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SPECIAL Readings on
THE PALESTINE ISSUE
looking at the past, present, and future

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Special readings for CSS 2024 exam by CSS Exam Desk Team
SPECIAL READINGS ON THE PALESTINE ISSUE
The CSS Exam Desk Team has referred to different
online websites, including Dawn, Al Jazeera, BBC, and
Foreign Affairs, to arrange this special reading for you.
Students are also required to read the special report
"The Middle East: Politics and Conflicts: Bridging the
Past to the Present" from the CSS Exam Desk website
to understand more about this situation in the ME. We
hope you will like and appreciate our work.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has claimed tens of
thousands of lives and displaced many millions of
people and has its roots in a colonial act carried out
more than a century ago. With Israel declaring war on
the Gaza Strip after an unprecedented attack by the
armed Palestinian group Hamas in Octobe 2023, the
world’s eyes are again sharply focused on what might
come next. Hamas fighters have killed more than 800
Israelis in assaults on multiple towns in southern
Israel. In response, Israel has launched a bombing
campaign in the Gaza Strip, killing more than 500
Palestinians. It has mobilised troops along the Gaza
border, apparently in preparation for a ground attack.
And later, it announced a “total blockade” of the Gaza
Strip, stopping the supply of food, fuel and other
essential commodities to the already besieged enclave
in an act that under international law amounts to a
war crime. But what unfolds in the coming days and
weeks has its seed in history.
For decades, Western media outlets, academics,
military experts and world leaders have described the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict as intractable, complicated
and deadlocked. Here’s a simple guide to break down
one of the world’s longest-running conflicts:
“Israel.” “Palestine.” One land, two names.
Those on each side claim the land as theirs, under
their chosen name.
1. Israel first appears near the end of the 13th
century BC within the Egyptian Merneptah Stele,
referring apparently to a people (rather than a
place) inhabiting what was then “Canaan.” A few
centuries later in that region, we find two sister
kingdoms: Israel and Judah (the origin of the term
“Jew”). According to the Bible, there had first been
a monarchy comprising both, apparently also
called “Israel.” In about 722 BC, the kingdom of
Israel was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian empire,
centred in what’s now Iraq. As an ancient
geographic term, “Israel” was no more.
2. Less than a century and half later, Judah was
overthrown. Its capital Jerusalem was sacked, the
Jewish Temple destroyed and many of Judah’s
inhabitants were exiled to Babylonia. Following the
exile’s end a little under 50 years later, the territory
of the former kingdom of Judah served as the heart
of Judaism for almost seven centuries (although
the rebuilt Temple was again destroyed in AD 70,
by the Romans).
3. In AD 135, following a failed Jewish revolt, Roman
Emperor Hadrian expelled the Jews from
Jerusalem and decreed that the city and
surrounding territory be part of a larger entity
called “Syria-Palestina”. “Palestina” took its name
from the coastal territory of the ancient Philistines,
enemies of the Israelites (ancestors of the Jews).
Subsequent to the Islamic conquest of the Middle
East in the seventh century, Arab peoples began to
settle in the former “Palestina.” Apart from about
90 years of Crusader domination, the land fell
under Muslim control for just under 1,200 years.
Although Jewish habitation never ceased, the
population was overwhelmingly Arab.
4. In the second half of the 19th century, the
longstanding yearning of Jews in the Diaspora to
return to the territory of their ancestors culminated
in the nationalistic movement called Zionism. The
Zionist cause was driven by steeply rising hatred
toward Jews in Europe and Russia. Immigrating
Jews encountered a predominantly Arab populace,
who also considered it their ancestral homeland. At
that time, the land comprised three administrative
regions of the Ottoman empire, none of which was
called “Palestine”. In 1917, the land came under
British rule. In 1923, “Mandatory Palestine,” which
also included the current state of Jordan, was
created. Its Arab inhabitants saw themselves
primarily not as “Palestinians” in the sense of a
nation, but instead as Arabs living in Palestine (or
rather, “Greater Syria”).
 1915, Hussein-McMahon: Sharif Hussein bin Ali,
ruler of Mecca and the Hejaz, and Sir Henry
McMahon, the British high commissioner in
Egypt, exchanged pivotal letters about the
future political status of the Arab lands, with
Britain aiming to encourage an armed revolt
against Ottoman rule. In one such letter,
McMahon wrote: “Great Britain is prepared to
recognise and uphold the independence of the
Arabs in all the regions lying within the frontiers
proposed by the Sharif of Mecca.”
 May 16, 1916, Sykes-Picot: Britain and France
signed a secret agreement outlining their
spheres of control in the Middle East after the
first world war, in which Palestine was
designated for international administration
pending consultations with Russia and other
powers. The agreement was eventually made
public and was seen by Arabs as a betrayal of
the Hussein-McMahon correspondence.
 In the aftermath of World War I, the sons of
Hussein were made the kings of Transjordan
(later Jordan) and Iraq. The League of Nations
in July 1922 gave Britain a mandate to
administer Palestine, while Britain expressed its
interest in Zionism and describes its intention
to develop a Jewish state. Palestinians revolt to
protest against the British governance that
encouraged open-ended Jewish immigration
amid increasing economic hardships faced by
Palestinian workers. A general strike was
declared, led by Hajj Amin al-Husseini, as well
as a boycott of Jewish goods. More than 5,000
Arabs are killed, mostly by the British. Several
hundred Jews are killed by Arabs.
 1942, the Palestine Regiment: The regiment
comprises Jews and Arabs conscripted in
Mandate Palestine and is an infantry regiment
of the British Army. It is deployed to Egypt and
Cyrenaica, but most of its work consists of
guard duty. In 1944, the Jewish military
subunits of the regiment became the basis for
the larger Jewish Brigade, which took part in
the Allies’ WWII effort in Europe.
5. Zionist leaders in Mandatory Palestine strove hard
to increase Jewish numbers to solidify claims to
statehood, but in 1939 the British strictly limited
Jewish immigration. Ultimately, the Zionist project
succeeded because of global horror in response to
the Holocaust. In November 1947, the UN General
Assembly passed Resolution 181, partitioning the
land into “Independent Arab and Jewish States.”
The resolution met immediate Arab rejection.
Palestinian militias attacked Jewish settlements.
Israel’s founding father David Ben-Gurion
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proclaimed the modern State of Israel on May 14,

1948, establishing a safe haven for Jews fleeing
persecution and seeking a national home on land
to which they claim deep ties over generations..
6. The new Jewish state was immediately invaded by
the armies of several Arab countries, alongside
Palestinian militants. By the time the fighting
ended the next year, the Palestinians had lost
almost four-fifths of their United Nations allotment.
Seven hundred thousand of them had been driven
from their homes, with no right of return to the
present day. For Jewish Israelis, it’s known as the
“War of Independence.” For Palestinians, it was al-
Nakba — “the Catastrophe.” On November 15,
1988, the Palestinian National Council issued a
declaration of independence, recognised a month 3. Jewish immigration to Palestine: A total of
later by the UN General Assembly. Approximately 376,415 Jewish immigrants, mostly from Europe,
three-quarters of the UN’s membership now arrived in Palestine between 1920 and 1946
accepts the statehood of Palestine, which has non- according to British records. At its peak in 1935,
member observer status. 61,854 Jews immigrated to Palestine. A detailed
breakdown of these records is available here –
NOTABLE EVENTS: Stanford BJPA (Page 185) and here – Atlas of
1. Pre-British Mandate Palestine: During World War Palestine (Page 21).
I, Britain made several conflicting agreements to
gain the support of various groups in the Middle
East. Most notably was the Balfour Declaration – a
public pledge promising the “establishment in
Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.
On October 31, 1917, British forces conquered
Palestine from the Ottoman-Turks, ending 1,400
years of Islamic rule over the region. In 1920, it
began its 28-year rule over British Mandate
Palestine. Before the British Mandate in Palestine,
Jews made up around 6% of the total population.

4. Proposed UN Partition Plan: Following the end of

WWII, the newly formed United Nations proposed a
plan that would grant 55 percent of historic
Palestine to a Jewish state and 45 percent to a
non-contiguous Arab one. Jerusalem would remain
under international control. Palestinians rejected
the proposal because it stripped away much of the
land that was under their control. At the time, they
Escalating tensions eventually led to the Arab Revolt, owned 94 percent of historic Palestine and
which lasted from 1936 to 1939. In April 1936, the newly comprised 67 percent of the population. This plan
formed Arab National Committee called on Palestinians to was never implemented on the ground.
launch a general strike, withhold tax payments and
boycott Jewish products to protest British colonialism and
growing Jewish immigration. The six-month strike was
brutally repressed by the British, who launched a mass
arrest campaign and carried out punitive home
demolitions, a practice that Israel continues to implement
against Palestinians today. The second phase of the revolt
began in late 1937 and was led by the Palestinian peasant
resistance movement, which targeted British forces and
colonialism. By the second half of 1939, Britain had
massed 30,000 troops in Palestine. Villages were bombed
by air, curfews imposed, homes demolished, and
administrative detentions and summary killings were
widespread. In tandem, the British collaborated with the
Jewish settler community and formed armed groups and a 5. Palestinians expelled: On May 14, 1948, the
British-led “counterinsurgency force” of Jewish fighters British Mandate expired triggering the first Arab-
named the Special Night Squads. Within the Yishuv, the Israeli war. Zionist military forces expelled at least
pre-state settler community, arms were secretly imported
750,000 Palestinians and captured 78 percent of
and weapons factories established to expand the Haganah,
the Jewish paramilitary that later became the core of the
historic Palestine. The remaining 22 percent was
Israeli army. In those three years of revolt, 5,000 divided into the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The
Palestinians were killed, 15,000 to 20,000 were wounded fighting continued until January 1949 when an
and 5,600 were imprisoned. armistice agreement between Israel and Egypt,
2. Jewish immigration from Europe: The British Lebanon, Jordan and Syria was forged. The 1949
Mandate facilitated Jewish immigration from Armistice Line is also known as the Green Line and
Europe to Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s. The is the generally recognised boundary between
Jewish population in Palestine increased from 6 Israel and the West Bank. The Green Line is also
percent (1918) to 33 percent (1947). referred to as the (pre-) 1967 borders, before Israel
occupied the remaining Palestinian territories
during the June 1967 war. In December 1948, the

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UNGA had passed Resolution 194, which called for
the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
At least 150,000 Palestinians remained in the
newly created state of Israel and lived under a tightly
controlled military occupation for almost 20 years
before they were eventually granted Israeli citizenship.
Egypt took over the Gaza Strip, and in 1950, Jordan
began its administrative rule over the West Bank. In
1964, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO)
was formed, and a year later, the Fatah political party
was established.
6. Israel occupies Gaza and the West Bank: During
the June 1967 War, Israel occupied all of historic
Palestine and expelled a further 300,000
Palestinians from their homes. Israel also captured
the Syrian Golan Heights in the north and the
Egyptian Sinai Peninsula in the south. In 1978,
Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty which led to
Israel withdrawing from the Egypian territory.
In December 1967, the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine was formed. Over the
next decade, a series of attacks and plane hijackings
by leftist groups drew the world’s attention to the
plight of the Palestinians. Settlement construction
began in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. A
two-tier system was created with Jewish settlers
afforded all the rights and privileges of being Israeli
citizens whereas Palestinians had to live under a
military occupation that discriminated against them
and barred any form of political or civic expression.
7. The first Intifada (1987-1993): The first
Palestinian Intifada erupted in the Gaza Strip in
December 1987 after four Palestinians were killed
when an Israeli truck collided with two vans
carrying Palestinian workers. Protests spread
rapidly to the West Bank with young Palestinians
throwing stones at Israeli army tanks and soldiers.
It also led to the establishment of the Hamas
movement, an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood
that engaged in armed resistance against the
Israeli occupation. The Israeli army’s heavy-handed
response was encapsulated by the “Break their
Bones” policy advocated by then-Defence Minister
Yitzhak Rabin. It included summary killings,
closures of universities, deportations of activists
and destruction of homes. The Intifada was
primarily carried out by young people and was
directed by the Unified National Leadership of the
Uprising, a coalition of Palestinian political factions
committed to ending the Israeli occupation and
establishing Palestinian independence. In 1988,
the Arab League recognised the PLO as the sole
representative of the Palestinian people. The
Intifada was characterised by popular
mobilisations, mass protests, civil disobedience,
well-organised strikes and communal cooperatives.
According to the Israeli human rights organisation
B’Tselem, 1,070 Palestinians were killed by Israeli
forces during the Intifada, including 237 children.
More than 175,000 Palestinians were arrested. The
Intifada also prompted the international
community to search for a solution to the conflict.
Hamas stands for the Islamic Resistance Movement
and in Arabic means “zeal”. Hamas has been in power
in the Gaza Strip since 2007 after a brief war against
Fatah forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas, the
head of the Palestinian Authority and Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO). The Hamas movement
was founded in Gaza in 1987 by an imam, Sheikh
Ahmed Yasin, and his aide Abdul Aziz al-Rantissi
shortly after the start of the first Intifada, an uprising
against Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian
territories. The movement started as an offshoot of the
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and created a military
wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, to pursue an
armed struggle against Israel with the aim of
liberating historic Palestine. It also offered social
welfare programmes to Palestinian victims of the
Israeli occupation. Unlike the PLO, Hamas does not
recognise Israel’s statehood but accepts a Palestinian
state on 1967 borders. Hamas violently opposes the
Oslo peace accords negotiated by Israel and the PLO
in the mid-1990s. The group as whole or in some
instances its military wing is designated as a
“terrorist” organisation by Israel, the US, European
Union, Canada, Egypt and Japan.
Hamas is part of a regional alliance that also
includes Iran, Syria and the group Hezbollah in
Lebanon, which opposes US policies towards the
Middle East and Israel. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the
second-largest armed group in the region, are often
united against Israel and are the most important
members of the joint operations room that coordinates
military activity among the various armed groups in
Gaza. The relationship between the two groups has
been tense when Hamas has exerted pressure on
Islamic Jihad to stop attacks against Israel.
8. The Oslo Accords: The Oslo Accords represented
the first direct Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement.
This led to the formation of the Palestinian
Authority (PA) – an administrative body that would
govern Palestinian internal security, administration
and civilian affairs in areas of self-rule, for a five-
year interim period. On the ground, the occupied
West Bank was divided into three areas – A, B & C.
 Area A initially comprised three percent of the
West Bank and grew to 18 percent by 1999. In
Area A, the PA controls most affairs.
 Area B represents about 22 percent of the West
Bank. In both areas, while the PA is in charge of
education, health and the economy, the Israelis
have full control of external security, meaning
they retain the right to enter at any time.
 Area C represents 60 percent of the West Bank.
Under the Oslo Accords, control of this area was
supposed to be handed over to the PA. Instead,
Israel retains total control over all matters,
including security, planning and construction.
The transfer of control to the Palestinian
Authority (PA) has never happened.
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10. The Palestinian division & the Gaza blockade:

The PLO leader Yasser Arafat died in 2004, and a
year later, the second Intifada ended, Israeli
settlements in the Gaza Strip were dismantled, and
Israeli soldiers and 9,000 settlers left the enclave.
A year later, Palestinians voted in a general
election for the first time. Hamas won a majority.
However, a Fatah-Hamas civil war broke out,
lasting for months, resulting in the deaths of
hundreds of Palestinians. Hamas expelled Fatah
from the Gaza Strip, and Fatah – the main party of
the Palestinian Authority – resumed control of
parts of the West Bank. In June 2007, Israel
The PA was supposed to make way for the first elected imposed a land, air and naval blockade on the
Palestinian government running an independent state Gaza Strip, accusing Hamas of “terrorism”.
in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with its capital in
East Jerusalem, but that has never happened. Critics
of the PA view it as a corrupt subcontractor to the
Israeli occupation that collaborates closely with the
Israeli military in clamping down on dissent and
political activism against Israel. In 1995, Israel built
an electronic fence and concrete wall around the Gaza
Strip, snapping interactions between the split
Palestinian territories.
9. The second Intifada: It began on September 28,
2000, when Likud opposition leader Ariel Sharon
made a provocative visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque
compound with thousands of security forces
deployed in and around the Old City of Jerusalem.
Clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli
forces killed five Palestinians and injured 200 over
two days. The incident sparked a widespread
armed uprising. During the Intifada, Israel caused
unprecedented damage to the Palestinian economy
and infrastructure. Israel reoccupied areas
governed by the Palestinian Authority and began
construction of a separation wall that along with
rampant settlement construction, destroyed
Palestinian livelihoods and communities. The wars on the Gaza Strip: Israel has launched four
Settlements are illegal under international law, but protracted military assaults on Gaza: in 2008, 2012,
over the years, hundreds of thousands of Jewish 2014 and 2021. Thousands of Palestinians have been
settlers have moved to colonies built on stolen killed, including many children, and tens of thousands
Palestinian land. The space for Palestinians is of homes, schools and office buildings have been
shrinking as settler-only roads and infrastructure destroyed. Rebuilding has been next to impossible
slice up the occupied West Bank, forcing because the siege prevents construction materials, such
Palestinian cities and towns into bantustans, the as steel and cement, from reaching Gaza. The 2008
isolated enclaves for Black South Africans that the assault involved the use of internationally banned
country’s former apartheid regime created. At the weaponry, such as phosphorus gas. In 2014, over a
time the Oslo Accords were signed, just over span of fifty days, Israel killed more than 2,100
110,000 Jewish settlers lived in the West Bank, Palestinians, including 1,462 civilians and close to 500
including East Jerusalem. Today, the figure is children. During the assault, called Operation Protective
more than 700,000 living on more than 100,000 Edge by the Israelis, about 11,000 Palestinians were
hectares (390sq miles) of land expropriated from wounded, 20,000 homes were destroyed and half a
the Palestinians. million people displaced.

Present-day maps (as of 2020)

11. How big are Palestine and Israel? Combined, the
areas of Palestine and Israel make up 26,790 km2.
That is about the size of the US state of Hawaii
(28,313 km2), the Caribbean nation of Haiti
(27,750 km2) or Albania in Europe (28,748 km2).
On the Palestinian side, the occupied territories
which include Gaza, the West Bank and East
Jerusalem have a surface area of 6020 km2 Israel
has a surface area of 20,770 km2 based on the
internationally recognised Green Line boundaries.

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14. Israeli settlements: These are Jewish

12. Occupied Palestinian territories: The occupied
Palestinian territories have been under Israeli
military control since 1967. This makes it the
longest occupation in modern history. The
segmented territories include Gaza, the West Bank
and East Jerusalem. The Gaza Strip is a small
coastal area bordering Egypt to the south. This
region is home to two million Palestinians. The
West Bank is the kidney bean-shaped area to the
east. It lies west of the banks of the Jordan River
from where it gets its name. East Jerusalem is
located on the Palestinian side of the 1949 Green
Line. Three million Palestinians live in the West
Bank and East Jerusalem.
communities built on Palestinian land. There are
between 600,000 – 750,000 Israeli settlers living in
at least 250 settlements (130 official , 120
unofficial) in the occupied West Bank and East
Jerusalem. Israeli settlements are illegal under
international law as they violate the Fourth Geneva
Convention, which prohibits an occupying power
from transferring its population to the area it
occupies. In 2019, under the presidency of Donald
Trump, the US declared that Israeli settlements on
occupied Palestinian land were “not necessarily
illegal”, a dramatic break from decades of US policy.

15. Separation wall: Since 2002, Israel has been

16. Israeli checkpoints: There are more than 700
17. Palestinian refugee camps: There are 1.5 million
13. Jerusalem – the divided city: According to the
international standards, Jerusalem is a divided city.
West Jerusalem has been Israeli territory since
1948, and Jews are in the majority. East
Jerusalem has a Palestinian majority and was
occupied by Israel in 1967. Since its annexation in
1980, Israel has considered the entire city of
Jerusalem a part of its territory. This is not
internationally recognised. For this reason, Israeli
maps do not show East Jerusalem being a part of
the occupied West Bank.
constructing a wall that stretches for more than
700 kilometres. Israel says that the wall is for
security purposes. However, rather than following
the internationally-recognised 1967 boundary,
known as the Green Line, 85 percent of the wall
falls within the West Bank. This severely limits the
freedom of movement for Palestinians.
road obstacles across the West Bank including 140
checkpoints. These checkpoints further limit
Palestinian movement. About 70,000 Palestinians
with Israeli work permits cross these checkpoints
in their daily commute.
Palestinian refugees living in 58 official UN camps
located throughout Palestine and neighbouring
countries. In total, there are more than five million
registered Palestinian refugees mostly living
outside of these camps. The plight of Palestinian
refugees is the longest, unresolved refugee problem
in the world.

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Israel’s history of annexation: Israel has unilaterally
annexed two territories in the past.
1. East Jerusalem (1980): Israel occupied East
Jerusalem at the end of the 1967 War. In 1980, it
passed a law making its annexation of East
Jerusalem explicit.
2. Golan Heights (1981) Israel unilaterally annexed
the Syrian Golan Heights in 1981. Israel uses the
term “applying Israeli sovereignty” over areas it has
annexed. Annexation and territorial conquest are
illegal under international law. In 2019 the US
recognised Israel’s annexation of the Golan heights.
It is the only country around the world to do so. As
of now, the Biden administration has not reversed
the widely denounced decision.
Which MENA (Middle East and North Africa)
countries have diplomatic ties with Israel?
September 15, 2023 marks three years since the
United Arab Emirates normalised ties with Israel
under a United States-brokered agreement known as
the Abraham Accords. The UAE became only the third
Arab nation, after Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994), to
establish diplomatic relations with Israel, ending a 25-
year period without such ties. Bahrain followed suit a
month later and, in shortly afterwards, Sudan’s
transitional government announced they would
normalise relations – but the idea was rejected by
several Sudanese political parties and was not
finalised. Then in December, Morocco agreed to
establish full diplomatic and trade relations with
Israel and establish direct flights between the two
countries. The deals, brokered by the Trump
administration, broke years of consensus among most
Arab states which had maintained any official
recognition of Israel should be contingent upon the
cessation of the occupation of Palestinian territory
and the establishment of a two-state solution based
on the 1967 borders.
1. Egypt: In 1979, Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat signed
a peace treaty with Israel that had been negotiated
during President Jimmy Carter’s Camp David summit
the previous year. According to the agreement, Israel
would relinquish the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in
exchange for Egypt’s full recognition of the Jewish
state and the establishment of full diplomatic relations.
2. Jordan: On October 26, 1994, King Hussein of Jordan
and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin formally
established peace during a ceremony witnessed by
then-US President Bill Clinton. It came a year after the
Oslo Peace Accords between Israel and the Palestinian
Liberation Organization (PLO).
3. UAE: On September 15, 2020, US President Donald
Trump together with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu signed agreements with Bahrain’s Foreign
Minister Abdullatif al-Zayani and Emirati Foreign
Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
4. Morocco: On December 10, 2020, with the help of the
US, Israel and Morocco agreed to establish full
diplomatic and trade relations.
5. Sudan: Although Sudan was part of the Abraham
Accords, it has yet to finalise the signing of a
normalisation treaty with Israel.
Trade between signatories of the Abraham Accords:
Trade between Israel and the UAE surpassed $2.5bn
in 2022 and reached $1.85bn in the first seven
months of 2023 according to Reuters news agency. In
March 2023, a free trade agreement signed by Israel
and the UAE came into effect, removing tariffs on
about 96 percent of goods traded between the two.
The deal aims to boost bilateral trade to more than
$10bn over the next five years.
What major wars have been fought since then? In
1967, Israel made a pre-emptive strike against Egypt
and Syria, launching the Six-Day War. Israel has
occupied the West Bank, Arab East Jerusalem, which
it captured from Jordan, and Syria’s Golan Heights
ever since. In 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israeli
positions along the Suez Canal and Golan Heights,
beginning the Yom Kippur War. Israel pushed both
armies back within three weeks. Israel invaded
Lebanon in 1982 and thousands of Palestinian
fighters under Yasser Arafat were evacuated by sea
after a 10-week siege. In 2006, war erupted in
Lebanon again when Hezbollah fighters captured two
Israeli soldiers and Israel retaliated. In 2005 Israel
quit Gaza, which it had captured from Egypt in 1967.
But Gaza saw major flare-ups in 2006, 2008, 2012,
2014 and 2021 that involved Israeli air raids and
Palestinian rocket fire, and sometimes also cross-
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border incursions by either side. As well as wars,
there have been two Palestinian intifadas or uprisings
between 1987-1993 and again in 2000-05. The second
saw waves of Hamas suicide bombings against Israelis.
What attempts have been there to make peace? In
1979, Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty, ending
30 years of hostility. In 1993, Israeli Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat shook hands on the Oslo
Accords on limited Palestinian autonomy. In 1994,
Israel signed a peace treaty with Jordan. The Camp
David summit of 2000 saw President Bill Clinton,
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Arafat fail to
reach a final peace deal. In 2002, an Arab plan offered
Israel normal ties with all Arab countries in return for
a full withdrawal from the lands it took in the 1967
Middle East war, the creation of a Palestinian state
and a “just solution” for Palestinian refugees. Peace
DIVERGING FORTUNES, CONSTANT HOSTILITIES
ISRAEL’S ONE-STATE REALITY?
(Writers by Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown. Published in
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power
in Israel with a narrow, extreme right-wing coalition
has shattered even the illusion of a two-state solution.
Members of his new government have not been shy
about stating their views on what Israel is and what it
should be in all the territories it controls: a Greater
Israel defined not just as a Jewish state but one in
which the law enshrines Jewish supremacy over all
Palestinians who remain there. As a result, it is no
longer possible to avoid confronting a one-state reality.
Israel’s radical new government did not create this
reality but rather made it impossible to deny. The
temporary status of “occupation” of the Palestinian
territories is now a permanent condition in which one
state ruled by one group of people rules over another
group of people. The promise of a two-state solution
made sense as an alternative future in the years
around the 1993 Oslo accords, when there were
constituencies for compromise on both the Israeli and
the Palestinian sides and when tangible if fleeting
progress was made toward building the institutions of
a hypothetical Palestinian state. But that period ended
long ago. Today, it makes little sense to let fantastical
visions for the future obscure deeply embedded
existing arrangements.
It is past time to grapple with what a one-state reality
means for policy, politics, and analysis. Palestine is
not a state in waiting, and Israel is not a democratic
state incidentally occupying Palestinian territory. All
the territory west of the Jordan River has long
constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where the
land and the people are subject to radically different
legal regimes, and Palestinians are permanently
treated as a lower caste. Policymakers and analysts
who ignore this one-state reality will be condemned to
failure and irrelevance, doing little beyond providing a
smokescreen for the entrenchment of the status quo.
Some implications of this one-state reality are clear.
The world will not stop caring about Palestinian rights,
no matter how fervently many supporters of Israel
(and Arab rulers) wish they would. Violence,
dispossession, and human rights abuses have
escalated over the last year, and the risk of large-scale
violent confrontation grows with every day that
Palestinians are locked in this ever-expanding system
of legalized oppression and Israeli encroachment. But
far less clear is how important actors will adjust—if
efforts have been stalled since 2014, when talks failed
between Israelis and Palestinians in Washington.
Palestinians later boycotted dealings with the
administration of US President Donald Trump since it
reversed decades of US policy by refusing to endorse
the two-state solution — the peace formula that
envisages a Palestinian state established in territory
that Israel captured in 1967.
Where do peace efforts stand now? The
administration of US President Joe Biden has focused
on trying to secure a “grand bargain” in the Middle
East that includes normalisation of relations between
Israel and Saudi Arabia, custodian of Islam’s two
holiest shrines. The latest war is diplomatically
awkward for Riyadh as well as for other Arab states,
including some Gulf Arab states next to Saudi Arabia,
that have signed peace deals with Israel.
Foreign Affairs on April 14, 2023)
they adjust at all—as the reality of a single state shifts
from open secret to undeniable truth.
U.S. President Joe Biden seems fully committed to the
status quo, and there is no evidence that his
administration has thought about the issue or done
much beyond crisis management and mouthing
displeasure. A strong sense of wishful thinking
permeates Washington, with many U.S. officials still
trying to convince themselves that there is a chance of
returning to a two-state negotiation after the aberrant
Netanyahu government leaves office. But ignoring the
new reality will not be an option for much longer. A
storm is gathering in Israel and Palestine that
demands an urgent response from the country that
has most enabled the emergence of a single state
upholding Jewish supremacy. If the United States
wants to avoid profound instability in the Middle East
and a challenge to its broader global agenda, it must
cease exempting Israel from the standards and
structures of the liberal international order that
Washington hopes to lead.
FROM UNSAYABLE TO UNDENIABLE
A one-state arrangement is not a future possibility; it
already exists, no matter what anyone thinks.
Between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River,
one state controls the entry and exit of people and
goods, oversees security, and has the capacity to
impose its decisions, laws, and policies on millions of
people without their consent.
A one-state reality could, in principle, be based on
democratic rule and equal citizenship. But such an
arrangement is not on offer at the moment. Forced to
choose between Israel’s Jewish identity and liberal
democracy, Israel has chosen the former. It has locked
in a system of Jewish supremacy, wherein non-Jews
are structurally discriminated against or excluded in a
tiered scheme: some non-Jews have most of, but not
all, the rights that Jews have, while most non-Jews
live under severe segregation, separation, and
domination.
A peace process in the closing years of the twentieth
century offered the tantalizing possibility of something
different. But since the 2000 Camp David summit,
where U.S.-led negotiations failed to achieve a two-
state agreement, the phrase “peace process” has
served mostly to distract from the realities on the
ground and to offer an excuse for not acknowledging
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them. The second Intifada, which erupted soon after
the disappointment at Camp David, and Israel’s
subsequent intrusions into the West Bank
transformed the Palestinian Authority into little more
than a security subcontractor for Israel. They also
accelerated the rightward drift of Israeli politics, the
population shifts brought about by Israeli citizens
moving into the West Bank, and the geographical
fragmentation of Palestinian society. The cumulative
effect of these changes became evident during the
2021 crisis over the appropriation of Palestinian
homes in East Jerusalem, which pitted not just Israeli
settlers and Palestinians but also Jewish and
Palestinian citizens of Israel against each other in a
conflict that split cities and neighborhoods.
Netanyahu’s new government, composed of a coalition
of right-wing religious and nationalist extremists,
epitomizes these trends. Its members boast of their
mission to create a new Israel in their image: less
liberal, more religious, and more willing to own
discrimination against non-Jews. Netanyahu has
written that “Israel is not a state of all its citizens” but
rather “of the Jewish people—and only it." The man he
appointed as minister of national security, Itamar
Ben-Gvir, has declared that Gaza should be “ours”
and that “the Palestinians can go to . . . Saudi Arabia
or other places, like Iraq or Iran.” This extremist vision
has long been shared by at least a minority of Israelis
and has strong grounding in Zionist thought and
practice. It began gaining adherents soon after Israel
occupied the Palestinian territories in the 1967 war.
And although it is not yet a hegemonic view, it can
plausibly claim a majority of Israeli society and can no
longer be termed a fringe position.
The fact of a one-state reality has long been obvious to
those who live in Israel and the territories it controls
and to anyone who has paid attention to the
inexorable shifts on the ground. But in the past few
years, something has changed. Until recently, the one-
state reality was rarely acknowledged by important
actors, and those who spoke the truth out loud were
ignored or punished for doing so. With remarkable
speed, however, the unsayable has become close to
conventional wisdom.
DEMOCRACY FOR SOME
To see the reality of a single state, many observers will
need to put on new glasses. These are people who are
used to seeing a distinction between the occupied
territories and Israel proper—that is, the state as it
existed before 1967, when Israel captured the West
Bank and Gaza—and think Israel’s sovereignty is
limited to the territory it controlled before 1967. But
the state and sovereignty are not the same. The state
is defined by what it controls, whereas sovereignty
depends on other states’ recognizing the legality of
that control.
These new glasses would disaggregate the concepts of
state, sovereignty, nation, and citizenship, making it
easier to see a one-state reality that is ineluctably
based on relations of superiority and inferiority
between Jews and non-Jews across all the territories
under Israel’s differentiated but unchallenged control.
Consider Israel through the lens of a state. It has
control over a territory that stretches from the river to
the sea, has a near monopoly on the use of force, and
uses this power to sustain a draconian blockade of
Gaza and control the West Bank with a system of
checkpoints, policing, and relentlessly expanding
settlements. Even after it withdrew forces from Gaza
in 2005, the Israeli government retained control over
the territory’s entry and exit points. Like parts of the
West Bank, Gaza enjoys a degree of autonomy, and
since the brief Palestinian civil war of 2007, the
territory has been administered internally by the
Islamist organization Hamas, which brooks little
dissent. But Hamas does not control the territory’s
coastline, airspace, or boundaries. In other words, by
any reasonable definition, the Israeli state
encompasses all lands from its border with Jordan to
the Mediterranean Sea.
It has been possible to overlook that reality because
Israel has not made formal claims of sovereignty over
all these areas. It has annexed some of the occupied
territories, including East Jerusalem and the Golan
Heights. But it has not yet declared sovereignty over
the rest of the land that it controls, and only a
handful of states would be likely to recognize such
claims if Israel were to make them.
Controlling territory and consolidating institutional
domination without formalizing sovereignty enables
Israel to maintain a one-state reality on its terms. It
can deny responsibility for (and rights to) most
Palestinians because they are residents of its territory
but not citizens of the state, cynically justifying this
discrimination on the grounds that it keeps alive the
possibility of a two-state solution. By not formalizing
sovereignty, Israel can be democratic for its citizens
but unaccountable to millions of its residents. This
arrangement has allowed many of Israel’s supporters
abroad to continue to pretend that all this is
temporary—that Israel remains a liberal democracy
and that, someday, Palestinians will exercise their
right to self-determination.
But even within its pre-1967 borders, Israel’s
democracy has limits, which become apparent when
viewed through the lens of citizenship. Israel’s Jewish
identity and its one-state reality have produced an
intricate series of legal categories that distribute
differentiated rights, responsibilities, and protections.
Its 2018 “nation-state” law defines Israel as “the
nation-state of the Jewish People” and holds that “the
exercise of the right to national self-determination in
the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish People”; it
makes no mention of democracy or equality for non-
Jewish citizens.
According to this hierarchy of membership, the fullest
class of citizenship is reserved for Israeli Jews (at least
those whose Jewishness meets rabbinical standards);
they are citizens without conditions. Palestinians who
have Israeli citizenship and reside in pre-1967 Israel
have political and civil rights but confront other
limits—both legal and extrajudicial—on their rights,
responsibilities, and protections. Palestinian residents
of Jerusalem theoretically have the option of becoming
Israeli citizens, but most reject it because doing so
would be an act of disloyalty. Palestinians who reside
in the territories are the lowest class of all. Their
rights and responsibilities depend on where they live,
with those in Gaza at the bottom of the hierarchy—a
position that has only deteriorated since Hamas took
control. Asking a Palestinian to describe his or her
legal status can elicit an answer that lasts for several
minutes—and is still full of ambiguities.
As long as hope existed for a two-state solution that
would see Palestinians’ rights recognized, it was
possible to view the situation within Israel’s 1967
boundaries as one of de jure equality combined with
de facto discrimination against some citizens—an
unfortunate but common reality in much of the world.
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But when one acknowledges the one-state reality,
something more pernicious is revealed. In that one
state, there are some whose movement, travel, civil
status, economic activities, property rights, and
access to public services are severely restricted. A
substantial share of lifelong residents with deep and
continuous roots in the territory of that state are
rendered stateless. And all these categories and
gradations of marginalization are enforced by legal,
political, and security measures imposed by state
actors who are accountable to only a portion of the
population.
Naming this reality is politically contentious, even as a
consensus has formed about the abiding and severe
inequalities that define it. A flurry of reports by Israeli
and international nongovernmental organizations
documenting these inequalities have driven the term
“apartheid” from the margins of the Israeli-Palestinian
debate to its center. Apartheid refers to the system of
racial segregation that South Africa’s white minority
government used to enshrine white supremacy from
1948 to the early 1990s. It has since been defined
under international law and by the International
Criminal Court as a legalized scheme of racial
segregation and discrimination and deemed a crime
against humanity. Major human rights organizations,
including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty
International, have applied the term to Israel. So have
many academics: according to a March 2022 poll of
Middle East–focused scholars who are members of
three large academic associations, 60 percent of
respondents described the situation in Israel and the
Palestinian territories as a “one-state reality with
inequality akin to apartheid.”
The term may not be a perfect fit. Israel’s system of
structural discrimination is more severe than those of
even the most illiberal states. But it is based not on
race, as apartheid was defined in South Africa and is
defined under international law, but on ethnicity,
nationality, and religion. Perhaps this distinction
matters to those who wish to take legal action against
Israel. It is less important politically, however, and is
virtually meaningless when it comes to analysis. What
matters politically is that a once taboo term has
increasingly become a mainstream, common-sense
understanding of reality. Analytically, what matters is
that the apartheid label accurately describes the facts
on the ground and offers the beginnings of a road map
to change them. Apartheid is not a magic word that
alters reality when invoked. But its entry into the
political mainstream reveals a broad recognition that
Israeli rule is designed to maintain Jewish supremacy
throughout all the territory the state controls. Israel’s
system may not technically be apartheid, but it
rhymes.
RUDE AWAKENING
It is primarily Israelis and Palestinians who must
grapple with the one-state reality. But that reality will
also complicate Israel’s relationship with the rest of
the world. For half a century, the peace process
allowed Western democracies to overlook Israel’s
occupation in favor of an aspirational future in which
the occupation would come to a mutually negotiated
end. Israeli democracy (however flawed) and the
nominal distinction between Israel and the occupied
Palestinian territories also helped outsiders avert their
gaze. All these diversions are gone. The one-state
reality has long been embedded in Israeli law, politics,
and society, even if it is only now being broadly
acknowledged. No ready alternatives exist, and it has
been decades since there was any meaningful political
process to create one.
Perhaps the recognition of these facts will not change
much. Many enduring global problems are never
resolved. We live in a populist world, where democracy
and human rights are under threat. Israeli leaders
point to the Abraham Accords, which established
Israel’s relations with Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and
the United Arab Emirates (UAE), to argue that
normalization with Arab states never required
resolving the Palestinian issue. For their part, Western
leaders may simply continue to pretend that Israel
shares their liberal democratic values while many pro-
Israel groups in the United States double down on
their support. Liberal Jewish Americans may struggle
to defend an Israel that has many characteristics of
apartheid, but their protests will have little practical
effect.
Yet there are reasons to believe that the transition
from an aspirational two-state world to a real one-
state world could be rocky. The mainstreaming of the
apartheid analogy and the rise of the Boycott,
Divestment, and Sanctions movement—and the
intense backlash against both—suggest that the
political terrain has shifted. Israel may enjoy more
physical security and regional diplomatic recognition
than ever before, with few international or local
constraints on its activities in the West Bank. But
control requires more than brute strength. It also
requires some semblance of legitimacy, with the
status quo sustained by its taken-for-granted nature,
its naturalization as common sense, and the
impossibility of even contemplating justifiable
resistance. Israel still has the material power to win
the battles it picks. But as those battles proliferate,
each victory further erodes its fighting position. Those
wanting to defend the one-state reality are defending
colonialist principles in a postcolonial world.
The struggle to define and shape the terms of this
one-state reality may take new forms. In the past,
dramatic interstate wars created openings for
negotiations and high-stakes diplomacy. But in the
future, U.S. policymakers are not likely to confront
conventional conflicts such as those that broke out
between Israel and Arab states in 1967 and 1973.
Instead, they will face something closer to the first
and second Intifada—sudden outbursts of violence
and mass popular contestation such as those that
occurred in May 2021. At that time, clashes in
Jerusalem sparked a wider conflagration involving
rocket fire between Israel and Hamas, demonstrations
and violence in the West Bank, and ugly incidents
where Israelis of Jewish and Palestinian ancestry (and
the Israeli police) behaved as if ethnicity trumped
citizenship. Daily acts of violence and sporadic bouts
of popular upheaval—perhaps even a full third
Intifada—seem inevitable.
Policymakers in the United States and elsewhere who
have long talked about the need to preserve a two-
state solution are increasingly being forced to react to
crises for which they are unprepared. The problems
engendered by the one-state reality have already
sparked new solidarity movements, boycotts, and
societal conflicts. Nongovernmental organizations,
political movements supporting various Israeli and
Palestinian causes, and transnational advocacy
groups are seeking to alter global norms and sway
individuals, societies, and governments with new and
old media campaigns. Increasingly, they aim to label
or boycott goods produced in places controlled by the
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Israeli government (or outlaw such boycotts) and
invoke civil rights laws to mobilize their supporters
and find alternatives to the feckless diplomatic efforts
of government leaders.
But all these movements and campaigns seek to
mobilize constituencies that are deeply divided. The
Palestinians are divided between those who bear
Israeli citizenship and those who have other forms of
residency, as well as among those who live in East
Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. They are
divided between those living in the one-state reality
and those living in the diaspora. They are divided
between the Fatah political faction that holds sway in
the West Bank and the Hamas organization that
controls Gaza. They are also increasingly split along
generational lines. Younger Palestinians feel less
attached to the movements that channeled the
political commitments and energies of their parents
and grandparents and are more likely to gravitate to
new groups and adopt new tactics of resistance.
Israeli Jews are similarly divided about the nature of
the state, the role of religion in politics, and a host of
other matters, including the rights of gays, lesbians,
and other sexual minorities. Liberal Israeli Jews have
organized massive protests against the Netanyahu
government’s assault on democracy and the judiciary,
but they have mobilized around the Palestinian issue
far less, showing how internal disagreements have
edged aside questions about a peace process that no
longer exists.
The result is that leaders on both sides do not lead.
There are politicians in all camps who want to keep a
lid on the conflict, generally not in service of any
strategy for resolution but out of a sense of inefficacy
and inertia. Other politicians want the opposite: to
shake things up and move in a sharply different
direction, as U.S. President Donald Trump did with
his “deal of the century,” promising an end to the
conflict in a matter that virtually erased Palestinian
rights and national aspirations. Jews pushing formal
annexation of the occupied territories and Palestinians
advocating for new modes of resistance to Israeli rule
also hope to upend the status quo. But all such efforts
founder on the firmly established structures of power
and interests.
Under these conditions, any diplomacy undertaken in
the name of resolving the conflict in a just manner will
likely fail because it misreads both the possible
alternatives to the current impasse and the will
among all parties to achieve them. Policymakers
wishing to construct better choices will have to pay
attention to the ways in which the one-state system
operates and evolves. They will need to understand
how its various inhabitants imagine their homeland,
how rights are enforced or violated, and how
demographics are slowly but portentously changing.
GHOSTS OF THE ARAB SPRING
Acknowledgment of the one-state reality has
important—and contradictory—implications for the
Arab world. The argument for the two-state solution
has long assumed the importance of the Palestinian
cause to Arab publics, if not to their governments. The
2002 Saudi peace initiative, which offered
normalization of relations between Israel and all Arab
states in exchange for complete Israeli withdrawal
from the occupied territories, established a baseline:
peace with the Arab world would require a resolution
of the Palestinian issue.
The Abraham Accords, brokered by the Trump
administration and enthusiastically sustained by the
Biden administration, explicitly targeted that
assumption by accelerating political normalization
and security cooperation between Israel and several
Arab states without requiring progress on the
Palestinian issue. This decoupling of Arab
normalization from the Palestinian issue went a long
way toward entrenching the one-state reality.
Thus far, the Abraham Accords have proved durable,
surviving the formation of Netanyahu’s government
with its extremist ministers. The normalization of
relations between Israel and the UAE, at least, will
likely outlast the next round of Israeli-Palestinian
violence and even overt Israeli moves toward
annexation. But since the accords were signed, no
additional Arab countries have sought to normalize
relations with Israel, and Saudi Arabia has continued
to hedge its bets by holding off on establishing formal
ties with Israel.
Arab normalization is likely to remain tethered to the
Palestinian issue indefinitely outside of the Gulf
countries. It is all too easy to imagine a scenario in
which Israel moves to confiscate more property in
Jerusalem, provokes widespread Palestinian protests,
and then responds to this unrest with even greater
violence and faster dispossession—eventually
triggering the final collapse of the Palestinian
Authority. Such an escalation could easily spark
large-scale protests across the Arab world, where
long-simmering economic hardship and political
repression have created a tinderbox. There is also the
even graver threat that Israel will expel Palestinians
from the West Bank or even Jerusalem—a possibility,
sometimes euphemistically called a “transfer,” that
polls suggest many Israeli Jews would support. And
that is to say nothing of how Hamas or Iran might
exploit such conditions.
Arab rulers might not care about the Palestinians, but
their people do—and those rulers care about nothing
more than keeping their thrones. Fully abandoning
the Palestinians after more than half a century of at
least rhetorical support would be risky. Arab leaders
do not fear losing elections, but they remember the
Arab uprisings of 2011 all too well, and they worry
about anything that invites mass popular
mobilizations that could rapidly mutate into protests
against their regimes.
EXIT, VOICE, OR LOYALTY?
Acknowledging the one-state reality could also
polarize the American conversation about Israel and
the Palestinians. Evangelicals and many others on the
political right might embrace this reality as the
realization of what they consider legitimate Israeli
aspirations. Many Americans who are left of center
may finally recognize that Israel has fallen from the
ranks of liberal democracies and may abandon the
fanciful promise of two states for the goal of a single
state that grants equal rights to all its residents.
The United States bears considerable responsibility for
entrenching the one-state reality, and it continues to
play a powerful role in framing and shaping the
Israeli-Palestinian issue. Israeli settlement
construction in the West Bank would not have
survived and accelerated, and occupation would not
have endured, without U.S. efforts to shield Israel
from repercussions at the United Nations and other
international organizations. Without American
technology and arms, Israel would probably not have
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been able to sustain its military edge in the region,
which also enabled it to solidify its position in the
occupied territories. And without major U.S.
diplomatic efforts and resources, Israel could not have
concluded peace agreements with Arab states, from
Camp David to the Abraham Accords.
Yet the American conversation about Israel and the
Palestinians has willfully neglected the ways in which
Washington has abetted the occupation. U.S. support
for the peace process has been couched both in terms
of Israel’s security and in terms of the idea that only a
two-state solution could preserve Israel as both
Jewish and democratic. These two goals have always
been in tension, but a one-state reality makes them
irreconcilable.
Although the Israeli-Palestinian issue has never been
high on the American public’s list of priorities, U.S.
attitudes have shifted notably: support for a two-state
solution has declined, and support for a single state
that ensures equal citizenship has risen over the past
few years. Polls show that most American voters
would support a democratic Israel over a Jewish one,
if forced to choose. Views on Israel have also become
far more partisan, with Republicans, especially
evangelicals, growing more supportive of Israeli
policies and the overwhelming majority of Democrats
preferring an evenhanded U.S. policy. Young
Democrats now express more support for the
Palestinians than for Israel. One reason for this shift,
especially among young Democrats, is that the Israeli-
Palestinian issue is increasingly viewed as an issue of
social justice rather than strategic interest or biblical
prophecy. This has been particularly true in the era of
Black Lives Matter.
The one-state reality has especially roiled the politics
of Jewish Americans. From the earliest years of
Zionism, most Jewish American supporters of Israel
held as sacrosanct the aspiration for Israel to be
simultaneously Jewish and liberal. Netanyahu’s latest
government might be the breaking point for this group.
It is difficult to square a commitment to liberalism
with support for a single state that offers the benefits
of democracy to Jews (and now seems to tread on
some of those) but explicitly withholds them from the
majority of its non-Jewish inhabitants.
Most Jewish Americans see basic liberal principles
such as freedom of opinion and expression, the rule of
law, and democracy not only as Jewish values but
also as bulwarks against discrimination that ensure
their acceptance and even survival in the United
States. Yet Israel’s commitment to liberalism has
always been shaky. As a Jewish state, it fosters a form
of ethnic nationalism rather than a civic one, and its
Orthodox Jewish citizens play an outsize role in
determining how Judaism shapes Israeli life.
In 1970, the political economist Albert Hirschman
wrote that members of organizations in crisis or
decline have three options: “exit, voice, and loyalty.”
Jewish Americans have those same options today.
One camp, which arguably dominates major Jewish
institutions in the United States, exhibits loyalty
enabled by denial of the one-state reality. Voice is the
increasingly dominant choice of Jewish Americans
who were previously in the peace camp. Once focused
on achieving a two-state solution, these Americans
now direct their activism toward defending Palestinian
rights, safeguarding the shrinking space for Israeli
civil society, and resisting the dangers posed by
Netanyahu’s right-wing government. Finally, there are
the Jewish Americans who have chosen exit, or
indifference. They simply do not think much about
Israel. That might be because they do not have a
strong Jewish identity or because they see Israel as
misaligned with or even opposed to their values. There
is some evidence that the more Israel lurches to the
right, the larger this group becomes, especially among
young Jewish Americans.
REALITY CHECK
So far, the Biden administration has sought to sustain
the status quo while urging Israel to avoid major
provocations. In response to continued settlement
construction in the West Bank and other Israeli
violations of international law, the United States has
issued empty statements calling on Israel to avoid
actions that undermine a two-state solution. But this
approach misdiagnoses the problem and only makes it
worse: Netanyahu’s far-right government is a
symptom, not a cause, of the one-state reality, and
coddling it in an attempt to coax it toward moderation
will only embolden its extremist leaders by showing
that they pay no price for their actions.
The United States could instead meet a radicalized
reality with a radical response. For starters,
Washington should banish the terms “two-state
solution” and “peace process” from its vocabulary. U.S.
calls for Israelis and Palestinians to return to the
negotiating table rely on magical thinking. Changing
the way the United States talks about the Israeli-
Palestinian issue will change nothing on the ground,
but it will strip away a facade that has allowed U.S.
policymakers to avoid confronting reality. Washington
must look at Israel as it is and not as it has been
assumed to be—and act accordingly. Israel no longer
even pretends to maintain liberal aspirations. The
United States does not have “shared values” and
should not have “unbreakable bonds” with a state
that discriminates against or abuses millions of its
residents based on their ethnicity and religion.
A better U.S. policy would advocate for equality,
citizenship, and human rights for all Jews and
Palestinians living within the single state dominated
by Israel. Theoretically, such a policy would not
prevent a two-state solution from being resurrected in
the unlikely event that the parties moved in that
direction in the distant future. But starting from a
one-state reality that is morally reprehensible and
strategically costly would demand an immediate focus
on equal human and civil rights. A serious rejection of
today’s unjust reality by the United States and the
rest of the international community might also push
the parties themselves to seriously consider
alternative futures. The United States should demand
equality now, even if the ultimate political
arrangement will be up to the Palestinians and the
Israelis to determine.
To that end, Washington should begin conditioning
military and economic aid to Israel on clear and
specific measures to terminate Israel’s military rule
over the Palestinians. Avoiding such conditionality has
made Washington deeply complicit in the one-state
reality. Should Israel persist on its current path, the
United States should consider sharply reducing aid
and other privileges, perhaps even imposing smart,
targeted sanctions on Israel and Israeli leaders in
response to clearly transgressive actions. Israel can
decide for itself what it wants to do, but the United
States and other democracies can make sure it knows
the costs of maintaining and even intensifying a
deeply illiberal, discriminatory order.
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The clearest global vision articulated by the Biden
administration has been its full-throated defense of
international laws and norms in response to Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine. Even if one ignores the one-state
reality, the same norms and values would surely be at
stake in Israel and Palestine, as is widely understood
across the global South. When Israel violates
international laws and liberal norms, the United
States should denounce Israel for those violations as
it would any other state. Washington needs to stop
shielding Israel in international organizations when it
faces valid allegations of transgressions against
international law. And it needs to refrain from vetoing
UN Security Council resolutions that aim to hold
Israel accountable, stop resisting Palestinian efforts to
seek redress in international courts, and rally other
countries to demand an end to the siege of Gaza—
another supposedly temporary measure that has
become a cruel and an institutionalized reality.
But the one-state reality demands more. Looked at
through that prism, Israel resembles an apartheid
state. Instead of exempting Israel from the strong
norm against apartheid, enshrined in international
law, Washington must reckon with the reality it
helped create and begin viewing that reality, talking
about it, and interacting with it honestly. The United
States should stand up for international, Israeli, and
Palestinian nongovernmental organizations, human
rights organizations, and individual activists who have
been demonized for courageously calling out
AN INVASION OF GAZA WOULD BE A DISASTER FOR ISRAEL
(Written by Marc Lynch. Published in the Foreign Affairs on October 14, 2023)
In the early morning of October 13, the Israeli military
issued a warning to the 1.2 million Palestinians of
northern Gaza: they must evacuate within 24 hours,
in advance of a probable ground invasion. Such an
Israeli assault would have the avowed goal of ending
Hamas as an organization in retaliation for its
shocking October 7 surprise attack into southern
Israel, where it massacred over 1,000 Israeli citizens
and seized over a hundred hostages.
An Israeli ground campaign has seemed inevitable
from the moment Hamas breached the security
perimeter surrounding the Gaza Strip. Washington
has fully backed Israeli plans, notably refraining from
urging restraint. In an overheated political
environment, the loudest voices in the United States
have been those urging extreme measures against
Hamas. In some cases, commentators have even
called for military action against Iran for its alleged
sponsorship of Hamas’s operation.
But this is precisely the time that Washington must
be the cooler head and save Israel from itself. The
impending invasion of Gaza will be a humanitarian,
moral, and strategic catastrophe. It will not only badly
harm Israel’s long-term security and inflict
unfathomable human costs on Palestinians but also
threaten core U.S. interests in the Middle East, in
Ukraine, and in Washington’s competition with China
over the Indo-Pacific order. Only the Biden
administration—channeling the United States’ unique
leverage and the White House’s demonstrated close
support for Israeli security—can now stop Israel from
making a disastrous mistake. Now that it has shown
its sympathy with Israel, Washington must pivot
toward demanding that its ally fully comply with the
laws of war. It must insist that Israel find ways to take
structural injustice. Washington must protect Israeli
civil society organizations that are the country’s last
refuge of liberal values and Palestinian ones whose
efforts will be critical to avoiding bloody conflict in the
months to come. The United States should also
oppose Israeli arrests of Palestinian leaders who offer
a nonviolent vision of popular resistance. And it
should not seek to stop or punish those who choose to
peacefully boycott Israel because of its abusive
policies.
Although Washington cannot prevent normalization of
relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the
United States should not lead such efforts. Nobody
should be fooled by the mirage of the Abraham
Accords thriving while the Palestinian issue festers.
Decoupling such normalization agreements from
Israel’s treatment of Palestinians has only empowered
the Israeli far right and cemented Jewish supremacy
within the state.
These U.S. policy changes would not immediately bear
fruit. The political backlash would be fierce, even
though Americans—especially Democrats—have
grown far more critical of Israel than have the
politicians they elect. But in the long run, these
changes offer the best hope for moving toward a more
peaceful and just outcome in Israel and Palestine. By
finally confronting the one-state reality and taking a
principled stand, the United States would stop being
part of the problem and start being part of the
solution.
the fight to Hamas that do not entail the displacement
and mass killing of innocent Palestinian civilians.
UNSTEADY STATE
The Hamas attack upended the set of assumptions
that have defined the status quo between Israel and
Gaza of nearly two decades. In 2005, Israel
unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip but did not
end its de facto occupation. It retained full control
over Gaza’s borders and airspace, and it continued
exercising tight control (in close cooperation with
Egypt) from outside the security perimeter over the
movement of Gaza’s people, goods, electricity, and
money. Hamas assumed power in 2006 following its
victory in legislative elections, and it consolidated its
grip in 2007 after a failed U.S.-backed effort to replace
the group with the Palestinian Authority.
Since 2007, Israel and Hamas have maintained an
uneasy arrangement. Israel keeps up a stifling
blockade over Gaza, which severely restricts the
territory’s economy and imposes great human costs
while also empowering Hamas by diverting all
economic activity to the tunnels and black markets it
controls. During the episodic outbreaks of conflict—in
2008, 2014, and again in 2021—Israel massively
bombarded the densely populated Gazan urban
centers, destroying infrastructure and killing
thousands of civilians while degrading Hamas’s
military capabilities and establishing the price to be
paid for provocations. All of this did little to loosen
Hamas’s grip on power.
Israeli leaders had come to think that this equilibrium
could last indefinitely. They believed that Hamas had
learned the lessons of past adventurism through
Israel’s massively disproportionate military responses
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and that Hamas was now content to maintain its rule
in Gaza even if that meant controlling the
provocations of smaller militant factions, such as
Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The difficulties the Israeli
Defense Forces (IDF) experienced in a brief ground
offensive in 2014 tempered its ambitions to attempt
more. Israeli officials waved off perennial complaints
about the humanitarian effects of the blockade.
Instead, the country was content to keep Gaza on the
back burner while accelerating its increasingly
provocative moves to expand its settlements and
control over the West Bank.
Hamas had other ideas. Although many analysts have
attributed its shifting strategy to Iranian influence,
Hamas had its own reasons to change its behavior
and attack Israel. Its 2018 gambit to challenge the
blockade through mass nonviolent mobilization—
popularly known as the “Great March of Return”—
ended with massive bloodshed as Israeli soldiers
opened fire on the protesters. In 2021, by contrast,
Hamas leaders believed that they scored significant
political gains with the broader Palestinian public by
firing missiles at Israel during intense clashes in
Jerusalem over Israeli confiscation of Palestinian
homes and over Israeli leaders’ provocations in the al
Aqsa mosque complex: one of Islam’s holiest sites,
which some Israeli extremists want to tear down to
build a Jewish temple.
More recently, the steady escalation of Israeli land
grabs and military-backed settler attacks on
Palestinians in the West Bank created an angry,
mobilized public, one that the United States—and the
Israel-backed Palestinian Authority—seemed unable
and unwilling to address. Highly public U.S. moves to
broker an Israeli-Saudi normalization deal may also
have appeared like a closing window of opportunity for
Hamas to act decisively, before regional conditions
turned inexorably against it. And, perhaps, the Israeli
uprising against Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s judicial reforms led Hamas to anticipate
a divided and distracted adversary.
It is still unclear the extent to which Iran motivated
the timing or nature of the surprise attack. Certainly,
Iran has increased its support to Hamas in recent
years and sought to coordinate activities across its
“axis of resistance” of Shiite militias and other actors
opposed to the U.S.- and Israeli-backed regional order.
But it would be an enormous mistake to ignore the
broader, local political context within which Hamas
made its move.
TIPPING POINT
Israel initially responded to the Hamas attack with an
even more intense bombing campaign than normal,
along with an even more intense blockade, where it
cut off food, water, and energy. Israel mobilized its
military reserves, bringing some 300,000 troops to the
border and preparing for an imminent ground
campaign. And Israel has called on Gaza’s civilians to
leave the north within 24 hours. This is an impossible
demand. Gazans have nowhere to go. Highways are
destroyed, infrastructure is in rubble, there is little
remaining electricity or power, and the few hospitals
and relief facilities are all in the northern target zone.
Even if Gazans wanted to leave the strip, the Rafah
crossing to Egypt has been bombed—and Egyptian
President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has shown few signs of
offering a friendly refuge.
Gazans are aware of these facts. They do not see the
call to evacuate as a humanitarian gesture. They
believe that Israel’s intention is to carry out another
nakba, or “catastrophe”: the forced displacement of
Palestinians from Israel during the 1948 war. They do
not believe—nor should they believe—that they will be
allowed to return to Gaza after the fighting. This is
why the Biden administration’s push for a
humanitarian corridor to allow Gazan civilians to flee
the fighting is such a uniquely bad idea. To the extent
that a humanitarian corridor accomplishes anything,
it would be to accelerate the depopulation of Gaza and
the creation of a new wave of permanent refugees. It
would also, fairly clearly, offer the right-wing
extremists in Netanyahu’s government a clear road
map for doing the same in Jerusalem and the West
Bank.
This Israeli response to the Hamas attack comes from
public outrage and has thus far generated political
plaudits from leaders at home and around the world.
But there is little evidence that any of these politicians
have given serious thought to the potential
implications of a war in Gaza, in the West Bank, or in
the broader region. Neither is there any sign of serious
grappling with an endgame in Gaza once the fighting
begins. Least of all is there any sign of thinking about
the moral and legal implications of the collective
punishment of Gazan civilians and the inevitable
human devastation to come.
The invasion of Gaza itself will be laced with
uncertainties. Hamas surely anticipated such an
Israeli response and is well prepared to fight a long-
term urban insurgency against advancing Israeli
forces. It likely hopes to inflict significant casualties
against a military that has not engaged in such
combat in many years. (Israel’s recent military
experiences are limited to profoundly one-sided
operations, such as this July’s attack on the Jenin
refugee camp in the West Bank.) Hamas has already
signaled gruesome plans to use its hostages as a
deterrent against Israeli actions. Israel could win a
quick victory, but it seems unlikely; moves that might
accelerate the country’s campaign, such as bombing
cities to the ground and depopulating the north,
would come with major reputational costs. And the
longer the war grinds on, the more the world will be
bombarded with images of dead and injured Israelis
and Palestinians, and the more opportunities there
will be for unexpected disruptive events.
Even if Israel does succeed in toppling Hamas, it will
then be faced with the challenge of governing the
territory it abandoned in 2005 and then mercilessly
blockaded and bombed in the intervening years.
Gaza’s young population will not welcome the IDF as
liberators. There will be no flowers and candy on offer.
Israel’s best-case scenario is a protracted
counterinsurgency in a uniquely hostile environment
where it has a history of failure and in which people
have nothing left to lose.
In a worst-case scenario, the conflict will not remain
confined to Gaza. And unfortunately, such an
expansion is likely. A protracted invasion of Gaza will
generate tremendous pressures in the West Bank,
which President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian
Authority may be unable—or, perhaps, unwilling—to
contain. Over the last year, Israel’s relentless
encroachment on West Bank land, and the violent
provocations of the settlers, has already brought
Palestinian anger and frustration to a boil. The Gaza
invasion could push West Bank Palestinians over the
edge.
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Despite overwhelming Israeli anger at Netanyahu for
his government’s nearly unprecedented strategic
failure, opposition leader Benny Gantz has helped
solve Netanyahu’s major political problems at no
evident cost by joining a national unity war cabinet
without the removal of the right-wing extremists
Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. This decision
is significant because it suggests that the
provocations in the West Bank and Jerusalem, which
Ben-Gvir and Smotrich spearheaded last year, will
only continue in this unsettled environment. In fact, it
could accelerate, as the settler movement seeks to
take advantage of the moment to attempt to annex
some or all of the West Bank and displace its
Palestinian residents. Nothing could be more
dangerous.
Serious conflict in the West Bank—whether in the
form of a new intifada or an Israeli settler land grab—
alongside the devastation of Gaza, would have
massive repercussions. It would lay bare the grim
truth of Israel’s one-state reality to a point where even
the last diehards could not deny it. The conflict could
trigger another Palestinian forced exodus, a new wave
of refugees cast into already dangerously
overburdened Jordan and Lebanon or forcibly
contained by Egypt in enclaves in the Sinai Peninsula.
BEYOND THE PALE
Arab leaders are realists by nature, preoccupied with
their own survival and their own national interests.
Nobody expects them to sacrifice for Palestine, an
assumption that has driven American and Israeli
policy under both former U.S. President Donald
Trump and U.S. President Joe Biden. But there are
limits to their ability to stand up to a furiously
mobilized mass public, particularly when it comes to
Palestine. Saudi Arabia might very well normalize
relations with Israel, that curious obsession of the
Biden administration, when there are few political
costs to doing so. It is less likely to do so when the
Arab public is bombarded with gruesome images from
Palestine.
In years past, Arab leaders routinely allowed anti-
Israel protests as a way to let off steam, diverting
popular anger toward an external enemy to avoid
criticism of their own dismal records. They will likely
do so again, leading cynics to wave off mass marches
and angry op-eds. But the Arab uprisings of 2011
proved conclusively how easily and quickly protests
can spiral from something local and contained into a
regional wave capable of toppling long-ruling
autocratic regimes. Arab leaders will not need to be
reminded that letting citizens take to the streets in
massive numbers threatens their power. They will not
want to be seen taking Israel’s side.
Their reluctance, in this climate, to cozy up to Israel is
not simply a question of regime survival. Arab regimes
pursue their interests across multiple playing fields,
regionally and globally, as well as at home. Ambitious
leaders seeking to expand their influence and claim
leadership of the Arab world can read the prevailing
winds. The last few years have already revealed the
extent to which regional powers such as Saudi Arabia
and Turkey have been willing to defy the United States
on its most critical issues: hedging on Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine, keeping oil prices high, building
stronger relations with China. These decisions suggest
that Washington should not take their continued
loyalties for granted, particularly if U.S. officials are
seen as unequivocally backing extreme Israeli actions
in Palestine.
Arab distancing is far from the only regional shift the
United States risks if it continues down this path. And
it is far from the most frightening: Hezbollah could
also easily be drawn into the war. Thus far, the
organization has carefully calibrated its response to
avoid provocation. But the invasion of Gaza may well
be a redline that would force Hezbollah to act.
Escalation in the West Bank and Jerusalem almost
certainly would be. The United States and Israel have
sought to deter Hezbollah from entering the fight, but
such threats will only go so far if the IDF continuously
escalates. And should Hezbollah enter the fray with its
formidable arsenal of missiles, Israel would face its
first two-front war in half a century. Such a situation
would be bad not just for Israel. It is not clear that
Lebanon, already laid low by last year’s port explosion
and economic meltdown, could survive another Israeli
retaliatory bombing campaign.
Some U.S. and Israeli politicians and pundits seem to
welcome a wider war. They have, in particular, been
advocating for an attack on Iran. Although most of
those advocating for bombing Iran have taken that
position for years, allegations of an Iranian role in the
Hamas attack could widen the coalition of those
willing to start a conflict with Tehran.
But expanding the war to Iran would pose enormous
risks, not only in the form of Iranian retaliation
against Israel but also in attacks against oil shipping
in the Gulf and potential escalation across Iraq,
Yemen, and other fronts where Iranian allies hold
sway. Recognition of those risks has thus far
restrained even the most enthusiastic Iran hawks, as
when Trump opted against retaliation for the attack
on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq refineries in 2019. Even
today, a steady stream of leaks from U.S. and Israeli
officials downplaying Iran’s role suggests an interest
in avoiding escalation. But despite those efforts, the
dynamics of protracted war are deeply unpredictable.
The world has rarely been closer to disaster.
CRIMES ARE CRIMES
Those urging Israel to invade Gaza with maximalist
goals are pushing their ally into a strategic and
political catastrophe. The potential costs are
extraordinarily high, whether counted in Israeli and
Palestinian deaths, the likelihood of a protracted
quagmire, or mass displacement of Palestinians. The
risk of the conflict spreading is also alarmingly large,
particularly in the West Bank and Lebanon but
potentially far wider. And the potential gains—beyond
satisfying demands for revenge—are remarkably low.
Not since the American invasion of Iraq has there
been such clarity in advance about the fiasco to come.
Nor have the moral issues been so clear. There is no
question that Hamas committed grave war crimes in
its brutal attacks on Israeli citizens, and it should be
held accountable. But there is also no question that
the collective punishment of Gaza, through blockades
and bombing and the forced displacement of its
population, represents grave war crimes. Here, too,
there should be accountability—or, better yet, respect
for international law.
Although these rules may not trouble Israeli leaders,
they pose a significant strategic challenge to the
United States in terms of its other highest priorities. It
is difficult to reconcile the United States’ promotion of
international norms and the laws of war in defense of
Ukraine from Russia’s brutal invasion with its cavalier
disregard for the same norms in Gaza. The states and
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peoples of the global South far beyond the Middle East
will notice.
The Biden admin. has made very clear that it supports
Israel in its response to the Hamas attack. But now is
the time for it to use the strength of that relationship
to stop Israel from creating a remarkable disaster.
Washington’s current approach is encouraging Israel
to launch a profoundly misbegotten war, promising
HAMAS-ISRAEL WAR AND MUSLIM COUNTRIES’ DIPLOMACY
(Written by Muhammad Hanif. Published in Pak- Observer on October 17, 2023)
BEFORE discussing the ongoing war between Hamas
and Israel, a brief summary of the Palestine-Israel
conflict, as presented by Al Jazeera News, dated 9
October 2023 is as follows. On 2 November 1917,
Britain’s then-foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour’s letter
addressed to Lionel Walter Rothschild, a figurehead of
the British Jewish community, confirmed the
commitment of the British government to “the
establishment in Palestine of a national home for the
Jewish people” and to facilitating “the achievement of
this objective”. At that time, Palestinian Arab natives’
population was more than 90 per cent.
A British Mandate for Palestine was created in 1923
after World War-1 and the end of the Ottoman Empire
and the Mandate lasted until 1948. Before the British
Mandate for Palestine, Jews made up approximately 6
per cent of the total population. Between 1923 to
1948, the British facilitated mass Jewish immigration
from Europe and about 375000 Jews were settled in
Palestine by forcefully confiscating the local Arab’s
land.
According to the Global Conflict Tracker, in 1947, the
United Nations adopted Resolution 181, which sought
to divide Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. That
plan was rejected by the Arabs as it gave 56 per cent
of the Palestine’s land to Jews. On May 14, 1948,
when Israel declared its independence, the first Arab-
Israeli War started, which ended in a stalemate. From
1948 to 1950, the Zionist military expelled about
750,000 Palestinians and captured 78 per cent of
Palestine. The remaining 22 per cent was divided into
the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In June 1967, Israel preemptively attacked Egypt and
Syria, starting the Six-Day War. After the war, Israel
gained territorial control of the Sinai Peninsula and
Gaza Strip from Egypt; the West Bank and East
Jerusalem from Jordan; and the Golan Heights from
Syria.
In October 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel to
regain their lost territory. Although Egypthad
captured the far bank of the Suez canal from Israel,
the war ended in a stalemate. In 1979, Israel and
Egypt signed the Camp David Peace Accord and Israel
returned the Senai Peninsula to Egypt, but the
question of Palestinian self-determination remained
unresolved.
In 1987, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip started their uprising, called the first intifada.
The 1993/1995, Oslo Accords gave a framework for
the two-state solution in the long term and
Palestinians to govern themselves in the West Bank
and Gaza for five years. The Accords enabled mutual
recognition between the newly established Palestinian
Authority and Israel’s government and the
Palestinians ended the first Intifada.
protection from its consequences by deterring others
from entering the battle and by blocking any efforts at
imposing accountability through international law.
But the United States does this at the cost of its own
global standing and its own regional interests. Should
Israel’s invasion of Gaza take its most likely course,
with all its carnage and escalation, the Biden admin.
will come to regret its choices.
In 2000, due to Palestinians’ grievances over Israel’s
control over the West Bank, Israel continued
settlements, a stagnating peace process and Israeli
PM Sharon’s visit to the al-Aqsa mosque, Palestinians
launched the second intifada, which lasted until 2005.
In response, the Israeli government retook the control
of West Bank and Gaza. From 1948 to 2022, the Jews
migration/settlements continued by suppressing the
Arab’s resistance with a brutal force. While from 1948
to 1950, Israel’s population had swelled to 33 per cent
from 6 per cent in 1917, now in 2023, Israel’s
population has risen to 67 per cent and local Arabs’
population has gone down to 33 per cent.
When Hamas won the Palestinian Authority’s first
parliamentary elections in 2006 and long time
majority party Fatah lost, mutual differences brewed
violence/split. Hamas seized control of Gaza and by
2018 Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah
Party was controlling the West Bank and Hamas had
become the de facto ruler of the Gaza Strip. In 2005,
Yassar Arafat died and the second Intifada ended. Due
to bloody clashes between Hamas and Israel over the
years, in 2007, branding Hamas as a terrorist
organization, Israel enforced blockade of the Gaza. It
also launched four major ground/air assaults between
2007 and 2021 and caused human/material losses to
the Gaza civilians.
Frustrated out of Israel’s blockades, its destructive
attacks and its recent violence on the Muslim
preachers in Al Aqsa mosque, on 7 October 2023,
Hamas attacked Israel by infiltrating its fighters
across the border fence to more than 20 locations by
achieving a total surprise. The Hamas fighters
attacked Israeli targets and have killed more than
1400 and injured above 4000 Israelis and also took
about 150 Israeli Army men/civilians as prisoners.
Israel, responding to the Hamas attack by bombing
Gaza residential areas, has dropped 6000 bombs,
killing about 4000 and injuring 13000 citizens,
including the children so far since the violence started
on 07 October. It is even targeting the
hospitals/schools. Israel has also enforced blockade of
Gaza by cutting supplies of water, food/medicines and
power. It has also amassed its tank force around Gaza
to seize it permanently. The US and the UK have
supported Israel and deployed their naval assets near
Gaza. The US Secretary of State has met the Arab
leaders, probably to caution them to stay away from
the conflict. The Muslim countries have responded
diplomatically. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt,
Pakistan and Iran have condemned the Israeli
bombing of the civilian population of Gaza and its
blockade and have demanded the end of the blockade,
bombing of civilians, likely ground attack on Gaza and
favoured a two state solution to end the conflict.
Saudi Arabia/other Arab countries have freezed the
ongoing peace talks with Israel.
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The Muslim countries have responded diplomatically.
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan and
Iran have condemned the Israeli bombing of the
civilian population of Gaza and its blockade and have
demanded the end of the blockade, bombing of
civilians, likely ground attack on Gaza and favoured a
two state solution to end the conflict. Saudi
Arabia/other Arab countries have freezed the ongoing
peace talks with Israel.
The OIC has condemned the ongoing Israeli military
aggression against the Palestinian people in the Gaza
Strip, killing/injuring thousands of civilians and
destroying residential buildings/infrastructure,
including hospitals/schools and mosques. The OIC’s
Executive Committee, is also convening an urgent
extraordinary meeting at the ministerial level, to
ISRAEL AND HAMAS NEED EACH OTHER
(Written by Aaron David Miller. Published in the Foreign Affairs on March 29, 2019)
War, like politics, makes for strange bedfellows. Israel
is currently preparing for a potentially dramatic
faceoff with Hamas. Over the past week, the group has
launched rockets into Israel, and it has called for a
million man march this weekend along the Israeli-
Gaza border to mark the anniversary of last year’s
March of Return. The protests may either fizzle or
spark an intensified round of conflict. Whatever
happens though, it will not undermine the curious,
co-dependent relationship that has evolved between
Hamas and the Israeli government, especially under
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. These two
key Middle East actors despise yet depend on one
another.
Israel and Hamas are unlikely partners. They call for
each other’s destruction and have been through three
major military confrontations, most recently in 2014.
Nevertheless, these two sworn enemies have long
cooperated out of practical necessity. On certain
issues—including managing their conflict through
Egypt and preventing the Palestinian Authority from
reunifying Gaza and the West Bank—their objectives
even align. Although neither wants to admit it, Israel
and Hamas need each other.
THE ODD COUPLE
For as long as Hamas has existed, it has maintained a
strangely functional relationship with Israel. In the
1970s, even before Hamas was founded, Israel
believed that Palestinian Islamist groups could serve
as a useful counterweight to Fatah, the more secular,
revolutionary, and (at the time) violent political party
that dominated the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO). In order to undermine Fatah, Israel allowed
these groups, including the forerunners of Hamas, a
fair amount of freedom to organize in Gaza. In 1979,
Israel even officially recognized an Islamic charity
created by Ahmad Yassin, one of the co-founders of
Hamas. Within five years, Yassin would be arrested
for weapons smuggling, and the Israelis would
eventually assassinate him in March 2004 in an effort
to stop Hamas terrorist attacks.
In the 1970s, Gaza’s Islamists needed Israel’s
acquiescence in order to grow. But since 1987, when
Hamas was founded as an independent organization,
the group’s ideological legitimacy has rested on its
claim to be waging an existential struggle with the
Jewish state. This paradox has continued into the
present day, with the added irony that Hamas, which
has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007, is heavily
dependent for its survival on Israel and Egypt. The
Israelis in the main and Egyptians decide whether to
address the escalating military situation in Gaza that
endangers the lives of civilians and the
security/stability of the region.
In view of the above discussed war scenario, the
Muslim countries need to get together and issue a
joint statement, condemning the Israeli bombing of
the Gaza’s civilian population, its blockade, cutting
the supply of water, food/medicines and power to
Gaza people and asking for the stoppage of these
actions by Israel, end the war and Israel to agree on a
two-state solution. The Muslim countries should also
convince the major powers to pass a resolution at the
UNSC to stop the war and UNSC to mediate a two-
state solution to attain a permanent peace in the
region.
permit deliveries of Qatari cash to Gazans, how much
electricity to provide to the local power grid, and how
far Gazan fishermen can travel from shore; in short,
they determine what is allowed in—and who is
permitted to travel to and from—the area.
Hamas uses its arsenal of rockets both to maintain its
domestic image of armed struggle against Israel and
as leverage to compel Israel to make periodic economic
concessions. By using controlled escalation, the group
seeks to remind Israel that Gaza will remain a threat
unless Israel meets some of its demands, including
infrastructure development, prisoner releases, and a
meaningful relaxation of Israeli restrictions on the
movement of goods and people in and out of Gaza.
Hamas, however, is walking a fine line: it wants to
pressure Israel without triggering a massive Israeli
response. The group, that is, must both fight with
Israel and cooperate with it. And for Israel, the bitter
reality is that despite Hamas’s terrorism and efforts to
radicalize Palestinians, the group is the least bad
alternative for running Gaza. The result is the current
dynamic—accommodation mixed with confrontation.
BEST FIENDS
From time to time, Israel and Hamas appear to be
interested in a more long-term arrangement. In May
2018, for instance, Israeli intelligence briefed the
country’s political leadership that Hamas, confronted
with the deteriorating economic conditions in Gaza,
was open to agreeing to a years’ long ceasefire in
exchange for an easing of the Israeli blockade, a
release of Hamas prisoners, and infrastructure
development. And earlier this week, reports emerged
that Israel, working through Egypt, was offering
concessions in exchange for a guarantee that Hamas
would prevent its demonstrations this weekend from
becoming violent.
That both sides periodically attempt such agreements
shows that Israel and Hamas realize that total victory
over the other is unlikely, or at least unacceptably
costly. Hamas knows that it needs Israel’s de facto
acceptance to ensure its control over Gaza and defuse
popular anger over the terrible conditions on the
ground; it also knows that it cannot defeat the Israeli
military and that it must maintain good relations with
Egypt, which controls the critically important crossing
at Rafah and is now working closely with Israel to try
to preempt an escalation. Israel, particularly under
Netanyahu, has for its part proved highly risk-averse.
Netanyahu does not want a major ground operation in
Gaza like the one in 2014, especially now, only weeks
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before an Israeli elections. And Israel has no desire to
reoccupy Gaza, from which it withdrew in 2005.
Yet the two sides’ failure to agree to a lasting deal
shows that both, in their own way, benefit from the
status quo. For Netanyahu, Hamas is probably the
least bad option in Gaza. The Israelis worry about
Hamas’ ties to Iran and its capacity to launch rockets
into Israel (last Monday, for instance, a rocket
launched from Gaza destroyed a house north of Tel
Aviv). But Israel has few good options. An Israeli
reoccupation of Gaza would be too costly, and the
Egyptians are not about to assume responsibility for
the area. Destroying Hamas, meanwhile, would create
a vacuum that could be filled by even more dangerous
jihadist groups, including affiliates of the Islamic State
(ISIS) now operating in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
Hamas is also useful—it provides an easy target for
Israeli propaganda, but it is also a group that Israel
knows it can negotiate with, whether through Egypt,
the UN, or perhaps (on occasion) directly.
In theory, the Israelis could push for the more
moderate Palestinian Authority (PA), dominated by
Fatah, to return to Gaza, from which it was ousted by
Hamas’ coup in 2007. (Perhaps under a different
Israeli government, it would.) But the split of the
Palestinians between Hamas in Gaza and the Fatah-
led PA in the West Bank makes that impossible. And
THE WELL-CRAFTED STRATEGY OF BLAMING THE VICTIM (Written by Ejaz Haider.
Published in the Friday Times on October 11, 2023)
When Ted Hughes wrote Apple Tragedy, upending the
story in the Genesis, it wasn’t a simple act of mocking
but an attempt to problematise the grand Christian
narrative of creation. As Hamas fighters clash with the
Israeli Goliath, something akin to that is happening in
the war of narratives across the world.
The grand narrative, led by the United States and its
western allies and pushed 24/7 by the mainstream
western media, presents Israel as the victim. This
narrative, seasoned by both a sense of guilt at
centuries of persecution of Jews by the Christian
world — culminating in the horrors of the Holocaust
— and modern strategic considerations, presents
Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East that
shares western values and must, therefore, be
militarily supported, strengthened and protected
against its enemies.
This thinking, which combines expiation of guilt and
strategic calculus, has led the West to give Israel a
virtual carte blanche. Even when on occasion US and
European governments feel queasy about Israeli
actions, they either give it a pass or express little more
than displeasure. Israel, for its part, has exploited this
thinking to its full advantage, branding any criticism
of its actions as anti-Semitic, a charge whose
connotations go deep in European history with its
pogroms and the Nazi immoral philosophy of eugenics.
The deep irony is that the present victims of Israeli
atrocities primarily are Palestinians who neither
invented the pogrom nor the racist bio-ideology of
eugenics. If anything, as Mark Cohen argued in his
comparative analysis of Jewish life under the crescent
and the cross, Jewish-Muslim relations were
comparatively much better than Jewish-gentile
relations, the “neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-
Arab history,” notwithstanding. As he put it, this
revisionism “has taken hold in many circles and has
flourished in the soil of the ongoing Israeli- Palestinian
conflict.”
this split serves Netanyahu well. The Palestinian
national movement now looks like Noah’s Ark: there
are two of everything—two statelets, two security
services, two systems of government, and two visions
of what a future Palestinian state should be. For
Netanyahu, Hamas is a hedge against a united
Palestinian movement focused on serious negotiation
to reach a two-state solution. Hamas, meanwhile, is
biding its time for an opportunity to take over the PLO.
Neither wants to strengthen PA President Mahmoud
Abbas. Indeed, both Netanyahu and Hamas would
prefer the current situation—a de facto three-state
reality—to a two-state solution.
WITH OR WITHOUT YOU
The Hamas-led protests this weekend may or may not
provoke a new round of escalation with Israel. But
even a serious blow-up is unlikely to change much.
During the 2014 Israeli-Hamas war, nearly 2000
Palestinians were killed, including 1200 civilians. The
long-term impact on Israel’s relations with Hamas,
however, was minimal. Far from creating a
transformative moment, the events of this weekend,
whatever they turn out to be, will be more likely to
mark yet another bloody phase in a conflict between
two parties who seemingly can’t live with each other—
or without each other, either.
This comparative approach is also important because
as Cohen rightly notes, “In the Middle Ages, tolerance,
in the modern, liberal meaning of full equality, was
not considered to be a virtue to be emulated.
Monotheistic religions were by nature mutually
intolerant.” (his italics)
The western governments and the mainstream media
are not interested in these nuances; nor are the
publics at large. In fraught situations, nuances are
the first casualty. Even so, it’s important, as
Palestinian (and also Arab) scholars and intellectuals
have tried to do for decades in the face of mounting
odds, to sustain and present the resistance narrative.
In the ongoing conflict, the pro-Israel sentiment,
predictably, is only focusing on Hamas’ military
offensive. Every television question begins with, “Do
you condemn the violence by Hamas?” This is
deliberate and strategic. The idea is to present the
Palestinians as perpetrators rather than victims, in
order to divert attention from the slow, structural
violence the Palestinians are subjected to not only in
Gaza, but also the Occupied West Bank.
According to a March 2022 report by the UN Special
Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the
Occupied Palestinian Territories, the “political system
of entrenched rule” in the occupied West Bank and
Gaza “satisfies the prevailing evidentiary standard for
the existence of apartheid.” In November last year, the
UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate
housing reached the same conclusion in relation to
Israel’s policies of Palestinian home demolitions
Earlier, in October 2022, the United Nations
Independent International Commission of Inquiry on
the OPT, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel,
concluded in its report “that the occupation of the
OPT is unlawful due to its permanence and Israel’s
measures to annex Palestinian land in law and in
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practice. In 2022, such measures included retroactive
authorisation of settlement outposts, including by the
Israeli Supreme Court.”
Serious research and findings by the UN and other
rights bodies as well as by independent scholars make
clear that Israel has put in place an institutionalised
regime of oppression against the Palestinians. Gaza
has been under Israeli blockade since 2007. But even
in the Occupied West Bank, Palestinians have been
segregated and their movements controlled through
560 Israeli checkpoints.
A February 2022 Amnesty report states that Israel
exercises control over Palestinians’ rights, fragments
and segregates Palestinian citizens of Israel, and
denies Palestinian refugees the right of return.
It does so “through massive seizures of land and
property, unlawful killings, infliction of serious
injuries, forcible transfers, arbitrary restrictions on
freedom of movement, and denial of nationality.” All
these actions constitute inhumane acts and the crime
of apartheid and fall under the jurisdiction of the
International Criminal Court.
In March 2022, Israel re-enacted the Citizenship and
Entry into Israel Law, which was first enacted in 2003
and was renewed every year until it was set aside in
2021. The law “imposes sweeping restrictions on
Palestinian family unification between Israeli citizens
or residents and their spouses from the OPT to
maintain a Jewish demographic majority.” In another
move to legally strangle the Palestinians, the Israeli
Supreme Court upheld a law in July 2022 which
authorises the Israeli interior minister to strip citizens
of their citizenship if convicted of acts that amount to
“breach of allegiance to the state.”
Tor Wennesland, UN special coordinator for the
Middle East peace process, told the UN Security
Council in August this year that escalating violence is
being fuelled by growing despair about the future
among Palestinians and a lack of progress towards
achieving an independent state. He was referring to
happenings in the Occupied West Bank where
according to the “UN humanitarian coordinator Lynn
Hastings… 77 healthcare workers were injured and 30
ambulances damaged while trying to help people in
the occupied territory so far in 2023, whether during
raids or protests or just on average days.” In the same
month, Israeli troops mounted an air-ground raid on
the Jenin refugee camp, killing nine Palestinians,
including two children. Additionally, violence by illegal
Israeli settlers has been on the rise. On September 21,
2023, Associated Press reported that “Violence from
Israeli settlers has displaced over 1,100 Palestinians
in the occupied West Bank since 2022, according to a
UN report released Thursday, with officials describing
the exodus as unparalleled in recent years.”
One can go on since the list is long and goes back to
the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe). Every legal and
administrative action by Israel that seeks to dominate
and subjugate the Palestinians and their lives is
documented and on the record, and is enforced
through Israel’s coercive power. Mark LeVine,
professor and director of the Programme in Global
Middle East Studies at UC Irvine has the best
description of Israel’s total and criminal control of
every aspect of Palestinian life — In an essay titled,
The quantum mechanics of Israeli totalitarianism,
LeVine wrote: “With its matrix of control, Israel has
achieved an unparalleled and uniquely successful
synergy of “bio” and “necro”-politics, controlling life
and death at most every scale of Palestinian existence.
The matrix is continuously adjusted with as much
care as Israel has adjusted the caloric intake of
Gazans during its periodic intensifications of the
Gazan siege.”
LeVine’s reference to necro-politics is important and
cites the 2003 essay, Necropolitics, by Achille Mbembe.
Mbembe explains that [his] “essay assumes that the
ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large
degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who
may live and who must die.” Hannah Arendt spoke of
the horrors of concentration camps, a place “that…
stands outside of life and death.” Quoting Giorgio
Agamben, Mbembe writes: “According to Agamben,
[the camp] acquires a permanent spatial arrangement
that remains continually outside the normal state of
law.”
These descriptions capture perfectly everyday life of
the Palestinians. The entire exercise is part of a
settler-colonial project, a project that began with the
infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 and has
subsequently given rise to some of the worst tragedies
in Palestine. It is also more perfidious because the
colonists are entrenched and have nowhere to go. In
that sense, it is more like white populations
decimating the natives in the Americas, Australia and
Tasmania and laying birthrights to those places.
The space which opened up in the run-up to and after
the Oslo Accords for a peaceful settlement has long
disappeared. Two Israeli ministers, Bezalel Smotrich
(Justice) and Itamar Ben-Gvir (National Security) are
rightwing illegal settlers. Their views on illegal
settlements and how to deal with Palestinians are a
matter of record. Last month, Israel’s Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu took a map of Israel to the
UNGA and brandished it before the world. The map
included in Israel all of Palestinian areas, including
Gaza and the occupied Golan Heights.
The issue is simple: Israel is in occupation of
Palestinians territories, refuses to end the occupation,
has left no space for negotiations, dispossesses and
kills Palestinians at will, demolishes their properties,
and deprives them of their rights and dignity as part
of a well-crafted strategy. The question, therefore, is
simple: what exactly should the Palestinians do?
Should they let Israel wipe them out? Should they be
condemned when they stand up to fight for their
rights, dignity and survival?
These are not emotive or rhetorical questions. They
are grounded in cold facts, facts recorded by, as noted
above, UN bodies, rights organisations and
independent scholars and analysts, including in Israel.
In a brilliant 2006 book, The Israel Lobby and US
Foreign Policy, Professors Mearsheimer and Walt, both
hard-nosed structural realists, argued that Israel is a
liability and the US needs to rethink its “rock solid,
unwavering” (Joe Biden’s recent words) support. Far
from any “shared strategic interests or compelling
moral imperatives,” argue Mearsheimer and Walt, “the
overall thrust of US policy in the region is due almost
entirely to US domestic politics, and especially to the
activities of the Israel Lobby.”
As Israel blockades and bombards Gaza, continues
with its illegal settlements and refuses to end its
occupation, it is time for America to heed the advice of
Mearsheimer and Walt.
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THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION: WHAT IT IS AND WHY IT HASN’T HAPPENED
(Written by Max Fisher. Published in the New York Times on December 29, 2016)
The two-state solution has for decades been the
primary focus of efforts to achieve peace in the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict, but the contours of what it would
actually look like — and why it has been so hard to
achieve — can get lost. Here’s a basic guide.
What is the two-state solution? It helps to start with
the problem the solution is meant to address: the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At its most basic level, the There is plenty of blame to go around. The Palestinian
conflict is about how or whether to divide territory
between two peoples. The territory question is also
wrapped up in other overlapping but distinct issues:
whether the Palestinian territories can become an
independent state and how to resolve years of violence
that include the Israeli occupation of the West Bank,
the partial Israeli blockade of Gaza and Palestinian
violence against Israelis. The two-state solution would
establish an independent Palestinian state alongside
Israel — two states for two peoples. In theory, this
would win Israel security and allow it to retain a
Jewish demographic majority (letting the country
remain Jewish and democratic) while granting the
Palestinians a state. Most governments and world
bodies have set achievement of the two-state solution
as official policy, including the United States, the
United Nations, the Palestinian Authority and Israel.
This goal has been the basis of peace talks for decades. relies on right-wing parties that are skeptical of or
Why is the solution so difficult to achieve? There are
four issues that have proved most challenging. Each
comes down to a set of bedrock demands between the
two sides that, in execution, often appear to be
mutually exclusive.
1. Borders: There is no consensus about precisely
where to draw the line. Generally, most believe the
border would follow the lines before the Arab-
Israeli war of 1967, but with Israel keeping some of
the land where it has built settlements and in
exchange providing other land to the Palestinians
to compensate. Israel has constructed barriers
along and within the West Bank that many
analysts worry create a de facto border, and it has
built settlements in the West Bank that will make
it difficult to establish that land as part of an
independent Palestine. As time goes on,
settlements grow, theoretically making any future
Palestinian state smaller and possibly breaking it
up into noncontiguous pieces.
2. Jerusalem: Both sides claim Jerusalem as their
capital and consider it a center of religious worship
and cultural heritage. The two-state solution
typically calls for dividing it into an Israeli West
and a Palestinian East, but it is not easy to draw
the line — Jewish, Muslim and Christian holy sites
are on top of one another. Israel has declared
Jerusalem its “undivided capital,” effectively
annexing its eastern half, and has built up
construction that entrenches Israeli control of the
city.
3. Refugees: Large numbers of Palestinians fled or
were expelled from their homes in what is now
Israel, primarily during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war
that came after Israel’s creation. They and their
descendants now number five million and believe
they deserve the right to return. This is a
nonstarter for Israel: Too many returnees would
end Jews’ demographic majority and therefore
Israel’s status as both a Jewish and a democratic
state.
4. Security: For Palestinians, security means an end
to foreign military occupation. For Israelis, this
means avoiding a takeover of the West Bank by a
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group like Hamas that would threaten Israelis (as
happened in Gaza after Israel’s 2005 withdrawal).
It also means keeping Israel defensible against
foreign armies, which often means requiring a
continued Israeli military presence in parts of the
West Bank.
Why do some consider the two-state solution dead?
leadership is divided between two governments that
cannot come to terms. The leadership in the West
Bank lacks the political legitimacy to make far-
reaching but necessary concessions, and the
leadership in Gaza does not even recognize Israel,
whose citizens it frequently attacks. The United States,
which has brokered talks for years, has taken more
than a few missteps. And most important, the current
Israeli leadership, though it nominally supports a two-
state solution, appears to oppose it in practice.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister since
2009, endorsed the two-state solution in a speech that
year. But he continued to expand West Bank
settlements and, in 2015, said there would be “no
withdrawals” and “no concessions.” Mr. Netanyahu
appears personally skeptical of Palestinian
independence. His fragile governing coalition also
outright oppose the two-state solution. Israeli public
pressure for a peace deal has declined. The reasons
are complex: demographic changes, an increasingly
powerful settler movement, outrage at Palestinian
attacks such as a recent spate of stabbings, and bitter
memories of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s,
which saw frequent bus and cafe bombings. And the
status quo has, for most Israelis, become relatively
peaceful and bearable. Many see little incentive for
adopting a risky and uncertain two-state solution,
leaving Mr. Netanyahu with scant reason to risk his
political career on one.
Are there other solutions? There are, but they involve
such drastic costs that the United States and many
other governments consider all but the two-state
solution unacceptable. There are multiple versions of
the so-called one-state solution, which would join all
territories as one nation. One version would grant
equal rights to all in a state that would be neither
Jewish nor Palestinian in character, because neither
group would have a clear majority. Skeptics fear this
would risk internal instability or even a return to war.
Another, advocated by some on the Israeli far right,
would establish one state but preserve Israel’s Jewish
character by denying full rights to Palestinians. Under
this version, Israel would no longer be a democratic
state. With few viable or popular alternatives, the
most likely choice may be to simply maintain the
status quo — though few believe that is possible in
the long term.
What happens if there is no solution? A common
prediction, as Secretary of State John Kerry stated, is
that Israel will be forced to choose between the two
core components of its national identity: Jewish and
democratic. This choice, rather than coming in one
decisive moment, would probably play out in many
small choices over a process of years. For instance, a
2015 poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that
74 percent of Jewish Israelis agreed that “decisions
crucial to the state on issues of peace and security
should be made by a Jewish majority.” That pollster
also found that, from 2010 to 2014, Jewish Israelis
became much less likely to say that Israel should be
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“Jewish and democratic,” with growing factions saying
that it should be democratic first or, slightly more
popular, Jewish first. Many analysts also worry that
the West Bank government, whose scant remaining
legitimacy rests on delivering a peace deal, will
collapse. This would force Israel to either tolerate
chaos in the West Bank and a possible Hamas
takeover or enforce a more direct form of occupation
that would be costlier to both parties. This risk of
increased suffering, along with perhaps permanent
setbacks in the national ambitions of both
Palestinians and Israelis, is why Nathan Thrall, a
Jerusalem-based analyst with the International Crisis
Group, told me last year, “Perpetuating the status quo
is the most frightening of the possibilities.”

COLLAPSE OF INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN LAW IN ISRAEL-PALESTINE CONFLICT

(Written by Dr. Nor Aishah Hanifa and Badereddin Seyam. Published on AA Turkeye on April 26, 2021)
Discussion on ethics and morals in conflicts and wars territory, as defined by jus ad bellum. Making matters
were dated back to the ancient Greek, Roman, Indian, worse, when the US and the western nations
and Chinese civilizations. Besides that, ethics and interpreted the Arab-Israel wars via the Cold War
morals preached to a greater extent in the Torah, lenses. The term "aggression" swallowed in favor of
Biblical, Quranic and Hadith traditions. After that, Israel during the Cold War (1945-1990). Aggression
ethics and morals were enhanced in the Renaissance remains a grey term in the Israel-Palestinian conflict
period and became an important value in western until we are manipulated about the real aggressor.
society. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), a Dutch Chapter VII often ineffective in arresting Israel under
philosopher and author of De Jure Belli Ac Pacis (The the jus ad bellum. In reality, Chapter VII cannot be
Rights of War and Peace), wrote the conditions for a applied to the Security Council P5s (US, Russia, UK,
just war, widely accepted today. States started to France, and China). They are granted veto power
realize that the use of force needs a certain level of through Article 27(3) of Chapter V. In most
control and regulations. International Humanitarian circumstances, Israel is protected by the US veto
Law (IHL), or Law of Armed Conflict, or the Law of War, power, although Israel breaches the jus ad bellum
become a prominent aspect in the 20th century with constantly.
Hague and Geneva Conventions. It was designed to
regulate the excesses of armed conflict by limiting the Obviously, asymmetry of power between big states
means and methods of warfare and limiting the and small states are really matters in imposing
suffering caused by war. responsibility of jus ad bellum over states. Israel, as a
powerful state backed by great power, tends to
Two functions of the IHL in the armed conflict interpret jus ad bellum in line with its national
performed by jus ad bellum and jus in bello. They interest and national security. In the process, jus ad
pave the guidelines for states to follow before and after bellum in the Palestinian case is usually sacrificed.
the war. Jus ad bellum refers to law towards war or Palestinians are not recognized by Israel to adopt the
justice in going to war. It discusses the objective of jus ad bellum. Palestinians fight for defending their
war, whether war is waged for self-defense or for territories (OPTs), often labeled as "terrorism."
protecting human rights. Justification of war is Scarcely real politics observe "self-defense" as a
imminent. Jus in bello refers to justice in the conduct fundamental cause of the Palestinian uprisings.
of war or law in the war. Jus in bello governs and Palestinians' self-defense spirit is usually equalized
seeks to moderate the actual conduct of hostilities. In with terrorism. "One man's terrorist is another man's
this regard, the question arises about Israel's freedom fighter" become a famous conception in world
occupation of the Palestinian territories and prolonged politics. In the Palestinian context, we cannot draw a
injustices to the Palestinians in the Israel-Palestinian fine line between the fight for freedom and self-defense.
conflict for almost 72 years. Hamas in Gaza is standing in this controversial status.
For Palestinians, Hamas are the freedom fighters who
Article 2(4) and Chapter VII of the UN Charter are the are fighting for the self-defense of Palestine. But for
major sources of jus ad bellum. Article 2(4) reads, "All Israel and other like-minded nations, Hamas are the
Members shall refrain in their international relations terrorists. How to justify jus ad bellum in the conflict?
from the threat or use of force against the territorial
integrity or political independence of any State, or in The second function of the IHL refers to jus in bello.
any other manner inconsistent with the Purpose of the Jus in bello is about state behavior during the war
United Nations." Chapter VII of the UN Charter refers and after the war. Jus in bello was developed through
to "Actions with respect to threats to the peace, the Geneva Law and the Hague Law. Hague
breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression." conferences of 1899 and 1907 establish conventions
Chapter VII consists of article 39-51. In the case of the to prohibit the use of expanding bullets, dropping of
Israel-Palestinian conflict, we find many grey areas to bombs from balloons, use of projectiles to diffuse
apply the Chapter VII. Chapter VII provides no gases, use of landmines and use of chemical weapons.
guidance to define the term "aggression." The Security Geneva conventions in 1864, 1929 and 1949
Council is reluctant to provide the right definition of established guidance on how military combatants
"aggression." The Israel-Palestinian conflict is dragged must be treated, treatment of non-combatants, codify
into the complexity of international law. Israel rape in war as an international crime. Specifically, the
accused the Arab nations aggressed first against Israel Geneva Convention 1949 dealing with i) wounded and
as a newly born nation via the UN Resolution 181. The sick on land, ii) wounded, sick and shipwrecked at sea,
Arab nations who represented the Palestinians and iii) prisoners of war and civilians.
accused Israel of being an illegal force to establish a
state in the Palestinian land. Israel has a conflictual In reality, in many conflicts, states failed to conform to
understanding of "aggression." The question to ponder the IHL. The same goes for the Israel-Palestinian
is who the first aggressor is? conflict. Israel is prone to breach jus in bello in
pursuit of its national interest and national security.
In addition, Israel argues that Israel fought the war in Israel is unable to distinguish "non-combatants" from
self-defense, as articulated in jus ad bellum. In the "combatants." Israel also often ignores "protected
same way, the Arab nations argue that the war property" from "military objectives." Israel targets
launched against Israel to defend the Palestinian Palestinian civilians, their land, residences, houses,

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buildings, schools, historical monuments, hospitals,
medical transports, water sources, water
infrastructure, and olive cultivation in their war
against Palestinians, which are deliberate breaches
over jus in bello as coded in the Geneva Conventions.
Israel signed the Geneva Conventions in December
1949 and ratified them in 1951. Article 1 of each
convention states that the sponsors of the convention
will "respect and ensure respect for the conventions in
all circumstances".
On the contrary, Israel notoriously breaches the
Geneva Conventions amid international condemnation.
The CJPME (Canadian Justice and Peace in the
Middle East, 2004) reports how Israel establish
Jewish colonies (settlements), home demolitions,
collective punishment, wanton killing, detention,
inhumane treatment of civilians, forcible transfers,
assaults, and harassment of medical units and
personnel. Israel violated its responsibility as the
occupying power in the West Bank, East Jerusalem
and Gaza. Although Israel is under the condemnation
of the UN and international community, no state
could stop Israel's behavior in the Middle East. The
western nations, who are for the most part
responsible for creating the IHL, failed to convince
Israel to comply with the IHL.
The limitation of liberal institutions in the Israel-
Palestinian conflict is clear without further
explanation. Liberal institutions are false promises in
real politics. Power plays an important role in the
conflict. The powerful states, like Israel, are able to
bend all rules to achieve their national interest.
International law is always secondary to Israel after
the national interest. Possessing less power in the
global system is a punishment for many weak and
small states. They are forced to bow down to the
powerful one. Palestinians are experiencing this
humility for many decades. International
Humanitarian Law exists only by name without
sufficient power to press Israel to obey. In fact, jus ad
bellum and jus in bello were prisoned by realism.
Understandably, the anarchic condition of the
international system is the main factor causing the
collapse besides power. Sir Hersch Lauterpacht (1952)
asserts, "If international law is …the vanishing point
of law, the law of war is even more conspicuously the
vanishing point of international law."
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