Abir Sultan/Pool Photo via AP
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends a press conference with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Cabinet Minister Benny Gantz in Tel Aviv, Israel, October 28, 2023. Netanyahu has refused to accept any responsibility for the October 7 attacks.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love …
—W.B. Yeats, from his poem cycle “Meditations in Time of Civil War”
The fantasy now gruesomely playing out in Israel and Palestine is shared by both Hamas and the Netanyahu government: a homogeneous state, devoid of either Jews or Palestinians, depending. Each understands that to turn its fantasy into actuality, it needs to bolster the other and undermine any groups that might advance the prospects for some form of coexistence.
Hence, Hamas’s main attacks on Israelis have come at the very moments when the prospect of coexistence loomed largest. Following the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, his foreign minister Shimon Peres was favored to win the next election and push strongly for a two-state settlement. To fend off that looming horror, Hamas launched a wave of attacks against Israelis, setting off four deadly bombings against civilian targets (buses, downtown Tel Aviv) in a nine-day period, which had the desired effect of convincing just enough Israelis that no two-state deal would work. Peres was sent down to a stunning defeat at the hands of a newcomer to the PM’s office—Bibi Netanyahu.
On October 7th, to block some kind of deal by which the Saudis would recognize Israel and do something, however inadequate, for Palestinians in the West Bank, Hamas sunk to the occasion again.
Bibi clearly understands his debt to Hamas, absent whom it’s likely he never would have been elected. In his nearly decade and a half in power, he’s consistently undermined and finally repudiated Israel’s commitment to a two-state solution, consistently pushing so many settlers into the West Bank that Palestinians have been confined to ever-smaller Bantustans. He’s also consistently refused to grant any legitimacy to the Palestinian Authority, making sure it could never effectively defend Palestinian interests, lest anyone consider it a credible partner in a two-state solution.
The continued existence of Hamas, on the other hand, mocked those Israelis who said that coexistence was possible, much less necessary. In this week’s New Yorker, David Remnick writes about a closed-door meeting with supporters in which Bibi reportedly said, “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state must support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy.”
Thus, a historic codependency that has brought death and ruin to both Palestinians and Israelis. Bibi’s current avowedly racist government and Hamas both seek homogeneous states that extend from the river to the sea—goals that can only be realized through cataclysmic violence. Each needs the other’s provocations to justify its own violence.
Any number of Israelis and Palestinians understand this, but in time of war, as Yeats (writing in the time of the Irish Civil War) understood, hearts grow brutal. Nonetheless, many Israelis who live inside the state’s 1948 borders have no great love for the West Bank settlers who’ve kept the region on the permanent edge of violence, who’ve been a moving force behind the rise of anti-Israeli sentiment internationally, who’ve been an electoral base of support for Bibi’s efforts to undermine Israeli democracy, and whose coddling by Bibi’s government has drained resources that could have been better used elsewhere (like border defenses around Gaza).
If the Biden administration seriously wishes to help solve this bloodiest of impasses (and begin to diminish a fast-growing rift within its own Democratic Party ranks), it must get serious about the two-state solution advanced under Bill Clinton’s presidency. The only way to do that is to condition all future aid to Israel on the withdrawal of its settlements from the West Bank. As the great majority of American Jews (as distinct from Christian evangelicals) do not believe that Israel has a divine right to that ostensibly biblically granted land, making the case for that withdrawal to his Jewish constituents (and to his fellow Democrats and any stray realpolitikniks across the political spectrum) shouldn’t be beyond Joe Biden’s capacity, particularly given the pro-Israeli capital he’s earned.
That would be capital well and strategically spent.
