When the cease-fire in Gaza went into effect earlier this week, the joy across the conflict line was palpable from 6,000 miles away. Although it is unlikely that complicated three-phase deal will ever be fully implemented, it will save lives, bring hostages home, and provide Palestinians in Gaza with much-needed humanitarian aid. The initial hostage and prisoner release also provides a moment to reflect on the broader consequences of the war. Among the most striking is how the conflict has not just altered the trajectories of Israeli and Palestinian societies but in important ways forced them into reverse.
No doubt, Hamas has notched a number of notable achievements since it launched the onslaught it called Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7, 2023. The group drew the IDF into a ferocious fight in the Gaza Strip that has compromised the international legitimacy of Israel’s military and the state it defends. And not since the announcement of the Clinton Parameters and the effort to rescue the Oslo process at the Egyptian resort town of Taba in early 2001 has the Palestinian question been front and center in Middle Eastern and international politics.
When the cease-fire in Gaza went into effect earlier this week, the joy across the conflict line was palpable from 6,000 miles away. Although it is unlikely that complicated three-phase deal will ever be fully implemented, it will save lives, bring hostages home, and provide Palestinians in Gaza with much-needed humanitarian aid. The initial hostage and prisoner release also provides a moment to reflect on the broader consequences of the war. Among the most striking is how the conflict has not just altered the trajectories of Israeli and Palestinian societies but in important ways forced them into reverse.
No doubt, Hamas has notched a number of notable achievements since it launched the onslaught it called Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7, 2023. The group drew the IDF into a ferocious fight in the Gaza Strip that has compromised the international legitimacy of Israel’s military and the state it defends. And not since the announcement of the Clinton Parameters and the effort to rescue the Oslo process at the Egyptian resort town of Taba in early 2001 has the Palestinian question been front and center in Middle Eastern and international politics.
At the same time, when Hamas sent its fighters over and through the fence that separates Israel from the Gaza Strip, they set the Palestinian search for justice back at least a generation, if not more. There was a time, not long ago, when it was possible for people to imagine a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In the years since the peace process irretrievably faltered, some observers had come to believe that the present “one-state reality,” encompassing the Palestinian areas plus Israel, would likely lead to a “one-state solution” in which Palestinians and Israelis live together. Regardless of the real-world prospects of either outcome, Hamas’s genocidal fever dream of liberating Palestine—from Metula to Eilat and from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea—which the group sought to make reality 15 months ago, has rendered both the one-state and two-state solutions impossible.
Add to Hamas’s bloodlust the international outcry over what Israelis regard to be righteous self-defense, and fewer and fewer of them are now willing to believe that Palestinian nationalism and Zionism can be reconciled. Palestinians may have a right to a state, but given the asymmetries of power that exist, Israelis have the capacity to prevent them from exercising it. After Oct. 7, that seems likelier than ever.
Even while Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are filled with joy over the cease-fire, they remain adrift, confronted with two unenviable political choices: the Palestinian Authority (PA)—a corrupt, repressive, and illegitimate vessel of another era that is irrelevant to the current predicaments of the people whom it is supposed to represent—or Hamas. Even with their limited mandate, the PA’s leaders seem incapable of accomplishing pretty much anything other than remaining in power. Hamas is an undesirable alternative. Its popularity waxes during conflict with Israel and wanes when the reality of life under the boot of the group’s cadres becomes clear to the Palestinians who must endure it. It is hard not to conclude from the last two decades that Hamas’s sacralized claims to resistance has brought Palestinians nothing but more pain and more grief. Yes, there is renewed international sympathy for the Palestinian cause, but the world has long recognized the importance of justice for Palestinians with little tangibly to show for it.
There may actually be other, better options for Palestinians. In distinct contrast to the PA and Hamas, there is a vibrant grassroots movement of Palestinians that is seeking new means of representation and leveraging the past 15 months of bloodshed to deepen the connections between the Palestinian struggle and international networks of progressives, NGOs, humanitarians, and academics. It is an interesting phenomenon, and perhaps an alternative to the PA and Hamas will emerge from this activism. But a significant amount of energy of these groups seems devoted more to Israel’s delegitimization than to any actual effort to forge a new Palestinian political reality. It is also an elite game. Average Palestinians have no such privilege or choice. They are forced between two factions that claim to be the expressions of the Palestinian nationalism but have done little to advance their cause, at times even profiting from their people’s suffering.
Given the destruction of Gaza and the existential nature of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians that Hamas’s onslaught and the Israeli response to it highlighted, the lasting and most tangible achievement of that attack may very well be the permanent statelessness of the Palestinian people.
For Israelis, the days of “bourgeois Israel” are over. The Israel of the Nike Store, fancy bicycle studios, Maseratis prowling the Ayalon Freeway, and glass towers built on the power of Silicon Wadi IPOs will, of course, remain, but there has been a vibe shift among Jewish citizens of Israel. The attacks on southern kibbutzim and towns 15 months ago vaulted Israel back to another time—one of vulnerability and uncertainty. The incomprehensible hostility of the world around Israelis and beyond, especially among governments and publics in the West, added to the collective shock.
Israelis believed that they had overcome their isolation of the past. Yet so strong and striking was the negative sentiment of the global elite toward a wounded Israel that it was as if U.N. Resolution 3379, which determined Zionism to be a form of racism, had never been repealed. In the coming years, Israel will confront even more hostility from influential—but not necessarily powerful—actors within the U.N. system and the NGO world who have demonstrated themselves to be part of a broad anti-Zionist front. Even though Israel enjoys diplomatic relations with most of the world, the war in Gaza has reopened the question of its global acceptance and legitimacy.
Uncomfortable as it may be, there are more discernible consequences of the war than the hostility of U.N. bureaucrats, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and governments from Ireland to Spain. It seems likely that Israel is too well integrated into the global economy—especially its high-tech and health sectors—for the call to boycott, divest, and sanction to succeed. But Israelis, whose security has been ensured and economic development boosted with the help of U.S. subventions, will have to grapple with higher defense budgets and the hostility of a not insignificant segment of the Democratic Party whose lawmakers will be asked to continue security assistance for Israel. That will not matter when Republicans control the executive branch and Congress, but Democrats will not be in the wilderness forever, and the IDF operations in Gaza that over the last 15 months killed more than 47,000 Palestinians (according to Palestinian health authorities in Gaza) have made an impression on Capitol Hill. The bipartisan consensus around support for Israeli security was already weakening when Hamas attacked; Israel’s ferocious reaction to Oct. 7 may very well have broken it.
What does this say about the future for Israelis and Palestinians? Almost nothing. There were more than a few sages who declared at the outset of the war “from crisis comes opportunity.” That sounds nice, but those are just words. The most likely outcome of the war was always going to be something closer to the status quo that existed on Oct. 6, 2023, than some promising change that improved the prospects for peace. As the release of Gonen, Damari, and Steinbrecher made abundantly clear, Hamas remains very much in power in Gaza, which portends a tighter Israeli blockade on the territory and periodic spasms of great violence. All the while, Palestinians and Israelis will remain further away from their national goals than they have been in decades.
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