MICHAEL YOUNG
Whatever else the Gaza war has done, it has ensured that the masks have fallen on Israeli intentions to make serious concessions for peace with the Palestinians. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to spar with President Joe Biden over a two-state solution, the upshot is clear: the Israeli political class, across the spectrum, either refuses to give up any land or remains very reluctant to break free from a model of occupation that has prevailed for over half a century.
This model is one that denies Palestinians their minimal demands for a settlement with Israel. It is based on offering them an aborted entity, with none of the attributes of sovereignty, and calling this creation a Palestinian state; legitimizing Israel’s illegal annexation of a significant portion of Arab land occupied in 1967; giving Israel a blank check to intervene militarily inside Palestinian areas; and burying the Palestinian refugee problem for good. These ideas were all, explicitly or implicitly, in the foundational roadmap for occupation, the Allon Plan.
But what is the situation on the Palestinian side? If Hamas can sustain the popularity it earned by attacking Israel on October 7, and if Palestinians are willing to look beyond the devastation that Israel has visited on Gaza as a consequence of this, then it would probably be fair to say that Hamas will have much more of a role to play in defining a political path for Palestinian society. But that implies that the organization will clarify what its real intentions are.
For a time, Hamas floated the idea of a long truce with Israel—in effect a vague form of peace that dared not speak its name. Recently, the party’s leadership abroad went a step further, when Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s Political Bureau, declared last November 1, “We are ready for political negotiations for a two-state solution with Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine.” However, given the apparent divisions within the Hamas leadership, it’s unclear whether the statement was authoritative and spoke for the whole organization.
There has been little of consequence from Ramallah in recent months. Rarely has a Palestinian leader seemed as inadequate as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The American plan for the day after in Gaza will almost certainly mean Abbas is shunted aside in favor of a younger, more popular leader. The Biden administration has spoken of a “reformed Palestinian Authority,” implying Abbas’s replacement. The name most often heard of the person who might do so is Marwan al-Barghouti, who has been languishing in Israeli prisons since 2002.
Abbas has other problems as well. For years, the Israelis have undermined and isolated him, finding nothing more threatening than a peace partner whose seriousness might force them to surrender occupied land. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken implicitly confirmed Israel’s treatment of Abbas recently, before holding talks with the Palestinian leader: “Israel must stop taking steps that undercut Palestinians’ ability to govern themselves effectively,” he said.
In Lebanon, meanwhile, Abbas’s Fatah is facing a sustained challenge from Hamas, especially in the largest refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh. October 7 was many things, among them an effort by Hamas to seize control of the Palestinian national movement. To an extent it may have succeeded, though to presume a Fatah debacle is too simple. Fatah still enjoys Palestinian support, and moreover benefits from being much more than a political organization; it is an embodiment, through decades of struggle, of a Palestinian state of mind, and in that regard still retains a solid base in society. That is why the Barghouti option remains so tantalizing. He is an ideal person to revitalize Fatah and improve ties with Hamas by virtue of having collaborated with it while in prison, when together they prepared with other Palestinian factions the so-called Prisoner’s Document of May 2006, setting out a vision for a Palestinian state in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967.
For now, however, there is disarray in Palestinian ranks. When we cut through the consensual talk about Israel’s unfathomable brutality, there has to be a Palestinian discussion about what October 7 hoped to achieve. The Biden administration has reheated the idea of a two-state solution, though Netanyahu’s refusal to endorse such an outcome, which he rejects on principle and which would alienate the far-right religious Zionist parties keeping him in power, makes implementation difficult. Nor is time on Biden’s side. The U.S. president is entering an election year, and will have little bandwidth to advance a post-Gaza peace plan that will probably fail anyway. His priority is a ceasefire, avoiding a regional war, and ensuring he does not come out looking as if he prevented Israel from defeating Hamas.
With that in mind, is there a broadly accepted Palestinian position on the political objectives sought with regard to Israel? The Prisoner’s Document may form the basis of such a position, but before that what is needed is a unified Palestinian leadership to legitimize a realistic political strategy. And we’re still far from that.
October 7 may have underlined for many Palestinians that armed resistance could achieve results, but at what price? Close to 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, large areas of the territory have been systematically razed by the Israelis, some 2 million Palestinians are living in appalling conditions, Israeli officials, present and former, are openly talking about ethnically cleansing the Palestinians, and even within Hamas there appears to be a quiet leadership battle between the military wing of the organization and its leaders outside Gaza. This is hardly a sustainable plan for victory. If Hamas’s armed wing in Gaza sought to anchor armed struggle in the Palestinian psyche as an acceptable course of action for the future, Israel’s savage response, and the fact that many countries did nothing to restrain the Israelis for weeks during the Gaza battle, should sound a cautionary note.
Hamas may turn what has happened into greater leverage within Palestinian ranks. The organization may conceivably succeed in securing a position in the Palestine Liberation Organization, becoming a major actor in negotiations and therefore better able to shape their progress. But what are the results Hamas wants? If October 7 was supposed to provide clarity, it did precisely the opposite. Giving Israel a golden opportunity to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is hardly a winning idea. But if, on the contrary, Hamas’s aim was to impose a new balance of forces with Israel, in such a way that future negotiations might be more evenhanded, then it’s up to Hamas to explain what it wants out of them. If Hamas is the victor in Gaza, as Yahya Sinwar has allegedly told Hamas negotiators, it has to answer how it wants to translate this politically.
But Hamas needs the PLO to agree, and both should finally unify around a mutually acceptable negotiating position. The violence deployed by the Israelis creates such an opening. After supporting Israel in the weeks after the October 7 attacks, many Western countries, even the United States, began altering their views as they watched the carnage in Gaza unfold. Sympathy is starting to tilt toward the Palestinians internationally. The Americans are likely to pay a price for giving Israel the leeway to pursue its massacre, and for arming the Israelis even as they committed human rights abuses, which is why Washington is now more eager to move to a new phase leading to a ceasefire. The Palestinians should exploit this interregnum and avoid being blindsided by political resolutions they oppose.
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