Israeli and Palestinian Societies Have Little Remaining Hope of Peace

The drama and violence in and around Gaza over the past year—and the escalation of violence on a regional level in the past month—have thrust Middle East issues back to the top of the global agenda. Much of the focus has been short-term solutions, for understandable reasons: A cessation of violence, release of hostages, and relief for those deeply affected by the fighting are all pressing issues. But the result has sometimes been to obscure some pernicious, long-term trends likely to survive long past the current set-in crises. This is particularly the case in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. A quarter century after the date by which the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel agreed to have their conflict resolved, the prospect of negotiating a settlement between Israel and the Palestinian national movement has evaporated. If that prospect ever returns—and it may not—the effort will have to take a very different form and be built on a new foundation that is yet to unveil itself. The situation has metastasized in a way so deeply felt by most Israelis and Palestinians that, paradoxically, if there is any hope for a revived effort, it lies in the despair that is shared among so many.

In the 1990s, key ingredients allowed for significant progress toward a negotiated settlement—much less progress than was understood at the time, but still quite real. A generation ago, negotiations found traction because of an Israeli leadership that wished to come to terms with Palestinians as a national community and that had the support of half the population, along with a Palestinian leadership willing to accept a two-state solution. Leaders were both weaker and more exposed than they often appeared; gaps were far deeper (even on the desirability of two states as the outcome), and opponents on both sides were more resourceful and powerful than outside observers realized. Still, the idea of a formal process by which leaders and their publics inched closer together worked off and on until, in the wake of the failures of the 2000s, the same forces began to work the other way.

Since that time, fundamental trends long in evidence in Israel and Palestine—and in the ways they interact—have overwhelmed any conflict-ending diplomacy and produced worsening bouts of violence. But the believers in a peace process have treated the steadily harsher realities as distractions or as distant futures that might still be avoided; denial and procrastination have ignored the extent to which these broader societal trends have so deeply entrenched themselves in mutually reinforcing ways.

The Real Divide Among Jewish Israelis—and What Does Not Divide Them

On the Israeli side, the despair concerning a peace with Palestinians is often understood as a shift to the right. U.S. diplomacy sometimes pretends even that shift—profound and sometimes extreme as it is—is simply an annoyance. And that is a mistake: It is not merely short-term changes in public opinion on specific questions that are at issue.

A set of deeper social and ideological developments undermines any peace process or even long-term conflict management. Senior officials can be described as “leaders,” but they are constrained by (even as they helped create) the realities that have turned diplomatic impasse into generational corrosion. The most obvious signs of these developments—distrust in both negotiations with Palestinians and a so-called two-state solution—are decades in the making. The dwindling number of Israelis who still advocate for accommodation with Palestinians as a national community through a diplomatic process are struggling to maintain relevance in Israeli public discourse. Open and determined advocacy for a diplomatic solution or accommodation of Palestinians as a people deserving sovereignty are voiced only from the margins of Israeli political life.

The real divisions in Israeli society (at least among its overwhelmingly Jewish majority)—are not about the two-state solution. The societal fissures animating demonstrations, electoral campaigns, and vitriolic public debate is not between traditional hawks and doves. Instead, it is between two camps, each diverse in themselves, on the nature of the Israeli state. If they are placed on a left-right continuum, they might be seen as center and right-wing since not much of a left remains.

On one side stands the center, an establishment that sees Israel very much as a Jewish state but also one of institutions, laws, procedures, and professionalism; members of this camp are often anchored in the country’s most vibrant economic sectors, universities, and above all state institutions. Relations with Palestinians are not the only concern for them—of course, there are frequent warnings of the need to avoid sliding into what this camp calls a “one state reality” (as if one does not exist already), but no real alternatives are offered. But just as pressing are fears that the country’s economic future is being sacrificed and religious structures and cultural mores imposed by those in the rival camp, some of whom (especially the very religious) contribute neither to the public fisc nor to the army’s enlisted ranks.

And on the other side stands a more diverse, far-right camp, unified by a concern that the first one is elitist, overly cosmopolitan, and more interested in pontificating from privileged positions than serving a Jewish people whose religious, traditional, or conservative members they disdain and are estranged from. This camp is motivated not only by opposing its centrist rival but also by an insistence that the Israeli state serve its Jewish majority without hesitation or qualification. And for many on the growing rightward wing of this already right-wing camp, that means that non-Jews remain in the entirety of what they call the Land of Israel by sufferance and not as of right.

What is traditionally seen as the center right of the Israeli political spectrum—anchored in the old Likud party—operated more like the first camp than the second when it first rose to power in the late 1970s. However, the camps that exist today did not exist in their current form; polarization took place originally on socioeconomic and territorial lines, but state institutions were generally respected across most of the spectrum. A generation ago, Likud leaders treated these institutions with some deference, especially in the military and security realms and the judicial system. Today’s right wing seems to see some of those same institutions as obstructionist to the democratic will while sheltering those who use their power and prestige for a left-wing agenda rejected by voters. And the members further right—who make up an integral and influential part of the current governing coalition—act as if the state’s security bodies are not so much professionalized and rule-governed institutions as they are (or should be) the unrestrained armed wing of the Jewish people. To the horror of the center, such leaders not only defend soldiers and civilians accused of atrocities against Palestinians but cheer on (and even lead) physical attacks to block attempts to hold accountable those accused of abuse. The center also fears that the right is using its current, narrow majority to parachute its members into senior state positions, turning them into partisan tools.

The drama of country-wide demonstrations, the reality of polarization, and the venom of domestic political discourse have somewhat overshadowed some underlying developments with international as well as domestic ramifications. Those shifts occasionally provoke headlines but rarely lead hapless international actors who still speak of a peace process to rethink their diplomatic options.

First, opposition to a two-state outcome is not merely a policy preference that unites the two camps but also “an existential threat,” according to prevailing discourse. That makes it easy to cast those who favor two states as mortal enemies of the state.

Second, the division between the two camps regarding Palestinians is no longer about how to reach an agreement with the latter as a national entity. The center camp sees the failure of two-state diplomacy as leaving no long-term alternative other than tinkering with the status quo. The right is working to institutionalize Israeli control of the entire land of Israel, not through ad hoc measures but through settlement, annexation, and deployment of overwhelming force. For those who see existing arrangements as “apartheid”—and the word is increasingly used even in Israel—the division is between those who implicitly accept it as an emerging possibility and seek to stave it off while they can come up with some hope of reversing some of its aspects and those who wish to embrace it as a policy.

Third, the rhetoric used among Israelis has shifted in ways that should no longer escape notice (but often does). Of course, hawkish politicians and commentators have long used sharp language in domestic debates. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s depiction of Israel’s enemies as Amalek—an entire people mentioned in the Bible who are to be destroyed and whose very memory is to be erased—proceeded for almost a decade before provoking much controversy. Only when a group of such statements from Israeli leaders were cited in South Africa’s complaint to the International Court of Justice did some officials explain that the prime minister had not actually quoted the most murderous verse—an oversight that a powerful Israeli minister quickly corrected. A year ago, I spoke of Israeli leaders “turning dog whistles into fog horns,” and that was before the trauma of the October 7 atrocities. Since that date, even less-shrill voices in Israeli discussions predicate their understanding on the perceived reality that Hamas’s genocidal intentions were fully revealed on October 7 in a way that seemed to cheer many Palestinians and dismayed few. And the more extreme ones have spoken of using nuclear weapons in Gaza; dehumanizing rhetoric quickly became a staple of public discourse even from senior officials.

Over the short term, there is every reason to believe that extreme and bellicose statements provide the kind of cover that have made atrocities possible in other settings. But even if an international spotlight sometimes (but not always) drives back such rhetoric into more oblique forms, there is also a long-term effect that implies that making an argument for concessions to a rival national community seems not simply naïve but even treasonous.

Fourth, the shift has occurred not only at the level of public rhetoric, especially but not exclusively on the right, but also in strategic thinking among leaders—even those in the center or the establishment. They no longer speak openly of the virtues of the status quo even when they have no alternative to offer. And indeed, sober thinkers inside the country and even outside of it speak of the failure of deterrence (and thus an implied need to move beyond intimidating adversaries to destroying them).

And finally, there have been a whole host of changes in the Israeli administration of Palestinians that go far beyond the construction of settlements and physical infrastructure designed to prevent any territorial compromise. United Nations officials have been effectively expelled; the most experienced and extensive UN agency working with Palestinians, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), may be close to being declared a terrorist organization by Israel; and settler violence increasingly appears to be less opportunistic and local than it is a strategic attempt to drive Palestinians out of crossroads deemed important to the settler enterprise.

Even if one does not believe that Israel and Palestine came close to mutual accommodation in the 1990s, there certainly was an active diplomatic process, a constituency for a negotiated settlement within Israeli society, and a widespread (if not universal) sense that Palestinians were a national community that needed to be accommodated in some way. All three elements are now dead. And to pursue that metaphor, the effect of the massacres committed by Hamas on October 7 was not to put nails in a coffin but to bury that already well-sealed coffin deeply underground.

The Corrosion in Palestine

Matters are different but perhaps even less promising on the Palestinian side. Disenchantment with the “peace process” of the 1990s may be even more profound than it is in Israeli society, but it expresses itself in deep alienation from almost all existing structures. As in Israel, those who argue for extreme tactics or embrace violence can find many openings, as was horrifically clear on October 7 and in the weeks afterward, in which so many Palestinians either refused to acknowledge the brutality of the attacks or looked past the atrocities committed in their name to welcome the return of Palestinian activism and global attention. But the institutional rot and disillusionment with diplomacy that left such openings was decades in the making.

PLO leaders who negotiated the creation of an interim Palestinian Authority (PA) thirty years ago presented that entity as the kernel of a Palestinian state. There was nothing in the Oslo Accords nor in the positions of Israel and the United States (which oversaw the negotiations) to vindicate such a claim, and even Oslo’s promises of expanded territorial reach for the PA—promises that were essential elements of the agreements for the Palestinian leadership—were simply pushed aside by Israel with the acquiescence of the United States after the PA established itself in the cities and most major towns in the West Bank and Gaza. By the end of the 1990s, few had faith that a Palestinian state was materializing. Instead, PA residents experienced a set of authoritarian, inefficient, and sometimes inchoate structures of self-rule in cities and towns. The most powerful Palestinian critics of Oslo were those who argued that the agreements would not produce the Palestinian state promised, and they seemed vindicated by Israeli leaders—and international sponsors of the peace process—who clearly saw things differently. By the early 2000s some finally spoke—at first timidly, then more frankly, and finally ad nauseam—about a two-state solution. What they meant was of course not a state in any real meaning of the term: The most thorough and sober accounts of the negotiations make clear that the Palestinian entity Israeli leaders seem to have offered would neither control its external security nor have full sovereignty over the ground below, the air above, nor its borders. Negotiators did not acknowledge that the term for such an entity is “protectorate” not “state.”

But even for those (and I include myself among them) who believed that some agreement was possible, from a Palestinian domestic perspective none of this debate gained much traction. The leaders were so isolated; the negotiations so secretive; and the trend lines of Israeli settlement and infrastructure construction, the reneging on past agreements, and the rhetoric on both sides so recriminatory that from 2000 on, public discussion among Palestinians was increasingly predicated not on the desirability of a two-state solution but on its impossibility. The modalities and the minutiae of the secret negotiations were . . . secret. But far less secret were the settlement expansions and the conversion of the economic and fiscal provisions of the Oslo Accords into a spigot by which Israel could unilaterally manage the PA’s finances and economic activity in the West Bank. Domestically, a movement to improve the PA’s governance structures and practices took hold in the 1990s and received strong international support in the early 2000s, leading to some very significant constitutional and fiscal reforms. However, those moves eventually disappointed their domestic constituency and international backers whose attention soon wandered elsewhere. As time went on, Palestinians turned against some of the most critical reforms, especially when revived democratic procedures resulted in a Hamas parliamentary majority in 2006.

If hopes for a two-state solution died, what replaced them? Nothing. And that development, so easily detected on the ground, has been largely ignored by outsiders for two decades. There were, of course, discussions among intellectuals about the desirability of two states versus a single state (whether binational, federal, or confederal) along with many creative ideas about obscuring, blending, or overcoming various forms of statehood and sovereignty. All ideas were abstract and theoretical, harnessed to no project, leadership, movement, political actor, or process. More importantly, none found much resonance in broader Palestinian society. Even at such intellectual levels, discussions tended to shift from such ideas to more general ones about “ending occupation,” the need for “popular resistance,” or the need for a new (generally unspecified) “national strategy.” The ultimate fate of Israel/Palestine remained ambiguous or simply beyond any horizon. This trend—which I have termed “the receding dream of statehood” and the shift from a “search for state to [a] search for tactics”—was predicated on the absence of viable diplomacy at present, the weakness and even irrelevance of the nationalist leadership, and the feeling that yesterday’s ideas have proved their bankruptcy but not yet been replaced by new ones.

But even this creative thinking has lost much of its hold. There are clear material trends in the West Bank and Gaza that make life today very difficult and promise only a worse tomorrow. The Palestinian national movement has long been a starting point for many political discussions, but in the absence of any viable strategy, it is increasingly becoming the end point. In any conversation over the past decade or more with Palestinians, if I asked about national strategy, my question has been turned around: What is it that I suggest? And I have no good answers.

Such disillusionment and despair have been growing for decades; they are voiced privately by senior officials and openly by younger Palestinians. In conversations in the northern West Bank in the summer of 2023, the most common hope I heard was “to live a normal life.” And now even that sounds like a distant hope to many.

The Spiral of Cynicism; Rushing by the Off-ramps

Perhaps the least-appreciated aspect of this mutual despair is precisely its mutually reinforcing nature. Israelis and Palestinians can hear voices on the other side, but the ones that carry most effectively are those of the extremes. A comment from an Israeli minister that might draw a sigh or an eye roll from an international diplomat will often be interpreted—with good reason—as a mortal threat by Palestinians. The strident boasts or fearsome commands of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar or a more visible Hamas official make Israeli headlines, while the ineffectual rhetorical failings of a prime minister in Ramallah barely rate mention. In public rhetoric and private conversations, members of various camps understand their own side as reacting against aggression rather than acting.

Even far away from the active violence now concentrated in Gaza and the West Bank, residents of Israel/Palestine often speak of areas where they dare not travel or thoughts they dare not voice; Palestinian citizens of Israel have been particularly caught in a vice of intense but localized pressure and harassment. What has appeared at times as an international conflict is increasingly taking on some frightening features of what has been labeled “ethnic war” or even “race war” in other settings.

And the societal transformation is deeply rooted, even as it is seen more superficially as caused by particular leaders or their supposed personal interests (such as Sinwar’s rise to dominance in Hamas or Netanyahu’s desire to evade trial). Whatever personal responsibility such leaders may or may not bear, the underlying trends that placed such authority in their hands would not disappear with their removal.

The mutually reinforcing nature of the descent into intractable conflict has not always operated. The harshness of the Israeli military campaign in Lebanon in 1982 was one of many contributing factors moving the Palestinian leadership to explicitly embrace the two-state solution later in the decade. The first intifada helped induce the Israeli leadership to treat Palestinians as a national community with the PLO leadership as its representative. And while the second intifada was one of the contributors to the death of the Oslo process, the violence directed toward Israelis in public persuaded many in what was then the center right to embrace territorial withdrawal, which they had earlier resisted, and others to begin speaking openly of a two-state solution.

But such developments have been rare. The idea of a “peace process” actually dates back to the late 1970s, when the focus was on building trust slowly between Israel and Arab states. Indeed, Israel and Egypt did sign a peace treaty in 1979. In the 1990s, the term came to refer almost exclusively to the Oslo agreement and its successors. The hope of this process was that the Israeli and Palestinian leaders would soften their positions and find ways to devise steadily expanding arrangements that would lead to some form of final agreement.

But a far more common pattern has been a spiral of cynicism, with the current wave of mutual radicalization well underway before October 7 and seemingly unstoppable since then. It is not simply the parties themselves who have hurled themselves into this spiral; the peace process’s international sponsors (especially the United States) have spoken blithely of the two-state solution while rushing past every possible off-ramp for deepening confrontation. Actions such as the rejection of the outcome of the 2006 Palestinian elections, the strident militancy (and even retributive measures) against any invocation of international law, the capitulation to Israeli annexation, the embrace of the blockade of Gaza, the failure to engage Hamas on its 2017 political document, and the abandonment of Palestinian elections in 2021 all look like possible turning points that were not seriously challenged within official U.S. circles. A different approach at each of these points would have been risky, but the alternatives offered were not marginal ideas in unofficial policy circles—they were quietly discussed and sometimes openly advocated. But they were dead on arrival in officialdom, deemed politically impossible in Washington.

And the pattern of whistling past the graveyard of the peace process continues. Many international commentators have drafted plans for economic and political reconstruction after the Gaza war based on the uncertain assumption that the war will have a clear end that allows for rebuilding. But even less realistically, they pile on a vague insistence that their massive projects to rebuild the status quo ante in terms of housing, infrastructure, and institutions be followed by an unspecified way to move beyond it. The alternative, they say, is endless war. Very few commentators realize that their supposed cure thus delivers a startling diagnosis identical to mine: Since they cannot deliver any credible long-term plan, their alternative of endless war is not a boogeyman but by far the most likely outcome.

It does little good to speak, as the UN does, of “unwavering commitment to the vision of the two-State solution.” Of course, endless repetition of the phrase might itself be packaged as refusing to waver, and perhaps at some very distant date it might serve the purpose of documenting global endorsement of the dual set of national rights. But leaving two-state sloganeering utterly unconnected to any mechanism, diplomatic initiative, or process leaves it worthless in Palestinian eyes and offensive to current Israeli officials (even antisemitic for those given to rhetorical hyperbole). Any future Israeli leaders who are not deaf to the calls would likely risk either electoral defeat by endorsing it today or perhaps even civil war if they somehow found themselves in a position to enforce it.

There is something churlish about such dismissal of two-state hortatory since so much of it is well-intentioned, advanced by experienced figures, and based on the hope that Palestinian and Zionist nationalist projects can both be met in the form of two democratic and peaceful states. Mentioning two states would have been helpful three decades ago. Forceful action would have been possible two decades ago. But since then, repeated, toothless reiterations of the formula have had profoundly pernicious effects. At their best they simply distract attention from the way harsh realities have completely undermined its promise; at their worst they lead to inherently futile attempts to meet today a shifting string of Israeli complaints that have been advanced by those who openly oppose a two-state outcome while postponing Palestinian complaints until they meet some shifting set of standards. The effect in Palestinian eyes is to render their own leaders utterly ineffectual in advancing Palestinian positions and often overly desperate to ward off the opposing side’s demand du jour.

Can Anything Be Done? Grasping at Despair as the Last Hope

If denial does not work, what about despair? There have been times in the past when shifts in what might be called the national mood among Israelis and Palestinians have drawn leaders into fundamentally rethinking their positions.

That is not happening now, at least in any positive way. On the ground, the very deadly effects of the current war have shifted things profoundly in the opposite direction.

But might the pendulum swing the other way? It might, when Israelis wake up not to the possibility of stinging defeat but to the promise of endless occupation, with young conscripts and older reservists being sent to enforce new security arrangements inside Gaza and periodically storm West Bank refugee camps in defense of an annexationist vision that so many have not shared. What about the realization that Israel faces not only the possibility of interminable occupation and conflict in Gaza and the West Bank but also a continuous, bounded conflict involving Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen with the possibility of unbounded conflict at any time? Will current coffee table conversation about second passports, German grandchildren, and international opprobrium (sometimes accompanied by distancing and even boycott) turn into a political force supporting politicians who finally grapple with the need to come up with a real alternative?

Might something similar happen on the Palestinian side, with Gazan society—suffering catastrophic casualties, living in bubbles that amount to massive new refugee camps with skeletal social services and anemic economic activity—joining a rising West Bank generation in articulating an overriding ambition simply to live a normal life?

Such speculation is not the stuff of diplomatic initiatives but of slow social change—and if it happens, it will be gradual, even generational in nature. The task of diplomacy today must be palliative in the short term without divorcing itself from addressing longer-term issues.

With regard to the palliative dimensions, it may simply be best to start with clear international legal norms on human rights rather than exclude such rights and the mechanisms built to discern, apply, and protect them.

And on long-term strategy, it is clear now what does not work. First, starting with a declared end point and hoping the parties will find their way leads to entrenchment, not exit from, existing arrangements. Second, talk of repeating the experience of Japan and Germany not only serves to provide cover for horrific levels of destruction today but also obscures the fact that the Israeli leadership has annexed Palestinian territory; it does not seek to reconstruct Palestinian politics but to end it. Third, drawing on the United States’ experience in Afghanistan and Iraq assigns to Israeli generals the task of fighting the previous American wars, again missing that Israel has conquered the West Bank and promises an indefinite security presence in Gaza. Unlike the United States, Israel does not seek a so-called status-of-forces agreement for its troops during a slow rebuilding of a sovereign but friendly political entity.

Instead of sketching out a precise structure, what makes more sense is the development and articulation of clear principles: Nobody will be encouraged, much less forced, to leave; Jews and Palestinians have national rights as well as individual human rights; no people should be left stateless. And those principles must not be mere platitudes but must operate during—and even guide—the shorter-term period of palliative policy. Not only are those who see a dark future if current trends continue right, but also, they are likely a substantial majority in both Israeli and Palestinian societies. They are disorganized and almost invisible in international policy debates; many seem more likely to vote with their feet than to form electoral coalitions. There has been so much violence and destruction over the past year and so much cruelty to the hopes of thirty years ago. If despair is the best hope, then the only good news is that it is in such rich supply.