As the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack and the ensuing Israel-Hamas war approaches, the prospects of peace between Israelis and Palestinians seem less likely than ever. Despite repeated attempts by U.S., Egyptian, and Qatari diplomats to negotiate a cease-fire and hostage release deal, the conflict in Gaza remains unresolved and is now spreading across the region.
Last year, Foreign Policy asked a group of writers what Gaza would look like in a year. This year, instead of seeking solutions or draft peace plans, we asked a range of contributors—Palestinians, Israelis, Americans, and Jordanians—to assess where we stand now and what the future may hold: In short, is the war in Gaza closer to its end or its beginning?—FP Editors
Chaos Is Spreading Because Washington Has Learned Nothing
By Dana El Kurd, senior nonresident fellow at the Arab Center Washington
The war in Gaza is only the beginning of mass violence that is likely to increase and spread in Israel and the Palestinian territories and across the region.
The second Palestinian uprising, or intifada, from 2000 to 2005, revealed that the Oslo peace process framework was incapable of resolving the underlying structures of Israeli domination that plagued Palestinian self-determination. The international community, with the United States at the forefront, responded to this realization not by endorsing meaningful negotiation but by consolidating the status quo of Palestinian fragmentation, Israeli violence, and piecemeal forms of Palestinian governance.
This was unacceptable to the Palestinian public, as years and years of polling continued to affirm. Grievances increased, and living conditions worsened in the occupied territories, with no political horizon in sight. Many scholars and analysts—including myself—forewarned that escalating violence was inevitable.
The Oct. 7 Hamas attack and the ensuing destruction of Gaza are only the beginning, for a number of reasons. First, it is clear that the Israeli army’s violence in Gaza is a model for future warfare. For this Israeli government, ethnic cleansing is a clearly stated policy. Particular members of the cabinet, such as Bezalel Smotrich, have vowed to make Palestinians surrender or transfer, indeed long before the war began.
The world is already seeing the implementation of this policy in parts of the West Bank, as Israeli forces raze Jenin, blockade hospitals in Tubas, and attack civilian infrastructure across a number of communities, in addition to the settler violence that has besieged Palestinian towns and led to multiple deaths. Displacements have begun across the occupied territories, not just in Gaza. Palestinian armed groups unrelated to Hamas have also formed to confront Israeli forces.
Second, the Palestinian question is tied to regional dynamics. This is perhaps an obvious assertion, given recent events in Lebanon. Nevertheless, some corners of Washington would like to believe that people across the Middle East are attached to Palestine for vaguely emotional reasons or only as a result of Iranian machinations. Ongoing unrest across the region makes clear that this explanation is insufficient.
The Palestinian question is indeed weaponized by Iranian-backed networks of militias, and the likelihood of escalation into a larger regional war is very real. However, to understand Palestine’s impact on regional unrest only through the prism of pro-Iranian militias is an incomplete assessment because the Palestinian question is also crucial in understanding anti-authoritarian dissent in the region writ large.
The issue has long been a gateway to dissent and oppositional politics and has historically sparked large-scale social movements that have challenged regimes. It is true that Arab regimes today are more violently repressive than ever before and have attempted to shut down any such pro-Palestinian organizing. However, the grievances generated by the latest war in Gaza among Arab citizens demanding more accountable foreign policy from their regimes cannot be so easily swept aside.
These events, and regime repression of public outrage, are likely to be the seeds of political consciousness for new generations of Arab citizens. And, as the Arab Spring showed, regimes are not as immune from the impact of dissent as they would like to believe.
Finally, U.S. decision-makers seem to have not absorbed any lessons from the past year of conflict. The White House continues to tout Arab-Israeli normalization as the pathway to peace, despite it being a glorified form of authoritarian conflict management at best. Discussions of the “day after” in Gaza remain out of touch with reality, with no Palestinian input, only advocating for reconfigurations of the current status quo—the same conditions that led us to our current predicament.
Gaza has been destroyed, Palestinians have been displaced en masse, and the impact on Gazan society will take years to heal. But Palestine is larger than Gaza. With no deviation from the current path, the tragedy will only continue.
It Will Take More Time for Israel’s Enemies to Get the Message
By Amit Segal, chief political analyst for Israel’s Channel 12 News and Yedioth Ahronoth
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 ushered in a new era around the world, one marked by less conflict and better relations between neighboring countries. Wars did not end entirely—they raged years in the former Yugoslavia, between Ethiopian and Eritrea, in Rwanda, and elsewhere. But interstate conflicts, which characterized the Cold War period, seemed to ebb. In recent years, we have seen the return of regional conflict, with various countries seeking to improve their own condition at the expense of their neighbors. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is a prime example.
The war forced on Israel on Oct. 7 is a different kind of conflict—one that Westerners categorically refuse to comprehend: a war in which one party is willing to dramatically worsen its own condition in order to inflict even more harm on its neighbor.
On the eve of the war, no one in Israel dreamed of expanding into Gaza or conquering the territory. And then thousands of rampaging Hamas terrorists invaded Israel on the morning of the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah and proceeded to murder, butcher, and rape. Similarly, Israelis had no hostile intent against Lebanon until Hezbollah started raining bombs on peaceful border communities the very next day—on homes, apple orchards, and dairy farms.
The catastrophic Israeli failure to foresee and prevent the Oct. 7 assault was not solely due to intelligence or operational lapses. It was primarily due to Israel’s misreading of the enemy. For years, the prevailing perception in Israel was that when an organization such as Hamas takes power, it must address civic concerns such as sewage and education, inevitably causing it to become more moderate.
The three H’s—Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—provide conclusive evidence that, in fact, the opposite occurs. Instead of contributing to the general prosperity, these groups have focused on militarizing their own societies and fomenting hate against their neighbors. The outcome is reflected in opinion polls: overwhelming support among Palestinians for Hamas and its atrocities and among Lebanon’s Shiite population for the murder of Israelis.
From 1948 to 1982, Arab states—secular dictatorships aligned with the Soviet Union—attempted to eradicate Israel through conventional military invasions. One after the other, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria gradually withdrew from this cycle of conflict—realizing they could not defeat Israel. Since then, proxies of Iran’s fundamentalist theocratic regime have sought to destroy Israel through suicide bombings, rocket attacks, and incursions. Israel belatedly woke up to the realization that this was not merely terrorist activity aimed at inflicting harm but rather a comprehensive strategy threatening its very existence.
Only when Israel’s neighbors internalize the futility of trying to destroy it through missile attacks on civilian centers and invasions aimed at mass slaughter will this war end. It will take time. Unfortunately, the plumes of smoke billowing over Gaza and Beirut are a necessary part of that process.
Translated by Ruchie Avital
The End of the Beginning?
By M.L. deRaismes Combes, assistant professor of national security, and John Nagl, professor of warfighting studies, both at the U.S. Army War College
Almost a year after Hamas’s horrific attack on southern Israel, the war in Gaza seems to be ramping down. Indeed, Israeli officials have recently turned their attention toward the ongoing threat of Hezbollah. At first blush, a slowdown in the war makes sense: The Gaza Strip lies in complete ruin, 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced, and conditions on the ground are extremely dire. The Israel Defense Forces have reached the Egyptian border, and even though they have refrained from a full assault on Rafah, there doesn’t seem to be much more to destroy.
However, looking at the conflict another way, the Hamas war is only in its infancy. Private assessments of Israel’s success are decidedly bleaker than the above picture suggests. The tunnel system so painstakingly built over the last few decades beneath the towns and cities of Gaza is far more sophisticated and serpentine than Israeli intelligence supposed.
Members of Hamas, specifically the Qassam Brigades, have planned for a long fight and seem to have no compunction about hiding among civilians. While their efforts to spark a larger Arab-Israeli war have so far failed to materialize, totally eradicating the organization—which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed last year to be Israel’s objective—is folly.
What Hamas did on Oct. 7—similar to what al Qaeda did on 9/11—was completely destroy any sense of ontological security that Israelis may have felt before the attack. That void has been replaced with a renewed conviction that knowing and responding to an enemy’s capabilities is far more important than trying to decipher their intentions.
But, as the United States found out the hard way after 20 years of combating insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, no amount of force will solve what is ultimately a political problem. If the end goal is for Israel to live in relative harmony with its neighbors, razing Gaza to the ground and killing more than 40,000 Palestinians have only exacerbated the underlying animosity between the two sides.
Hamas might suffer attrition in the short term. Its numbers and perhaps even capabilities may reach a level where they no longer present an imminent threat to Israel. But the manner in which Israel achieves any such pyrrhic victory has in reality already created the next generation of Hamas or Islamic Jihad or whatever other group feels pushed to the brink of despair and anger.
At the same time, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and his compatriots do not seem to care about the suffering of Palestinians; they have accomplished their goal of preventing Saudi Arabia from normalizing relations with Israel. As long as Israel continues to employ overwhelming force, and as long as there are Palestinians who feel they have nothing left to lose, the war will continue in one form or another.
Finally, the October assault caught more than just Israel off guard. Hamas’s allies were also left flat-footed. Iran has used the subsequent war to solidify the Shiite Crescent around a common cause, even if that support is more lip service or theatrical than anything substantive. Israel’s unrelenting assault on Gaza has isolated the country even further from its neighbors, leaving Iran a certain degree of freedom and legitimacy via its proxies in the region.
While the Iranian government is certainly in a precarious position, since it does not seem to want an all-out war, Israel’s hard hand toward the population of Gaza has essentially fed into Iran’s revolutionary narrative as the voice of the downtrodden. If and when the dust in Gaza settles, Iran could emerge stronger than before, propagating the same permissive dynamics that led to the attack in the first place.
This article reflects the authors’ views and not those of the U.S. Army War College or the U.S. Army.
Netanyahu’s Stubbornness Will Lead to Endless War in Gaza
By Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative
As the world takes stock of the past 12 months since the Oct. 7 massacre that triggered the most destructive war in Gaza’s history, a grim possibility is emerging due to the failure to reach a cease-fire deal. The prospective agreement proposed by the United States with Qatari and Egyptian mediation has stalled due to the issue of control over the Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow strip of territory along Gaza’s border with Egypt. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists on direct management of the corridor.
He believes that future smuggling of illicit items and munitions into Gaza can only be prevented by direct Israeli occupation, something that Hamas vehemently opposes. Interestingly, senior Israeli security officials, including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, have questioned Netanyahu’s demands, calling them a disgrace and an attempt to extend the war unnecessarily.
The lack of progress in achieving a cease-fire and hostage release deal has not stopped Israeli bombardment from continuing throughout Gaza, claiming dozens of lives on an almost daily basis and prolonging the suffering of a battered and desperate civilian population. Disease, hunger, insecurity, constant evacuation orders, uncertainty, and fatigue are ravaging Palestinians in Gaza, who are stuck between a merciless Israeli war machine and a ruthless militant organization.
Despite being massively weakened and losing most of its administrative governance capabilities, Hamas nevertheless continues to rule different parts of Gaza and is able to exercise dominion over swaths of the territory, conducting some security functions to keep the population in check and carrying out small harassing attacks against Israeli ground units.
Against this backdrop, Israel has been shifting its focus and resources away from its southern front to the northern border with Lebanon. In the past week, it has seriously escalated the conflict with Hezbollah by killing its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and bombing the country’s south and the capital, Beirut. This has entailed moving ground units and military assets out of Gaza while maintaining enough force for an active battlefront and reducing the tempo of overall combat operations and missions.
The Israel Defense Forces continue to attack Hamas targets in different parts of Gaza, destroy smuggling and offensive tunnels, and seek out intelligence that could lead to the location of the remaining hostages and their captors as well as Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar. Still, it is quite clear that the Israeli focus is currently on dealing with the rising threats from Hezbollah and other Iran-backed proxies that are likely to carry out attacks against Israeli targets. The barrage of ballistic missiles recently launched by Iran toward Israel, may be the opening salvo of a war that further distracts Israel away from Gaza, prolonging Palestinian misery and suffering.
As the Israel-Hamas war’s end appears unlikely for the remainder of Joe Biden’s presidency, things seem to be headed in the direction of a sustained low-intensity war. In such a scenario, a steady rhythm of strikes, incursions, attacks, guerrilla warfare, assassinations, and an overall game of whack-a-mole will be a daily occurrence instead of the high-intensity tempo that was characteristic of the first months of the war.
Such attrition would serve the goals of Israel while allowing Hamas to hold on just enough to stay relevant and active. Military experts have agreed that it is difficult for Israel to achieve a decisive victory; therefore, without world pressure to end hostilities, the people of Gaza will not know peace or security for the foreseeable future.
Israel’s Perpetual War Puts Jordan in a Bind
By Marwan Muasher, former Jordanian deputy prime minister and foreign minister
Almost a year after the Israel-Hamas war started, many people in the region hope that we are nearer to the end than the beginning. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s clear attempts to prolong the war, and thus his own political future, still have limits. But the unanswered question is what lies ahead after the war. With prospects for a serious political initiative to end the war almost nonexistent, the conflict is likely to go on, and the death toll on both sides will continue to rise.
One of the parties that has serious concerns is Jordan. Ever since its peace treaty with Israel was signed in 1994, the Jordanian authorities have used two arguments to sell the treaty to a skeptical—and now outright hostile—public.
The first is that by signing a peace treaty, Jordan has protected its own borders and prevented any Israeli attempt of mass transfer of Palestinians from the West Bank, thereby ending the long-standing far-right Israeli argument that “Jordan is Palestine.”
The second is that the Netanyahu administration will eventually leave, and Jordan can then resume its cooperation with a more reasonable Israeli government ready to negotiate a peace settlement based on a two-state solution—an outcome that is necessary to preserve not only Palestinian but also Jordanian interests.
Both of these arguments have been seriously weakened since Oct. 7.
2024 is not 1994. The Palestinian population today has exceeded that of Jewish Israelis in areas under Israel’s control. And the far right is now a central part of the Israeli government. If Israel does not seek to end the occupation or acquiesce to a two-state solution, and if it does not want to perpetuate what is essentially an apartheid system, then Jordan fears that Israeli designs regarding the mass transfer of Palestinians remain on the Netanyahu government’s agenda and have not been buried.
The killing of more than 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza as well as the eradication of schools, hospitals, roads, electricity, water networks, and places of worship have made Gaza basically uninhabitable. With settlers in the West Bank—protected by the Israeli army—engaged in vigilante killings of Palestinians and attempts at ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities, the Jordanian argument about preventing a mass expulsion of Palestinians into Jordan may no longer hold water.
Likewise, hopes about a two-state solution are evaporating. The Israeli parliament passed a law in July against the establishment of such a solution, with the approval of all of Israel’s major parties. The divide in Israeli society is no longer between the peace camp and hard-liners. It is simply between the pro-Netanyahu and anti-Netanyahu factions.
Once the war is over, Jordan will be faced with two difficult choices. Resuming economic and security cooperation with Israel will pit the government against a very angry population, demonstrated by a huge win for the Islamist parties in the Sept. 10 elections. Maintaining the current tough, anti-Israel rhetoric will be unpopular with the United States. Jordan will have to walk a tightrope after the war.
The Worst May Be Yet to Come
By Hagar Shezaf, West Bank correspondent for Haaretz
Almost a year into the war, few Israelis or Palestinians believe it will end anytime soon. Previous Israeli campaigns in Gaza lasted a few weeks at most, but this one appears to be a war with no endgame. The Israeli government’s unwillingness to discuss the “day after,” its empty slogans about “total victory,” and the escalation in Lebanon have normalized the abnormal for Israelis: uncertainty, grief, and displacement. In Gaza, of course, the impact is much worse than the other battle zones, with tens of thousands dead and nearly the entire population internally displaced.
In the West Bank, where I do my reporting, Palestinians see the destruction in Gaza and wonder if it’s their future as well. Since Oct. 7, Israel has regularly used aircraft to strike in the West Bank—something it had done only rarely in the preceding two decades. Residents of the Nur Shams refugee camp have watched Israeli military bulldozers grind up their streets—suspecting they might be booby-trapped—and compared the images to the destruction in Gaza.
In the village of Qaryut near Nablus, a father whose 13-year-old daughter was shot dead in their home by the Israeli military told me he was thankful he could bury her in one piece, unlike those in Gaza whose loved ones are often dismembered in Israeli strikes.
But even as the West Bank is undergoing Gazafication, Gaza faces the possibility of becoming more like the West Bank: permanently occupied. For Israelis, the idea of maintaining a military presence in Gaza has become increasingly mainstream since the war began. Another idea gaining traction is of Israelis settling in Gaza—erecting civilian communities there, similar to those in the West Bank. While it remains a minority position among Jewish Israelis, its advocates include members of the far right who wield substantial power in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration.
Many analysts have pointed out Netanyahu’s personal interest in extending the war in order to keep his coalition intact and postpone his corruption trial. But his coalition partner Bezalel Smotrich, who helps shape Israeli policy in the West Bank, has his own reasons to see the fighting continue, which also stretch the bounds of what might be considered security needs. While the United States and the rest of the international community are focused on Gaza, Smotrich has had a free hand to push forward a de jure annexation of the West Bank through abstruse bureaucratic maneuvers.
The war has also enabled Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir—another far-right member of Netanyahu’s government—to exclude most Palestinian workers from the Israeli labor market, pushing the West Bank to the brink of economic collapse and further weakening the Palestinian Authority. In the meantime, the Israeli military has armed thousands of settlers, creating de facto militias bent on restricting Palestinian movement in the West Bank and accelerating the establishment of illegal outposts.
All wars end eventually. But in the current political constellation, Israel’s most powerful actors have an interest in extending this one indefinitely. For Palestinians in the West Bank, the worst may be yet to come.
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