The Only Path Forward
The first step toward coexistence for Israelis and Palestinians—and toward the resolution of the conflict between them—must be the abandonment of the zero-sum mentality that has suffused thinking about the conflict for far too long. And it’s not just the Israelis and Palestinians who have fallen victim to such thinking. In Western and Arab capitals, elites have chosen to view the issue through ethnic, religious, colonialist, and geopolitical frameworks that are simplistic, woefully misguided, and incompatible with their oft-stated commitment to universal values.
There is nothing unpatriotic or disloyal about understanding another people’s history and its foundational narratives. This is simply sound strategy, undergirded by normal human empathy. Each dead-end eruption of violence has put paid to the notion of a military solution; reconciliation is the only path forward. The parties should not be asked to reach a consensus on the historical record of the past 140 years in the region. But they can, and should, learn to understand each other well enough to build a shared future around a promise of mutual recognition, equal rights, security, and prosperity.
The simple fact is that two peoples, in roughly equal numbers and with distinct national identities, reside in the territory that lies between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Israel exercises various degrees of hegemony over that territory, which includes Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. The people who reside there, however, have been sorted by Israel into four primary categories. There are Israeli Jews (including West Bank settlers), who enjoy exclusive first-class citizenship in the Israeli state, as most recently enshrined in Israel’s 2018 nation-state law. There are Palestinian citizens of Israel, who have political rights but suffer discrimination within the state. There are Palestinians in the West Bank, who live as noncitizens under foreign-military occupation, or who contend with Israeli-settler encroachment and violence. And there are Palestinians in Gaza, who live as noncitizens under a military blockade and are currently suffering through Israel’s brutal military campaign.
This four-layered arrangement is inherently unjust, unstable, and unsustainable. In the postcolonial world, ethnic domination is simply not going to fly. Sooner or later, a formula for coexistence undergirded by legal, political, and social equality must be found.
The latest explosion in the tortured history of this land began on October 7, with Hamas’s brutal attack in southern Israel that killed more than 1,100 Israelis. Since then, 33,000 Gazans have been killed, according to Hamas’s Health Ministry. Some 1.9 million Gazans have been displaced, and most of the Strip has been destroyed. The onset of disease, famine, and chaos will only exacerbate the human devastation in the months to come. The emotional and political impact—in the region and globally—is likely to be generational. Once the difficult triage work of bringing the violence to a halt, ensuring the return of all hostages, and restoring some level of stability to Gaza is complete, the world community must prioritize a genuine political resolution to this most vexing and intractable of conflicts.
Promises of a “total victory”—whether Israeli fantasies of enforcing military submission or expulsion, or Palestinian visions of an international restoration of pre–Balfour Declaration Palestine—undermine progress toward peace. Such chimerical ideologies would damn the populations of the region to many more years of violence and cruelty. The purveyors of these atavistic yearnings, no matter how sincerely they feel them, must be marginalized. People of goodwill, who genuinely believe in a peaceful future and who can prioritize their reverence for universal values over tribalism, will be the ones who bring about peace. For far too long, ideological extremism, political cowardice, cynical exploitation, and war profiteering have been ceded an effective veto power over finding a pragmatic resolution to the conflict, while the blood of the Palestinian and Israeli peoples continues to flow.
The question of Israel and Palestine needs to be reframed and recalibrated. Relitigating years of violence and atrocities may make for good television or social-media spats, but it does nothing to promote peace. There is no need for either side to submit to the other’s narrative or to admit their own singular culpability.
Rather, the paramount focus must be on a shared future built on equality, the rule of law, justice, compromise, and the rejection of ethnic or sectarian supremacy. The elevation of these principles from sloganeering to practice will be the basis of any just and lasting resolution. Those who embrace them need to engage in the effort to bring about peace—and those who do not can watch their influence ebb as history passes them by.