The Middle East Constant

Israel must choose the less bad option, however bad it be

My first op-ed was published on August 15, 1988, in The Jerusalem Post. It was my birthday (as it remains) and I was very young; the editor, I do believe, just wanted to shut me up. In the article, titled “The case for unilateral action,” I argued that Israel must detach itself from the West Bank and Gaza simply for demographic reasons, but also that a negotiated peace was unlikely. My conclusion was that Israel needed to act unilaterally, create new facts, and let the world adjust.

With Israel currently threatening to take over Gaza once again, and Western nations preparing to recognize Palestine, it is interesting to look back – at what was proven right or wrong, what has changed, and what has stayed the same.

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My prediction that negotiated peace with the Palestinians cannot be accomplished – as they won’t embrace even the most far-reaching of offers – would appear to have been validated. Twice, in 2001 and 2008, Israel proposed independence on almost all of the West Bank and Gaza, creative arrangements in Jerusalem, and only a symbolic “return” of the descendants of refugees. That’s the most it will ever allow – and the Palestinians refused to grab it. My conclusion is that they prefer a single state – because that’s bad for Israel.

The result was that Israel indeed began moving in the direction of unilateralism, exactly as my younger self predicted and argued for.

Unfortunately, though, this also did not go so well. That’s because the unilateral pullout from Gaza in 2005 was followed less than two years later with its forceful takeover by the jihadist mafia Hamas. Israel bears some blame for the disaster that has unfolded since, because shortsighted right-wing governments allowed Hamas to flourish and sought to weaken the Palestinian Authority, in order to divide the Palestinians. But what is indisputable, after Hamas invaded Israel and massacred 1,200 people on October 7, 2023, is that unilateralism has been significantly discredited.

That brings us to the essential truth that has stayed the same.

Now, as in 1988, Israel cannot thrive in the default outcome of simply absorbing the West Bank, and now, perhaps, also Gaza. The combined territory houses 15 million people, just under half of them Jews. A country in all that territory can be run by the Jews or be democratic, but not both. It will also be at war with itself and at loggerheads with the world.

Israel’s current trajectory is precisely that – to not be democratic. That seemed likely even in 1988, before there were still experiments in peacemaking and unilateralism to be explored. Given the failures on those tracks, and the unwise addition of about a half million settlers to the population of the West Bank, this non-democratic outcome now seems likelier still.

If Israel continues down this road, I doubt it will survive. There are millions of Israelis who will reject life in a police state with a huge population of disenfranchised and hostile Arabs, and they will gradually leave – just as people left Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and other states where life became too hard and the prospects too bleak.

The prospective leavers are precisely the people responsible for Israel’s qualitative advantage over its enemies and for the prosperity created by the “Start-Up Nation.” The rump Israel will eventually be forced by the world to extend the vote to the Palestinians and will be renamed Palestine. That is the future that right-wing Israel is unwittingly creating.

I discussed some of this recently with Marc Schulman, publisher of the excellent Tel Aviv Diary on Substack. I said Israel has about a decade to save itself (for reasons that go beyond the imbroglio with the Palestinians).

"Israel at the Crossroads: A Decade to Save the Nation - with Dan Perry"

How can disaster be avoided, given the failure of negotiations and the reality that implacable enemies took over the one territory that Israel abandoned unilaterally? My answers today, with the benefit of hindsight, would be:

• Israel cannot withdraw from the entire West Bank, leaving itself about nine miles wide at its narrowest point. After October 7, the public would consider that too great a risk. To avoid decades of discussion about this issue, Israel must draw its own map, probably carving out a contiguous area of about two-thirds of the West Bank. Unilateralism again, essentially.

• It would then be advisable to remove the settlers from the areas to be partitioned off, but keep the military presence in place, to a degree, for now. That would create the landscape for a future pullout by eliminating the settler complication from the equation, and would probably require a withdrawal of about 100,000 settlers deep inside the West Bank. Again, unilateralism – with a huge internal conflict.

• Israel should offer the Palestinian Authority recognition of statehood without demanding the end of the conflict. I was not wrong 37 years ago: the Palestinians will not offer an end-of-conflict declaration without asking for a price too high for Israel to pay – such as the Old City of Jerusalem.

• Israel must insist that the Palestinian state be demilitarized, control the borders, and allow no weapons to go in.

That last point will bring howls from Palestinians insisting that an independent country needs to be able to defend itself. Yet there is no other way to get the Israeli public to go along with the idea – not after October 7. Moreover, demilitarization is far from unprecedented. Some states are fully demilitarized (Costa Rica, Liechtenstein, Panama, Grenada), relying on police forces, treaties, and allies for security, while others are partially demilitarized with minimal forces integrated into alliances, like Luxembourg and Iceland. Palestine will get over it.

These are Israel’s evergreen issues, no less relevant today than they were in 1988.

What do they mean for Israel’s current – and very controversial – plan to occupy all of Gaza City, and then the entire Strip? If that leads to its demilitarization, in the long term it may not be a terrible idea – despite the vast cost. But if it takes Israel in the direction of a long-term entanglement with Gaza and its hostile, desperate, and angry population of over two million, then it is the opposite of what Israel must do to save itself. In short: a probably terrible idea.

Either way, the main constant is this: Now, as in 1988, Israel does not face great choices in its tangle with the Palestinians. “Israel will be forced to accept the least of many evils,” I wrote then. “Partial forfeiture of the territories represents a measure of risk —– but the other possibilities promise the certainty of disaster.”

Maturity, and strategy, require the correct identification of the path that is the least bad. Human’s are not wired for it, but the Israelis better wise up quick, because they’re running out of time.