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.

I know of many other, no less traumatizing, events. In 1987, I published a Hebrew-language novel called Border Patrol — based on a case I had heard at the time — about a soldier who accidentally kills a pregnant woman in Lebanon, and is haunted by the ghost of the unborn child. Then there were such cases as the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, carried out by Lebanese Christian militias supplied and supported by the IDF, with Israeli troops surrounding the camps and lighting up the area with flares. From wars to skirmishes to endless occupation, serving in the IDF has provided ample opportunities for violence, accidental or otherwise, against innocent civilians.

All the same, as I think back to my basic training, shortly before the hell of the Yom Kippur War, I must admit that we were taught to respect and fear the weapons we were given. The “purity of arms” of the IDF was always partly mythical — yet it was constantly drilled into us. To be victorious, we were told, we had to be just, and as soldiers we were issued clear instructions on when we were allowed to open fire: rules which were strictly enforced. The IDF could not be like those marauding, lawless, criminal armies that subjected Jews to wanton murder, rape, and humiliation during the long centuries of exile. As early as the Thirties, the prominent Zionist leader Berl Katznelson exhorted Jewish paramilitary troops in Palestine: “May our arms remain pure. We train to use weapons, we carry weapons and confront those who attack us. But we do not want our arms to be soiled by the blood of innocents.”

In reality, of course, since its formation in 1948, the IDF engaged in multiple war crimes, not least during the War of Independence itself. Most of these crimes were covered up or denied, from the now well-documented cases of executions in Palestinian villages in the Galilee, which were long denied, to the widely reported massacre of over 100 people, including women and children, in the village of Deir Yassin in April 1948, for which no one was eventually charged.

Even so, on occasion, a few have been prosecuted and held up as a warning about the potential of young armed men descending into savagery. This was the case of the massacre of over 40 civilians in Kafr Qasim in 1956, which resulted in an Israeli court ruling that a “black flag” flies over unlawful orders to kill innocents. But the occupation, which began following the Six Day War, brought with it growing dehumanization of the Palestinians and the ever-progressive loosening of rules on exercising violence against civilians, as can be seen now in the escalating attacks by Jewish settlers, often abetted by IDF troops, against Palestinians in the West Bank. The scandal that is currently roiling Israeli society — and the nature of the debate surrounding it — is the culmination of this process, with profound ramifications for the rule of law in Israel as a whole.

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By Omer Bartov

In July 2024, the IDF military police opened an investigation into reports of abuse of Palestinian prisoners in the notorious detention center of Sde Teiman. An initial attempt to arrest some of the suspected soldiers was met with demonstrations, and some protesters and far-Right politicians broke into the camp to protect the culprits. Eventually, five soldiers were indicted for causing severe abuse and injury to a prisoner who had to undergo emergency surgery. As protests reached a frenzy, a clip allegedly showing soldiers brutalizing a prisoner was leaked to the media, exposing to the public the severity of the abuse. Initially, the office of the Military Advocate General, tasked with running the investigation, insisted that it could not determine the identity of the leaker. But, in October this year, Military Advocate General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned, conceding that she had authorized the leak to protect her office from false accusations that it was needlessly persecuting innocent soldiers merely carrying out their duty against Hamas operatives. She then disappeared, raising fears about her possible suicide. Fortunately, Tomer-Yerushalmi later resurfaced, only to be taken into custody herself. She is currently under investigation both for leaking the video and for lying to the Supreme Court about its provenance.

Israeli society is starkly divided over the scandal. Those who defend the arrested soldiers — notably Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir — claim that Tomer-Yerushalmi and her office are part of a “deep state” plot: one that is trying to undermine the Israeli government, “tie the hands” of the IDF in its war against terrorism, and prevent it from accomplishing a “final victory” against Hamas. Those who defend Tomer-Yerushalmi say that while she might have made mistakes in how she conducted herself, what matters much more is that she and her office stood up for the rule of law and exposed the abuse of Palestinian prisoners by rogue IDF soldiers.

The truth is far more sordid — and troubling. The office of the Military Advocate General is charged with investigating and charging illegal conduct by members of the IDF. Yet for the past two years, as the IDF killed tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza, and as evidence mounted of attacks against aid workers — from a drone strike against the Aid Central Kitchen charity in April 2024, to the tank shells that killed 22 at a hospital in August 2025 — Tomer-Yerushalmi, the IDF’s top legal adviser, did virtually nothing.

This did not begin on October 7. For years, the office of the Military Advocate General has facilitated and obscured the crimes of Israeli soldiers. Created in 1948 to provide judicial advice, and to arrange military trials, the office is headed by an advocate general appointed by the Minister of Defense and is not directly subordinate to the army’s chief of staff. It also includes a department responsible for ensuring that the IDF operates in accordance with international law.

As a 2016 report by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem pointed out, however, this entire military judicial apparatus gradually transformed into a mechanism for covering up crimes, what it called a “fig leaf of the occupation”. Indeed, after years of failed appeals to the military justice system, B’Tselem concluded that the Advocate General’s very existence was intended not to deliver justice — but to offer its semblance.

This conclusion is supported elsewhere too. As far back as January 2009, for instance, Haaretz reported that the office adopted highly controversial interpretations of international law to justify the IDF’s actions in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. That included the bombing of a graduation ceremony of a police course on the first day of the operation that killed dozens of policemen, and the killing of 40 people by a mortar shell aimed at a target next to a United Nations Relief and Works Agency school, where Palestinians were sheltering. “Our goal is not to fetter the army,” Daniel Reisner, the officer who established the department was even quoted as saying, “but to give it the tools to win in a lawful manner.” More than that, Reisner explained that his department backed policies that were “on the edge” of the legal void: demolishing houses, carrying out deportation, and conducting targeted assassinations. “What we are seeing now is a revision of international law,” Reisner added, a decade and a half before October 7. “If you do something long enough, the world will accept it.”

According to B’Tselem, Operation Cast Lead caused the death of 762 innocent civilians, including 318 children and over 100 women. But officials in the legal department insisted that these deaths, along with a great deal of indiscriminate destruction of property, had no impact on the legality of the operation. “The law has actually been stood on its head,” concluded Professor Orna Ben-Naftali, an Israeli legal scholar, even back then. “It has ceased to fulfill its purpose, and we have to admit that it has gone into dissolution procedures ahead of bankruptcy.”

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The slippery slope of 2008 became even more pronounced during the IDF’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge, in which over 500 Palestinian children were killed. The plunge to the abyss, as is well known, came with Israel’s response to the October 7 massacre. Over the next two years, at least 68,000 Palestinians were killed, of whom up to 20,000 were children. As far as is known, no one has been brought to account. Indeed, the Advocate General’s office provided legal license for much of the killing. For one thing, it showed a high tolerance of civilian collateral damage in attacks on Hamas operatives — not only senior officers but low-ranking members too — by asserting that civilians who would or could not leave their homes as instructed could be considered enemy targets. For another, it refused to undertake all but the most superficial investigations of blatant crimes, adding to the sense of impunity among IDF troops.

Given all this, it is anyway difficult to feel sorry for Tomer-Yerushalmi, even if one must regret that she will pay a price for the wrong crime. What is more troubling, though, is that Prime Minister Netanyahu and his minions have pounced on the case as an opportunity to accelerate their campaign of dismantling what remains of Israeli law, installing their own people in positions of power and claiming that any accusations of wrongdoing are mere manifestations of “deep state” liberalism and foreign antisemitism. Most recently, the government has announced that it would launch its own inquiry into the fiasco of October 7 — which occurred under its watch — rather than establishing an independent state commission of inquiry.

All the while, one must wonder who now is left to stand in the breach? As I recall how all this began, with the progressive cheapening of Palestinian lives and the use of law to justify the unjustifiable, I can only conclude that, when some of us youngsters warned of the corrupting effects of the occupation in the years following the war of 1967, we had no idea how far Israeli democracy would finally be dismantled. Thanks to a military justice system that provides impunity to the IDF, the horror I described four decades ago in Border Patrol has now become the norm.

And though the last few weeks have shown hints of optimism — the hostages are home, and Gaza is free from the buzz of IDF drones — the Holy Land’s basic problems feel just as intractable. Whatever Donald Trump might claim, this truth can ultimately be encapsulated in his deal’s very last line. “The United States will establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians,” the document proclaims, “to agree on a political horizon for peaceful and prosperous co-existence.” This, after all, has been the promise of peace negotiations since I was in the army — and so far they’ve achieved pretty much nothing.

We know, of course, that the current Israeli government, the most Right-wing coalition ever assembled in the nation’s history, has no intention of facilitating the creation of a Palestinian state. Long before he formed this government, in late 2022, Benjamin Netanyahu spent his entire career preventing that very possibility. As far back as his incitement against Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin during the negotiation over the Oslo Accords — which led to Rabin’s assassination in 1995 — Netanyahu has been a vehement and consistent enemy of Palestinian statehood.

As recently as 6 October 2023, indeed, Netanyahu thought he could “manage the occupation” rather than putting an end to it through a political compromise. Hamas’s massacre the following day smashed that idea. But even if it hadn’t, Netanyahu’s colleagues would still have remained, with Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich both eager to dispossess the Palestinians and annex certainly the West Bank if not Gaza too. Either way, the triumvirate aspires to a very different future from that envisioned in the Trump plan Netanyahu has reluctantly endorsed.

If, as some fear, the Prime Minister ultimately manages to derail the plan, the demolition of Gaza and the slaughter of its Palestinian population will continue, even as some Jews hope to resettle the territory themselves. Those Palestinians remaining in Gaza will be squeezed into less than a quarter of the territory and subjected to conditions resembling a cross between a ghetto and a prison camp. This is all part of the openly professed government target of “encouraging” them to leave.

As for the West Bank, once conditions in Gaza require fewer Israeli troops, the illegal and plausibly apartheid regime in place there already will accelerate the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the territory, whose initial phases include moving the rural population into the urban centers in the south; taking over and demolishing the refugee camps in the north; separating both regions from each other; and progressively turning Palestinian communities into isolated outposts. Whether or not Israel succeeds in annexing parts of the West Bank, it aims to perpetuate a sense of poverty, siege, intimidation and despair intended to similarly “encourage” Palestinians in the West Bank to quit the territory altogether.

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By Omer Bartov

Many decades have passed since the start of Israel’s occupation in 1967, and its transformation into a nation ruling more or less equal numbers of Palestinians and Israelis. One of developments since has been the growing dehumanization of Palestinians in the collective Jewish Israeli mind. The “social death” that Palestinians have undergone, insulated as they are behind the security barrier, means they’re encountered by Israelis only as a population to be controlled and oppressed. That becomes clear enough if you turn on the television, with one Channel 14 host claiming he doesn’t “sleep well” unless more of Gaza is flattened. Or else go on social media, with many comparing Palestinians to “Amalak”, a Biblical enemy that God commanded the Israelites to annihilate. As late as August, a Haaretz poll found that 82% of Israelis were untroubled by reports of famine in the Strip.

These societal attitudes are also reflected in law. Palestinian citizens of Israel still enjoy equal rights under Israeli law, with many pursuing successful careers from medicine to the law. Yet the Nation State Law, passed in 2018, defines Israel as the historical homeland of the Jewish people, and grants them the exclusive right to national self-determination in the country. At the core of this transformation is the gradual emergence of a thoroughgoing apartheid state, not only in the occupied territories, but increasingly in Israel proper as well. This is already manifested in the treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel as an undesirable population that should similarly be “encouraged” to leave. As Haaretz again reports, over half of Israeli Jews now back expelling their Arab compatriots wholesale, up from 31% in 2003.

No less important, these hardening attitudes are now boomeranging back against Israeli Jews. The country’s beleaguered Attorney General and Supreme Court, seen before October 7 as the last bastions of the rule of law and civil rights for Jewish citizens, now remain silent in view of the widespread severe abuses of international law vis-à-vis Palestinians under occupation. More than that, they ignore or even condone the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocidal actions of the IDF in Gaza. Taken together, these institutions can no longer be expected to act in defense of Jewish citizens protesting their regime’s brutalities.

In other words, if Netanyahu scuttles Trump’s plan, using his own infamous bag of tricks, and relying on Trump’s notoriously short attention span, the future of Israel — quite apart from, but also related to, the catastrophic fate of Palestinians — is dire indeed. Even before the war, secular Israeli Jews feared that the growing demographic weight and political clout of their religious compatriots would change the nature of Israeli society. Since October 7, these fears, exacerbated by intensifying messianic rhetoric and the erosion of the rule of law, as well as the deteriorating economic situation, have led thousands of young professionals and their families to leave the country, with many more considering their own migration. Certainly, this exodus won’t be counterbalanced by the influx of Jews making Aliyah from the diaspora, notwithstanding the many examples of genuine antisemitism they face in Europe and elsewhere.

If this trajectory were to continue, in the coming decades Israeli society risks changing even in such strongholds of tolerance as Tel Aviv, with Israeli nationalism focused not only on its ethnic but also on its religious Jewish identity — one which rejects all other non-orthodox versions of Judaism. Religious coercion would greatly increase, and secular, progressive, and liberal Jewish life in Israel risk diminishing into ever-more isolated enclaves. Israel may not be the next Iran, but a mix of theocracy and authoritarianism may well be the destiny for a state largely founded by secular socialist Zionists who had rebelled against what they saw as the stranglehold of backward-looking religious leaders in the diaspora.

In foreign policy, too, Israel would suffer. If it were to become the apartheid state its critics have long accused it of being, it wouldn’t be able to maintain strong economic, political, and military ties with its main European allies and the United States. It would gradually lose the support of growing parts of the diaspora: even as things stand today, around two-in-three American Jews believe Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza. None of this is helped, of course, by the claim of Israel itself — a claim disputed by many Jews living beyond its borders — that it represents the Jewish people as a collective.

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As an increasingly unstable and feeble pariah state, Israel could continue to exist for a couple of decades: mostly, perhaps, because it may still be perceived as a strategic asset by the United States. But the weaker it got, and the more extremist it became, the less of an asset Israel would be for any rational actor in the White House. All the while, keeping down millions of occupied Palestinians would only become harder, all of which would distract from Israel’s external security. In an unstable and violent region, that’ll only make it less attractive as a strategic ally to Europe or the US.

Taken together, this is not a country that I would want to live in, nor wish for my children and grandchildren to make a life in. It would also be the very opposite of what the visionaries of Zionism, the prophets of the Haskalah — the Jewish Enlightenment — or the Jewish religious sages throughout the generations, had hoped and prayed for.

In the long run, of course, the grim reality may lead Israelis to develop a more robust civil rights movement together with their Palestinian cousins, in a country which, combined with the occupied territories, now has a population of seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians. Optimists might even suggest that this will culminate in what was called for during the heyday of the Oslo negotiations: a “state of all its citizens”. But that is far from certain, considering how oppression and racism seems sure to generate ever more extremism: whether from Hamas or hill-top settlers. We may want to believe that, eventually, Israel will go through the same process as South Africa in the early Nineties. But there is no assurance that a Mandela or a de Klerk will emerge, and even if they do, current conditions in South Africa demonstrate that dismantling apartheid does not undo the long-term damage it inflicts on society.

This is why we must hope that the vague promises and hopes expressed in Trump’s plan do end up opening the path to another future. Despite the justified cynicism and skepticism expressed by its critics, and the obvious bad-faith of many of the politicians and advisers associated with it, the President’s plan broadly points in the right direction.

It’s clear, in the end, that the Gaza Strip must be ruled by its Palestinian population, and that it must be joined with the West Bank as a single political entity: the only way it can hope to be economically viable. Once the necessity of this process is recognized, it must also be acknowledged that the Jewish and Palestinian populations of this land have no choice but to find a way to share it with equality, justice, security, and dignity for all. The goal, then, is not to determine who has a greater right on the land, or who has committed worse atrocities, or who was there first — but to devise a plan that would allow both Jews and Palestinians to rule over themselves and to live side-by-side with members of the other group.

Such a blueprint actually exists, and the vague outlines of Trump’s plan do not in any way contradict it. That blueprint, known as “A Land for All”, and previously known as “Two States, One Homeland”, was founded under joint Israeli-Palestinian leadership in 2012. Now led by the Israeli Jew May Pundak, and the Palestinian citizen of Israel, Dr Rula Hardal, the movement has variously involved journalists, scholars and activists, both Israelis and Palestinians and on both sides of the Green Line.

Overall, the plan envisions a confederation between the States of Israel and Palestine, located more or less along the 1967 borders, and based on shared principles of equality, freedom and dignity. All the while, it would distinguish between citizenship and residence: so that Israeli citizens would be allowed to live in Palestine, and Palestinian citizens would be allowed to live in Israel, as long as they respected the laws of both states. Because the infrastructure of the land on both sides of the 1967 ceasefire Green Line is so inextricably linked — true from water, to electricity, to the “972” dialcode that unites Ramallan phones with their Haifan cousins — this confederation’s institutions would have to create mechanisms for sharing resources and institutions.

In this Israel-Palestine Confederation, people would have their own national identity, and each state would enjoy the right of return for its group to be implemented as it sees fit within its own borders. But in the more distant future, the confederation, having shown that Jews and Palestinians can live productively, creatively, and safely side-by-side, may decide to transform itself into a single state of all its citizens — not through a violent struggle, but through a process of reconciliation, mutual respect and trust, and a recognition of the benefits of diversity and the creative power of fusing cultures and traditions, rather than striving to eradicate them.

Implementing this plan would require a radical change in Israeli political thinking and leadership — but also among Palestinians. Hamas is clearly no longer a plausible partner, if it ever was, meaning the only viable alternative is the Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah. But the PA is both deeply corrupt and discredited as a collaborator in the occupation. It hardly helps that, just like Hamas, the PA’s security forces have often been accused of torture, something which is incidentally also true of Israel itself.

But just as there are Jewish Israelis today who might yet be able to offer a different vision after decades of failure, so too can new Palestinian leaders emerge. Some potential leaders are currently in Israeli jails. Others are still unknown to us, or perhaps even to themselves. But once the political space for change is created, I believe that more pragmatic leaders will invariably emerge, as has happened more than once before when nations emerge from the darkness of colonialism and oppression.

If and when such a confederation is eventually created, it could become the very light to the Gentiles that some of the early and more humanistically inclined prophets of Zionism had hoped it would become. A city on a hill, not a pariah among the nations. And if you accuse me of utopianism, amid the slaughter in Gaza and the bubbling violence in the West Bank? Well, barely a century ago, the idea of a Jewish state in the Holy Land would have been dismissed as utopian too, and indeed was by Jews and non-Jews alike.

Yet as Theodor Herzl famously said, “if you will it, it will not remain a dream.” Besides, the status quo doesn’t need dreamers to condemn it: continue down this path and extremism will only grow. As for myself, I may not live long enough to see this different future, if it ever comes at all. But I pray that one day, my grandchildren, and the grandchildren of my Palestinian friends, will be able to experience the realization of that promise — and finally consign the region’s endless wars to history.

Lying a mere six miles north of Jerusalem, Ramallah is a perennial strategic vulnerability for the State of Israel. It is also caught between two powers who dominate the lives of the people here. The Israelis occupy their land, and the Iranians seek any opportunity to enlist the Palestinians in their 40-year battle against the Jewish state.

Ramallah is the largest city in the West Bank, and it is ruled by Fatah, the largest faction in the multi-party Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO has a violent past, but is secular and more moderate than its rival, Hamas, which is trained and funded by Iran, and (despite its base being Gaza) also has a long history in Ramallah. Also operating the area, more clandestinely, are Hamas’ military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, as well the even more psychotic terror group Islamic Jihad.

And now, if the Iranians have their way, these groups will turn the West Bank into an active front in their decades-long proxy war against Israel. Already there are signs of a stepping-up of terror activity. On Sunday, Israel’s General Security Service (Shin Bet) announced that it had thwarted a large-scale Hamas operation in Hebron, a city on the other side of Jerusalem. It was one of the largest cells uncovered in recent years, said Shin Bet, and its members were planning to carry out shooting and bombing attacks against Israeli targets. “They conducted training, gathered intelligence, and assembled explosive devices to carry out attacks in the West Bank and inside Israel.”

It was startling news. After almost two weeks of tit-for-tat missile exchanges with Iran, Israelis are now having to worry about Iranian proxies once again.

Ramallah is unique. Superficially, it’s like so many other Arab cities: crowded streets, pungent wafts of gasoline and food, variegated shop fronts and dangling electricity cables, all amid a din of shrieks, roaring engines and incessant honking.

But it is no traditional Arab city. As I drive 10 or so miles east from King David Street, near Jerusalem’s old city, the wide, smooth boulevards narrow and the roads get rougher. For a while, Hebrew intermingles with Arabic on the signage and then it disappears altogether. This, though, is an area encased within Israeli control. The currency is the Israeli shekel, and thousands of Ramallah’s people — and far more before the atrocities of October 7th — work in Israel.

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Along with Israel’s Arabs, though, the people here have typically preferred to stay out of the Iran-Israel War. And it’s not like they aren’t provoked. With around 450,000 Israeli settlers (excluding East Jerusalem) and over 100 Israeli illegal outposts in the West Bank, tensions here are constant.

Worse, many of the more vicious settlers have used Gaza as a distraction to steal more land and get yet more violent. Here, in December 2023, I found a city that even Palestinian Authority figures told me was ripe for another Intifada (uprising). But a sullen peace has held.

Now, though, with Hamas and Hezbollah crippled, Assad mouldering in Moscow, and much of Iran’s command-and-control military and nuclear infrastructure no more, the Mullahs are battered and humiliated. They need a win — and, no longer flush with proxies to ululate and lob ordnance at Tel Aviv, they need alternatives. The West Bank, and its capital Ramallah, offers an almost ideal solution. Over the past six months Iran-backed terror groups in the West Bank, particularly Islamic Jihad, have become yet more active, with the IDF carrying out intense operations in response. These include drone strikes and ground missions, during which, in some cases, large swathes of people have been displaced which has caused yet more anger.

There is opportunity for the Iranians here. The only question is: will they take it?

I arrive as the city is on strike. Settlers have killed three Palestinians, and the people, understandably enraged, are refusing to work. If Iran wants to exploit discontent here, Israel’s settlers are doing its work for it. Streets are deserted; occasionally groups of young men stroll by smoking and talking on their phones.

I drive up through a series of winding roads. In Ramallah, class is delineated by height. The city sits on the Judaean Mountains and the higher up the slope you live, the richer and more powerful you are.

Major General Akram Rajoub’s apartment gazes down over the city. The space is a delineation of power; the style is Soho House meets Mukhabarat. We sit around a hexagonal glass table with gold-colored inlay. A long dark wood dining table

takes up half the room. Framed photographs of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas gaze down at us. Rajoub was 16 years old in 1980 when the IDF arrested him on charges of membership in the Fatah movement, possessing a weapon, and shooting at an Israeli police station in the West Bank. He served 14 years. After the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, he joined its intelligence unit and became a brigadier general, then the director of the Preventative Security Apparatus (essentially the FBI of Palestine). He cracked down on Hamas, liaised with Israel, and was responsible for training Palestinian commanders in cooperation with the US and UK. No one knows more about the threat of pro-Iranian terror groups in the West Bank than him. Not least because he then went on to become governor of Nablus and Jenin, which are the West Bank’s Hamas and Islamic Jihad strongholds. A major challenge for him was dealing with these violent Iran-backed militias who were loyal to Iran not Palestine. The result is of course chaos. “When militias are armed and funded by foreign backing, two parallel power structures emerge, and the security situation deteriorates,” he says wearily.

He’s not wrong. In Jenin, the Palestinian Authority is supposedly in charge. But when Hamas and Islamic Jihad militias launch attacks from there, Israel’s response is swift and unforgiving. All Palestinians in the area pay the price for Iran’s meddling.

I ask him directly: “Do you think Iran has Palestine’s best interests at heart?”

His response is equally direct. “Iran has never cared about Palestine’s liberation. They see Palestinian groups as a tool, not a cause. By supporting Hamas and Islamic Jihad, they use Palestinian blood to keep Israel occupied and distracted from their nuclear program.”

Rajoub argues that to end the Iranian threat in the West Bank, Israel must end its occupation there. Without occupation, he argues, there’s no justification for armed resistance. Right now, the Palestinian people have lost hope of a state and stability. This makes them ripe for Iranian exploitation.

Looking at Ramallah’s deserted streets, it’s notable that people are willing to go on strike and forgo opening their businesses in already desperate times, and so I can’t help but agree.

Since 7 October, the Israelis have had the West Bank under even more onerous security measures, essentially dividing it into cantons. With its high unemployment, power shortages, and a general sense of despair, is is now fertile ground for Iranian-backed terror groups.

Be that as it may, polling suggests that West Bank residents, reluctant to see the conflict worsen, are gravitating toward Fatah rather than Hamas – but, according to a May 2025 poll conducted in the West Bank, the vote for Hamas stands at 38% and Fatah at 27%. Hamas’s vote has dropped over the past year and Fatah’s has risen, suggesting that the population doesn’t want more conflict. That said, Hamas is the popular choice in Fatah’s stronghold. It’s terrible news for the PLO, and great news for Iran.

Rajoub understandably sees danger. “There’s been a decrease in activity due to the crackdowns, but the ideology remains,” he tells me. “People still believe in Iran’s cause. It’s a dangerous seed that could sprout again when the time is right.”

If the seed remains, what about the practicalities?

For Iran to cause chaos for Israel here it needs a reliable weapons pipeline — and it used to have one, relying on Hezbollah’s smuggling network to move arms from Lebanon through Syria, across Jordan, and into the West Bank. According to Israeli expert Jonathan Spyer, weapons were first transported to Hezbollah’s base in Qusayr, Syria, then to farms in Homs and Damascus, before being smuggled into Jordan and the West Bank by local families like the al-Saeeds and al-Ramthans. In the past, it was small arms — pistols and AKs. By the summer of last year, it had become C-4 explosives, anti-tank mines, rocket-propelled grenades, and advanced missiles.

But Israel’s pager operation put Hezbollah, and then as a result Assad, out of the game — for now. There are already signs that the “Army of God” is starting to regroup. “Never count these bastards out,” a security source told me last week. “Sure, they’re weak right now. But they’ve been weak before and they came back.”

There is also danger closer to home for the Israelis. Outside a fried chicken shop in central Ramallah I speak to Mohammed, a local investigative journalist. “It’s odd,” he says. “While the Palestinian Authority uses AK-47s, Iranian-backed groups are armed with M16s, a weapon typical of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Some versions even resemble Israeli sniper rifles.”

These, Mohammed explains, come in via the Israeli black market. Here the journey is much easier — all you must do is cross the checkpoints from Israel into the West Bank.

And it’s striking how easy it could be. No one checked my vehicle as I entered or left the West Bank. Generally, there is a rigorous process on the way out. But that wouldn’t stop a smuggler entering with weapons, dispersing them and coming out clean. The Israelis are almost certainly aware of a lot of this. They know that a lot of pro-Iranian terrorists are probably walking around here with weapons.

Even if they don’t always use them. With a mischievous glint in his eye, Mohammed tells me that, with cash in the West Bank so tight, and the Iranians so rich, sometimes pro-Iran terrorists happily take Iranian cash with no intention of doing any actual terrorism. To satisfy their paymasters, they merely film themselves screaming “Allahu Akbar!” while firing a few rounds (often with weapons they already owned) close to Israeli observation towers. This grabs Israeli attention without any bloodshed. The would-be terrorists then send the videos to the Iranians (who are apparently happy with what they see) and pocket the cash. “These guys know the IDF will come after them,” says Mohammed, “but a lot less hard than if they’d killed anyone.”

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Palestinians often gather to protest against Israel at Aladdin Cafe, close to the City Inn Square. Here, I meet Yusuf Paraka, who was a field officer in the Preventive Security Apparatus (one of the West Bank’s internal intelligence agencies) in Ramallah for 30 years until he asked for retirement three months ago. Pro-Iranian terror groups were a big part of his job. They were also its biggest frustration as he attempted to hunt them down only to see them escape from a Palestinian controlled area into another where he had no jurisdiction.

I ask him about the recent Iran-Israel conflict. Whose side are the Palestinians on? “When Iranian missiles flew over from Jordan, people were cheering from the rooftops,” he tells me. “They were happy about it. But does that mean they’re happy with Iran? No. We are not persuaded that Iran will not destroy Israel with its missiles. Once again, Iran is bringing chaos to the Palestinians, leaving them to deal with the destruction of Gaza.”

Following the combined Israeli and US strikes last month, Tehran is in trouble. But it’s wounded, not dead. While the Mullahs are in greater danger than ever since the 1979 revolution, they still hold a monopoly on violence inside Iran. Their war with Israel and the West remains a core ideological and strategic objective, and there has been no Waterloo. The war continues, and with their capabilities in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza diminished, the Mullahs need options more than ever.

“In the end, Iran is so dangerous not because of the money it gives. Palestinians can buy guns without Iranian money. But Iran changes the mentality,” says Mohammed. “They make this a religious war. And a religious war never ends.”

So while Israel refuses to improve life for Palestinians and continues to enable the worst impulses of the settlers, Iran will continue to find weakness and opportunity in the West Bank.

Worse, Israel’s standing in the United States, its most stalwart supporter, has suffered, its popular support fallen and falling. More broadly, the war has led to an unprecedented erosion in support for Israel above all among Democrats and young people, including American Jews. For the first time, an American president seeking re-election worries that his support for Israel, typically an asset in any political campaign in the United States, could contribute to his defeat. His campaign rallies have been interrupted by hecklers yelling “Genocide Joe” and berating him for abetting war crimes. According to recent survey, nearly a third of American adults believe the Gaza war amounts to genocide. And now, American university campuses are roiled by anti-war protests, which some Jewish students have joined.

More pertinently for the immediate situation in Gaza, Israel’s government appears to lack any post-war plan. And that matters. Even in the unlikely event that Netanyahu achieves all his started objectives in Gaza — freeing the hostages while also destroying Hamas seems impossible — more than nine million Israelis and more than five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are fated to live cheek-by-jowl. Neither community plans to depart, nor can they be expelled. The dreams of the most radical Palestinian movements of destroying the Jewish state and the calls from some within Israel’s hard-Right to expel Gazans en masse are equally fantastical. So, what can we expect after the war ends?

The most likely scenario is that Israel’s leaders will continue the policy that, despite intermittent negotiations with the Palestinians, has been in place since 1967, when Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza following the Six-Day War. Often called “mowing the grass”, it boils down to the open-ended occupation and suppression of Palestinians, using massive force when deemed necessary. One example of the latter is Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009), which followed peaceful Palestinian protests that gave way to rocket and mortar attacks by Hamas. Over 22 days, the IDF killed some 1,400 Palestinians, including 300 children, its deadliest war in Gaza before the current one. Another, Operation Protective Edge (2014), left nearly 1,400 Palestinians civilians dead, including 500 children. On a smaller scale, mowing the grass features intermittent clampdowns on Palestinian resistance to occupation and dispossession. The by-product of this approach has been, and will surely continue to be, an endless cycle of bloodletting. The sole uncertainty: how much time will elapse between one phase of violence and the next and how long each lasts.

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Yet mowing the grass doesn’t rely on naked force alone. To avoid directly ruling the West Bank Israel has relied on the Palestinian Authority (PA) for day-to-day governance. To replicate this arrangement in post-war Gaza, Israel will have to persuade people who enjoy legitimacy and respect in the community to serve as administrators in place of Hamas. The alternative, military rule, is a recipe for rebellions and violence that will entrap the IDF indefinitely. And the problem here is that, after the carnage and destruction in Gaza, few if any non-Hamas notables will rush to volunteer. Some eventually may, but risk being viewed as quislings and discredited as the PA has been. Aside from its corruption and ineptitude, the PA has come to be seen as Israel’s subcontractor.  In a November-December 2023 survey by the Palestinian Center for Survey Research, 60% of West Bank residents said they wanted the PA dissolved.

Despite the pitfalls, perhaps local notables will agree to govern their territory, either because the IDF succeeds in destroying Hamas or because Hamas has forfeited Gazans’ support by perpetrating the October 7 that led to the pitiless Israeli bombardment in the first place. Then again, the many thousands of young men who have seen their parents and siblings killed, their homes and neighbourhoods demolished, and their own lives upended, may equally become a deep recruitment reservoir for follow-on armed resistance movements. Israel may end up creating more extremists than it has killed. Though Hamas may die, its animating ideology could live on.

Though far from homogenous, the anti-war Left that has organised around this war shares a simple ambition: Israel should jettison this “mowing the grass” model and resume negotiations aimed at a two-state solution, which has only been pursued in fits and starts since the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995. Those summits did have some concrete accomplishments: Israel’s recognition of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as the representative of the Palestinian people; the PLO’s renouncing of terrorism and accepting the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state; and the creation of the Palestinian Authority. All this was a pathway to a Palestinian state, albeit with undefined contours, encompassing the West Bank and Gaza.

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That ultimate goal seemed achievable on at least two occasions: the first was the 2000 Camp David talks between PA Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, with President Bill Clinton mediating, exerting pressure, and presenting a far-reaching proposal. Then, in 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert put forward his own two-state proposal. Both initiatives envisioned Israel living in peace alongside a Palestinian state encompassing most of the West Bank and Gaza, with a corridor between the two places, the incorporation of the largest West Bank Jewish settlement blocks (such as Ariel and Ma’ale Adumim) into Israel, and the Palestinians compensated through “land swaps”. The negotiations failed for many reasons, including the status of East Jerusalem (who would control what and how) and the right of return for Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948 (how many and where).

These structural obstacles remain. But the two-state solution also becomes progressively harder to achieve so long as Israel, while mowing the grass, keeps building Jewish settlements on the West Bank and ignores the “outposts” proliferating there — along with roads reserved for Jews — despite the lack of the government’s consent. A record 23 outposts were built in 2023, and there are now 160 West Bank settlements inhabited by 520,000 people, not counting another 250,000 in East Jerusalem; add to that the outposts in which as many as 30,000 people live. Not only are additional settlements (with 3,500 homes) planned, the hard-line Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently urged the legalisation of 68 outposts. Following the Gaza War, the government also announced the appropriation of 800 hectares in the Jordan Valley to build more settlements — the biggest confiscation of Palestinian land in 30 years. In a move that further fragments the West Bank, the government recently earmarked $940 million for renovating and constructing roads for the exclusive use of settlers. Steps like these demonstrate its rejection of the two-state solution and its determination to create “facts on the ground” that will make it even harder for future Israeli leaders to achieve that goal.

True, the settlers are a small segment of Israel’s population, but they are also a powerful one. They regard the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) as a divine gift bequeathed to Jews for eternity, and Right-wing parties draw strong support from them. True, largest settlement clusters could be joined to Israel as part of a two-state deal and balanced by land swaps, but Palestinians are right in arguing that all settlements are illegal under international law, no matter that Israel has insisted they must demonstrate their readiness to compromise by accepting them. This point of view is increasingly in the political ascendant following the collapse of the Israeli Left, the growing power of Right-wing parties and movements, the increase in settlements, and the expropriation of more and more Palestinian land to make way for them. Unsurprisingly, polls show that disillusionment with this 30-year quest has reduced support for it: less than a third of Jews and only 37% of Palestinians back it.

The most modish panacea to this intractable problem, a one-state solution — a single state that stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and ensures equal rights to Jews and Palestinians (Muslims and Christians) alike — is even less likely. It contradicts the fundamental principle underlying the Zionist project, namely that Jews must have their own homeland. Moreover, there’s little evidence that replacing the Jewish state created in 1948 with one that provides Jews and Palestine the same rights has much appeal even among Israelis on the Left. It would be an even harder sell now because it will require Israelis to abandon deeply rooted conceptions of self and nation at a time when the Gaza war has increased their both distrust of Palestinian leaders and their vigilance about security.

For now, there is no chance that this idea will take wing. The Netanyahu government, which rejects a two-state solution, won’t even entertain the thought of a one-state solution — unless it involves a single one between the river and the sea with no more than a small minority of Palestinians in it. The same goes for future governments that are formed by or include parties from the political Right. As for the long run, the Right-ward trajectory of Israel’s politics — partly due to demographic trends favouring Right-wing voters — all but guarantees that the one-state vision will remain just that.

In times of stress and uncertainty people hold fast to what’s familiar. Perhaps the Gaza war will be an exception and prove to be a catalyst that shakes things up and — despite the fear and suspicion on both sides, Israelis and Palestinians — creates the conditions for the bold political choices required to achieve the two-state solution. That would be nice but not likely — not until the passage of time reduces the Gaza War’s psychological grip on Israeli Jews and Palestinians, the ideology of extremists in both communities lose ground, and a new generation rooted in the centre and Left moves Israel in a different direction. Until then, Israeli leaders will fall back on “mowing the grass”. But we know, now better than ever, where that can lead.

Beyond the trauma of the war in Gaza, there is another trauma in the West Bank: Israeli settlers. There are more than 450,000 Israeli settlers (and more than 100 Israeli illegal outposts) in the West Bank, with an additional 220,000 living in East Jerusalem. Since October 7, their thieving and violence has gone into overdrive. The UN humanitarian office has recorded more than 250 settler attacks, which resulted in the murder of eight Palestinians, including a child, and injuries to more than 70 others. Since late October, more than 1,000 Palestinian residents have fled several West Bank villages, claiming that Israeli settler violence and threats had driven them out.

I enter the West Bank from Israel through the Rantis checkpoint, a stark monolith etched in concrete and steel. Usually there would be a queue of cars here, but now the road is clear. Since October 7, the region has been in lockdown.

Central Ramallah is a thicket of modern bustle interspersed with building sites and the odd patch of rubble. School children — mainly girls in striped, blue uniforms — scamper across the pavement. If violence comes, it will be Palestinian youth largely battling Israeli forces in the streets. In Cafe Vanilla, a spacious bistro with an “I love Palestine” sign outside, I meet 33-year-old Gaza-born Fathi Aljhoul, a handsome man with a shaved head. On his right arm he has a tattoo of a leaf; a band encircles his left bicep. The owner of a marketing company, he looks just like a hipster in London or Brooklyn. Since the war began, he has lost 70 members of his family in Gaza — 45 cousins in one attack.

“We are very angry,” he tells me. “All of my friends are angry — and we are not afraid of anything. Every day, I watch Al-Jazeera from when I wake up until one or two in the morning. We have stopped our lives. We watch Gaza — it’s a mini-massacre every day. We watch our own cousins being killed every day.” He describes how the West Bank is spiralling. “Since the war began, the Israelis are killing three to four people here every day. An Israeli settler shot a Palestinian harvesting his olives in the heart.”

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Since the war began, Israel claims it has arrested hundreds of Hamas operatives in the West Bank. The IDF carries out raids every morning and night. Aljhoul can’t even get to villages 10 minutes away in the Ramallah outskirts because the city is surrounded by Israeli Army checkpoints. “Since 7 October they have sealed off the West Bank,” he tells me. “In Ramallah things are probably easiest because you still have access from Jerusalem. But in Jenin and Hebron and across the West Bank it is harder. And this is in Area A, which is supposed to be under Palestinian control.”

He adds that the IDF is not just arresting Hamas operatives but anyone they want. “My friend has a brother who supports the Hamas party in college,” he tells me. “My friend does not. But every three or four days the occupation army goes to his home and ransacks his house. The last time, they took away his father for a night and flushed his Palestinian flags down the toilet. They want to take revenge on anything, including the flag. They have totally lost it since 7 October.” He continues: “Since the war began, we have lost everything: our family, our lives, our sanity. It’s very difficult to think about hope or peace now.”

I ask if we might see another intifada. “Anything is possible,” he replies. “It looks like we are getting there… I always spoke about a two-state solution, but over the past few years, new settlements have been built near Ramallah, Jerusalem, Nablus and Bethlehem. I believe the only thing left is to take all of Palestine again — from the river to the sea.”

After this, I wind through Ramallah’s narrow streets on my way to meet with an official from Fatah, the political party that governs the West Bank. My appointment is with Dr Sabri Saidam, Deputy Secretary General of Fatah’s Central Committee. Outside his office is a large poster of several Israeli soldiers surrounding a blindfolded Palestinian youth they have arrested. “I Can’t Breathe,” reads the caption underneath, the rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement. As ever, Palestinian nationalism mixes easily with the ideological and linguistic tropes of the Western Left.

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Saidam, a large man dressed in black, speaks impeccable English and has a PhD in physics from Imperial College London. “The West Bank and Gaza are one people,” he tells me, “and they are charged with emotion. The increasing attacks by settlers on innocent farmers is adding to the psychological pressure everyone is feeling due to the war on Gaza. People are bitter at losing loved ones. I have lost 44 members of my family in Gaza since the war began.”

Then there is the burgeoning economic crisis. 220,000 West Bank residents rely on daily wages from working in Israel. Without this income, society is in danger of collapsing. “This crisis is affecting the income coming into the treasury,” Saidam says. He is right to be concerned. The intense stress of war combined with sustained economic hardship could be the toxic mix that blows the West Bank apart. 220,000 people here rely on daily wages from working in Israel; without this money, society is in danger of collapsing. “We have tried wars, they achieved nothing. Neither side can solve this matter by throwing each other into the sea.”

On the coffee table in front of me lies a Quran, a model of the Dome of the Rock, and two tiny London black cabs, one of which has a Union Jack on its roof. It’s a reminder of the role of the British empire in the current Middle East Crisis. “Britain cannot be neutral,” Saidam says. “It has a legal and historical responsibility that gives it a special prominence on this issue.”

Once again, I ask if an intifada is coming. “I cannot tell you what will happen tomorrow,” he replies. “Wars are never endless, but they are senseless. Once they start, they can go in any direction.”

I later meet Mustafa Barghouti, who leads the Palestinian opposition party, Palestinian National Initiative. We gather in a boardroom in his office nearby (most things are nearby in Ramallah) where a large photo of the Dome of the Rock stretches across a wall. “Please record me. I like to be recorded,” he says, in a joking reference to the mass surveillance Israel subjects Palestinian leaders to.

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“This Israeli government is very extreme,” he says. “We have people like [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich saying ‘we should fill the West Bank with settlers’. So we then have one of three options. One: leave, which is ethnic cleansing. Two: accept a life of subjugation, which is apartheid. Three: die, which is genocide.” He goes on to describe the settlers’ “terror tactics”: “They are using the distraction of Gaza to push forward with their stealing of our land. They now think they have the green light to go.”

“We are already in an intifada,” he says. “What does it mean? Self-organisation, self-reliance, and defying Israel measures. The IDF cannot enter any town or city without being confronted by young people who try to resist in non-violent ways.” But these confrontations can easily slip into violence, which in this region easily expands.

Barghouti appears sincerely to want peace. But later, I watch an interview where he tells CNN that no Israeli civilians were killed on October 7. With each side enraged, and the hatred growing, even moderates must speak out both sides of their mouths.

Later that day, I talk to an American-born Israeli settler, Yehuda Anaki, who moved from New York to the settlement of Ofra, deep in the West Bank. I ask him what he thinks about those who say settlers like him are stealing other people’s land. “If anything is historic Israel it’s this,” he says. “It’s not Tel Aviv and its beaches. It’s not called Judea for no reason. This is our birth right — we have a historical connection to the land.” This is the problem in a single sentence. Settlers are driven by an unshakable belief in God the divine estate agent, parcelling out land to them personally.

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It is impossible to reason with this sort of nonsense. And even the IDF, as an officer later tells me, regards the settlers as a strategic threat to Israel. Word from inside the IDF is that on October 7, certain army units took a long time to arrive on the scene because they had been moved from the southern border to guard settlers in the West Bank.

Anaki, too, fears the possibility of war here. “Everyone is on high alert. It could ignite at any moment. What happened in Gaza will be 10 times worse. We are surrounded by Palestinians — to the north of Ofra is a Hamas village. I definitely think another intifada is possible. I slept in my full body armour 10 days ago. I thought, that’s it — it’s begun.”

Everywhere I looked in Ramallah, I saw young people — mostly men: gathering, smoking, talking. Without any hope of finding a job, many could drift towards organised violence and extremism. Meanwhile, Israeli civilians are out in force buying as many guns as they can lay their hands on. This is a war in which no one is left out. And here in the West Bank, the message is as worrying as it is clear: this is just the start.

Don’t look to Netanyahu for the answer. He has been clear about the war’s objective: to destroy Hamas, particularly its military wing, the Izzedine ad-Din al-Qassem Brigades. Some of his far-Right politicians have gone further, calling for the levelling of Gaza, perhaps even with nuclear weapons, or expelling its entire population. But these amount to more of the same: rage-fuelled impulses. Neither Netanyahu nor anyone else in Israel’s government (some key members of the political opposition joined the cabinet after October 7) has yet articulated a coherent post-war strategy for Gaza, let alone for the larger dispute between Israelis and Palestinians. This failure bodes ill for both communities.

Even if the IDF eviscerates Hamas, Israel’s leaders will — regardless of whether Netanyahu survives politically — have to figure out how to organise Gaza in order to create and sustain stability there. Departing in haste from a place, large swathes of which have been reduced to rubble, will elicit universal condemnation. Worse, that step will not produce conditions within Gaza that increase Israel’s security, the justification for the war from the outset. The United States could walk away from its failed wars of regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya; those countries are distant from the American homeland. Israel cannot do the same with its neighbour.

Israel could decide to stay and occupy Gaza indefinitely. But given how much death and destruction has been wrought, IDF soldiers will police a hostile population of 2.3 million people, some proportion of whom will eventually turn to armed resistance, even if leaderless. The Israeli army has demonstrated, more than once, that it has the firepower to quell revolts; but heavy-handed repression coupled with a prolonged occupation will beget a self-sustaining cycle of violence out of which, in time, a variant of Hamas will emerge. The more draconian Israel’s occupation, the more likely a renewed intifada of sorts — one that will most probably spread to the West Bank. This means Israel will end up policing two Palestinian territories, resorting regularly to arrests, interrogations and military raids — all without diminishing Palestinians’ determination for a state they can call their own. Moreover, the United States, the one country truly indispensable to Israel, has already stated that an occupation of Gaza would be unacceptable, save for a “transition period”.

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As an alternative, a multinational peacekeeping force could be deployed in Gaza. But which countries will provide troops to patrol Gaza indefinitely given the calamitous conditions? The United States, Britain and France have been involved in discussions. But these countries have long been staunch supporters of Israel, and Gazans will understandably see their soldiers as Israel’s enforcers, if not impartial protectors. Deploying an all-Arab force might be a way around that problem, but because Israel’s war has aroused intense anger across the Middle East, the region’s rulers will be skittish about being seen as collaborators. And Egypt, a potential leading candidate in a peacekeeping operation, has joined Israel in blockading Gaza for nearly 20 years, inflicting tremendous suffering on its people, who are unlikely to welcome its troops. A UN peacekeeping force could be the answer. Yet the historical record casts doubt — Bosnia and Rwanda, for example — on their capacity to restore and maintain order in the face of large-scale violence, which cannot be ruled out in Gaza.

More fundamentally, peacekeeping troops, no matter their nationality, cannot provide day-to-day governance any more than a city’s police force can run the quotidian operations required for basic services, such as healthcare, education and housing (to say nothing of managing war-shattered Gaza’s reconstruction). Administering the territory in a manner that eventually meets the minimal needs of its citizens will be a multi-year task at minimum, and will require a government with local roots and popular legitimacy. Israel will understandably not allow any role for Hamas, but it has also ruled out one for the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority. In any case, the PA commands scant respect among Palestinians. A recent poll found that a majority believes it should be dissolved and that it serves Israel’s interests more than theirs. That owes partly to the failure of its negotiations with Israel (since the 30-year-old Oslo Accords) to produce anything that remotely resembles a Palestinian state, or even to resist the construction of Israeli settlements on the West Bank and the (continuing) evictions of Palestinians from their homes and grazing and farm lands.

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A viable governing authority in post-war Gaza will, therefore, have to be staffed by local notables who have earned public goodwill and respect. But those who do enjoy grassroots esteem are precisely the ones who will worry about forsaking it by joining what Gazans may come to view as a collection of quislings propped up by Israel to do its bidding. Netanyahu’s insistence that Israel will “continue to control security” in Gaza after the war suggests that one Israeli demand could be guaranteed access to Gaza for the IDF. His statement that the IDF could remain there for “an indefinite period” suggests that Israel may ask for much more than that. Even a government run by respected Gazans will lose legitimacy if it accedes to either demand, especially the second.

Aside from Israel’s lack of a strategy for post-war Gaza, since 1996 it has not had (with some exceptions such as Ehud Barak) a leader with a plan for addressing the political aspirations of Palestinians. And its Right-ward political trajectory since the latter half of the Nineties, and especially in recent years, makes it unlikely that one will emerge without fundamental political change. Yet history and geography dictate that Israelis and Palestinians must live side by side.

American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib was recently vilified, and later reprimanded by the House, for using the slogan “from the river to the sea”, which Hamas has used in calling for Israel’s destruction. (Tlaib clarified that her plea was for equal rights in that space for Israeli Jews and Palestinians alike.) But it bears remembering that Right-wing Israeli politicians have long used these same words to underscore their pledge to continue the occupation and never allow a Palestinian state, of any kind. Or that the 1977 platform of Netanyahu’s Likud Party likewise declares that “between the Sea and the Jordan [river] there will be only Israeli sovereignty”. If Israel remains determined to reject a Palestinian state, it will perforce revert to quarantining Gaza, as it has since 2007, and managing the West Bank in the manner that it has since 1967. Based on the past, that amounts to a formula for continued violence — perhaps not on the scale of October 7 but bad enough to intermittently unsettle the lives of Israelis and Palestinians alike, though not in equal measure.

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Sadly, as things stand, even a mediator determined to kickstart talks between Israelis and Palestinians toward a two-state solution — that Biden has said he will revive after the war to ensure “a vision of what comes next” — will find that the pathways to it have been all but blocked by now. The West Bank has been chopped up: Israel fully controls Area C, which accounts for 60%  of its area and contains its richest agricultural lands. Area A and Area B, both under the authority of the PA, albeit to varying degrees, are archipelagos cut off from each other by roads reserved for Israeli Jews and a constellation of settlements. Moreover, settlement construction has soared since 2000, and the number of settlers living in those deemed legal under Israeli law plus the illegal “outposts” has increased from under 200,000 in 2000 to more than 485,000 today. What’s more, even as the war in Gaza continues, the Israeli government seems intent on building additional new settlements.

How, under these circumstances, can any West Bank state that even minimally meets Palestinians’ aspirations be created so as to marginalise Hamas-like movements? To make matters worse, the atrocities Hamas committed could make those Israelis who have warned that any Palestinian state, regardless of location and configuration, will pose a mortal threat to the Jewish state much more influential in the country’s public square. The dismaying upshot, then, is that Israel has no coherent strategy for managing post-war Gaza, or for resolving the larger Israeli-Palestinian dispute — save for a tougher version of business-as-usual. And that, it ought to be clear by now, is a dead end.

That was 21 years ago, at the peak of Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield, in which entire divisions occupied the Palestinian cities of the West Bank. Back then, their targets were the militant organisations who had been waging a suicide bombing campaign within Israel during the Second Intifada.

Last week, I stood on the same spot as the Israeli soldiers who had once again occupied the Jenin refugee camp started to leave. Most of them hadn’t even been born in 2002; here was just another generation of Israelis and Palestinians fighting for the same little piece of land in yet another round of this interminable conflict.

Not everything was the same, however. Two decades on, Israel’s tactics are markedly different. This time, they deployed a much lighter operational footprint — without the tanks, armoured personnel carriers and massive firepower of 2002. Instead, they were mounted on nimble armoured tactical vehicles, with aerial cover provided by drone strikes. They also had better intelligence, pinpointing the locations of the militants’ weapons stores and command posts. And they spent much less time there: two days, rather than 11.

Another key difference was that, in 2002, the entire West Bank was in turmoil, with the Second Intifada raging in every town and village. Last week, with the exception of a few individual clashes, beyond Jenin the region was tense but largely calm. The death toll was therefore lower, with 12 Palestinians and one Israeli soldier killed (compared with 53 Palestinians and 23 Israelis in 2002). But while the fighting was more limited, look close enough and one can discern the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Jenin, the northernmost city in the West Bank, is relatively isolated from the Palestinian Authority’s administrative capital in Ramallah: it is unique in not having Israeli settlements built around it, and is close to Israel’s heavily Palestinian cities across the border. For a short period in the middle of the 2010s, there was talk of “the Jenin Model”, for what some called “an economic peace” or “shrinking the conflict”.

Thousands of the city’s residents had work-permits in Israel, and thousands of Israelis flocked to Jenin to shop and do business. After the Second Intifada ended in 2005, Israel gradually handed back control of the cities to the semi-autonomous Palestinian Authority (PA). By that point, exhausted by the conflict and the damage done to the local economy, many Palestinians were more interested in rebuilding their lives than resisting the Israeli occupation. Until 2020, militant activity remained at the lowest level in decades, as the PA’s security forces maintained order in the town, cooperating closely with the Israeli army.

Then came the pandemic and the return of Israeli roadblocks, which were designed to stop the spread of Covid-19 but succeeded mainly in suffocating the nascent economic revival. These came along with a series of power struggles within the local Palestinian apparatus and the resulting vacuum was filled by a group of young gunmen who took over the refugee camp, producing videos of themselves strutting with assault rifles on social media. Then some of them began carrying out shooting attacks on Israeli patrols and settlements, and even further afield inside Israel.

Israel’s initial response was to launch a series of arrest raids, aimed at capturing or killing the leaders of what became known as Kataib Jenin, the Jenin Brigades. But then, six months ago, a new Israeli government came to power, under the veteran prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who returned to office thanks to an alliance of far-Right parties, representing the Jewish settlers in the West Bank. They demanded a much wider and deadlier military operation in the West Bank. The Jenin operation was what they got.

For many years, it was Hebron, the southernmost city of the West Bank, also isolated from the PA’s centre in Ramallah, that was regarded by many on both sides as the main hub of Palestinian resistance. After all, Hebron is not only surrounded by Israeli settlements — it has a settlement within its old city with constant Israeli military presence. But despite the many sources of tension within the city, and the de facto eviction of hundreds of Palestinian families from their property around the settlement in the old quarter, other districts have flourished.

Drive into Hebron from its northern side, which is under Palestinian control, and you discover a boomtown with new malls and building projects. “Many of the families here have relatives living in the Far East, especially China, and Hebron has become a centre of trade that was barely disturbed during the pandemic,” one local businessman tells me. “It’s not that anyone here is happy with the settlers or the occupation, but people here also have what to lose.” Roughly 10% of the West Bank’s population live in Hebron, but an estimated 35% of its trade goes through there. Unlike in Jenin, where the attempts to build a new economic future of the city mainly came from outside, with the Israeli and Turkish governments trying to push an ambitious industrial zone project, in Hebron the financial initiative has come from the city’s population itself.

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The same is true of the armed resistance. While the “legacy” Palestinian organisations tried to posthumously claim the affiliation of the 12 young men (four of them teenagers) killed during the recent Israeli incursion, the real power currently in Jenin’s refugee camp is the Jenin Brigades — a group that has been in existence for barely two years and owes allegiance to none of the established movements, though it is happy to accept money and arms from Iran.

It is a new form of resistance to Israeli occupation, which is no longer based on the old ideological and hierarchical lines dividing the rival Palestinian movements. Instead, it resembles a franchising model, where the local franchise-holders control their small fiefdoms. A similar framework has emerged in the Balata refugee camp of Nablus, the West Bank second-largest city.

Crucially, these developments are cause for concern within both Israel and the PA — proof of how little power they have over the general direction of the West Bank. But they are also worrisome for those supporters of the Palestinian cause who have hoped to see some form of collective leadership. For the past 16 years, since Hamas’s takeover of Gaza, the main split within the Palestinian movement was between the Fatah-dominated PA in the West Bank and Hamas-ruled Gaza. Last week’s round of bloodshed in Jenin, however, heralded a future in which the area becomes a series of warring enclaves. The result is twofold: an unending security headache for Israel, but unless some unity evolves, also a perpetuation of its occupation.

But the unusually high body count in January hasn’t led to a spiralling escalation. There was no terrorist attack that shocked Israelis out of their routine and forced the government’s hand into a broader operation. There was no deadly revenge attack from settler radicals. There was no botched Israeli military operation with a high body count, which then circulated on social media and spiked local passions and global condemnations. But at some point, probably soon, our luck will run out. After nearly two decades of comparative quiet, the Israelis and Palestinians seem headed towards another pointless round of violence.

Israel’s fundamental dilemma has not changed much since 1967 when it first conquered the West Bank from Jordan in the Six Day War. Withdrawing from the occupied territories leaves the very real risk that they will become a base for future attacks (as has happened with nearly every other territory Israel has withdrawn from), while incorporating the territories into Israel requires an existential compromise on either Israel’s democratic or Jewish character. Avoiding a decision, meanwhile, raises the costs of a future settlement while sinking Israel deeper into the strategic and moral morass of occupying a foreign nation and governing the Israeli civilians who have settled there.

Aspects of the dilemma have shifted slightly, but this big picture has not. The internal Israeli political debate has taken to ignoring the issue, and for now is consumed with a controversial legal reform advanced by Netanyahu’s new Right-wing government to weaken the Supreme Court. It is a highly illiberal reform and Israel will be much better off if it is blocked or heavily diluted. But it’s hard to say that it heralds “the end of Israeli democracy”, especially when that has been the charge against nearly every development in Israeli politics in the last 40 years. And while this diversion draws all the attention, a parallel legislative effort is quietly underway which, if anything, is even more ruinous to Israeli democracy. This is the attempt to legalise the wildcat Israeli settlement Homesh, located outside Jenin in the northern West Bank. It is one of four which Israel took down in the 2005 Disengagement, the same week as it pulled out all of its soldiers and settlers from Gaza.

From 2007 to 2020 the relationship between Israel and the Palestinian territories had three faces. In Gaza, there was no military or Israeli civilian presence of any kind, and the territory was ruled by an isolated and internationally-unrecognised Hamas government. In the northern West Bank around Jenin, there was no Israeli civilian presence but full freedom of action for the IDF to carry out raids and arrests, with varying measures of security cooperation from the Palestinian Authority, and a large and mostly unnoticed business footprint of Israeli Arabs from northern Israel. In the rest of the West Bank there was also a significant Israeli military presence, but unlike in the Jenin sector there was a large and growing Israeli civilian presence as well.

This status quo held for 13 years, and created a kind of unintended laboratory condition for dealing with the Palestinian Territories without a peace agreement (or a full-scale war, for that matter). And the clear winner among the three was the model that had a military presence but no Israeli settlers. Jenin, which had been the suicide bomber capital of Palestine in the Second Intifada, became the quietest sector in the entire conflict. Compared with the chronic violence in and around Hebron, to say nothing of Gaza, it left little room for doubt: the disengagement from the northern West Bank was, in the immediate term at least, a success.

But for the Israeli settler movement, this was a success that had to be denied or obscured, lest it be copied elsewhere in the West Bank. Repeated efforts were made to reestablish settlements, especially around Homesh. But with varying levels of speed and resistance, the IDF generally moved in and removed the illegal outposts whose settlers claimed, not always seriously, that they had established a seminary not a settlement.

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By Anshel Pfeffer

Then, in 2020, two things changed. First, coronavirus restrictions ended the flow of Arabs from northern Israel into the northern West Bank — as well as their cash. And second, newly appointed Defence Minister Benny Gantz, not wanting to rock the boat in anticipation of his promised rotation into the PM’s office under the deal he had struck with Netanyahu, temporarily stopped the army from removing the Homesh settlers. There, they became more and more entrenched, and the inevitable friction led to violence with local Palestinians.

When a Homesh settler was killed in an attack in 2021, the perverse logic of the entire settler enterprise ensnared the area in its death grip. The army couldn’t possibly forcibly evacuate the settlers during the mourning period; that would be giving into the terrorists. Settlers from around the West Bank paraded in their thousands to show solidarity, leaving the army no choice but to secure their passage, which necessitated road closures and checkpoints. The pretence of a seminary in Homesh was mostly dropped, and it began to look increasingly like a new settlement.

Tensions mounted and violence increased, between settlers and the local Palestinians, between Palestinians and the army, and between settlers and the army in the few cases where the latter did try to put the brakes on. The Jenin sector, for 15 years the quietest in the territories, was by 2022 the epicentre of a new wave of Palestinian terrorism, which was now spilling onto Israel’s streets — north, south, and in Tel Aviv. The army had no choice but to act, and the pace and aggression of raids and arrests took off. The link between the surge in violence and the sudden reluctance to deal with the squatters at Homesh is barely noted in Israel, and for the settler movement it is crucial that it remain so. For, amid the flurry of populist Right-wing legislation the new government has initiated, perhaps the most dangerous of all is the bill which will retroactively legalise the Homesh settlement.

It is worth pausing to consider all the various ways this unprecedented legislation would irreversibly damage the very foundations of liberal democracy in Israel. First, it would officially create a new Israeli settlement in the West Bank, something from which Israel has largely refrained for around three decades. Second, it would legalise settlement in the one place where Israeli law has explicitly forbidden it since the 2005 Disengagement. Third, it would effectively cancel part of the Disengagement, a major diplomatic initiative undertaken by the State of Israel after it had successfully defeated the Palestinians in the Second Intifada and for which it received real (and potentially reversible) benefits from the United States and the international community. Fourth, it would introduce a civilian Israeli presence into the one sector of the West Bank that has not had one for almost two decades and that, not coincidentally, managed to keep a comparatively low level of violence — with easily predictably grim results.

But fifth, it would formally void one of the central tenets of sovereign statehood, namely the monopoly on armed force and capacity to set foreign and security policy. The proposed law doesn’t change policy for the future; it legitimises the actions of settlers in the past. It essentially tells the armed thugs who violated Israeli law for the past few years, commandeered private property, engaged in violent scuffles with the Israel Police and the IDF, and were linked repeatedly to harassment of Palestinian civilians nearby, that this is and was a legitimate way to pursue political interests. There is no real looking back from this moment, not in a country where so many are armed and where the political divisions are so deep. And not when the Cabinet member who oversees the Israel Police, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is so closely identified with the groups that will have achieved their goals through these methods.

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Ben-Gvir, for years a far-Right rabble rouser but now a minister, has never worn a uniform or served a day in his life. He orders the police to quickly demolish the homes of families of terrorists who are killed in their attacks against Israelis, though this tactic has been shown repeatedly to be worse than useless. Bereft of new ideas, he has been reduced to populist stunts, sharing videos of himself eating pitta bread after removing pitta bread from the mess halls of security prisons. Under his watch, a remarkable run of comparative peace and prosperity is coming to an end.

On the Palestinian side, the situation is even worse. The Israelis have an alternative if they ever choose to turn against the coalition currently in power. The Palestinians do not even have a vocabulary for connecting their actions to their outcomes.

Any serious discussion of the Palestinian state should ask whether or not life has improved since the Palestinians rejected statehood at the end of the Oslo process in 2000 and opted instead for violent confrontation with Israel. This isn’t a rhetorical question for Israeli public diplomacy, but one the Palestinians should be asking their leadership.

Yet to pose this question would be to acknowledge a kind of agency that exalted victimhood doesn’t allow for. It is now nearly 23 years since Yasser Arafat rejected Ehud Barak’s Camp David Summit and instead gambled on a violent terror campaign in the hope of better terms. There was no way of knowing then that this gamble would turn out so badly. At the time, it wasn’t viewed as a particularly controversial decision; what’s striking, however, is how that perception hasn’t changed.

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By Anshel Pfeffer

I’ve argued elsewhere that the entire Palestinian predicament is the outcome of three very different Arab-Israeli wars which began in 1947, 1967, and 2000. It’s not an intuitive historical argument to make, as these three wars have so little in common. The first began as an Arab-Jewish civil war fought village by village, which then expanded into a multi-state war across four borders lasting a year and a half. The second was a rapid but conventional military conflict fought in less than a week. And the third was a low-intensity armed conflict characterised by frequent terrorist attacks and counterinsurgency operations by an occupying army which took about five years to peter out.

All three were preceded by a wave of righteous ecstasy on the Arab side. All three ended in a disastrous defeat for the Arab side that irreversibly worsened the political and economic situation of the Palestinians. And all three defeats were followed by the collective erasure of any memory of the excitement before the conflict. They instead became stories of distilled victimisation, almost ensuring a repeat performance a generation later.

Why does this keep happening? It’s not that Palestinians are uniquely irrational; nor are the Palestinians the only nation birthed by the collapse of an old imperial order. The Irish, Bulgarians, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Poles, Ukrainians and many others formed modern states on a mix of historical claims and very modern myth-making throughout the 20th century, frequently in conditions of war and displacement, and always with unanswered territorial claims. Some of these were the basis for lingering resentments and conflicts for generations.

Yet none except for the Palestinians rejected statehood when it was on offer because it didn’t include all their territorial claims. And this includes the Israelis who accepted the UN partition plan on roughly half of what was left of the original British Mandate. Zionists accepted a state that didn’t even include Jerusalem, the focal point of Jewish longing for two millennia and already then, as for a century before, home to a Jewish majority. This is the difference between a movement for national liberation and a movement for the elimination of another nation. In the former, even a very difficult compromise can be understood as an achievement (however partial or internally controversial). In the latter, a compromise that leaves this unwanted presence is still an unacceptable defeat.

The Arab war against Zionism has been a central organising political fact of Arab politics for over a century. This self-destructive passion hit its peak in the mid-20th century, dragged numerous Arab states into repeated military catastrophes and saw nearly every Jewish community in the Arab world completely erased, some after a continuous presence of more than 2,000 years. Anti-Zionism serves the same totemic function for broad circles of activists and intellectuals in the West too. Accepting that Israel is not a state whose policies may merit severe critique, but one whose existence is a crime, is now the price of entry to the community of the good.

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This is how the “Arab-Israeli” conflict morphs into the “Israeli-Palestinian” conflict, which then morphs into just “the occupation” and now increasingly “apartheid”. The first transition denied the scope of the conflict and effaced the reality of a tiny Jewish minority being marked for destruction by the Arab world as a whole. The second denied that there was a conflict at all, and rendered the entire situation as an extended outcome of an Israeli sin. The third eliminates even the possibility that such a sin can be expiated; it instead holds Israel’s existence as inherently evil. Between these two external forces, and with all the internal dysfunction of Palestinian politics, it is nearly impossible to expect the Palestinians to do what every other national liberation movement has done: seek political freedom and build a society from there. After three catastrophes in three generations, there is not even a hint of an alternative.

Three destructive and unnecessary wars put the Palestinians in the lamentable place they now inhabit. It’s impossible to know what the fourth will look like, but it’s unlikely it will resemble that or any of the previous three. The current violence has not sparked that war yet, but unless something dramatic changes in the political trajectories of both parties, something eventually will. And when it does, Israelis will pay a heavy and avoidable price — and the Palestinians an even larger one.

Raised in ultra-assimilative Budapest Neolog-Judaism, Herzl’s acquaintance with Hebrew and (in adulthood) Jewish practice was minimal, and he was a most unlikely man to spark a global movement of Jewish self-consciousness.

Yet, within eight years of meeting Güdemann, he had created the structures of a worldwide campaign, mobilised a mass following of impoverished Orthodox Jews in Russia and Galicia, and argued his cause in person to the representatives of three world powers. Within a decade he was dead, and since then he has remained in many ways a mystery. It is this mystery that Derek Penslar’s recent biography Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader makes strides toward unravelling, in doing so posing questions for Israel today.

Zionism’s foundational text, the 1896 Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”) was born almost by accident. In May 1895 Herzl’s long gathering background despondency regarding the Jewish predicament in Europe was energised by an external shock: rabid anti-Semite Karl Lueger’s election as mayor of Vienna. This would prove the spark for the explosion of creativity that launched Zionism, the fuel being Herzl’s deep emotional unease arising from a fraught marriage and frustrated literary ambition.

“Herzl was in the grip of an existential crisis” Penslar writes: “he experienced a prolonged period of heightened energy that in June escalated into a frenzy… Herzl’s Zionist program emerged as a kind of condensation, in which an effulgence of psychic energy gradually thickened and stabilised.”

He later recalled writing while “walking, standing, lying down, in the street; at table, [and] at night when I started up from sleep.” Herzl needed Zionism as an overarching purpose just as Zionism needed Herzl’s energy to come to life.

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Despite frenzied composition Der Judenstaat’s tone is powerfully controlled. Herzl dissects the “Jewish Question” with forensic rigour, evoking the psychological “de-personalisation” of advanced depression, “standing outside himself” as observer, watching dispassionately. “The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers,” Herzl wrote: “Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migration. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution.”

Paradoxically, Herzl argued, if Jews embraced the “otherness” gentile Europeans attributed to them, disdaining Jewish assimilation, then reconciliation would follow. Removing Jews en masse from Europe would eliminate anti-Semitism. If Jews “become an independent nation, settled on the soil of their own land and leading the life of a normal people” Christian Europeans would view them as reliable international partners — not “enemies within”. The few Jews remaining behind in Europe would be indulged by Christians as a benign curiosity.

Jews too would be transformed: “We are what the ghetto made us,” but the Jewish authorities would “make it impossible… for those of our people, who are hawkers and peddlers here, to re-establish themselves in the same trades there”. Gentile esteem would ensue. A “blank slate” would facilitate innovation: a seven-hour work day; funded worker education; centralised labour agencies matching need to supply. Success would attract Jewish diaspora migrants and, again, Christian respect.

Though no theocracy, Herzl’s Jewish state would honour religion because Jews “feel our historic affinity only through the faith of our fathers” — even if many Jews lacked faith at the present. Palestine was preferred not because God commanded it but because tradition meant it “would attract our people with a force of marvellous potency”.

Herzl was happy to embrace stereotypes to make the case. “We have attained pre-eminence in finance,” he argued, so Jewish financiers should alleviate Ottoman public debt as the price of statehood. He even sought help from anti-Semites like Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm, who he hoped could be motivated to pressure Sultan Abdul Hamid II in order to answer Germany’s own “Jewish question”.

Herzl tirelessly promoted his project through speeches, articles, meetings and a futuristic novel Die Altneuland (“The Old-Newland”) which attempted to communicate the texture of lived experience in the hoped-for state. The novel gave Zionism emotional content, offsetting Die Judenstaat’s arid rationalism. Herzl understood that for a political project to succeed it must appeal to the imaginative faculty, yet he rejected categorisation of Die Altneuland as “utopian”. The book’s subtitle If you will it, it is no dream was meant to be taken seriously.

Penslar deems Herzl a paradigmatic exemplar of what sociologist Max Weber later termed “charismatic authority”. From Vilnius to Sofia crowds assembled – even at dead of night – to watch Herzl’s carriage passing by.

Jewish criticism of Herzl was incessant, and prior to 1945 anti-Zionism was the majority position in world Jewry. Assimilationists balked at Herzl’s despair of achieving Enlightenment pluralism in Europe; rabbinical scholars decried his ambition to restore a Jewish polity through human agency as a blasphemy.

“Heart neurosis! That, and the Jews, will kill me off!” Herzl complained to physician Alexander Mamorek in September 1903. His struggles presaged the coalition instability which plagues modern Israeli politics, sustaining unity among partners in Zionism’s fractious alliance proving nightmarish. The yearnings of Secularists for European culture, the Orthodox for inherited tradition and Hebrew language enthusiasts for a newly-created identity were painfully antithetical. Herzl’s words to Mamorek proved prophetic: he succumbed to a lethal combination of stress and cardiac arrhythmia nine months later.

Herzl was very much a product of Budapest, the city where he lived until he was 18, and one of the great centres of European Judaism. The Herzl home abutted Dohanhyi Street’s Great Synagogue, then the world’s largest and built to resemble the ground plan of a church, and staffed by cassocked rabbis. The family worshiped there regularly, if not zealously.

Today an extension of the synagogue incorporates the site of Herzl ’s home; the garden in which he played is merged within land which became (and remains) a mass grave for around 2,000 Jews of the Budapest ghetto who died variously by bullet, starvation and disease in autumn 1944. That coincidence presents a powerful argument for his project’s necessity.

Penslar’s presentation of Herzl presents strong implicit arguments regarding the state he imagined and most importantly the proposed annexation of the West Bank. For one thing, nowhere in either Der Judenstaat or Die Altennueland did Herzl specify what the geographic boundaries of the Jewish homeland should be.

In Die Autlnueland Herzl even retreated from asserting territorial sovereignty itself. In his mature thought the “Jewish State” was to be a “charted” – not sovereign – entity sheltering within a great power: more like the State of New York than the United States of America. It would have no army of its own.

Herzl was clear that land transfer would be through consensual purchase. Even this should be preceded by international approval under “public law”. Initially Der Judenstaat hinted at Jewish exclusivism, but later Die Altneuland stressed Arab equality. The assertion of a biblical mandate for control of the West Bank (or “Judea and Samaria” as Likud politicians’ term it) clashes even with Der Judenstaat’s earlier rejection of theocracy.

For Herzl the Jewish people’s self-consciousness, not Palestine’s land mass, was what enabled statehood. Hence his claim to have “founded the Jewish State” at Basel before it had any land whatsoever. In the already quoted diary entry of 3rd September 1897 he asserted that “The foundation of a State lies in the will of the people for a State). Territory is only the material basis; the State, even when it possesses territory, is always something abstract. At Basel, then, I created this abstraction.”

On top of his many other talents Herzl possessed an eerie capacity for prediction. On 3 September 1897, reflecting on the first Zionist Congress at Basel, Herzl wrote: “to sum up… I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years and certainly in 50, everyone will know it.” Fifty years and two months later, on 29 November 1947, the United Nations voted overwhelmingly to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states.

Six months later, on 15 May, 1948, David Ben Gurion read out Israel’s independence declaration in the Tel Aviv Museum standing beneath Herzl’s portrait and thereby invoking his authority. Yet it’s an authority that is often misunderstood or misused by his successors, so that today it could be argued that what Israel desperately needs today is more Zionism.