I saw a new poll out today which reports that 70% of Jewish Israelis says Benjamin Netanyahu should resign from office as soon as the war ends. The same poll of Arab Israelis is currently in the field. There’s no doubt it will push that number higher. That represents a major deterioration from the first week or so after the October 7th massacres which had already shown a dramatic decline in public support for Netanyahu’s government. What does this mean exactly?
From following the news closely and talking to many Israelis it seems clear to me that this is about more than accountability for a security failure: ‘You’re Mr. Security. You had one job. You failed.’ There seems to be a much more thoroughgoing collapse of all sorts of basic assumptions about security and whether the status quo can ever really work. Turning on Netanyahu doesn’t mean any lack of support for prosecuting the current war. Fighting the current war seems to have all but universal support among Jewish Israelis though there are, of course, differences of opinion on how to prosecute it. The real questions are what comes afterwards.
I’ve already argued that however the current war ends, it doesn’t really change much in itself in more than the short-term. That requires at least the beginnings of a true political settlement. If Israel overthrows the Hamas government and effectively destroys its military capacity, what then? Israel going back to occupying Gaza with a military administration is a disaster. Leaving it in a vacuum is simply the best way to bring back Hamas, and if not Hamas then a Hamas-like group. One possibility is an interim civil administration overseen by a consortium of Arab states. But even that is only a bridge to something more permanent. The only real path to something permanent is for the Palestinian Authority to reassume control over Gaza. And that only really changes things if that is on a path to statehood, though it seems so far in the distance it feels funny to even write it.
US Secretary Tony Blinken said that a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority should take over Gaza after the war. A lot hangs on “revitalized.” Because the problem is that the PA is now seen by many Palestinians as little more than a corrupt collaborationist force policing the occupation on behalf of Israel. And that is by design. Whatever other problems there are about the PA, and there are many, successive Netanyahu governments since 2009 have advanced a deliberate policy of weakening the PA and making it into an object of contempt. That’s why Netanyahu has long had a tacit alliance of convenience with Hamas, building up Hamas at the expense of the PA. If the PA were robust and popular it would be a potential partner for a peace settlement. Make it weak and despised and there’s much less pressure to talk peace since there’s no one to talk to. They don’t even claim to want one. This was always the implicit policy. But on more than one occasion Netanyahu stated it explicitly: if the goal is to avoid the creation of a Palestinian state the policy must be to build up Hamas at the expense of the PA.
Needless to say that calculation looks like a poor one today.
But back to a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority.
The Palestinian Authority’s current Prime Minister has made clear in the last couple days that there’s no way it will take over Gaza without a political plan covering the West Bank and Gaza. I don’t think that means a peace deal which obviously isn’t happening any time soon. I would imagine it means some kind of decisive break with the policies of the last dozen years and a resumption of genuine cooperation and negotiation that at least plausibly looks forward to statehood.
That would be a massive, massive shift. It’s something impossible to imagine under Benjamin Netanyahu. And it requires hope over experience to imagine it under any Israeli government today. That path hasn’t been seriously entertained in Israeli electoral politics since at least 2009 and arguably since the beginning of this century. And that is basically where this all is.
I had a few readers write into me last night and say I was still too optimistic about a two station solution even after the quite dark read of the matter I published yesterday. As I told one of those readers this afternoon, what I wrote really isn’t a matter of optimism. My aim was to make two simple points.
The first is that a one state solution is simply absurd and will never work, whether you might want it to or not. It’s an absurd proposition unless you’re talking about a single state in which one side quickly expels or destroys the other. Partition, the rougher label for two states, is the only credible path out of the endless bloodletting. That doesn’t mean it’s likely. Maybe it’s one state 0% chance of success and two states 5% chance of success. Even if the percentages are that bleak, I feel certain of the core proposition.
I have many Zionist friends who say it won’t change anything anyway. It’s not really about the occupation. And I half agree with them, at least in the medium term. If you doubt that, ask yourself why Hezbollah continues to build a vast rocket force exclusively for targeting Israeli civilian centers decades after Israel withdrew from Lebanon. But ending the occupation is still the right decision, both strategically and morally.
If you are in a hole, the situation is bleaker at 100 feet than 10 feet and bleaker still at 1,000 feet. But the next step is the same in each case.