but because far too many Palestinians still oppose Israel’s existence and that peace would have probably proven illusory, regardless of who was in office in Israel. The two-state solution may have been another Hamas victim.

The Right will have to recognize that Israel cannot perpetuate the status quo indefinitely, nor should it. It will finally have to confront the demographic and political reality, that Israel cannot indefinitely control three million Palestinians in the West Bank and now, possibly, two million in Gaza if it wishes to remain a predominantly Jewish, robustly democratic, and secure state. 

The massacres and kidnappings have demonstrated the veracity of the Right’s fears of a Palestinian state but that does not change the fundamental realities. Separation from the Palestinians remains no less critical than in the past. 

The route to getting there, however, remains less clear than ever.

The writer, a former deputy Israeli national security adviser, is a senior fellow at INSS and the MirYam Institute. He is the author of Zion’s Dilemmas: How Israel Makes National Security Policy, and Israeli National Security: A New Strategy for an Era of Change, as well as the new: Israel and the Cyber Threat: How the Startup Nation Became a Global Superpower. Twitter: @chuck_freilich