Great post! I've learned a lot from this and your other posts on the conflict. But I think "actually, the real problem is housing and transit policy in Tel Aviv" deserves some sort of award for Most Yglesian Take of 2023 :-)
1. We largely don't really know what Palestinians' demands for an acceptable state are. If you listen to Tareq Baconi's recent appearance on Ezra Klein's podcast, for instance, he claims that the right of return is *an absolute minimum* demand for Palestinians. He seems to believe Hamas was in the right to scuttle the peace process, since the right of return was never on the table. Ezra seems shocked at how crazy all of this sounds.
By all appearances, though, Palestinians seem to be willing to endure extreme suffering in order to avoid accepting anything that is less than their minimum acceptable state. So it's important to actually figure out what those demands are, and no one has ever articulated them.
EDIT: Some commenters have noted that I misunderstood Baconi (keeping the original just so others can see what I had written before being corrected). What he's saying, apparently, is that Israel needs to *acknowledge* a right to return. But still, I'd like to know exactly what is considered an acceptable offer of a state.
2. It's telling that we have this assumption that a two-state solution requires some plan to evacuate the Jews from the West Bank. On the other hand, we never talk about a two-state solution requiring a symmetric plan to evacuate Arabs from Israel. Even the staunchest leftists operate under this assumption without realizing how damning it is.
Why do we make this assumption? Everyone knows why.
3. I also find it odd that discourse always talks about this issue as though the more powerful party needs to be the one to make concessions. So, for example, Barak's offer of a state is considered "insulting" because it didn't include exactly 100% of the West Bank, and there was no mention of the patently insane "right of return." Shouldn't Israel be willing to give Palestinians a little more, given that they hold all the cards?
This logic is really never applied anywhere else, for obvious reasons. In conflicts, losers make concessions, not winners! Has a country ever lost this many *offensive* wars against an opponent and then felt entitled to make demands?
I dunno, I still just see two groups who don't want a solution & therefore they are not finding a solution. I find the whole issue terribly dull and would prefer Americans refocus on problems we need to solve here.
This is the first time I’ve read a Slow Boring post that I felt was completely detached from reality.
“A two state solution has gotten safer” - are we just memory holing the last 18 years in Gaza? Is the marginal Israeli in 2008 voting against a 2SS not supposed to have noticed that the absolute first thing Gazans did with the foundations of a state is direct their efforts towards terrorism? And we know now that that continued for another 15 years culminating in the absurd barbarity of Oct. 7th.
This failure to consider the implications of eliminationist terrorism for Israeli safety is shot through this analysis - did Arafat blunder by not providing a counter, or perhaps by launching the Second Intifada with suicide bombings on Israeli civilians eating pizza and riding the bus?
I simply don’t understand how you can tell this story without reference to the terrorism that was part and parcel of its “negotiations”.
If Palestine becomes a state, and the West Bank is no longer occupied, doesn't Hamas or similar entities just take over like they did in Gaza? Edit: The article alludes to Jordan, Egypt, UAE stopping this but I don't understand the mechanism. Their own occupation of the West Bank?
When the median voter agrees strongly with the policy, "If you see a jew, it is moral to kill them", can't imagine them having a democracy.
1. Most Israelis that are not willing to compromise in terms of lands are doing it for reasons of security. They are afraid that it will be a re-run of the terror attacks that we suffered during the 90s and early 2000s, or the hamas land that is now controlling Gaza, after it was evacuated completely, but we didnt have a day of peace since.
2. The extreme religious right, sees the West Bank settlements as their main priority, even more than the existence of Israel, and like all religious groups are willing to take very extreme measures to obtain this aim, not matter what are the costs. They have outsized control in the right wing politics in Israel which gives them power like they never deserved. Their presence in the west bank is the main source of friction with the local population which makes everything much more complicated and make their human rights to suffer in an unmoral way.
Personally i think, we (Israel) should return to 1967 lines as much as possible and where its not, give other land in return. For several years we can keep pure military presence only where its needed and later create a border and treat this land like an enemy state, like Lebanon for example.
Good article. But the 1948 partition wasn’t rejected because the Arab states thought it was a bad deal in terms of land percentages (also, the Jewish state was mostly useless Negev desert). They rejected the existence of a Jewish state in the region. They invaded to destroy it, not to reduce its size.
I support a two-state solution but I find it puzzling that Matt has a whole section in his post here about how the two state solution is now safer but it only focuses on Israel's relationships with other states and completely neglects the non-state actor security component which has been the real sticking point since at least the 1990s and has become considerably more salient since October 7.
Israel withdraws from Gaza in 2005 and Hamas overthrows the PA and turns Gaza into a terrorist state that regularly fires rockets at every major Israeli population center, and sends teams over to abduct and/or kill Israelis. It's started at least three wars with Israel since 2005, and on October 7 of this year thousands of Gaza's (Hamas and civilians) invaded the country proper and murdered 1400 citizens, including about 1000 citizens.
The West Bank has been a lot quieter but Hamas and Islamic Jihad are clearly still operating there, and Israel maintains a strong and active security presence in much of the West Bank. It's hard to be sanguine about the PA's chances of not collapsing following a complete Israeli withdrawal.
Yes, Syria is a collapsed state, and Lebanon has no interest in starting a war with Israel but Syria and Lebanon are such weak states that they cannot stop terrorist groups from attacking from their borders.
This is the real problem - not that Jordan is going to invade.
The thing that Israelis need to be convinced of is that surrendering security control over the Palestinian territories won't lead to Gaza writ large except within the municipal borders of Jerusalem and 10 miles from Tel Aviv.
I agree with MY’s overall message. Both Israelis and Palestinians should reaffirm their commitment to an eventual 2-state solution. Even if conditions don’t exist now for the negotiations, both sides should work towards creating those conditions. And pro-Palestinian advocates who take maximalist and radical positions rather than make a reasonable political platform are doing the Palestinian people a disservice.
However, I think MY makes several mistakes. First, I think his characterization of the Israeli side of the peace process is wrong. From what I understand, Olmert and Abbas (as well as Tzipi Livni and Palestinian negotiator Qurei) had dozens of negotiation sessions. The Palestinian papers do suggest that Abbas actively participated in the negotiations and were willing to make significant concessions. However, Olmert’s final offer was rejected by Abbas primarily because he wasn’t allowed to take home the map and didn’t have time to study it. And no Abbas did not give a counterproposal to that. Instead, Olmert resigned, and peace negotiations were stalled because of the invasion of Gaza, the subsequent election, and several other factors. Whether you think Israel’s offers were generous or not is a matter of opinion. But I do not think it’s the case that this was a last minute effort, rather a process that the parties worked on for a long while.
Second, in his analysis, he acknowledges the security risk of the West Bank turning into a launching pad for attacks on Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa. But his answer to this is that Arab states friendly to Israel will prevent that. What evidence do we have that this is the case? Did Egypt or Jordan prevent Hamas from taking Gaza or using it to launch attacks? How about the UAE or Saudi. Egypt has worked with Israel to impose the blockade (which is something), but I think the message is that Israel cannot count on the Arab world from providing its security from Palestinians terror.
This is what is so critical. Discounting the far right, who are ideologically opposed to a 2SS, the typical Israeli believes that a 2SS must come with some real security assurances. People may disagree that those security assurances are. But without security assurances, the thing is dead in the water. Because the threat of rockets being able to be launched from the higher ground of the West Back down to Ben Gurion airport or to Tel Aviv is a real and serious threat.
Because of this, a 2SS and an end to occupation can only occur in a negotiated settlement with a PA that has legitimacy and the power to control the more radical Palestinian factions from unleashing violence in response to such agreement. Israel did unilateral withdrawal in 2005 from Gaza and Olmert toyed with the idea of doing the same thing in 90% of the West Bank (which never came to be). Unilateral withdrawal is not the answer.
And with Hamas in control of Gaza and an ineffectual, illegitimate PA in the West Bank (and frankly a right wing government in Israel), the conditions for such an agreement that can both create a 2SS and ensure security do not exist. I think there are things that Israel can do unilaterally to help possibly one day bring about the conditions, instead of sabotaging them. But it also requires Palestinian leadership to be able to show that they can check the power of their most radical elements and prevent them from using violence as a spoiler.
I wholeheartedly disagree with the framing of two-state as cringe. What's cringe is the Norman Fikelstein/selective revisionism/utopianism. You can disagree about whether Palestine is still morally righteous in trying to expel the "invaders" after losing 3 wars. You can disagree about whether Arafat took the peace attempts seriously and Israel was bad-faith or he was acting cynically. But anybody seriously proposing anything other than 2-state as a solution to the *current* situation - who thinks that the best outcome is that the entire region of present Israel and present Palestine, be merged and left to democratic whims, without acknowledging - well, the last 75 years - is truly cringe.
Israel certainly has done bad things, and Netanyahu is an asshole. This does not change the fact that as long as Gaza is controlled by a murderous death cult, negotiations are going to be somewhere between super hard and impossible. I, like Matt Y, support a two-state solution (or a three-state solution; see Noah Smith's recent article), but how do you get from here to there?
All possible solutions have huge obstacles -- which means the real obstacle is both sides deciding what hard choices they are willing to make.
A two state solution requires the following:
- Evacuation of settlements in the center of the West Bank and giving up Israel's demands that would have prevented territorial contiguity for Palestine. this will require pulling settlers out, kicking and screaming, from places like Ofra and Kiryat Arba. It will be brutal and ugly. The proposed "land swaps" to avoid having to rehouse so many people closer to the border may not be so acceptable to the people living on them (Palestinian citizens of Israel may be discriminated against, and may want a "state of all its citizens," but they don't want to be transferred to Palestine, as some plans have had them.)
- Palestinians need to give up the right of return. This always results in "but this allows Israel to be a racist ethnostate," but the *point* of the two state solution is "two states for two peoples." This objection is really an objection to the two state solution itself, and should be characterized as such.
The alternative is one state. And advocates aren't always clear about what kind of state that would be.
Israeli right wingers want "one state" -- the Greater Land of Israel. They think Palestinians will leave or will live under subjugation. This is a pipe dream.
Pro Palestinian advocates want one of two things:
- A single state of Palestine, where, by dint of numbers, Palestinians would form a majority and be in charge. The potential difficulties with that are obvious.
- An explicitly binational state (also advocated by some left wing Jews). This would explicitly protect Jewish rights as a group. The issue here is that it could turn out like Lebanon, paralyzed and incapable of functioning.
Advocates of the binational state say that a two state solution is impossible because qe have a one-state reality and we've passed the tipping point. They are not entirely wrong about that, given the increasing Israeli stranglehold over the West Bank. Where I think they are wrong is that they believe a binational state or confederation would allow people to sidestep hard solutions over settlements. It would eliminate arguments over the largest settlements closest to the 1967 line. But it ignores the reality of the settlement program, especially in the central West Bank. The settlements were planned to disrupt Palestinian territorial continuity and to grab land from Palestinian villages, and in the more right wing settlements, they want confrontation with Palestinians. Even around Jerusalem, the ring neighborhoods and new settlements present problems. They were designed to make Israeli rule permanent.
(this is why it would not be possible, as some settlers claim to want, to allow them to remain under Palestinian administration. They are NOT going to live peacefully with their neighbors, they are going to continue to demand land.)
America is flooding in weapons (200 cargo planes since the start of the war, as of a couple of weeks ago) and straight out US forces (2 carrier groups!!) to safeguard Israel's flanks. This is 1000x more significant than what Jacobin and other leftists tweet out, harmful though that is.
Israelis seem genuinely surprised by how permissive the US has been. Israeli media write of "total support" from America. There were rumours last week that Biden had said Israel has to wind down fighting by year-end, then Blinken said Israel will decide when the war ends not America and the administration bypassed Congress to fast-track resupply of 14,000 anti-tank shells (Hamas doesn't have tanks!).
Israel has clearly lost the plot in recent years, electing Ben-Gvir and Smotrich and assorted other lunatics. Maybe after this war things will improve of their own accord; I'm not hopeful. It will definitely help of if the superpower at least attached some conditions to its arms supplies. I'm not sure how much less the US could be doing than it is right now to push towards a peaceful outcome. Visa bans against violent settlers? Those are criminals, why would they be allowed into the US in the first place?
What I don't understand about this conflict: why the need to cut one big deal? Why can there not be incremental progress? There seem to be a lot of individual steps that could be taken to make life better for both sides without having to solve the whole damn problem in one go? For example the status of Palestinian refugees (or rather their descendants) in their host countries could be improved without necessarily giving up on the right of return.
Take the case of displaced people in Europe after World War II. Today, after many decades of incremental rapprochement, their descendants have functionally a full "right of return"; which hardly anybody cares about because their situation in their new homes is so good that they don't think about going "back".
Something like a right of return becomes exponentially easier to grant when you can expect fewer people to make use of it. Therein lies an obvious positive-sum pathway of incremental steps. Why can such steps not be taken?
Unfortunately I don't have the time today to respond in-depth either to Matt (with whom I mostly agree, in terms of what is realistic for both sides) or some of the insightful posts on this thread, but I did want to share, for those who may not have seen it, some accounts of the execution of Yuval Doron Kastelman (who himself had stopped a terrorist attack by Hamas) by an IDF settler whose justification was that he thought his victim was an Arab.
I'll try to add some archive.is links to Haaretz (which I can't access from work), but it really struck me as a tragic example of the best of Israel being murdered by the worst of Israel (and unfortunately the latter is part that is growing in size and strength).
Great post! I've learned a lot from this and your other posts on the conflict. But I think "actually, the real problem is housing and transit policy in Tel Aviv" deserves some sort of award for Most Yglesian Take of 2023 :-)
Some thoughts.
1. We largely don't really know what Palestinians' demands for an acceptable state are. If you listen to Tareq Baconi's recent appearance on Ezra Klein's podcast, for instance, he claims that the right of return is *an absolute minimum* demand for Palestinians. He seems to believe Hamas was in the right to scuttle the peace process, since the right of return was never on the table. Ezra seems shocked at how crazy all of this sounds.
By all appearances, though, Palestinians seem to be willing to endure extreme suffering in order to avoid accepting anything that is less than their minimum acceptable state. So it's important to actually figure out what those demands are, and no one has ever articulated them.
EDIT: Some commenters have noted that I misunderstood Baconi (keeping the original just so others can see what I had written before being corrected). What he's saying, apparently, is that Israel needs to *acknowledge* a right to return. But still, I'd like to know exactly what is considered an acceptable offer of a state.
2. It's telling that we have this assumption that a two-state solution requires some plan to evacuate the Jews from the West Bank. On the other hand, we never talk about a two-state solution requiring a symmetric plan to evacuate Arabs from Israel. Even the staunchest leftists operate under this assumption without realizing how damning it is.
Why do we make this assumption? Everyone knows why.
3. I also find it odd that discourse always talks about this issue as though the more powerful party needs to be the one to make concessions. So, for example, Barak's offer of a state is considered "insulting" because it didn't include exactly 100% of the West Bank, and there was no mention of the patently insane "right of return." Shouldn't Israel be willing to give Palestinians a little more, given that they hold all the cards?
This logic is really never applied anywhere else, for obvious reasons. In conflicts, losers make concessions, not winners! Has a country ever lost this many *offensive* wars against an opponent and then felt entitled to make demands?
I dunno, I still just see two groups who don't want a solution & therefore they are not finding a solution. I find the whole issue terribly dull and would prefer Americans refocus on problems we need to solve here.
This is the first time I’ve read a Slow Boring post that I felt was completely detached from reality.
“A two state solution has gotten safer” - are we just memory holing the last 18 years in Gaza? Is the marginal Israeli in 2008 voting against a 2SS not supposed to have noticed that the absolute first thing Gazans did with the foundations of a state is direct their efforts towards terrorism? And we know now that that continued for another 15 years culminating in the absurd barbarity of Oct. 7th.
This failure to consider the implications of eliminationist terrorism for Israeli safety is shot through this analysis - did Arafat blunder by not providing a counter, or perhaps by launching the Second Intifada with suicide bombings on Israeli civilians eating pizza and riding the bus?
I simply don’t understand how you can tell this story without reference to the terrorism that was part and parcel of its “negotiations”.
If Palestine becomes a state, and the West Bank is no longer occupied, doesn't Hamas or similar entities just take over like they did in Gaza? Edit: The article alludes to Jordan, Egypt, UAE stopping this but I don't understand the mechanism. Their own occupation of the West Bank?
When the median voter agrees strongly with the policy, "If you see a jew, it is moral to kill them", can't imagine them having a democracy.
The article is missing to critical parts:
1. Most Israelis that are not willing to compromise in terms of lands are doing it for reasons of security. They are afraid that it will be a re-run of the terror attacks that we suffered during the 90s and early 2000s, or the hamas land that is now controlling Gaza, after it was evacuated completely, but we didnt have a day of peace since.
2. The extreme religious right, sees the West Bank settlements as their main priority, even more than the existence of Israel, and like all religious groups are willing to take very extreme measures to obtain this aim, not matter what are the costs. They have outsized control in the right wing politics in Israel which gives them power like they never deserved. Their presence in the west bank is the main source of friction with the local population which makes everything much more complicated and make their human rights to suffer in an unmoral way.
Personally i think, we (Israel) should return to 1967 lines as much as possible and where its not, give other land in return. For several years we can keep pure military presence only where its needed and later create a border and treat this land like an enemy state, like Lebanon for example.
Good article. But the 1948 partition wasn’t rejected because the Arab states thought it was a bad deal in terms of land percentages (also, the Jewish state was mostly useless Negev desert). They rejected the existence of a Jewish state in the region. They invaded to destroy it, not to reduce its size.
I support a two-state solution but I find it puzzling that Matt has a whole section in his post here about how the two state solution is now safer but it only focuses on Israel's relationships with other states and completely neglects the non-state actor security component which has been the real sticking point since at least the 1990s and has become considerably more salient since October 7.
Israel withdraws from Gaza in 2005 and Hamas overthrows the PA and turns Gaza into a terrorist state that regularly fires rockets at every major Israeli population center, and sends teams over to abduct and/or kill Israelis. It's started at least three wars with Israel since 2005, and on October 7 of this year thousands of Gaza's (Hamas and civilians) invaded the country proper and murdered 1400 citizens, including about 1000 citizens.
The West Bank has been a lot quieter but Hamas and Islamic Jihad are clearly still operating there, and Israel maintains a strong and active security presence in much of the West Bank. It's hard to be sanguine about the PA's chances of not collapsing following a complete Israeli withdrawal.
Yes, Syria is a collapsed state, and Lebanon has no interest in starting a war with Israel but Syria and Lebanon are such weak states that they cannot stop terrorist groups from attacking from their borders.
This is the real problem - not that Jordan is going to invade.
The thing that Israelis need to be convinced of is that surrendering security control over the Palestinian territories won't lead to Gaza writ large except within the municipal borders of Jerusalem and 10 miles from Tel Aviv.
I agree with MY’s overall message. Both Israelis and Palestinians should reaffirm their commitment to an eventual 2-state solution. Even if conditions don’t exist now for the negotiations, both sides should work towards creating those conditions. And pro-Palestinian advocates who take maximalist and radical positions rather than make a reasonable political platform are doing the Palestinian people a disservice.
However, I think MY makes several mistakes. First, I think his characterization of the Israeli side of the peace process is wrong. From what I understand, Olmert and Abbas (as well as Tzipi Livni and Palestinian negotiator Qurei) had dozens of negotiation sessions. The Palestinian papers do suggest that Abbas actively participated in the negotiations and were willing to make significant concessions. However, Olmert’s final offer was rejected by Abbas primarily because he wasn’t allowed to take home the map and didn’t have time to study it. And no Abbas did not give a counterproposal to that. Instead, Olmert resigned, and peace negotiations were stalled because of the invasion of Gaza, the subsequent election, and several other factors. Whether you think Israel’s offers were generous or not is a matter of opinion. But I do not think it’s the case that this was a last minute effort, rather a process that the parties worked on for a long while.
Second, in his analysis, he acknowledges the security risk of the West Bank turning into a launching pad for attacks on Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa. But his answer to this is that Arab states friendly to Israel will prevent that. What evidence do we have that this is the case? Did Egypt or Jordan prevent Hamas from taking Gaza or using it to launch attacks? How about the UAE or Saudi. Egypt has worked with Israel to impose the blockade (which is something), but I think the message is that Israel cannot count on the Arab world from providing its security from Palestinians terror.
This is what is so critical. Discounting the far right, who are ideologically opposed to a 2SS, the typical Israeli believes that a 2SS must come with some real security assurances. People may disagree that those security assurances are. But without security assurances, the thing is dead in the water. Because the threat of rockets being able to be launched from the higher ground of the West Back down to Ben Gurion airport or to Tel Aviv is a real and serious threat.
Because of this, a 2SS and an end to occupation can only occur in a negotiated settlement with a PA that has legitimacy and the power to control the more radical Palestinian factions from unleashing violence in response to such agreement. Israel did unilateral withdrawal in 2005 from Gaza and Olmert toyed with the idea of doing the same thing in 90% of the West Bank (which never came to be). Unilateral withdrawal is not the answer.
And with Hamas in control of Gaza and an ineffectual, illegitimate PA in the West Bank (and frankly a right wing government in Israel), the conditions for such an agreement that can both create a 2SS and ensure security do not exist. I think there are things that Israel can do unilaterally to help possibly one day bring about the conditions, instead of sabotaging them. But it also requires Palestinian leadership to be able to show that they can check the power of their most radical elements and prevent them from using violence as a spoiler.
I wholeheartedly disagree with the framing of two-state as cringe. What's cringe is the Norman Fikelstein/selective revisionism/utopianism. You can disagree about whether Palestine is still morally righteous in trying to expel the "invaders" after losing 3 wars. You can disagree about whether Arafat took the peace attempts seriously and Israel was bad-faith or he was acting cynically. But anybody seriously proposing anything other than 2-state as a solution to the *current* situation - who thinks that the best outcome is that the entire region of present Israel and present Palestine, be merged and left to democratic whims, without acknowledging - well, the last 75 years - is truly cringe.
Israel actually is investing in mass transit relatively intensively by its standards at the moment btw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tel_Aviv_Light_Rail
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tel_Aviv_Metro
ctrl+F "Hamas" = 0
Israel certainly has done bad things, and Netanyahu is an asshole. This does not change the fact that as long as Gaza is controlled by a murderous death cult, negotiations are going to be somewhere between super hard and impossible. I, like Matt Y, support a two-state solution (or a three-state solution; see Noah Smith's recent article), but how do you get from here to there?
All possible solutions have huge obstacles -- which means the real obstacle is both sides deciding what hard choices they are willing to make.
A two state solution requires the following:
- Evacuation of settlements in the center of the West Bank and giving up Israel's demands that would have prevented territorial contiguity for Palestine. this will require pulling settlers out, kicking and screaming, from places like Ofra and Kiryat Arba. It will be brutal and ugly. The proposed "land swaps" to avoid having to rehouse so many people closer to the border may not be so acceptable to the people living on them (Palestinian citizens of Israel may be discriminated against, and may want a "state of all its citizens," but they don't want to be transferred to Palestine, as some plans have had them.)
- Palestinians need to give up the right of return. This always results in "but this allows Israel to be a racist ethnostate," but the *point* of the two state solution is "two states for two peoples." This objection is really an objection to the two state solution itself, and should be characterized as such.
The alternative is one state. And advocates aren't always clear about what kind of state that would be.
Israeli right wingers want "one state" -- the Greater Land of Israel. They think Palestinians will leave or will live under subjugation. This is a pipe dream.
Pro Palestinian advocates want one of two things:
- A single state of Palestine, where, by dint of numbers, Palestinians would form a majority and be in charge. The potential difficulties with that are obvious.
- An explicitly binational state (also advocated by some left wing Jews). This would explicitly protect Jewish rights as a group. The issue here is that it could turn out like Lebanon, paralyzed and incapable of functioning.
Advocates of the binational state say that a two state solution is impossible because qe have a one-state reality and we've passed the tipping point. They are not entirely wrong about that, given the increasing Israeli stranglehold over the West Bank. Where I think they are wrong is that they believe a binational state or confederation would allow people to sidestep hard solutions over settlements. It would eliminate arguments over the largest settlements closest to the 1967 line. But it ignores the reality of the settlement program, especially in the central West Bank. The settlements were planned to disrupt Palestinian territorial continuity and to grab land from Palestinian villages, and in the more right wing settlements, they want confrontation with Palestinians. Even around Jerusalem, the ring neighborhoods and new settlements present problems. They were designed to make Israeli rule permanent.
(this is why it would not be possible, as some settlers claim to want, to allow them to remain under Palestinian administration. They are NOT going to live peacefully with their neighbors, they are going to continue to demand land.)
America is flooding in weapons (200 cargo planes since the start of the war, as of a couple of weeks ago) and straight out US forces (2 carrier groups!!) to safeguard Israel's flanks. This is 1000x more significant than what Jacobin and other leftists tweet out, harmful though that is.
Israelis seem genuinely surprised by how permissive the US has been. Israeli media write of "total support" from America. There were rumours last week that Biden had said Israel has to wind down fighting by year-end, then Blinken said Israel will decide when the war ends not America and the administration bypassed Congress to fast-track resupply of 14,000 anti-tank shells (Hamas doesn't have tanks!).
Israel has clearly lost the plot in recent years, electing Ben-Gvir and Smotrich and assorted other lunatics. Maybe after this war things will improve of their own accord; I'm not hopeful. It will definitely help of if the superpower at least attached some conditions to its arms supplies. I'm not sure how much less the US could be doing than it is right now to push towards a peaceful outcome. Visa bans against violent settlers? Those are criminals, why would they be allowed into the US in the first place?
What I don't understand about this conflict: why the need to cut one big deal? Why can there not be incremental progress? There seem to be a lot of individual steps that could be taken to make life better for both sides without having to solve the whole damn problem in one go? For example the status of Palestinian refugees (or rather their descendants) in their host countries could be improved without necessarily giving up on the right of return.
Take the case of displaced people in Europe after World War II. Today, after many decades of incremental rapprochement, their descendants have functionally a full "right of return"; which hardly anybody cares about because their situation in their new homes is so good that they don't think about going "back".
Something like a right of return becomes exponentially easier to grant when you can expect fewer people to make use of it. Therein lies an obvious positive-sum pathway of incremental steps. Why can such steps not be taken?
Unfortunately I don't have the time today to respond in-depth either to Matt (with whom I mostly agree, in terms of what is realistic for both sides) or some of the insightful posts on this thread, but I did want to share, for those who may not have seen it, some accounts of the execution of Yuval Doron Kastelman (who himself had stopped a terrorist attack by Hamas) by an IDF settler whose justification was that he thought his victim was an Arab.
https://nitter.net/BenzionSanders/status/1730489255816839608
https://nitter.net/RedRevDanny/status/1730913120732807413
ETA two articles from Haaretz: https://archive.li/uP2hC, https://archive.is/25izK
I'll try to add some archive.is links to Haaretz (which I can't access from work), but it really struck me as a tragic example of the best of Israel being murdered by the worst of Israel (and unfortunately the latter is part that is growing in size and strength).