Hamas’s attack on Israel, and the ensuing Israeli response, has brought new energy to discussions of restarting a peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, which has been dormant for years. To understand how such a process might develop, I spoke with Nathan Thrall, the former director of the International Crisis Group’s Arab-Israeli project, and an expert on the conflict, who lives in Jerusalem. He is also the author of the recent book “A Day In The Life Of Abed Salama,” which tells the story of the occupation through a Palestinian man’s search for his son after a fatal bus accident. (I first spoke to Thrall in the immediate aftermath of the October 7th attack. Since then, a number of Thrall’s book events have been cancelled.) During our conversation, the transcript of which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Hamas’s incursion may have changed Israeli politics, whether debates about a one-state solution versus a two-state solution are helpful, and America’s role in the conflict.
How are you thinking about a possible resolution to this conflict differently from how you did before October 7th?
I had a book come out on October 3rd, and the question of what I saw as a viable political solution to the conflict was one that came up in every talk. I always gave the same answer, which is one I’ve been giving for years now, which is that all of the talk of solutions is a distraction. A one-state solution isn’t on the horizon. A two-state solution isn’t on the horizon. A confederation isn’t on the horizon. All of this talk of which of these possible utopias one prefers serves to distract us from the everyday reality of violent oppression. But now I think that the war has forced me to think about what is actually realistic, because every crisis is also an opportunity, and the war has made things possible that were not possible before.
What are those things?
So, one of the main things that it has done is that it has convinced the vast majority of Israelis that the model in place prior to October 7th is not working. The price of October 7th is far too high for Israel to pay if that is what it means to manage the conflict.
When you say “manage the conflict,” I assume you mean the Israelis letting it fester without any long-term resolution.
Yeah, I mean precisely that phrase. “Managing the conflict” is one phrase that is used by Israeli officials to describe what their policy has been for the past decade. That means a system in which Israel is the sole sovereign between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. There are seven million Israeli Jews and seven million Palestinians living under Israeli rule. The vast majority of those Palestinians don’t have basic civil rights, and Israel has no intention of resolving that fundamental issue, and instead seeks to make minor adjustments to its system of control in order to make the burden of that occupation and oppression lighter. “Managing the conflict” has meant both those minor adjustments and these periodic bouts of great violence in Gaza. So the onus now is on the Israeli government to provide the public with an answer to how October 7th won’t happen again. There is no plausible answer that they can give that doesn’t include actually resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
But just because there is not a plausible answer to you or me, doesn’t mean there won’t be a plausible answer to the Israeli public. The answer could be to keep Palestinians in a state of further oppression to prevent them from committing terrorist attacks.
What I would argue is that there are no answers that Israel can give that are actually credible to the Israeli public. There are theoretical possibilities, such as putting an Arab or international force in place after Israel has “eradicated Hamas,” putting the Palestinian Authority in place in Gaza and periodically invading Gaza, as Israel does in the West Bank. But none of those things are credible answers, or they’re simply not possible to do. I don’t think that the Israeli government has the ability to present the Israeli public with an answer that is both realistic and convincing.
You said that you thought talking about long-term solutions was a distraction before because the Israeli public and the Israeli government did not want a solution, essentially? They didn’t want a one-state solution, they didn’t want a two-state solution. But now your sense is that they may have changed their minds, so it’s plausible to talk of longer-term solutions?
Broadly speaking, yes. If you look at the situation on the ground, it was one of increasing land confiscation, increasing Israeli control, increasing settler violence, a continued blockade of Gaza. None of those things were going away, and they were only getting worse. Everybody was saying, “Look away from the arrest of adolescents from their parents’ homes in the middle of the night every night in the West Bank. Let’s talk about what we prefer in terms of confederation or two states or one state.” None of those things were remotely in the cards. It was a totally fantastical conversation that served, in fact, to further the opposite of any kind of just resolution of the conflict. It served to further land confiscation and increasing Israeli absorption of the West Bank.
It wasn’t that if you polled Israelis, huge numbers would tell you that they were in favor of absorbing the West Bank into Israel and settlement expansion and the like. It was simply that they were living comfortably and they didn’t have to think about it. There were, of course, Israelis who were in favor of it. Prior to October 7th, you had this massive movement against the government and its proposed judicial reform that described itself as a pro-democracy movement. The situation of Israelis was so comfortable that they could speak without blushing about Israeli democracy, while half of the people under Israel’s control were Palestinians, and most of those Palestinians didn’t have basic civil rights.
Now the Palestinian issue is at the forefront of Israeli politics, and it is at the forefront of every Israeli’s mind, with them thinking, Do I have a future here for my children and grandchildren? There is a real motive for Israelis to find something better.
The typical way this conversation goes is it becomes a conversation about one state versus two states. Do you think that’s a helpful paradigm?
I think that it obscures more than it illuminates. I think that so many different possible arrangements are thrown under these two headings, and so many different things are meant by them, that it really winds up becoming meaningless. You have all kinds of public-opinion polls of Israelis asking, “Do you support two states?” But when you drill down and then you actually ask, “Do you accept full sovereignty, do you accept an evacuation of the settlements, would you accept a return to the 1967 borders?” the support just sinks. So if we’re talking nearly in abstractions, it’s very comfortable for everybody to just live in the realm of sloganeering.
There is the question of whether to give basic civil rights to all the people who live under Israel’s control, and there is the question of how or whether to establish a separate state for Palestinians to live in. Those seem like different things. They could come about broadly at the same time, or the civil rights could come before the state, but they seem like somewhat different things to work toward. I’m curious how you think about those two ideas and whether they intersect.
Support for a single state with equal rights for all, with true equality for all, has negligible support among both Israelis and Palestinians. That has been the case for a very long time, and it is even more true today, after October 7th. The willingness of Israelis to contemplate the possibility of ordinary Gazans working in Tel Aviv and renting apartments in Tel Aviv and maybe even buying a home in Tel Aviv was next to nonexistent prior to October 7th, and now it’s even less.
What’s significant about buying a home in Tel Aviv, or are you just using that as an example?
I’m just saying that the driving force behind all of the political initiatives that have been described as peace initiatives, the driving force of what is called the Israeli peace movement, has not been love and coexistence but separation. When former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was moving toward Oslo, he was promising to take Gaza out of Tel Aviv. It was about removing Arabs from Jewish spaces. That was the vision of peace. That instinct is a thousand times greater today than it was prior to October 7th, and the people who would like to see a single state with equal rights for all have an enormous obstacle to overcome in public sentiment.
I understand why, if you describe the approach as a “one-state solution,” many Palestinians, many Israelis, many people in the West who are supporters of the Palestinian cause or are supporters of the Jewish state, say they don’t like that idea. But if you phrase it as Israel should give everyone under its control equal rights, that’s a much easier argument to make. So I’m curious if you think that this could be a civil-rights movement, regardless of the long-term political solution.
I think it’s a powerful argument. The fact is that there is a one-state solution in place today. It’s a state with gross inequality, but there is a single state in control between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. The task of those calling for equality has been to flip this paradigm where the whole world accepts the default position that there should be indefinite occupation and oppression. Only once we get everybody to agree on the utopia, then we can move away from occupation and oppression to say, “No, talk about your utopia as long as you want, but our default is equal rights today.” That, in itself, is an impossible political task. From a purely political perspective, you are trying to create incentives. One of the greatest obstacles to reaching any kind of resolution has been the absence of incentives for the stronger party, Israel. If the whole world were saying, “Our default from now on is equality for everybody under Israeli control, and you figure out whatever long-term solution you want that would preserve your goals,” then Israel would have a very strong incentive to move toward.
When you think about the possibility of two states, do you see it through the lens of a civil-rights struggle and then Israel needing to decide what to do? Or the older way of thinking about it—that you have negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel with some sort of international component?
I think it is very likely that we are going to see new [international] conferences calling for two states or some kind of resolution. I am quite sure that any such conference will not result in a sovereign Palestinian state. That said, I do think that if—and this is a big if—if the United States were serious about ending this war in a way that would actually lead to a sustained period of calm, that the U.S. has the opportunity to put forward a proposal that would be much more credible than the ones that the Israeli government has been putting forward.
Look at the options that Israel has: the reoccupation of Gaza in part or in whole is definitely not going to lead to peace. The annexation of Gaza, which would, for Israel to consider, have to be accompanied by the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, will not lead to an end of the conflict. (By the way, this was the original plan for Israel after 1967. In June, 1967, Israel was convinced that it was going to annex Gaza and relocate the 1948 refugees who are more than two-thirds of the population of Gaza to either the West Bank or Arab countries or elsewhere. There was even a secret cabinet resolution in June, 1967, calling for the annexation of Gaza.) Occupation by proxy, whether you put in the Palestinian Authority or some international or Arab force, will not lead to an end of the conflict.
There are all kinds of things that fall well short of that, for example, giving some carrots to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, rezoning certain areas to give to the Palestinian Authority and its hundred and sixty-five islands of limited control in the West Bank, ceding some greater chunk of territory in order to strengthen the P.A. and induce it to take over in Gaza. Then you also have the idea of potential normalization with Saudi Arabia. So just as the U.A.E. normalized with Israel on the pretext that it was saving the West Bank from Israeli annexation, you could imagine Saudi Arabia normalizing with Israel on the pretext that it’s saving Gaza.
But all of these options fall very short of ending the occupation. And the only option that would actually result in a long-term ceasefire, a robust long-term ceasefire, would be to end the occupation and establish a Palestinian state.
Do you feel that America has leverage to say that they can help if Israel goes along with some longer-term plan?
Yes. If the United States were serious about actually achieving a robust long-term ceasefire, the United States could say, “We are going to recognize a Palestinian state now without saying what its borders are. We are going to issue our parameters for what we believe the outlines of the solution must be, where a Palestinian state must exist on no less than twenty-two per cent of its historic territory. And land swaps between Israel and Palestine must be equal and they should not exceed some number. And we are going to decommission the military wing of Hamas. We are not going to make the same mistake as we did in the Iraq War where we leave all of these militants with nothing to do but join spoiler groups. We are going to have a vetting process and integrate them into the security forces of the Palestinian state. Hamas is going to be integrated into the P.L.O. We are going to put in U.S. security guarantees for Israel with U.S. troops in the West Bank. U.S. troops maybe even in Gaza and U.S. security guarantees that, if there’s any kind of attack on Israeli soil, the U.S. is going to intervene.”
What would come with that is not just normalization with Saudi Arabia but normalization with the entire Arab world. Netanyahu can claim a victory. He can say, “I dismantled Hamas’s military wing, we won the war, and we’re in a stronger position today than we were on October 6th. We now have a normalization with the entire Arab League and we have an ironclad U.S. security guarantee.” I’m just providing one hypothetical series of steps that the U.S. could take if it were serious about achieving a robust long-term ceasefire. I do not think anything like that is in the cards.
But the other important element of that is that regardless of the scope of Israeli military operations, Hamas will continue to exist no matter what. There’s no day-after scenario, whether an international trusteeship or handover to the P.A., that realistically can sidestep or ignore that reality. And if you look just at the opinion polling that we’ve seen now, and I’m not a person who puts great stock in opinion polling, Hamas’s approval, its popularity in the West Bank, is more than three times greater than Fatah’s. In Gaza, it’s also three times greater than Fatah’s and nearly eight times greater than the P.A.’s. So, no matter what, Israel is going to have to deal at least indirectly with Hamas. There will have to be Hamas acquiescence in any kind of stable solution no matter what Israel does in Gaza going forward.
Obviously, Biden and America’s credibility in much of the Arab world is the lowest it’s been probably since at least the Iraq War. Do you feel that the United States is still, given its relationship to Israel and its role as the most powerful country in the world, a necessary part of any two-state solution even if it’s not sufficient and not likely to happen?
So just to back up, it is the case that almost all of the breakthroughs that have occurred between Israel and the Arabs have come about initially without the United States. But that said, in this particular scenario that I just described, it would be essential that the United States is a part of it because the U.S. security guarantees for Israel would be one of the most important aspects of the arrangement.
Given that we started with you saying talk of long-term solutions was a distraction, what do you think a young Israeli or a young Palestinian or even a young American who does want to see this conflict solved, and doesn’t want to see what we’re seeing on our TV screens right now, should be doing right now?
I think the most fundamental thing is that, on both sides, support for a single state with true equality of collective and individual rights for Jews and Palestinians is quite low. There is, however, considerable support on both sides for a single state that is exclusively Jewish or exclusively Palestinian. Both ideas are fanciful since neither Palestinians nor Israeli Jews are going anywhere, and neither side will accept anything less than full equality in collective and individual rights. If a realistic political alternative to the status quo is to emerge, it will have to offer more clarity about the rights of the other side. That clarity is lacking not just in the messages sent to the outside world but within the Israeli and Palestinian coalitions themselves: Palestinians have not agreed internally about what status the Jews would have in a Palestinian state. And Jews likewise have not been clear about what status Palestinians should have in this more than half-century-old single state that Israelis still manage to deceive themselves into calling temporary. In the meantime, while everyone argues about these entirely hypothetical scenarios, Palestinians are constricted into smaller and smaller spaces while Jewish settlements expand, the U.S. increases its support for Israel, and anyone who says that this system of ethnic subjugation is racist is at risk of being called an antisemite.
Of course, most urgently, everybody needs to be putting the maximum pressure on their governments to get a permanent ceasefire because of the scale of this killing, the killing of civilians, of women and children. The Times on Saturday reported that Israel’s killing of roughly ten thousand women and children during the past seven weeks exceeds the number killed in an entire year by the U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq in 2003 and approaches the number of civilians killed by the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan over nearly twenty years. There’s nothing that looks like this. ♦
