It’s the kind of no-nonsense language that the Democratic grassroots have been demanding in recent months. Polling shows that an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters have swung wildly against Israel, with younger Independents and Republicans also trending in the same direction. According to one poll, only Russia scored worse than Israel when it came to the negative views among young Democrats (even Iran outscored the Jewish state). 

It would seem, then, that Platner and likeminded progressive office-seekers around the country have hit upon a winning issue. But it’s one thing to adopt more Israel-critical policies in response to popular opinion — and quite another to transform the party into a singularly Israel-obsessed vehicle: one in which opposition to the Jewish state functions as the main priority, a source of factionalism, and an ideological purity test. 

That way lies marginalization, a fate not unlike that of ex-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his Your Party in Britain. This, just when Democrats are poised to re-emerge from the political wilderness amid President Trump’s historic unpopularity and a faltering GOP majority in Congress.

The danger for Democrats doesn’t lie in the shift itself — a recalibration in America’s relationship with Israel is overdue, as voters across the spectrum are emphatically telling pollsters. The real threat, rather, is in the way an intensified focus on a single foreign-policy issue risks pulling the party off course, leaving it vulnerable to a vocal activist subset that doesn’t necessarily reflect broader public opinion on other questions. 

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Graham Platner, gentry liberal

By James Billot

Corbyn offers an instructive cautionary tale. After being expelled from Labour in 2024, the 76-year-old socialist went on to co-found a Left-wing breakaway party the following year. Your Party — the name itself was a magnet for ridicule — promised to be everything that Labour wasn’t: an unapologetically socialist outfit that would tax the rich, nationalize utilities, defend the National Health Service against privatization, and, most importantly, take a strong stance against Israel. During its first week, the party attracted hundreds of thousands of voters disillusioned by the Starmer government, as well as a former Labour member of Parliament and four independent Muslim MPs who were elected on pro-Gaza platforms. 

Yet within days, problems emerged. Before it had even officially launched, a leadership fight between Corbyn and another MP resulted in a mini-schism. What was ostensibly a disagreement over the party’s internal structure quickly spilled into a chaotic membership drive, generating as many factions as it did representatives. The bigger problem, though, was the ideological division between its MPs. Unsurprisingly, Your Party’s socially conservative Muslim MPs took a very different view on issues such as gender identity and trans participation in women’s sports, which ultimately contributed to the departure of two MPs. 

The inherent tension in the “rainbow-and-crescent” alliance of progressive activists and Muslim social conservatives is a problem for Democrats, too. Over the last few years, clashes between Muslim-American parents and local Democratic leaders over school curricula have spilled into courtrooms and onto the streets, largely driven by Muslim opposition to LGBTQ content. For the most part, however, the alliance has been held together by a shared opposition to Israel.

Similarly in Britain, Israel was the centripetal force around which Your Party’s members revolved. Or so they thought. Instead, it turned out to be another source of division. Zara Sultana, Your Party’s erstwhile co-leader, came out as strongly as an anti-Zionist, whereas Corbyn refused to use the term. The result was an ironic dynamic in which Corbyn, long one of Britain’s most prominent critics of Israel, was denounced by elements of his own movement for insufficient purity on the issue. Now, the party can barely muster enough candidates to represent it in next month’s local elections.

The United States has a different party and electoral system than Britain’s, but the parallels are clear: Left-wingers’ competitive signaling on Israel incentivizes candidates to adopt maximalist positions, alienating supporters and cannibalizing other issues in the process. In San Francisco’s House race, for example, Scott Wiener, a liberal Zionist, has faced sustained criticism from activists for refusing to describe Israel as an apartheid state or characterize its military campaign as genocide. Several debates were interrupted by pro-Palestine hecklers, which ultimately led to Wiener resigning as co-chairman of the state’s Jewish Caucus before leaving it altogether.

It made little difference. Wiener’s progressive rival, Saikat Chakrabarti — who has embraced the term “genocide” and called for a ban on both defensive and offensive weapons transfers to Israel — is within striking distance of him in the polls. Meanwhile, in Michigan, Senate candidate Abdul al-Sayed, who has shared a stage with Hasan Piker and talked openly about how Israel is “just as evil as Hamas,” is now tied for first in the polls to secure the party nomination. Similar dynamics have unfolded in Illinois’s and New Jersey’s special elections, too, which became as much a referendum on the Israel lobby as on any local issue.

None of this is to suggest that Democrats should maintain the status quo on Israel. Under Netanyahu, the Jewish state has become more aggressive and unrestrained in its conduct across the Middle East, not bothering with the pretense of a two-state solution. The Jewish state has rarely stopped to weigh even the costs of wielding the power of life and death — in perpetuity — over some seven million Palestinians. 

But, again, there is a difference between treating Israel as one foreign question among many, on one hand, and turning it into an ideological litmus test that supersedes everything else, on the other. This has created a purity spiral in which Democratic candidates across the country are jumping over each other to prove their pro-Palestine credentials — or at least, to ward off any hint that they are “soft” on the issue. Even Gavin Newsom, ever the tumbleweed in shifting winds of public opinion, went so far as to compare Israel to an apartheid state (a remark he later walked back). 

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One major reason for this drastic shift is the rise of independent media. As the influence of traditionally pro-Israel legacy outlets has waned, a new ecosystem of progressive streamers and online platforms has filled the space. These outlets will approvingly repost clips of, for example, Graham Platner calling the US’s relationship with Israel “shameful,” while castigating moderate Democrats for equivocating on the issue. 

For influencers and outlets like Zeteo, the Young Turks, Majority Support, and Hasan Piker, Israel is a near daily fixation (to say nothing of Tucker Carlson and other podcasters on the Right), which creates what Cass Sunstein and Timur Kuran call an “availability cascade”: a self-reinforcing feedback loop, in which constant mention of an issue makes it seem more important, urgent, or widespread, thereby further increasing its visibility.

Today, the question of whether Israel is committing genocide has the same political potency (and clippability) as “what is a woman?” for progressives and “did Trump win the 2020 election?” for Republicans. In just the last week, it has been asked of former President Barack Obama all the way down to Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg in the New York 12th district contest. And every podcast, speech, and special election primary in which a candidate’s position on Israel determines their standing only reinforces that dynamic at the national level. As a preview of what’s to come, earlier this month, the Democratic National Committee weighed a proposal at its spring conference to condemn the “growing influence” of money in primary elections, with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee singled out in the debate; the resolution was ultimately rejected. Without any kind of counterweight in the party, expect more resolutions like these to emerge.

In Britain, Your Party’s launch was meant to signal a new moment of unity for Left-wing dissidents from the Labour mainstream. Instead, it exposed how little consensus there was beneath the surface. Democrats should be wary of repeating the same pattern. Primary season is already drifting into an anti-Israel spectacle; if that dynamic accelerates, Democrats risk a Corbyn-style implosion that hands Republicans an unforced advantage in 2028.

None of this brought joy to Israel. In its unsmiling sobriety, the Eichmann trial represented the country’s only opportunity to bring a leading Nazi to justice. Over 100 witnesses testified to the horrors of the Final Solution, leaving the new Jewish State, then still home to hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors, mesmerized, shocked, traumatized. “Justice,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her famous account of the trial, “demands seclusion, it requires sorrow rather than anger.”

Eichmann’s was the second and last judicial execution ever carried out in Israel. And, as the atmosphere around his death implies, it was framed by robust moral reasons. In a country created as a safe haven for Jews after the Holocaust, the very notion of legally executing other human beings went against the grain for large parts of the population. Judaism generally frowns upon the judicial killing of others, albeit with a particular focus on other Jews, while the historical legacy of Jewish persecution meant a long-term insistence on the sanctity of human life.

Yet if the death penalty for murder was abolished back in 1954, it has now returned with a literal vengeance. Late last month, the Knesset passed a law permitting the execution of Palestinians in the West Bank. If that wasn’t stark enough — among other things, it explicitly excludes Israeli Jews — the law’s passage was also accompanied by celebration. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s security minister, popped champagne, proudly wearing a noose-shaped lapel pin as he went.

Ben-Gvir’s law is not entirely new. As the Eichmann execution implies, Israel already permits the death penalty in exceptional circumstances. These include involvement in genocide, but also a range of security offenses, from warmongering and undermining state sovereignty to treason.

In practice, though, these laws were almost never enforced. The only known case of legal execution besides Eichmann’s occurred in June 1948, when one Meir Tobianski was accused of passing military secrets to Jordan. But he was posthumously cleared of treason, while the death sentences of several Jewish murderers were commuted, largely thanks to the injunction that since man was created in the image of God, only God has the right to deprive him of life. The final abolition of the death sentence for murder came following a lengthy discussion in the Knesset, where Jewish tradition, universal humanitarianism, and the lack of deterrence were all invoked.

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As for Palestinians accused of murdering Jewish Israeli citizens, and sentenced to death by Israeli military courts, their punishments were repeatedly overturned by higher courts. This was in part because of the same legal and moral arguments applied to Jewish criminals. As Adi Carmi, a former senior Shin Bet official, said in March: “as an Israeli citizen living in a Jewish and democratic state, any encounter with terrorists should end with their neutralization or if needed taking them out. Once the terrorist has put up his hands and been arrested and cuffed, from my point of view the battle is over and he needs to be tried. As a Jew who sanctifies the sanctity of life, I do not want to see the death penalty.”

There have historically been more hard-nosed reasons to avoid executions too. As security-minded officials have warned, executing those who resist Israeli occupation, normally referred to in Israel as terrorists, would be counterproductive. Transforming them into martyrs, their deaths would merely fuel the cycle of violence. This reluctance also played a part in Israel’s claim to have joined the general trend in the West of viewing executions as inhumane — in contrast to its Arab neighbors, where the death penalty has been more common, or to Iran, whose theocratic regime has carried out public hangings and other gruesome acts.

In 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu himself opposed a proposal by members of his own coalition to adopt the death penalty. Only six MKs supported the law and 94, including most of the Right, opposed it. In this, they were only following tradition. Writing in 1969, Natan Yellin-Mor, a leader of the extreme-Right underground during the British Mandate in Palestine, warned that “if the death penalty is used at a time of a national struggle, it may elevate the person sentenced”. For their part, former security officials have also worried about the international repercussions of the death penalty, with Carmi noting that it could harm Israel’s relations with its Arab neighbors. Other experts have made a similar point about Israel’s wider reputation abroad, with former Shin Bet official Lior Akerman suggesting that executing Palestinians could “exacerbate attitudes toward us by states around the world.”

All this has now changed. Ben-Gvir’s party is called Otzma Yehudit — the Hebrew for “Jewish Power”. The far-Right, ultra-nationalist party traces its ideological roots to the outlawed Kach Party, itself banned in 1994 for its outright support for racism and Jewish terrorism. Kach’s most infamous supporter was Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born settler who murdered 29 Palestinians at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Ben-Gvir has described Goldstein as a “hero”, and until 2020 hung a portrait of the killer at his home in an illegal West Bank settlement.

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How the IDF escapes justice

By Omer Bartov

The death penalty voted into law by the Knesset on 30 March is an extraordinary piece of legislation, even by recent Israeli standards. The law makes absolutely no pretense about being exclusively directed against Palestinians, stating that any resident of the West Bank found guilty of killing someone in a “terrorist act” must be sentenced to death by a military court, barring exceptional circumstances that would impose a mandatory life sentence instead.

At the same time, a death sentence no longer requires, as it previously did, a unanimous decision by a panel of military judges, nor that they be at least at the rank of lieutenant colonel. Indeed, according to this new law, the death penalty must be imposed even if the prosecution asks for a lesser sentence. As for the state of Israel proper, the new law vaguely mandates that any killing intended to undermine the existence of the state must similarly be punished with death or a life sentence, and that the execution must be carried out within 90 days, barring intervention by the prime minister. In short, the new law clearly imposes the death penalty only on occupied Palestinians — and potentially on Palestinian citizens too — but not on Jews.

Before the law can go into effect, it will be reviewed, and possibly overturned, by the Supreme Court. This could happen for humanitarian reasons — in reference to Jewish law and to the “Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty” of 1992 — or, given the law’s prejudicial nature, on judicial grounds. In recent years, however, the court has increasingly veered to the Right, as well as becoming ever-more timid, and it may well either hedge in some manner or allow the law to be enforced.

Whatever the judges decide, it is impossible to define this new law as anything but blatantly racist, making a clear distinction between two groups, Jews and Palestinians, on the basis of their nationality and ethnicity. It is another substantial step in the ongoing establishment of an apartheid regime in the West Bank, as well as its creeping extension into the state of Israel itself. The same state that, just over six decades ago, executed a Nazi perpetrator for implementing a racist genocidal policy against European Jews — in a trial that in many ways served to establish the Jewish state’s legitimacy as a safe haven for Jews after the Holocaust — is now in danger of abandoning its last claim to a just legal system.

The consequences of this new legalized racism, deeply rooted in the far-Right’s ideology, are unfathomably destructive. Beyond his antics in the Knesset, Ben-Gvir made that clear, promising the law would ensure “a day of justice for the murdered” — and “a day of deterrence” for Israel’s enemies. And if legal experts from the Israel Democracy Institute see things differently, defining the law as “unconstitutional, immoral, and contrary to Israel’s commitments according to international law”, it is hard not to see a more basic moral collapse from Arendt’s sombre reflections.

I grew up in Israel before the occupation of 1967, and recall listening to recordings from the Eichmann trial on the radio with my family every evening. For someone like me, the transformation of Israel from a country that perceived itself as the clearest answer to persecution and genocide — to one that is engaged in systematic oppression against Palestinians, and is now seeking to legalize their judicial killing, is devastating. These are not only the actions of extremists such as Ben-Gvir and finance minister Itamar Smotrich; more than half of Knesset members voted for the law. That Zionism, which set out to emancipate the Jews, has now become an ideology geared towards dehumanizing Palestinians, is not only tragic. It is, I think, sufficient cause to reject the ideology altogether, and call instead for the remaking of the state into a just and equal society for all its inhabitants. For now, it remains to underline that the law is a breathtaking plunge. One is hard put to think of a more stunning turn of events.

Netanyahu hasn’t granted any interviews to Israeli media since the start of the war, but his statements in English, including this one, have left many of his compatriots confused. After all, at the end of last summer’s 12-Day War, Netanyahu proudly proclaimed that “we removed from ourselves two immediate existential threats: the threat of annihilation by nuclear bombs, and the threat of annihilation by ballistic missiles.” That bombastic statement now looks questionable, to say the least. If the two “existential threats” had already been removed less than a year ago, then why are we at war again, focusing on the same two objectives?

The confusion, and the resulting strategic overstretch, trace back to the notion of “existential” threats in Netanyahu’s discourse. To wit, Netanyahu exaggerated not just about the outcome of the June 2025 war, but also the severity of the threat posed by the Islamic Republic — to his own political benefit and the Jewish state’s detriment. 

It’s clear that the Tehran regime was — and remains — a threat to Israel: Its leaders vow publicly to destroy the Jewish state, fund terror organizations that have been murdering Israelis for decades, and have laid the groundwork for developing nuclear weapons. So yes, to state the obvious, Iran is a threat that Israel must take seriously. But not every threat is an existential threat, one that should be placed at the very top of a country’s list of national priorities, eclipsing other threats in terms of the resources and intelligence devoted to it.

Describing the Iranian threat as an existential one has been at the core of Netanyahu’s politics for decades. His pitch to Israeli voters has been simple: Iran threatens our very survival as a country, and I’m the only one who can stop the mullahs in Tehran from exterminating us. He campaigned on this issue time and again, and it helped him remain in power continuously since 2009, except for the brief 18 months in 2021 and 2022, during which Israel’s short-lived “Government of Change,” led by Naftali Bennett, temporarily replaced him.

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Israel’s opposition leaders during this period often upheld Netanyahu’s framing of Iran as the top threat, even if they criticized some of his tactical choices, such as his controversial speech before the US Congress denouncing Barack Obama’s nuclear deal in 2015. But for the most part, none of the opposition leaders has fundamentally challenged the idea that Iran should be placed atop the list of potential threats to the Jewish state.

A rare exception came in the summer of 2014. That’s when Tamir Pardo, the then-director of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency said in a closed-door briefing that the conflict with the Palestinians, not Iran, is the biggest security threat to Israel. The quote was published by Israeli newspaper Haaretz, where I work, and made Netanyahu furious.

Netanyahu had appointed Pardo, yet the latter’s comments directly contradicted Netanyahu’s worldview. Netanyahu, while constantly emphasizing the Iranian threat to Israel, had for years treated the Palestinian issue as a minor nuisance, a small problem that could be “managed” indefinitely and that shouldn’t distract from the Iran crisis.

Pardo, by contrast, suggested that the Iranian threat was one Israel could manage. To Pardo’s mind, it was the Palestinian problem — Israel’s military occupation in the West Bank and Hamas’s rise to power in Gaza — that could someday explode in ways that would truly endanger the country. “The Palestinian question is the top external threat [to Israel],” he said at the time.

Netanyahu wasn’t convinced, and the spy chief’s comments were soon forgotten. When Netanyahu delivered his speech to Congress in March 2015 — conveniently for him, just two weeks before that month’s general election — no one in the Israeli political system challenged his assertion that the Islamic Republic was the biggest threat endangering Israel.

After his 2015 victory, Netanyahu took two substantial policy decisions that showcased his view of Iran as Israel’s top threat, and his corresponding view of the Palestinian issue as a mere distraction. First, he convinced President Trump to blow up Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. That move set the stage for a sequence of events that eventually led to the current war, as the Tehran regime intensified its nuclear activity without the constraints of the JCPOA. Israel responded to this by increasing its own preparations for war with Iran, in order to prevent it from developing a nuclear weapon.

Second, Netanyahu approved Qatar’s cash payments to Hamas in Gaza as a mechanism to keep the Gaza Strip from flaring up. The Qatari payments, which over the years amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars, were a terrible idea: they directly strengthened Hamas and allowed the Islamist organization to turn itself from a militia into an army of terror. But Netanyahu and his supporters in the Israeli media justified it at the time as a brilliant ploy to keep the Palestinian front quiet, while Israel focused on Iran — the “existential” threat.

To be fair, Netanyahu wasn’t alone in adopting this “Iran first, Palestinians last” strategy. He had many willing partners in the top ranks of the Israeli military — a reality reflected in the diversion of ever-more resources over the years toward anything related to a future war with Iran: fighter jets, missile-defense systems, nuclear submarines, covert operations, and more. It seemed that for the more “glamorous” sectors of the armed forces — those responsible for overcoming the Iranian threat — budget was never an issue.

At the same time, Israel’s “regular” army — the ground forces responsible for protecting the borders and policing the occupied West Bank — was gradually hollowed out. There were older, retired generals who warned over the years about this dangerous trend, warning that the military wouldn’t be ready in case of a surprise attack from Hamas in the south or Hezbollah in the north. But their warnings were mostly ignored or dismissed. The Iran-as-existential doctrine became dogma.

In that sense, Israel’s stunning recent achievements against the Islamic Republic — the aerial domination of Iranian skies, the decapitation of the senior leadership, deep Mossad penetration of the regime — shouldn’t be viewed separately from the equally stunning failures of the Israeli military on Oct. 7. These are two sides of the same coin, two elements of a deliberate strategy to focus completely on the threat from Iran, while dismissing the Palestinian issue as a minor problem that can be kicked down the road with Qatari bribes in Gaza and the aid of the corrupt and increasingly unpopular Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

In retrospect, and in light of what we know today about Oct. 7, the Gaza War and the two Israel-Iran wars, it’s at least worth asking if Netanyahu’s set of priorities has been wrong all along. Hamas on Oct. 7 killed some 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 250 hostages. Tens of thousands of Israeli families had to be evacuated from their homes, and hundreds of Israeli soldiers died in the Gaza war that ensued.

That war, which also led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians and the destruction of large parts of the Gaza Strip, also harmed Israel’s international reputation in unprecedented ways, as evident in recent polls showing that for the first time ever, more Americans sympathize with the Palestinians than with Israel. This by itself is a major strategic crisis for Israel, and it will only get worse in the future, since the levels of support for the Jewish state are significantly lower among younger respondents in virtually every poll on this subject.

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Israel’s two wars with Iran, by comparison, have so far resulted in the deaths of approximately 60 Israelis — this, despite Iran firing almost 1,000 ballistic missiles at Israel, including direct hits against a hospital, residential buildings, and energy infrastructure. The Iranian regime is currently fighting a war of survival, and it may indeed survive by shutting down the Straits of Hormuz and choking the global economy; but in terms of the direct damage to Israel, the Islamic Republic has been much less destructive than Hamas or Hezbollah.

All this doesn’t mean that Israel should have ignored the threat posed by Iran, nor that it was a mistake for Israel to take military action against Tehran in June 2025 and again in February 2026 (the question of whether Washington should have joined Israel in those two wars is a separate one). The ballistic missiles that did penetrate Israel’s air-defense system caused extensive damage in Israeli cities. And to be sure, the nuclear threat is one Israel can never treat lightly, not least from Iran, a country ideologically pledged to Israel’s elimination. But it’s still important to ask whether the singular, years-long focus on the Iranian threat, and the dismissal of the Palestinian issue as a sideshow, had turned out to be a strategic blunder.

This question isn’t just important for our understanding of the past; It should be treated with urgency today, as Hamas tightens its grip over postwar Gaza, and Israeli far-Right extremists are trying to set the West Bank on fire with nightly attacks on Palestinian communities. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority — which today controls approximately 40% of the West Bank, and works hand-in-hand with Israel to thwart terror plots there — is on the verge of collapse; the tens of thousands of men employed in its security forces could soon be left without paychecks, but with their weapons in hand, a potential nightmare scenario for the Jewish state.

Once the second Israel-Iran war ends, Netanyahu will probably boast once again that an “existential threat” has been removed, no matter what the actual results on the ground and regardless of whether or not a third war with Iran will be needed in the future. He will describe Israel as stronger than ever — “a regional superpower,” in his words, that can bomb targets thousands of miles away on a daily basis and suffer painful but tolerable losses at home thanks to its advanced air-defense systems.

Maybe some parts of this description will even be true. But Israelis and supporters of the Jewish state abroad will be wise to remember the lessons of Oct. 7. We must ask ourselves if the real existential threat to Israel is truly buried under the sand somewhere in Iran — or whether it is actually found in our own inclination to bury our heads in the sand and ignore much more dangerous things happening right next to us.

Contrary to the way this agreement has been sold by the White House and Benjamin Netanyahu, then, it offers Hamas an opportunity to assess, while not being bombed, the ways and means for it to continue its rule over Gaza. Given the carnage, the Islamist outfit will likely remain on a tightrope, playing Palestinian hatred of Israel off against the desolation it has provoked. Islamic history offers a long record of martyrdom losing its appeal when the unrighteous prove stronger and more fierce than expected. Hamas is calculating that with both Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners safely exchanged, fear of a long-lasting insurgency will keep it in power. It’s a decent bet.

With any luck, the 250 Palestinians in jail for life, and who are now being released, might also reenergize the resistance. Hamas’ stubborn fearsomeness, fortified by all those tunnels, has certainly guaranteed that outsiders will approach Trump’s indispensable idea of an “international stabilization force” for post-war Gaza as a worthy recommendation best staffed by others. Are American, Emirati, Saudi, Egyptian, Jordanian, European, or, least likely of all, Palestinian Authority (PA), forces really going to patrol the Strip if Hamas fighters remain there to ambush them?

If Trump can finally get a stabilization force into the Strip — and that’s a big if — a slow but bloody harassment would likely be enough to keep the force’s effectiveness similar to that of a typical UN peacekeeping mission: basically useless. If Qatar calls off Al Jazeera, and the Saudis tell their myriad press outlets to limit Gazan reporting, Hamas may find it hard to show the world that other Arabs are thumping on Palestinians. But that potential advantage is nonetheless unlikely to convince them from jumping into the Gaza morass, especially when everyone from the Gulfies to Egypt held their distance from the Palestinian imbroglio.

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The biggest beneficiary of such a force, at least in the short term, would be the Israelis. The burden of policing Gaza would be lightened. Lots of Arabs now deal with the Jewish state, those within the Abraham Accords pretty publicly. The Gaza conflict may not have changed those exchanges much: given the private distaste that many Arab leaders have for Palestinians. The recent leaked Pentagon documents about regional cooperation against Iran and other threats since October 2023 surely reflect what’s been true since at least the First Iraq War in 1991, when many Palestinians sided with Saddam Hussein. But no Arab ruler has ever asked their soldiers to bleed for the Israelis — or the Palestinians. Across each of their four wars with Israel, Arab rulers definitely weren’t vying to create a Palestinian state. So unless the Gazans bring down Hamas from the inside, the group will likely rule the Strip’s rubble since no one else is going to volunteer.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) obviously need a break from two years of constant combat. Even among the most hawkish of Israelis who believe the Palestinians — not just Hamas — share the guilt for what happened on October 7, war weariness is almost universal. In Gaza and on the West Bank, Israel hit the ceiling of how much manpower it can continuously deploy. It’s now crystal clear that most Israelis adamantly don’t want to reoccupy Gaza. Most Israelis would probably love to see an international stabilization force move in, even if such a deployment curtailed Israeli actions. Jerusalem obviously can’t trust Cairo to keep arms from crossing over the Egyptian-Gaza border. The Israelis might trust the Americans to stop arms from flowing through Hamas tunnels, but that would mean turning US troops, who would have to build a substantial security perimeter, into both an occupying force and a target for Hamas.

Limited Israeli occupation therefore still seems inevitable. Walling off the Palestinians in Gaza didn’t work brilliantly before. Rebuilding the Strip will offer ample opportunity to Hamas, or indeed other militants, to divert materials for underground bunkers. Unless the Israelis can check everything that comes into the Strip, Hamas or others could also begin to reconstitute crude but deadly missiles and mortars. The opportunities here for corruption and anti-Israeli sympathies, especially if Arab forces given policing duties, would surely be more than Israel could bear. Jerusalem might accept Americans, maybe Europeans, to verify Palestinian behavior. But if Hamas regains freedom of movement throughout all of Gaza — if Israel doesn’t have internal checkpoints from which to launch rapid operations — the IDF could once again find itself committing much larger forces later: with all the death and destruction that’ll inevitably entail. Without a Western-led stabilization force, willing to commit to years in Gaza, the Israelis will somehow need to fill the void.

All the while, Israelis hope the cessation of hostilities will make their country less of a pariah. They have traditionally had a close relationship with Europe, and would eagerly welcome less hostility. Images of Gaza in rubble likely won’t animate as much anger as those of active urban warfare. All Israelis would like to see the erosion of American support stopped; Netanyahu has no interest in bushwhacking the President’s peace-making. Trump’s current Gaza plans, as vague as they are, seem to be less delusional than his first-draft, “Las-Vegas-by-the-Sea” dreamscape. The harsh realities of postwar Gaza will tax Trump’s attention span, however, especially once it becomes obvious the stabilization force has zero chance of working without US troops entering harm’s way. Nor will a ceasefire resuscitate the lost affection on the American Left for Israel, especially worrying when their critiques increasingly cut to the very heart of the Zionist project. Pro-Israeli sympathies on the American Right may be somewhat safer — unless Trump actually sends US troops off on yet another Middle Eastern adventure.

For the moment, then, all Trump has actually achieved so far is the hostage-prisoner exchange. Netanyahu has agreed to the release of several stone-cold killers, though drew a red line at Marwan Barghouti, a significant player in the Second Intifada whom an Israeli court found guilty of the murder of five Israelis. Politically talented even behind bars, and fluent in Hebrew, Barghouti is undeniably charismatic. Since he’s been in jail for 23 years, he’s also untouched by the rampant malversation that defines the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas, Yasser Arafat’s successor.

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Were Barghouti freed, he might try to force new presidential and legislative elections. Palestinian democracy died in 2006, when Fatah, the most powerful member of the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization, refused to recognize Hamas’s victory in legislative elections: something Fatah achieved with the approval of both Israel and the United States. Today, though, Barghouti might well triumph in a similar vote.

With more access to the press, Barghouti could make a lot of noise in favor of a two-state solution; unlike a growing number of Palestinians, and just about all Israelis, he still seems to like the idea. Israelis surely fear his disruptive potential: even without an election victory, Barghouti might be able to engineer a third intifada on the West Bank, especially when violence by Jewish settlers only ever seems to worsen. The IDF and the internal security service, Shin Bet, have deployed a lot of manpower to the far side of the Jordan to ensure that another insurrection doesn’t happen.

Most Israelis and Palestinians, let alone all those in the West who’ve watched the Gaza war with horror, will surely cheer if the bloodletting truly ceases. It’s likely, however, that what’s left of the Hamas leadership and Netanyahu, the IDF, and Shin Bet are all looking down the road, trying to figure out how “peace” might reward the enemy. In his peacenik aspirations, President Trump appears well-intentioned. But good intentions really don’t matter, least of all in the Holy Land. Money doesn’t actually matter that much either, once the fighting actually starts. If it did, the Sunni Arab Gulf states would be powerhouses, easily a match for Iran and capable of suppressing Yemen’s ragtag Houthis.

As for Gaza and the West Bank, the preeminent question today is whether the Palestinians’ physical and emotional exhaustion leads them to recalculate the costs of their beliefs and actions. They have by far lost the most since October 7, 2023. If they have changed, and that finally depletes Hamas’s reserves of manpower, then Trump’s diplomacy might actually be the start of something positive, far-Right Israeli intransigence notwithstanding. Then again, optimism is usually a very bad bet in the Middle East.

For Israel and Lebanon, the coming weeks will be no different. The outgoing Biden team will seek to have an impact on the war. The incoming Trump team will manoeuvre to have as much unpleasantness as possible finished before it comes and as much credit as possible coming to them. And various European and Arab states will seek to exploit the American transition for their own initiatives.

Across the West, diplomats and experts have settled on a consensus for solving the ongoing Arab-Israeli war — one that reveals exactly why international diplomatic efforts have consistently failed. At its core, this approach focuses on restoring the very ceasefire conditions which Lebanon and Hezbollah violated last year, while avoiding any mention of even the desirability of peace — something Lebanon would benefit from more than any other party. In failing to recognise this, our international diplomats embody all the pathologies and failures that have come to define their contribution to this decades-long conflict.

According to the Quai d’Orsay and the State Department, the formula for ending the war merely requires punching in the four-digit PIN code 1701. That, of course, is UN Security Council resolution 1701, the one that ended the last war back in 2006. The resolution included several clear obligations for all parties. Israel was to withdraw from Lebanese territory. Hezbollah was to move all its forces north of the Litani River, creating a buffer zone where the only permitted armed forces would be those of the UN peacekeeping force (UNIFIL) and the Lebanese Army (LFA). UNIFIL was to monitor and enforce these deployments. And Hezbollah was supposed to be decommissioned as an armed force inside sovereign Lebanese territory.

The first measure, Israeli withdrawal, was implemented within days of the resolution’s passage. The others were not. Once Israel’s withdrawal was complete, UNIFIL announced that it had no intention of enforcing 1701, and over the course of the next 17 years, Hezbollah assembled an arsenal of rockets and missiles. It also built a network of tunnels that were supposed to allow it, in a future war, to “conquer the Galilee” in an operation similar to the one Hamas ultimately launched hundreds of kilometres away in southern Israel.

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The day after Hamas’s assault on southern Israel on October 7 last year, Hezbollah began firing rockets on northern Israel, forcing the rapid evacuation of border communities comprising nearly 100,000 residents, most of whom have yet to return home. After 11 months of low-intensity warfare, Israel took the initiative, and in 11 days managed to deal Hezbollah a decisive blow. 

On 17 and 18 September, exploding pagers and walkie-talkies disabled the militia’s communications network, taking thousands of fighters out of commission. Over the next week, a series of airstrikes based on precise intelligence destroyed the majority of Hezbollah’s rockets and launchers and eliminated key military commanders. Finally, on 27 September, an Israeli airstrike on a bunker in Beirut killed nearly every senior figure in the organisation, including its voluble leader Hassan Nasrallah. This was followed by a ground invasion which has seen tunnels and munitions, prepared over a decade and more, destroyed with huge losses to Hezbollah and minimal losses to the IDF.

However, the 11-day campaign woke up the international community in a way that 11 months of rocket fire did not. And the unanimous response has been an urgent call for implementation of 1701. David Lammy called for a “political solution in line with Resolution 1701”. The French ambassador to the UN called upon Israel “to stop the escalation underway in Lebanon” and reiterated Frances determination for a cessation of hostilities “in accordance with Resolution 1701”. Hours before the successful operation to kill Nasrallah, the US, Canada, Australia, Canada and a host of European and Arab states issued a joint declaration demanding an immediate 21-day cease “to provide space for diplomacy towards the conclusion of a diplomatic settlement consistent with UNSCR 1701”.

This consensus around the indeterminate and obsolete Security Council resolution tells, in short, the entire story of the failure to resolve this conflict. If there is one thread running through nearly every diplomatic effort of the last eight decades, it is a firm commitment to the idea that any party that launches a war against Israel and is then defeated is entitled to a restoration of the conditions it violently rejected when launching the war.

This unspoken normative commitment explains the iterations of final status plans presented to the Palestinian leadership after its rejection of statehood at Camp David and subsequent suicide bombing campaign of the early 2000s. It explains the insistence on pre-1967 armistice lines as the only legal basis for Israel’s border after 1967. It explains the curious exception to that norm regarding the refusal to recognise even the pre-1967 part of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. And it explains the cruel human experiment known as UNRWA, a refugee agency that, unlike any other refugee agency, exists not to rehabilitate refugees but rather to keep them in a permanent state of immiseration to maintain an irredentist claim against another country.

Such a norm has not featured in the post-war mediation of any other conflict, not before 1945 and not since. No one has ever seriously suggested creating a kind of sportsman’s mulligan as an international diplomatic norm for other conflicts for this very reason. It’s not hard to see why this might be the case. If the international community extended a line of insurance to other aggressors, which promised that launching wars could bring gains with victory but no losses with defeat, there would be a lot more wars. 

But what’s even more notable than the warped consensus around 1701 is the absence of any mention of making peace between the two neighbouring states. Nowhere is the establishment of normal diplomatic relations between Lebanon and Israel even mentioned as a long-term goal.

One might argue that peace right now is not realistic, and that may be true. But that is equally true about an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank or the establishment of a Palestinian state or the redivision of Jerusalem — and yet these are always mentioned as long-term goals by European governments.

Why shouldn’t a peace treaty be the clearly stated goal? Normal diplomatic relations would resolve any existing border disputes. After all, the ones still extant are tiny and largely invented pretexts for maintaining Hezbollah’s arsenal.

Just before the US election, France hosted an “International Conference in Support of Lebanon’s People and Sovereignty”, where $1 billion in aid was pledged and where French President Macron claimed Israel was “sowing barbarism”. If there was any suggestion that Lebanon’s situation might have been improved by not firing rockets into Israel for the past 11 months, the participants were too polite to mention it. Nor was there any reckoning with Lebanon’s decision to cultivate an alternative armed force, larger than its own military, implicated in atrocities in Syria, and answerable to the Islamic Republic of Iran. The insistence of global actors, most notably the host country itself, on protecting Hezbollah and securing for it advantageous ceasefire arrangements in previous wars in 1996 and 2006 also went unmentioned.

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And no one mentioned peace. Normal diplomatic relations between Lebanon and Israel wouldn’t mean that Lebanon agrees with everything Israel does. This is already the case for France as well as most of its allies. For that matter, it is also the case for Egypt and Jordan. It would just mean that there is an agreed border, a possibility for minimal economic cooperation, and a commitment to resolve disputes by negotiation. Good for Israel, to be sure. But even better for Lebanon. 

True, no one could seriously believe that this path will be adopted. But the reticence to even raise the topic of peace is in many ways revealing. Most obviously, it sends the wrong message and incentivises the wrong behaviours — as well as violates any normal diplomatic practice regarding other international disputes. But it also mirrors the manner in which the contemporary Western cordon sanitaire around racism has an elaborate permission structure exempting hatred of Jews. Once again, all that’s required is to frame one’s dislike as a kind of grievance against Israel — rather than as pathological hatred of a highly imperfect state that is fighting a complex seven-front war it did not seek.