Sixty-three days into the Gaza War at the time of writing this and no one really knows what the endgame is, global punditry aside.
Even Israel, whose stated objective for the war is the total destruction of Hamas and occupation of Gaza Strip, has no clear strategy, partly because it is unclear what total destruction of Hamas means (if it’s even possible) and partly because other state actors, including the United States, do not agree with either Israel’s reoccupation of Gaza or the expulsion of Gaza residents from the area.
This has little to do with the fog of war. At the heart of the problem lies the idea of Israel itself: Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel), “God-given inheritance of the Jewish people based on the Torah”. This religious idea informs not only Zionism but, increasingly, Religious or what Avishai Margalit called Maximalist Zionism. And it has unfolded, since the Balfour Declaration, as a “settler-colonial project”, to quote Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, the author, among other books, of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge.
Put another way, the problem is both simple and intractable. Simple because it should be obvious that Palestinians have a right to their land, freedom and sovereignty. Intractable because Israelis believe that giving Palestinians any land or allowing them sovereignty amounts to the destruction of the Jewish state.
This fear of destruction of the Jewish state expresses itself in several ways: denying the Palestinian refugees the right of return to their lands, allowing illegal settlements on Palestinian lands in violation of the Oslo Accords and emplacing elaborate physical and psychological structures of occupation enforced through the constant presence of military forces, not just in Gaza but also in the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Even Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who signed the Oslo Accords with Yasser Arafat, was clear that there could be no sovereign Palestinian state.
These structures of occupation, which are so intricate as to require a separate treatment, are complemented with slow and systemic violence against the Palestinians: restricted movement, checkpoints, roadblocks, arrests, killings, house demolitions and a virtual carte blanche to the illegal settlers to exercise control over the lives and livelihoods of Palestinians.
Even Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who signed the Oslo Accords with Yasser Arafat, was clear that there could be no sovereign Palestinian state. Less than a month before his assassination, speaking at Knesset, Rabin, while acknowledging that “we [Zionists] did not return to an empty land” and wanting to “give peace a chance”, spoke of “an entity which is less than a state and which will independently run the lives of the Palestinians under its authority”.
Rabin was basically assuring the rightwingers and conservatives that while he thought making peace was important, what he was doing was not creating a sovereign Palestinian state. And yet, national religious conservatives and Likud party leaders believed that withdrawing from any “Jewish” land was heresy. The Likud leader and future prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, accused Rabin's government of being “removed from Jewish tradition [...] and Jewish values”.
Likud and other rightwing groups also organised regular anti-Oslo rallies. As reported at the time in the Israeli media, Rabin was depicted as a Nazi in SS uniform; some placards showed him in the crosshairs of a gun. Protestors also chanted slogans like “Rabin is a murderer” and “Rabin is a traitor”. For his part, in July 1995, Netanyahu led a mock funeral procession featuring a coffin and hangman’s noose at an anti-Rabin rally where protesters chanted, “Death to Rabin”. The situation got so bad that Carmi Gillon, chief of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, alerted Netanyahu of a plot on Rabin's life and asked him to dial down the rhetoric. Netanyahu refused to heed.
As late as October 27, 2022, as reported by Times of Israel, Merav Michaeli, Chief of Israel’s Labour Party, “accused Benjamin Netanyahu of being complicit in the assassination of former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin”. The ToI went on to report that “Ben Gvir, the rising star of the current election campaign, whose Religious Zionism party is seen heading for some 14 seats in the 120-member Knesset, first captured national attention when he was filmed as a teen boasting about stealing an emblem from Rabin’s car a short time before the assassination.”
“We got to his car, and we’ll get to him, too,” Ben-Gvir told a reporter at the time in televised comments. Ben-Gvir has been Israel National Security minister since 2022 and is an illegal settler like Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister in Netanyahu’s coalition government.
Put another way, the problem is both simple and intractable. Simple because it should be obvious that Palestinians have a right to their land, freedom and sovereignty. Intractable because Israelis believe that giving Palestinians any land or allowing them sovereignty amounts to the destruction of the Jewish state.
But we have fast forward. It’s important to understand how Ertez Yisrael has worked as a motif since Israel’s creation. Menachem Begin was once asked by a reporter about Israel’s borders. He replied that they were all given in the Bible. In his 1992 book, Illusions of Triumph: An Arab View of the Gulf War, Egyptian journalist, Mohamed Heikal has an instructive vignette regarding Yitzhak Shamir:
The second message [to the King of Morocco] was a four-page letter from Shamir: “Your Majesty, the image given of me in the Arab press is that I am very hard. It’s not true.” Shamir said he had lived through the agonies of the pogroms and that friends and relatives of his had been caught up in the Holocaust. He understood the suffering of others. “I have lived my life dreaming of a nation and a state, so I can understand the Palestinians. If you are angry over what we are doing to face the Palestinian uprising, it is not that we do not understand. We understand their dreams very well, but unfortunately here we have a conflict between two dreams... we agree to the Palestinians having a dream, but they should understand that it is impossible.”
The late US-Israeli political scientist, Daniel Elazar, writing in 1990 in Jewish Political Studies Review had this to say:
The idea of the Jewish people living independently in their own land stands at the heart of [Jewish political] tradition. No matter how reckoned in the traditional sources, the fulfilment of the mitzvot [commandments in Torah] in their completeness depends on the existence of a Jewish polity in Eretz Israel. (Israel as a Jewish State)
This essentially means that (a) Jews have a right to establish a state in Palestine, (b) they have a right to establish a Jewish state, (c) this state has a “right to exist,” as commissioned by God, (d) it has a “right to defend itself”, (e) it has the “right” to inherit all the biblical land that the Jewish God promised it and (f) it has the right to enact “laws that are racially and religiously discriminatory in order to preserve the Jewish character of the state”.
This, as Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, argues is deeply problematic because “the rights that Israel claims for itself are central to what the Palestinians and the international community argue is under negotiation – namely, colonisation, occupation, and racial and religious discrimination.”
All of this is known to the Palestinians who suffer daily indignities. This is also known to Israeli rights groups like Machsom [Hebrew for checkpoint] Watch, B’tselem, Breaking the Silence (an organisation of former IDF officers speaking out against Israeli policies), Jewish Voice for Peace, United Nations bodies and western capitals.
As late as last September, Benjamin Netanyahu, took a map of Israel to the United Nations and brandished it there. It showed all the OPTs and Golan Heights as part of Israel.
The other crucial point is that while the current focus is on the murderous conflict in Gaza, Gaza is a subset of the broader problem of Israel’s hegemonic control derived from some Biblical and “self-arrogated rights [that] are not up for negotiations”.
It is precisely because of this that the oft-repeated two-state solution is essentially moribund while an inclusive one state solution is impossible.
This is what makes analysing the endgame of this iteration so difficult. While Israel wants to expel all Palestinians from Gaza and other Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), its western allies invoke the two-state solution that simply cannot come into being without Israel burying the idea of Eretz Yisrael and the colonisation that flows from it.
As late as last September, Benjamin Netanyahu, took a map of Israel to the United Nations and brandished it there. It showed all the OPTs and Golan Heights as part of Israel. Speaking on my programme InFocus with Ejaz Haider, Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator, told me that multiple leaders in the current Israeli coalition government openly speak about annexing the OPTs.
Without an international consensus on measures to change Israel’s ideological calculus on Eretz Yisrael, there is no possibility of this conflict ending. Israel may ultimately win this iteration but the next would be bloodier and more expansive. As Ilan Pappe said, “We are witnessing the beginning of the end of this [settler-colonial] project”. It will be a long process, and in the interim “it will become more ruthless and brutal”.