Israel's Last Chance

The region is changing and Israel has a narrow window to avoid a dire future

I was recently on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart where I was asked to critique Jon’s plan for a future peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. Given the tenor of the show, the plan was pitched in an ironic manner. But even more ironic was that this comedic proposal perfectly mirrors the Biden administration’s current dead-serious idea for how to end the conflict: Convince Israel to allow the creation of a demilitarized Palestinian state in exchange for full normalization with the Gulf Arab states and broader Muslim world, an exchange which is known as the Arab Peace Initiative. I wanted to add some additional thoughts about this subject.

I try to embody optimism and diplomacy in my public statements. But my honest assessment is that after the current war there is unlikely to be a two-state solution, one-state solution, or any other solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict in the future. The Israeli government publicly rejects the two-state concept, and this rejection is today shared by the Israeli public and main opposition camps. The Gaza Strip has been reduced to rubble and it is unclear whether it will even be habitable in future. While the Arab Peace Initiative is still technically on the table, the whole concept of a “peace process” sounds like an antiquated Baby Boomer paradigm whose time has passed. I no longer hear calls for peace in my conversations with people in the region or elsewhere. What I hear are calls for vengeance, and vows to steel themselves for generations of hard struggle.

The conventional wisdom is that the lack of a peace agreement in any conflict is worse news for the weaker party. But I believe that in the context of this conflict that this logic does not hold. In the long-term, so long as ethnic cleansing is off the table, no peace is worse news for Israel than the Palestinians. Despite boasting the Middle East’s only nuclear weapons and a militarized state worthy of Prussia, Israel is a small country in a region where it is deeply isolated. A deal with the Arab states in exchange for a two-state solution, despite the compromises entailed, would grant it much needed friends and partners in the region, as well as revived legal and political legitimacy. That deal is still on the table. Yet the Israeli government rejects it, instead relying on its traditional approach of using blanket U.S. support to insulate itself from having to make any tough choices. This is not going to be a sustainable approach in a world where U.S. power is in relative decline, and views on Israel domestically are undergoing generational turnover.

One of the most sobering revelations of the current war has been the reaction of the non-Western powers to October 7. Benjamin Netanyahu has long tried to cultivate relations with illiberal countries, who he believed would not nag Israel about settlements and occupation. Yet after the attacks Israel couldn’t even get a condolence call from China, which has instead used international fora to justify the attacks as legitimate armed resistance to occupation. Israel is now weathering diplomatic and legal assaults from Brazil to South Africa to Russia. Rather than diversifying its alliances, it finds itself yet again reliant on U.S. vetoes at the United Nations to protect it from descending to Iran-level isolation. This is not sustainable.

Israel’s total population is around nine million, of which two million are Palestinian citizens and another 1.6 million* are ultra-orthodox Jews exempt from society. Despite Israel punching above its weight in many categories, few foreign countries have material incentive to side with a divided country of nine million against the collective will of at least 1.2 billion across the world who are opposed to it.

Luckily for Israel, most of its neighbors are willing to offer it a golden bridge to redemption and integration, in exchange for the reasonable request that it comply with international law and either grant Palestinians legal rights within Israel or permit their statehood and self-determination. Its failure to accept, or even entertain, this offer is dooming Israel to a very lonely and bleak future, reliant solely on a distant, divided, and increasingly distracted West to protect it against a world otherwise united in opprobrium.

Absent such a deal Israel will face genuine threats to its long-term viability.

Israel is a nuclear-armed state with a robust doctrine for deploying these weapons in the case of an existential conflict. Rather than facing a united military front in future, an isolated Israel is more likely to experience an escalated version of the death by a thousand cuts strategy currently being pursued by Iran and its proxies. Tightly calibrated military pressure, along with diplomatic and political campaigns, can be crippling to a small country reliant on first world standards of living to prevent emigration. As Selim Koru recently wrote, even Sunni-majority states like Turkey that have been relatively muted about the war in Gaza are quietly preparing for the next stage of the conflict rather than abandoning it. The BRICS countries appear to view Israel as an outpost of U.S. influence in Asia that they would also like to apply greater pressure upon as time goes on. This is not a position that any country should want to find itself in.

I take pride in having a diverse audience for my writing and commentary and I know that I have readers from across the ideological spectrum. I hope that people who are Israeli, or pro-Israel, will take into account what I have written here and reconsider their rejection of the Arab Peace Initiative, which I believe, despite its shortcomings, represents the last chance for Israel to ensure a place for itself in the Middle East. Absent such a deal I predict a future of ethnic cleansing, genocide, state collapse, the use of tactical nuclear weapons, and dissolution of international legal and human rights norms. And as I said, I don’t view peace as the most likely outcome.

As much as Jon Stewart and the Biden administration may be short on ideas for solving the conflict, the olive branch still being held out by the Arab League is the only way Israel will be able to avoid being trapped in a hostile continent and reliant on pressing the U.S. into regional conflicts that are inflaming public opinion and becoming impossible to sustain. This is Israel’s last chance, and I hope for its own sake and the sake of the rest of the region they will treat it with the gravity it deserves.

*Previously wrote 2M but specified for clarity. Figures vary by sources.