What Would I Do?

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As I write this, Israel celebrates 77 years since its founding in 1948. By any measure, the modern Jewish state is a miracle. It has grown its economy to the point where its per capita GDP exceeds Britain, France, Spain, and Italy. It has a stable currency and ample per capita foreign reserves. Israel is a truly innovative leader in computing, medicine, and agriculture, creating technologies for everyday use worldwide. The modern state of Israel looked set for a bright future despite threats on its borders and saber-rattling from Iran. That future promise tragically came to a violent end on October 7, 2023, when the shocking attack by Hamas, while it was contained within a day, uncovered the extent of multiple internal and external existential threats to the Jewish state.

We might look back and wish for a time machine to change the past. There is no going back to 1947, June 5, 1967, or October 6, 2023. In other words, there is no changing the fact that the state of Israel exists and will continue to exist in one form or another. There is no undoing the 1967 conquest of the West Bank, the resulting 58-year occupation, and the extensive Jewish settlement of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. There is no going back to the false sense of security Israelis had before October 7, no deferring the Palestinian issue forever, no false belief in the invincibility of the IDF and the state intelligence services, no belief that Israeli military power can force a unilateral solution on the Palestinians, and no belief that past military successes can guarantee future security. Some may still cling to the notion that a full or partial Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank is a possibility. They do so as the alternative is to admit that the one-state solution is the only way forward and that a single state is either a democratic binational state or a Jewish minority-ruled apartheid-like state.

I was recently asked what I, a former IDF paratrooper officer, would do to solve what seems to be a forever war. To which I replied that it was the wrong question, as such a question seems to imply that the solution is a military one. The correct question, in my opinion, is “What would a person who has empathy for the dead, wounded, and bereaved families on both sides of the conflict do to end this forever bloodshed?”.

The somewhat short answer, which I will expand on, is that both sides need to acknowledge that both have identical rights to live on the same piece of land, both have identical rights to national aspirations, and both need to find a compromise to share power and space in the same territory. Neither party is going to leave their homes in large numbers shortly, and both are destined to live with each other.

In order to achieve such an objective, a bilateral process needs to be started of reconciliation and negotiation in order to create the framework to build the trust and security necessary for both parties to come to an agreement.

There are of course many reasons which can be found why this is impossible. Many obstacles, beliefs, and practices make it seem an impossibility. But consider the alternative: A forever war with killing and maiming for the foreseeable future. Fortress Israel living by a Spartan code, dependent on the support and largess of a superpower for its survival.

What is chronically overlooked, ignored, and indeed swept under the carpet is the motivation of Israel’s adversaries. The motivation of the Palestinians, to violently resist, fight, and struggle against Israel, is rooted in a 77-year history of displacement, suffering, occupation, trauma, denial of civil and political rights, and massive generational trauma fostered on them by an Israeli policy of escalating retaliation. That motivation, to violently resist Jewish rule, is not going to disappear.

Past attempts to impose a unilateral military solution have all failed. The most dramatic example is that of the PLO, exiled from Lebanon, only to return as peace partners in the now-failed Oslo Accords. The PLO, pre-Hamas, was as reviled, hated, and like Hamas, responsible for a string of terror attacks killing and maiming countless children and civilians. Elimination of Hamas, an impossible task, will only see the emergence of a new body, equally, if not more determined to violently resist Israel’s Jewish rule in the region.

There is no military solution to such a conflict, a 100-year war that seems to get more extreme, deadly, and costly with every new event. The lack of a strategic vision as to what the state of Israel should be, what its borders should be, and what its security doctrine should be has only led to a lack of vision and answers as to how to solve the conflict. Israel has come up against the hard reality that it simply cannot muster enough combat soldiers to simultaneously occupy and hold Gaza, police the West Bank, fight Hezbollah in Lebanon, and meet any other military threats that may arise. The state of Israel failed its citizens on 7 October by proving incapable on that day of meeting the basic function of a state to secure its inhabitants. Technically, on paper, the IDF is more than capable of dealing with a ragtag terrorist force on its borders. However, as history has shown us again and again, no army cannot be taken by surprise, no intelligence force cannot be fooled, and no technological barrier cannot be overcome. When all three come together, October 7, and similar disasters happen. Furthermore, Israel does not have the psychological, financial, and logistical capacity for endless wars on its borders, the country is suffering, militarily, economically, and psychologically with the strain of maintaining a war that, as of this writing, has raged for more than eighteen months.

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Without a compelling vision and resulting efforts to end the conflict, Israel’s existential crisis will deepen with elites choosing to leave for safer and more prosperous shores. How many families will choose to knowingly place themselves and their loved ones in a state of continuous existential danger when they have a safer alternative available? This is especially so in the world we live in today, where the skills of Israeli elites are in demand and it is relatively easy to pick up and move a family to a more secure location in the Western world.

The current demographics and relative proportions of about 50% Jews and 50% non-Jews in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean dictate that any equitable solution must lead to a binational state where power is shared between Jews and non-Jews. The experience of such a binational state in Lebanon led to religious clashes and a violent failure of the Lebanese binational state. This was due, in no small part, to the actions, pressures, and facilitation by outside actors, including Israel. I refuse to believe that the startup nation, with all its brilliance, economic and military power, and the known Israeli capability for innovation, cannot find a creative way to bring about a successful secular binational state in what is now Israel, that can work while providing peace, security, freedom of religion and prosperity for all its inhabitants.

Such a solution would lead to the end of the Jewish state as it stands today. Sharing power means an end to Jewish minority rule, as unthinkable and unacceptable as that may seem to the majority of Israeli Jews today. While there are no guarantees as to the successful outcome of such an experiment, it is surely worse to bet on the maintenance of the status quo – the continuation of the 100-year war between Israel and the Palestinians. Most Jewish Israelis would resist, some violently, such a proposal. After all, whites in South Africa and what was Rhodesia did not readily give up their power and privilege either, especially as the liberation forces they were fighting had vowed to get rid of all the whites. Neither did Protestants in Northern Ireland readily give up power and privilege for a settlement, even though the Catholics had vowed to send them all back to England.

At the end of the day I believe that absent a peacefully negotiated solution, there are only two possible outcomes from the current situation: Either the balance of military forces or the demography of Palestine/Israel, meaning the discrepant national birth rates and/or emigration, will violently determine the country’s future, and either Palestine/Israel, between the river and the sea, will become a Jewish majority state, without a substantial Arab minority, or it will become an Arab state, with a gradually diminishing Jewish minority. This is especially the case as the forces of violent resistance access more sophisticated technologies, are better trained, have leaders who learn to organize and mobilize in large numbers, and weapons of mass destruction proliferate. There is always the ultimate threat overhanging the region of nuclear proliferation, after Israel introduced atomic weapons into the region, potentially leading to it becoming a nuclear wasteland, a home to neither people.

It has to be said that it is increasingly unlikely that Israel will ensure a substantial Jewish majority by forcefully expelling millions of Palestinians. Bother Israel’s Arab neighbors and the rest of the world will not stand by quietly and allow such a scenario to take place.

The only realistic question is whether any possible outcome will be the result of peaceful negotiations or will it be forged via constant conflict with the accompanying deaths, wounding, and bereavement. I hope that it can be accomplished through peaceful negotiations, thereby halting the ongoing and never-ending violent loss of life, bereavement, and misery.

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