This is the second article I read about the current iteration of the conflict in the American press, and I want to say that Matt continues to be pretty good. Not just compared to the American competition (NYT: "Israel bombed a hospital with 500 dead civilians."), but good in general. Thank you!
I have slight disagreements, of course (my understanding is that negotiations in 2007-08 broke down at a more preliminary stage than at the 2000 Camp David Summit, so I think that the closest the two parties got to peace was 2000), but I think my main disagreement is about the practical reality of the settlements. I think that an important reason why Hamas hasn't consolidated control of the West Bank as well is that settlements break the territorial continuity between the main cities there, so continued Israeli occupation without the settlements would be difficult or impossible. I also think that without the occupation, the West Bank would turn into Gaza, as Hamas is clearly more popular in the West Bank than any other organization like Fatah or PIJ. In other words, while I think "I dislike both the settlers in the West Bank and the rocket attacks on Tel Aviv."* is a consistent moral position, I think it's not a consistent practical position.
Matt's whole argument these days is that this problem is nearly impossible to solve, and yet my main disagreement is that I think that the problem is even harder than what this article says.
PS: I'm glad I'm posting AFTER City Of Trees!
*I'm an atheist, so I have no sympathy for religious zealots.
Thanks Matt for giving your views (I know you would like to spend less time on this issue). I mostly agree with them, except that I think it underestimates the extensive antisemitism and anti-Israel hatred. Even if Israel was better on the West Bank, the International community would unfairly be treating Israel (and people would be treating Jews) to major problems with regard to Gaza.
I also think Israel would be less likely to lean towards right wing governments if less of the criticism was framed as talk about the legitimacy of the state.
No matter how valid the moral appeal, people tend to hunker down (and even commit moral atrocities) when they feel their existence or even important aspects of their life are threatened.
But trying to persuade someone doing bad things to be better by making them feel safe might be more effective (especially when they can point to worse behavior by others) but it's much less emotionally satisfying to anyone who feels strongly about the wrong.
What prevents a deoccupied West Bank from turning into what Gaza is now? Gaza-ify the West Bank and the outcomes are almost too horrible to contemplate. Lots of discussion of the Iraq War and Arab Spring these past weeks, but if there’s one lesson to be learned from them, it’s that Things Can Always Get Worse, and ending an unjust status quo can just create a much, much worse situation for all sides involved.
I feel kind of wierd about the extent to which 10/7 has made Israel's bad act in the West Bank a prominent part of the discourse. It isn't like Israel is doing much different there before 10/7 but the amount of criticism it has been getting for it has gone up significantly.
The thing is, Israel deserves a lot of criticism for the West Bank, but the timing is wierd. If you look at terrorism as a way to bring attention to a cause, it is almost an example of Hamas' attack "working," but you don't want to encourage such things. It also seems like a way to both-sides the attack.
I'm not sure I really have a point here, it just doesn't sit right with me.
I think the Israeli public believe that even if they found a Palestinian partner to take a two state deal, that partner would never be able to deliver the peace that was supposed to be the dividend, either because of lack of desire or the partner would not survive as leader of the Palestinians. I'm not sure reinstalling Fatah in Gaza will go any better the second time unless there's an outside force keeping them in power.
I think the two state window has probably closed, barring the rise of some amazingly charismatic moderate Palestinian leader who could unite most Palestinians. I think the Israeli plan will be to withdraw from Gaza, but this time with more ability to intervene and better border buffering, and to continue status quo in the West Bank
This is completely correct as an analysis of what should be done.
But as the very comments here demonstrate, that's just not what people are interested in discussing. As humans we naturally want to blame and punish so we have lots of trouble dealing with a situation where we have some leverage and moral influence over one actor who could massively reduce suffering by changing policies but where it's bad behavior is less bad than that of the other actors.
Unfortunately the net result of all this is to push Israel further down it's right wing course because instead of treating Israel's bad behavior the way we treat bad behavior by the Turks or Egyptians (sad and unfortunate) we instead can't seem to resist somehow placing it into some kind of judgement about the state's legitimacy.
I think Matt is going too easy on the Gaza airstrikes.
It's true that causing civilian deaths in pursuit of a military objective isn't always wrong. But the problem here is that there is no military objective, much less a political one.
Hamas has always been committed to the destruction of the Jewish state. That was true for the 16 years that Gaza's borders were successfully sealed, and it isn't any more true now than it was then. The only thing that's changed is that Israel has suffered an enormous intelligence and security failure which allowed the border to be breached for a couple of days.
There's not much chance now of another unexpected direct attack, although the rocket launches will continue (and mostly be intercepted by Iron Dome). So what exactly are the airstrikes supposed to accomplish--apart from revenge against the civilian population, which the Israelis don't bother denying is their primary purpose?
The fact that many Palestinians support violence against Israeli civilians makes the problem harder, not easier. Nobody can seriously think that bombing Gaza will improve their attitudes on that point.
The only reasonable thing for Israel to do now is reinforce the border, start taking out individual Hamas perpetrators (to the extent that's possible... America did it with al-Zawahiri in Kabul, after all) and then start to think about why so many Palestinians want to exterminate them and what kind of policies might make them change their minds. But Netanyahu's government has no intention of doing any of those things.
I absolutely agree that the US needs to deprioritize Israel and give it a smaller share of Washington's foreign policy attention. But that's exactly why calling for a ceasefire and condemning the airstrikes more forcefully--even if it had had no effect at all on Israel's behavior--would have been the right approach. America's credibility in the Muslim world is completely shot now, and that's going to have disastrous effects in places that matter much more than Palestine.
One quibble - Turkey is a NATO member, so with Article V, the U.S. is in some sense more closely tied to Turkey than to Ukraine or to Israel.
I agree with most of the moral judgements you make in this article. But I think splitting the issues of Gaza and the issues of the West Bank misses a key feature of the political dynamic: The swift rise of Hamas in Gaza after Israel's 2005 withdrawal discredited the idea of territorial concessions / a two-state solution in the eyes of the median Israeli voter. The median Israeli voter looks at Gaza and says: if we reverse the occupation of the West Bank, a Hamas-like entity will take control of the West Bank, and Tel Aviv will be under constant rocket fire.
I used to believe that at least some of the "people who chant 'from the river to the sea' ... favor the creation of a secular democracy with equal rights for all." But if they say it AND refuse to condemn the 10/7 attacks, I think it's completely reasonable not to take their professed beliefs seriously. The shock that I and so many Jews felt after 10/7 was that there are so many such people in the world, even in the US. People who refuse to condemn the 10/7 attack, and surely those who celebrate it and call for more Intifada, are calling for another genocide of the Jews.
One more thing: Matt's 5-point plan is unrealistic, but if it doesn't include an immediate release of all hostages, then Israel would be stupid to agree to it. No Israeli government ever would have agreed to it.
If everyone between the river and the sea could vote without slaughtering one another, liberal Jews and Arabs who live in Israel would hold the balance of power. The median voter between the river and the sea would not be bent upon a genocidal rampage and might prove pretty good at transactional politics.
Of course, this will never happen because zionists are a powerful majority in Israel and irredentists are a powerful majority in Palestine. Both sides have used political violence to thwart compromise. Both sides want to gerrymander things so that their coalition will prevail. The essence of zionism is gerrymandering-- excluding non Jews from political power so that Jewish culture can fully blossom. West bank Palestinians didn’t even have elections until recently and have never been able to elect a government that can control and defend its territory. Neither side cares about liberal democracy, both want to control ballot access to get their desired outcomes and are willing to do so at the point of a gun.
In the reality after October 7th, the legitimacy of the settlements in the West Bank for 30 percent of Israelis comes from history and the Bible (some of the ultra-Orthodox, even the legendary late Shas leader Ovadia Yosef, actually oppose this argument because they see the people of Israel as if they are still in exile). For 50 percent, the understanding that a 'Palestinian state' is not the end of history in the Fukuyama sense, but rather another terrorist entity that will eventually be controlled by jihadists, and 20 percent truly despise the settlements.
An important point is missed here. Palestinians were first willing to engage in a serious peace process in a very specific geopolitical moment- with the fall of the Soviet Union that sponsored them and a unipolar American moment. The Israeli public responded to the same moment by an (briefly) ascendant pro peace left.’ Arab countries mostly were willing to make peace when they wanted to switch from the Soviet to western alliance. Right now we’re in a sort of Cold War 2.0. Hamas is sponsored by Iran which is increasingly allied with China and Russia. Recent Arab normalization was facilities by fear of Iran. It’s possible that a solution would be determined by this larger power struggle and how they various parties fit within it. Ukraine for one is eager to tie the conflicts together with Israel’s (if came out strongly on Israel’s side- a gesture unfortunately not yet reciprocated by the Israeli government). Russia is increasingly overtly on the Hamas side and to a lesser extent so is China. The key for American interests is to tie more Arab (and if possible Palestinian) parties to the American pro peace side. At the same time supporting the liberal side within Israel against the authoritarian populism of Netanyahu which, like its polish and esp.
Hungarian counterparts is also ultimately softer on the pro American anti western interests.
This is the second article I read about the current iteration of the conflict in the American press, and I want to say that Matt continues to be pretty good. Not just compared to the American competition (NYT: "Israel bombed a hospital with 500 dead civilians."), but good in general. Thank you!
I have slight disagreements, of course (my understanding is that negotiations in 2007-08 broke down at a more preliminary stage than at the 2000 Camp David Summit, so I think that the closest the two parties got to peace was 2000), but I think my main disagreement is about the practical reality of the settlements. I think that an important reason why Hamas hasn't consolidated control of the West Bank as well is that settlements break the territorial continuity between the main cities there, so continued Israeli occupation without the settlements would be difficult or impossible. I also think that without the occupation, the West Bank would turn into Gaza, as Hamas is clearly more popular in the West Bank than any other organization like Fatah or PIJ. In other words, while I think "I dislike both the settlers in the West Bank and the rocket attacks on Tel Aviv."* is a consistent moral position, I think it's not a consistent practical position.
Matt's whole argument these days is that this problem is nearly impossible to solve, and yet my main disagreement is that I think that the problem is even harder than what this article says.
PS: I'm glad I'm posting AFTER City Of Trees!
*I'm an atheist, so I have no sympathy for religious zealots.
Thanks Matt for giving your views (I know you would like to spend less time on this issue). I mostly agree with them, except that I think it underestimates the extensive antisemitism and anti-Israel hatred. Even if Israel was better on the West Bank, the International community would unfairly be treating Israel (and people would be treating Jews) to major problems with regard to Gaza.
I also think Israel would be less likely to lean towards right wing governments if less of the criticism was framed as talk about the legitimacy of the state.
No matter how valid the moral appeal, people tend to hunker down (and even commit moral atrocities) when they feel their existence or even important aspects of their life are threatened.
But trying to persuade someone doing bad things to be better by making them feel safe might be more effective (especially when they can point to worse behavior by others) but it's much less emotionally satisfying to anyone who feels strongly about the wrong.
What prevents a deoccupied West Bank from turning into what Gaza is now? Gaza-ify the West Bank and the outcomes are almost too horrible to contemplate. Lots of discussion of the Iraq War and Arab Spring these past weeks, but if there’s one lesson to be learned from them, it’s that Things Can Always Get Worse, and ending an unjust status quo can just create a much, much worse situation for all sides involved.
I feel kind of wierd about the extent to which 10/7 has made Israel's bad act in the West Bank a prominent part of the discourse. It isn't like Israel is doing much different there before 10/7 but the amount of criticism it has been getting for it has gone up significantly.
The thing is, Israel deserves a lot of criticism for the West Bank, but the timing is wierd. If you look at terrorism as a way to bring attention to a cause, it is almost an example of Hamas' attack "working," but you don't want to encourage such things. It also seems like a way to both-sides the attack.
I'm not sure I really have a point here, it just doesn't sit right with me.
I think the Israeli public believe that even if they found a Palestinian partner to take a two state deal, that partner would never be able to deliver the peace that was supposed to be the dividend, either because of lack of desire or the partner would not survive as leader of the Palestinians. I'm not sure reinstalling Fatah in Gaza will go any better the second time unless there's an outside force keeping them in power.
I think the two state window has probably closed, barring the rise of some amazingly charismatic moderate Palestinian leader who could unite most Palestinians. I think the Israeli plan will be to withdraw from Gaza, but this time with more ability to intervene and better border buffering, and to continue status quo in the West Bank
There have been two states since Israel exited Gaza in 2005.
What you’re proposing is the installment of a pro-western autocratic puppet regime, aka Fatah. Because free elections would favor Hamas.
This is completely correct as an analysis of what should be done.
But as the very comments here demonstrate, that's just not what people are interested in discussing. As humans we naturally want to blame and punish so we have lots of trouble dealing with a situation where we have some leverage and moral influence over one actor who could massively reduce suffering by changing policies but where it's bad behavior is less bad than that of the other actors.
Unfortunately the net result of all this is to push Israel further down it's right wing course because instead of treating Israel's bad behavior the way we treat bad behavior by the Turks or Egyptians (sad and unfortunate) we instead can't seem to resist somehow placing it into some kind of judgement about the state's legitimacy.
I think Matt is going too easy on the Gaza airstrikes.
It's true that causing civilian deaths in pursuit of a military objective isn't always wrong. But the problem here is that there is no military objective, much less a political one.
Hamas has always been committed to the destruction of the Jewish state. That was true for the 16 years that Gaza's borders were successfully sealed, and it isn't any more true now than it was then. The only thing that's changed is that Israel has suffered an enormous intelligence and security failure which allowed the border to be breached for a couple of days.
There's not much chance now of another unexpected direct attack, although the rocket launches will continue (and mostly be intercepted by Iron Dome). So what exactly are the airstrikes supposed to accomplish--apart from revenge against the civilian population, which the Israelis don't bother denying is their primary purpose?
The fact that many Palestinians support violence against Israeli civilians makes the problem harder, not easier. Nobody can seriously think that bombing Gaza will improve their attitudes on that point.
The only reasonable thing for Israel to do now is reinforce the border, start taking out individual Hamas perpetrators (to the extent that's possible... America did it with al-Zawahiri in Kabul, after all) and then start to think about why so many Palestinians want to exterminate them and what kind of policies might make them change their minds. But Netanyahu's government has no intention of doing any of those things.
I absolutely agree that the US needs to deprioritize Israel and give it a smaller share of Washington's foreign policy attention. But that's exactly why calling for a ceasefire and condemning the airstrikes more forcefully--even if it had had no effect at all on Israel's behavior--would have been the right approach. America's credibility in the Muslim world is completely shot now, and that's going to have disastrous effects in places that matter much more than Palestine.
There are two powerful and opposed forces in the universe:
-- My desire, like Matt says, for the US to step back and apply a lot of benign neglect toward the Israel/Palestinian conflict
-- My desire to weigh in with posts and comments on every new development, especially when Someone Is Wrong on the Internet.
Well, I'm going to take a stand today and comment on this conflict no further, unless as I read the comments I find someone is being wrong.
One quibble - Turkey is a NATO member, so with Article V, the U.S. is in some sense more closely tied to Turkey than to Ukraine or to Israel.
I agree with most of the moral judgements you make in this article. But I think splitting the issues of Gaza and the issues of the West Bank misses a key feature of the political dynamic: The swift rise of Hamas in Gaza after Israel's 2005 withdrawal discredited the idea of territorial concessions / a two-state solution in the eyes of the median Israeli voter. The median Israeli voter looks at Gaza and says: if we reverse the occupation of the West Bank, a Hamas-like entity will take control of the West Bank, and Tel Aviv will be under constant rocket fire.
I 100% endorse Matt’s proposal of disengagement. It is as humble as it is wise.
I used to believe that at least some of the "people who chant 'from the river to the sea' ... favor the creation of a secular democracy with equal rights for all." But if they say it AND refuse to condemn the 10/7 attacks, I think it's completely reasonable not to take their professed beliefs seriously. The shock that I and so many Jews felt after 10/7 was that there are so many such people in the world, even in the US. People who refuse to condemn the 10/7 attack, and surely those who celebrate it and call for more Intifada, are calling for another genocide of the Jews.
One more thing: Matt's 5-point plan is unrealistic, but if it doesn't include an immediate release of all hostages, then Israel would be stupid to agree to it. No Israeli government ever would have agreed to it.
If everyone between the river and the sea could vote without slaughtering one another, liberal Jews and Arabs who live in Israel would hold the balance of power. The median voter between the river and the sea would not be bent upon a genocidal rampage and might prove pretty good at transactional politics.
Of course, this will never happen because zionists are a powerful majority in Israel and irredentists are a powerful majority in Palestine. Both sides have used political violence to thwart compromise. Both sides want to gerrymander things so that their coalition will prevail. The essence of zionism is gerrymandering-- excluding non Jews from political power so that Jewish culture can fully blossom. West bank Palestinians didn’t even have elections until recently and have never been able to elect a government that can control and defend its territory. Neither side cares about liberal democracy, both want to control ballot access to get their desired outcomes and are willing to do so at the point of a gun.
In the reality after October 7th, the legitimacy of the settlements in the West Bank for 30 percent of Israelis comes from history and the Bible (some of the ultra-Orthodox, even the legendary late Shas leader Ovadia Yosef, actually oppose this argument because they see the people of Israel as if they are still in exile). For 50 percent, the understanding that a 'Palestinian state' is not the end of history in the Fukuyama sense, but rather another terrorist entity that will eventually be controlled by jihadists, and 20 percent truly despise the settlements.
An important point is missed here. Palestinians were first willing to engage in a serious peace process in a very specific geopolitical moment- with the fall of the Soviet Union that sponsored them and a unipolar American moment. The Israeli public responded to the same moment by an (briefly) ascendant pro peace left.’ Arab countries mostly were willing to make peace when they wanted to switch from the Soviet to western alliance. Right now we’re in a sort of Cold War 2.0. Hamas is sponsored by Iran which is increasingly allied with China and Russia. Recent Arab normalization was facilities by fear of Iran. It’s possible that a solution would be determined by this larger power struggle and how they various parties fit within it. Ukraine for one is eager to tie the conflicts together with Israel’s (if came out strongly on Israel’s side- a gesture unfortunately not yet reciprocated by the Israeli government). Russia is increasingly overtly on the Hamas side and to a lesser extent so is China. The key for American interests is to tie more Arab (and if possible Palestinian) parties to the American pro peace side. At the same time supporting the liberal side within Israel against the authoritarian populism of Netanyahu which, like its polish and esp.
Hungarian counterparts is also ultimately softer on the pro American anti western interests.