Ami Ayalon was one of Israel’s legendary gatekeepers — intelligence chiefs who’ve shouldered the daunting responsibility for the country’s security since the state’s founding, defending it against the odds from hostile Arab neighbors and militant Palestinian groups.
And he’s pessimistic about the prospects for Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan.
Ayalon became head of the Shin Bet security service after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, having turned the job down just a few months before. He’s credited with reviving a then-demoralized agency and modernizing it. Under his leadership, Shabak — as Israelis call the security service by its acronym — had a high success rate in preventing militant attacks.
In the 2012 documentary “The Gatekeepers,” Ayalon explained that much of that success was down to close coordination with counterparts in the Palestinian Authority. “We’re not your agents,” they told him. “We only do it because our people believe at the end of the day, we’ll have a state beside Israel.”
That background is important to understand why he’s gloomy about the prospects of Trump’s plan, which “has more holes than Swiss cheese,” he told POLITICO.
The biggest hole not filled is a clear commitment to a two-state solution — the only path to a negotiated settlement, as far as Ayalon sees it. Lack of a sure political horizon for a Palestinian state will mean the withholding of the kind of cooperation he was able to secure from the Palestinian Authority, he explains. Peace will prove elusive.
Without Palestinians directly running Gaza in the meantime, as envisaged in the French-Saudi and Egyptian initiatives, the chances of Hamas disarming are negligible, he believes.
That’s also the position of Palestinian factions, including the Palestinian Authority. The future makeup of Gaza’s interim postwar government has been a sticking point in the talks about the Trump plan. Israel has insisted that neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority should have any role in running postwar Gaza. But Muslim countries and Palestinian leaders want the Palestinian Authority to manage civilian affairs in the enclave.
Palestinian Authority officials warn that excluding Hamas totally risks the militant group wrecking the interim administration.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who has embraced the Gaza peace plan, last month called on the international community to “stop the Israeli government’s undermining of the Palestinian Authority and the two-state solution.”
He has also affirmed the readiness of institutions within the authority to assume administrative responsibility for Gaza and to link it with the West Bank, with Arab and international support and coordination.
‘Better ideas’ to counter Hamas ideology
For the past 20 years since leaving Shabak, Ayalon has been a prominent advocate for the two-state solution. He argues this with patriotism and the long-term security of Israel in mind, as well as from a position of authority based on his experience as a former Shabak boss.
Ayalon’s watched the war in Gaza with rising exasperation. It was a just war at the start, he says. But he mocks the whole idea that peace will follow, and Israel will be safe, once Hamas is vanquished militarily.
“We have to ask ourselves: What is Hamas all about? It is a radical Muslim organization with a military wing.” Since Hamas is a combination of an ideology and a military force, the idea of total victory is nonsense, he thinks. “And yes, you can defeat the military wing on the battlefield — but you cannot defeat its ideology with the use of military power,” he adds.
You need “better ideas” in order to defeat an ideology, he believes. The two-state solution — that is, an independent, sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel — is the better idea to counter Hamas.
His greatest worry is that the carnage, trauma and brutality of the war will fuel Hamas recruitment. “When a child, a teenager, loses his family, what will he do? He will take up a knife, a gun, and kill an Israeli, a Jew.”
He also says the war will inevitably be exploited by global jihadi organizations — such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State group — to radicalize, inspire and encourage attacks around the world.
Overcoming public skepticism
Ayalon’s not an outlier among other Israeli gatekeepers in advocating strongly for a two-state solution. Many of them, including Ayalon’s predecessor as head of Shabak, Yaakov Peri, supported the initial stages of the war, arguing Israel had to defend itself after the murderous rampage across southern Israel two years ago by Hamas and allied militant groups.
But they became fierce critics when the military campaign in the Palestinian enclave was prolonged, the death tally rose and the enclave was razed.
And they railed against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for not developing a serious plan to follow up.
For Peri, a two-state solution is the only way to a negotiated settlement. And without it, the very existence of the state of Israel will always be in peril. Peri told POLITICO last year, “Israel could survive a civil war, for example over a withdrawal of settlements from the West Bank; but can’t endure long term without a deal with the Palestinians.”
The position of Ayalon and Peri, and other stalwarts of Israel’s defense and intelligence establishment, however, is at odds not only with Netanyahu’s forever wars, but Israeli public opinion as well.
In 2012, 61 percent of Israelis supported a two-state solution. But for the past decade and more, Israelis have lost faith in the very idea.
In a Gallup poll published this past September, only 27 percent of Israelis backed a two-state solution, with 63 percent opposed — consistent with other surveys since 2023.
Palestinians are equally skeptical. The two-state solution also receives little support in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Only 1 in 3 adults support a two-state solution, while 55 percent oppose it.
That doesn’t deter Ayalon. Public skepticism can be overcome, he says, noting that most Israelis were suspicious of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty signed by Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin in 1979. The Egyptian and Israeli leaders of the time courted great risks to ink an agreement.
“We need great gestures now,” he says. “We need Arab leaders to come to Jerusalem and to speak to the Israeli people. And then we shall see beginning of change … on both sides — among the Palestinians and Israelis,” he concludes.
So while he’s critical of the Gaza plan, he does see a glimmer of hope. “It is a first step,” he says, “on a long journey of a thousand miles, as the Chinese say.”
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