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Israel’s Forever War

The Long History of Managing—Rather Than Solving—the
Conflict
By Tom Segev May/June 2024

Published on April 23, 2024

A Syrian tank from the Six-Day War in the Golan Heights, February 2019
Ronen Zvulun / Reuters

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T o Israelis, October 7, 2023, is the worst day in their country’s 75-year history.
Never before have so many of them been massacred and taken hostage on a single
day. Thousands of heavily armed Hamas fighters managed to break through the
Gaza Strip’s fortified border and into Israel, rampaging unimpeded for hours, destroying
several villages, and committing gruesome acts of brutality before Israeli forces could regain
control. Israelis have compared the attack to the Holocaust; Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu has described Hamas as “the new Nazis.” In response, the Israel Defense Forces
have pursued an open-ended military campaign in Gaza driven by rage and the desire for
revenge. Netanyahu promises that the IDF will fight Hamas until it achieves “total victory,”
although even his own military has been hard put to define what this means. He has offered
no clear idea of what should happen when the fighting stops, other than to assert that Israel
must maintain security control of all of Gaza and the West Bank.

For Palestinians, the Gaza war is the worst event they have experienced in 75 years. Never
have so many of them been killed and uprooted since the nakba, the catastrophe that befell
them during Israel’s war of independence in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians were forced to give up their homes and became refugees. Like the Israelis, they
also point to terrible acts of violence: by late March, Israel’s military campaign had taken
the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians, among them thousands of children, and
rendered well over a million homeless. As the Palestinians see it, the Israeli offensive is part
of a larger plan to incorporate all Palestinian lands into the Jewish state and get them to
abandon Gaza entirely—an idea that has in fact been raised by some members of
Netanyahu’s government. The Palestinians also hold on to the illusion of return, the
principle that they will one day be able to reclaim their historic homes in Israel itself—a
kind of Palestinian Zionism that, like Israel’s maximalist aspirations, can never come true.

Ever since the first Zionists began to conceive of a Jewish homeland in Palestine in the late
nineteenth century, Jewish leaders and their Arab counterparts have understood that an all-
encompassing settlement between them was likely impossible. As early as 1919, David Ben-
Gurion, Israel’s future first prime minister, recognized that there could be no peace in
Palestine. Both the Jews and the Arabs, he observed, were claiming the land for themselves,
and both were doing so as nations. “There is no solution to this question,” he repeatedly
declared. “There is an abyss between us, and nothing can fill that abyss.” The inevitable
conflict, he concluded, could at best be managed—limited or contained, perhaps, but not
resolved.

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In the months since the October 7 attacks, critics of Netanyahu, noting his efforts to bolster
Hamas and his push for Arab normalization deals that sideline the Palestinian issue, have
accused him of trying to manage the conflict rather than end it. But that complaint
misreads history. Netanyahu’s cardinal blunder was not his attempt to parry the issues that
divide Jews and Arabs. It was that he did so more incompetently—and with more
disastrous consequences—than anyone else over the past century. Indeed, conflict
management is the only real option that either side, and their international interlocutors,
has ever had. From its beginnings, the conflict has always been perpetuated by religion and
mythology—violent fundamentalism and messianic prejudices, fantasies and symbols, and
deep-rooted anxieties—rather than by concrete interests and calculated strategies. The
irrational nature of the conflict has been the main reason why it could never be resolved.
Only by confronting this enduring reality can world leaders begin to approach a crisis that
demands not more empty talk of solutions for the future but urgent action to better cope
with the present.

THIS LAND IS MY LAND

Not far from the grave of Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, on the mountain
in Jerusalem that bears his name, is a national memorial to generations of Jewish victims of
terrorism. The monument reflects an Israeli tendency to try to prove that Jews were
persecuted by Arabs in Palestine long before the first Zionists set foot there. The earliest
victim mentioned is a Jew from Lithuania who was killed by an Arab in 1851 after a
financial dispute, and the eviction of some Arabs, related to the rebuilding of a synagogue in
the Old City of Jerusalem. The memorial also mentions several Jewish victims of Arab
robberies and 13 Jews who were killed in British bombing raids on Palestine during World
War I. Palestinian historiography and commemorative culture rely on a similarly
tendentious use of history.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, fewer than 7,000 Jews were living in Palestine,
making up about 2.5 percent of the population of what was then an Ottoman province.
Some of their communities had been there for many centuries. As more Arabs and Jews
migrated there, the territory’s population grew, and with it the relative proportion of Jews.
Most Arabs came from neighboring countries in search of employment. Most of the Jews
came for religious reasons and as refugees from pogroms in Eastern Europe, and they
tended to settle in the Old City of Jerusalem. These immigrants had no intention of
establishing Jewish statehood in Palestine. In fact, most Jews at the time did not believe in
the Zionist ideology, and many of them even opposed secular Zionism on religious
grounds.

By the end of the nineteenth century, there were about half a million Arabs in Palestine,
whereas the number of Jews, although it had increased steadily, was around 50,000, or about
one-tenth of the population. Nonetheless, Herzl’s international activities, including a visit in
1898 to Jerusalem, where he was received by the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, began to
worry leaders of the Palestinian Arabs.

The following year, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, the mayor of Jerusalem, expressed his concerns
about the Zionists in a remarkable letter written to the chief rabbi of France. “Who could
contest the rights of the Jews in Palestine?” Khalidi began in polite, even sympathetic,
French prose. “My God, historically it is your country!” But that history was now deep in
the past, he continued. “Palestine is an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, and more
gravely, it is inhabited by others,” Khalidi wrote. The world was big enough, with plenty of
uninhabited land for Jewish independence, he concluded.

“For God’s sake—let Palestine be left alone!” Herzl, who received the letter from the French
chief rabbi, assured Khalidi in his reply that the Zionists would develop the land for the
benefit of all inhabitants, including the Arabs. Previously, however, he had written that the
Zionist project might require the resettlement of poor Palestinians to neighboring
countries.

For Ben-Gurion, a Jewish majority was more important than gaining territory.

Around the time of Herzl’s death, in 1904, young Zionists, mostly socialists from Eastern
Europe, began to come to Palestine. One was David Gruen, who later changed his name to
David Ben-Gurion. Born in Poland, he arrived in 1906 at the age of 20 and joined a Jewish
workers’ group in the Galilee. His first political activity was the promotion of “Hebrew
labor”—an attempt to require Jewish employers to hire Jews rather than Arabs. At the time,
the Zionists’ acquisition of land also led to the dispossession of some Arab agricultural
workers, some of whom reacted violently. In the spring of 1909, Ben-Gurion’s settlement
was attacked, and two of his fellow members were killed, one of them apparently in front of
Ben-Gurion. The future prime minister of Israel concluded that the Jews and the
Palestinian Arabs had irreconcilable differences; there was no escaping the conflict.

Ben-Gurion’s attitude toward the Arabs was further shaped by two other experiences.
During World War I, he was expelled from Palestine by the Ottoman authorities. On one
of his last days in Jerusalem, he ran into a young Arab with whom he had studied in
Istanbul. When Ben-Gurion reported that he was about to be expelled, his acquaintance
replied that as his dear friend, he was deeply sorry for him, but as an Arab nationalist, he
was very happy. “That was the first time in my life that I heard an honest answer from an
Arab intellectual,” Ben-Gurion said. “His words burned themselves into my heart, very, very
deeply.” Years later, Ben-Gurion had a conversation with Musa Alami, a prominent Arab
Palestinian and politician. Ben-Gurion promised as usual that the Zionists would develop
Palestine for all its inhabitants. According to Ben-Gurion, Alami replied that he would
rather leave the land poor and desolate for another century, if need be, until the Arabs could
develop it themselves.

Ben-Gurion often dismissed the “easy solutions” that he attributed to some of his
colleagues, such as the notion that Jews could be encouraged to learn Arabic or even that
Jews and Arabs could live together in one state. They were refusing to acknowledge the
facts. Ben-Gurion’s own concept of the Jewish future in Palestine was based simply on
acquiring as much land as possible, if not necessarily the entire territory, and populating it
with as many Jews and as few Arabs as possible. His views about the conflict remained
unchanged to the end of his life and continuously informed his efforts to manage it.

SWITZERLAND IN JUDEA

In 1917, the Zionist movement achieved one of its most important successes when British
Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour declared the United Kingdom to be in favor of
establishing a “national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration,
as it became known, was part of a strategic British plan to take the Holy Land from
Ottoman dominion. In reality, like almost everything to do with that land, Balfour’s policy
was driven more by sentimental religious ideas than by rational statecraft. A staunch
Christian Zionist, Balfour was committed to the idea that the people of God should return
to their homeland after a 2,000-year exile so that they could fulfill their biblical destiny. He
aspired to go down in history as the man who made this messianic transformation possible.

As was often the case with Western officials at the time, Balfour’s apparent reverence for
the Jews simultaneously drew on deep anti-Semitic prejudice. Like others of his era, he
attributed almost unlimited power and influence to “the Jew,” including an ability to
determine history and even convince the United States to enter World War I. (It was hoped
that the Balfour Declaration would sway American Jews to push the United States to join
the Allied powers in the war.)

By the end of 1917, the United Kingdom had conquered Palestine, thus beginning nearly
30 years of British rule. During this period, the Zionist movement laid the political,
economic, cultural, and military foundations for the future state of Israel. Tensions with the
Arabs increased over the years as hundreds of thousands of new Jewish immigrants, mainly
from Europe, continued to arrive. In the 1920s, these immigrants were motivated not by
support for Zionism but by the severe new immigration restrictions imposed by the United
States. In the 1930s, more than 50,000 Jewish refugees arrived in Palestine from Nazi
Germany, although in less desperate circumstances most of them would have preferred to
stay in their country.

Large-scale immigration of Jews sparked more waves of Arab violence against Jews and
against the British authorities, who were seen as supporting Zionist aims. This came to a
head in the Arab revolt of 1936–39, in which Palestinians rose up against the British
colonial administration through a general strike, an armed insurrection, and attacks on
railways and Jewish settlements. Amid this turmoil, the British began to regard Palestine as
a nuisance. To get rid of the problem, they appointed the so-called Peel Commission, which
recommended dividing the land into Jewish and Arab states—the very first “two-state”
solution.
1. British Mandate Palestine in 1933. 2. The UN’s 1947 two-state partition plan, with Jerusalem and surrounding areas under
international trusteeship. 3. Israeli-held territory after the 1967 war, including Sinai, which was eventually returned to
Egypt in 1982.
British Government / United Nations / University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Libraries

Although the Jewish state it envisioned was small, amounting to just 17 percent of British
Mandate Palestine, Ben-Gurion supported the plan. Notably, Arab inhabitants of the area
designated for the Jewish state were to be transferred to the Arab state, a provision that he
described in his diary as a “forced transfer,” drawing a thick line under the words. Most of
his colleagues, however, wanted much more land for the Jewish state, setting off a
contentious debate between the center-left Zionist leadership and right-wing “Revisionists”
who cultivated a dream of a Greater Israel on both banks of the Jordan River. Although
they stood to gain control of about 75 percent of the land, the Arabs rejected the idea of a
Jewish state in principle, and the British withdrew the plan. Here, again, was the “abyss”
between Jews and Arabs that Ben-Gurion had identified years earlier and that would
become even deeper after the Holocaust and the war of 1948.

In January 1942, a few weeks before Nazi leaders met at the infamous Wannsee Conference
to discuss the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” Foreign Affairs published an article
by the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann calling for the establishment of a Jewish state in
Palestine. At the time, no one outside Germany knew about the Nazis’ planned
extermination camps, but their treatment of Jews in occupied Western Europe and during
Germany’s ruthless assault on the Soviet Union had already made clear that the Nazis were
threatening the existence of the entire Jewish people. Only total victory over the Third
Reich could halt the extermination of the Jews, and although Weizmann expressed a hope
that a better world could be built after the war, his article was an urgent appeal for a Jewish
homeland. Palestine, he wrote, was the only place where Jews, particularly Jewish refugees,
could survive.

From a Zionist perspective, Weizmann’s proposal contained elements of compromise: more

than 20 years earlier, at the Versailles peace conference after World War I, he had presented
a map of the Land of Israel with biblical borders that extended to the east bank of the
Jordan River—territory much larger than the country would ever attain. In his article, by
contrast, Weizmann did not specify borders but proposed unlimited Jewish immigration to
a democratic country that would offer equal rights to all its inhabitants, including Arabs.
Although he wrote that the Arabs must be “clearly told that the Jews will be encouraged to
settle in Palestine, and will control their own immigration,” he asserted that Arabs would
not be discriminated against and would “enjoy full autonomy in their own internal affairs.”
He also did not rule out the possibility that the new Jewish state could join “in federation”
with neighboring Arab states. But like Ben-Gurion, he also foresaw the need to contain the
Palestinian Arabs: should they wish, he wrote, “every facility will be given to them to
transfer to one of the many and vast Arab countries.”

Attempting to convince his readers that the Jews were worthy of help, Weizmann
somewhat pathetically promised that “the Jew” no longer fit the anti-Semitic stereotypes
that were prevalent in the West before the start of the Zionist project. “When the Jew is
reunited with the soil of Palestine,” he wrote, “energies are released” that if “given an outlet,
can create values which may be of service even to richer and more fortunate countries.”
Weizmann compared the hoped-for Zionist state to Switzerland, “another small country,
also poor in natural resources,” that had nevertheless become “one of the most orderly and
stable of European democracies.” Seven years later, he was elected the first president of
Israel. In the meantime, the Nazis had murdered six million Jews.

UNREALIZED GAINS

In November 1947, the UN General Assembly recommended the partition of Palestine,

this time in a division that would give each side broadly equitable areas of land, with the
Old City of Jerusalem under international control. The Arabs rejected the plan, in
accordance with their traditional objection to Jewish statehood in Palestine. The Zionists
accepted partition, although Ben-Gurion expected war and hoped that it would end with
territory that was empty of Arabs.

Soon afterward, Arab militias began a series of attacks on the Jewish population, and
Zionist groups retaliated with actions against Arab communities. In May 1948, Ben-
Gurion declared Israel’s independence. It was a dangerous gamble. Regular Arab armies and
volunteers from Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Transjordan were about to
invade the new country, and top commanders of the Jewish armed forces warned that the
odds of defeating them were even at best. U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall
demanded an immediate cease-fire; Ben-Gurion feared that the Zionists were not ready for
war. Before the UN partition plan was announced, he had tried in vain to persuade the
British to stay in Palestine for five to ten more years, which could have given the Jews more
time to increase immigration and strengthen their forces.
But faced with the historic opportunity to declare a Jewish state, Ben-Gurion chose to obey
a Zionist imperative that he said had guided him since the age of three. He later explained
that the Israelis won not because they were better at fighting but because the Arabs were
even worse. In keeping with his abiding view that establishing a Jewish majority was more
important than gaining territory, he led the army to push out or expel most of the Arabs—
some 750,000—who fled to the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, which Ben-Gurion
left unoccupied, as well as to neighboring Arab countries. A direct line could be traced from
the Zionists’ campaign in the 1920s to replace Arab workers with Jews to the far larger
effort in 1948 to remove Arabs from the land of the new Jewish state. Israel lost close to
6,000 soldiers in that war, nearly one percent of the new country’s Jewish population at the
time.

Israeli troops firing at an Arab village in the Galilee region, 1948

Stringer / Reuters

When the war ended in early 1949, green pencils were used to draw armistice boundaries
between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the famous “Green Line.” Gaza became an Egyptian
protectorate, and the West Bank was annexed by Jordan. Israel now controlled more
territory than it had been allocated in the UN partition plan. It was also almost free of
Arabs; the ones who remained were subjected to a rather arbitrary and often corrupt
military rule. Most Israelis at the time saw this as an acceptable situation—a rational way of
managing the conflict. The Arabs in turn considered Israel’s existence a humiliation that
had to be remedied. In Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, authorities did not allow Palestinian
refugees to be integrated into their new countries of residence, forcing them instead to live
in temporary camps, where they were encouraged to nurture the idea of return.

In the first two decades after independence, Israel made remarkable achievements. But it
failed to reach the Zionist goal of providing the entire Jewish people with a safe national
homeland. Most of the world’s Jews, including many survivors of the Holocaust, still
preferred to remain in other countries; those in the Soviet Union and other communist
countries were forbidden to emigrate by the authorities in those places. After the 1948 war,
most Middle Eastern Jews, many of whose families had been in the region for thousands of
years, no longer felt safe in Muslim countries and chose—or were forced—to leave. Most
settled in Israel, at first often as destitute refugees. By the mid-1960s, immigrants who had
arrived since independence made up around 60 percent of the Israeli population. Most had
not yet mastered the Hebrew language, and they often disagreed on basic values and even
on how to define a Jew.

Ben-Gurion continued to manage the conflict, but many Israelis, particularly newcomers,
felt that Israel’s existence was still in danger. Only a few close confidants knew about Ben-
Gurion’s nuclear project. Border wars frequently broke out; the IDF prepared contingency
plans for the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. During the Suez crisis of 1956, Israeli
forces invaded Egypt, occupying Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, but withdrew a few months
later. In a cabinet meeting, Ben-Gurion said that if he believed in miracles, he would ask for
Gaza to be swallowed up by the sea.

After Ben-Gurion resigned in 1963, Israelis were left with a weak and hesitant leadership
and a deep economic crisis. More and more of them began to lose confidence in Israel’s
future. In 1966, the number of Jews emigrating from the country exceeded the number
entering it. A popular joke referred to a sign supposedly hanging at the exit gate of the
international airport that read: “Would the last person to leave the country please turn off
the lights?”

LAND FOR WAR

By the mid-1960s, a new generation of Palestinian refugees had grown up on the legacy of
the nakba and the dream of return. They founded the Palestine Liberation Organization, a
movement that declared a war to free Palestinians and establish an Arab state encompassing
their entire historical land, and began carrying out attacks on military and civilian targets in
Israel. Some Palestinian militants infiltrated Israel from Syria and Jordan. Israel responded
with military reprisals, and in May 1967, Egyptian officials openly threatened to
“annihilate” Israel. As tensions rose, many Israelis doubted that their country could survive,
and the weariest ones relived their Holocaust experiences. Playgrounds around the country
were hastily prepared to serve as burial grounds for the tens of thousands of the expected
dead. Israel’s decision to attack Egypt in June 1967 was not only a preemptive strike but
also an act of nightmarish panic.

But the surprise attack, launching what would come to be called the Six-Day War, resulted
in a dramatic victory for the IDF. Within hours, the Egyptian air force had been destroyed
on the ground, and Israelis’ existential dread was replaced by an almost uncontrolled
triumphalism. Led by Revisionist opposition leader Menachem Begin, who had joined
Israel’s emergency cabinet on the eve of the war and would later become prime minister, as
well as some other cabinet ministers, prominent Israeli politicians demanded the
“liberation” of what they called Greater Israel—the biblical land that included the entire
West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Such an ambition reflected national and religious feelings, but strategically it was contested.
A few months before the war, senior officials from the IDF, the prime minister’s office, and
the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, had met to discuss the possibility that King
Hussein of Jordan would be overthrown by Palestinians living in the West Bank. At the
time, the Israeli leadership concluded that the king was working to eradicate Palestinian
nationalism in Jordan and the West Bank and that it would be advisable, indeed almost
vital, for Israel to stay out of it. After the June victory, however, none of the cabinet
ministers questioned why it would be in Israel’s interest to occupy land that was populated
by millions of Palestinians. Having just experienced a kind of national resurrection, they
were determined to acquire as much land as possible. The impulse came from the heart, not
from the head.

No one questioned why it was in Israel’s interest to occupy the West Bank.
Ben-Gurion had opposed the attack on Egypt because he feared defeat, including the
destruction of Israel’s nuclear reactor in Dimona. After the war, he said that if he had to
choose between a smaller state of Israel with peace or the newly expanded boundaries
without peace, he would choose the first option. But even he could not contain his emotions
when Israeli forces entered the Arab-controlled areas of Jerusalem at the beginning of the
war. Shortly afterward, he demanded that the wall of the Old City immediately be torn
down to ensure that Jerusalem remained “united” forever.

Taking Arab Jerusalem was a fatal decision, for neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians were
likely to agree to any compromise there. There were efforts to manage this flash point, but
these arrangements often broke down, and the eternal city has since remained the
emotional core of insoluble conflict. The Israeli conquest of the West Bank sparked similar
messianic passions, and within months, Israelis began to settle there. Only a few realized
that in the long run, occupying the Palestinian territories would put Israel’s Jewish majority
and its shaky democracy in jeopardy. Just as there was no rational justification for the
existential hysteria that had preceded the Six-Day War, there was no rational basis for the
unbridled expansionism that took hold after it.

Despite Israel’s victory, the 1967 war simply reinforced the underlying tensions that had
long driven the Arab-Israeli conflict. Arab countries reaffirmed their refusal to recognize
the existence of Israel; the Palestinians’ longing for their lost homeland intensified. Every
few years, another war broke out. And each side did what it could to manage a situation
that had no ready answers. Egypt was able to make peace with Israel in 1979 mostly
because Israel was not required to give up any part of Palestine; under a similar logic, Jordan
was able to follow suit in 1994. In reaching these agreements, both Arab countries
abandoned the Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank, perpetuating the
people’s identity as the orphans of the Middle East.

CONTAINMENT OR CATASTROPHE

Like Ben-Gurion and other Israeli leaders, Netanyahu does not believe the conflict can be
solved. But he has proved even less adept than his predecessors at managing it. In an
attempt to divide and rule the Palestinians and prevent them from attaining independence,
he accepted and then encouraged the Hamas takeover of Gaza. Later, he developed the
illusion that peace with some Gulf Arab states in the 2020 Abraham Accords would
weaken the Palestinian cause. Implicit in these moves was the idea that it would be possible
to control Hamas by bribing its leaders: Israel thus allowed Qatar to deliver Hamas millions
of dollars in cash packed in suitcases. The Israeli government also issued work permits for
residents of Gaza on the premise that this economic arrangement would restrain Hamas.
This kind of bribery reflects a long tradition of Israeli condescension toward the Arabs—a
fundamental contempt for them and their national feelings.

In reality, Hamas used much of the money to acquire thousands of rockets, some of them
obtained from Iran, that were frequently fired at Israeli cities. In reaction, Israel imposed a
blockade on the territory that made Gazans even poorer. Hamas organized a fighting force
and constructed a web of tunnels that some experts have described as the most extensive
underground fortress in the history of modern warfare. Most important, Netanyahu’s
approach disregarded Hamas’s ideological and emotional commitments, some of which
outweigh even life itself, as was illustrated by the organization’s barbarity last October and
in the months since. Israel has responded to this indescribable catastrophe with the
vengeful devastation of Gaza and its people, a military campaign that, after more than five
months, has singularly failed in its primary goal of “total victory” over Hamas.

The history of the Arab-Israeli conflict is rife with futile peace plans. These have varied
from a single binational state—a concept that was first proposed by Jewish intellectuals in
the 1920s, and again in the 1940s—to transforming the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan
into a Palestinian state, an idea that has repeatedly resurfaced since the 1967 war. Seemingly
reasonable two-state solutions have also been conceived over the years that might allow
Israelis and Palestinians to control their own destinies, in some cases with some form of
international oversight of the contested holy sites in Jerusalem.

For decades, successive U.S. administrations have sponsored such initiatives, but rarely have
they gotten beyond the concept stage, regardless of how favorable they might seem to one
side or the other. Consider the “deal of the century,” a two-state solution briefly proposed by
the Trump administration in 2020. It would have left Israeli settlements in the West Bank
and East Jerusalem largely intact and given Israel complete security control over both. Yet
Jewish settlers themselves did not support it because it gave parts of the West Bank, as well
as the outskirts of East Jerusalem, to the Palestinians. That “deal” was merely another
iteration of an enduring fantasy. There is little reason to believe that the Biden
administration’s efforts to lay down a post-Gaza peace plan will be any more successful.

Israeli soldiers next to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency headquarters, Gaza City, February 2024
Dylan Martinez / Reuters

Historically, Israelis and Palestinians have occasionally shown a readiness to make at least
some compromises. And in the early 1990s, it seemed that peace had won after all: the Oslo
accords brought leaders of the two sides to the White House lawn in 1993 and
subsequently earned them the Nobel Peace Prize. But even then, the results were
evanescent. The following year, an Israeli fanatic massacred 29 Palestinians in a mosque in
Hebron in the West Bank, setting off new waves of terrorist attacks by Palestinians. Shortly
thereafter, another Israeli extremist assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin—just
as, after the 1979 peace accord with Israel, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had been
assassinated by an Egyptian fanatic. Acts of terrorism and the rise of extremist forces on
each side led to the end of the Oslo peace process, but in hindsight, the plan had never had
much chance of success.

The common flaw in these international peace initiatives is a failure to contend with the
inability of the Israelis and the Palestinians to embrace a lasting solution. Outside powers,
including the United States, have never acted forcefully enough to stop the systematic
violation of human rights in the Palestinian territories. But the primary reason the conflict
endures is neither Israeli oppression of the Palestinians nor Palestinian terrorism, but rather
the irrevocable commitment of both peoples to undivided land. These absolute positions
have increasingly become the essence of collective identities on each side, and any
compromise is likely to be denounced by significant Israeli and Palestinian constituencies as
a national and religious betrayal.

Evidently, existential conflicts shaped around competing visions of nationhood cannot be

ended by grand solutions that neither side will support—least of all, during the most
devastating war that Israelis and Palestinians have experienced in three-quarters of a
century. But such a conflict can be managed in more or less reasonable ways. If a century of
failure has made clear that the two sides are unlikely to be reconciled in the foreseeable
future, the war in Gaza has exposed the terrifying cataclysm that poor handling of the
conflict can bring about. When the fighting is over, imaginative, resourceful, and
compassionate management of the conflict between the two sides will be more crucial than
ever. Rather than devoting energy and political capital to deeply unpopular—and
unsustainable—peace plans, the United States and other leading powers must do more to
ensure that Palestinians and Israelis can find a safer and more tolerable existence in a world
without peace.

Countless failures in the search for a solution to the conflict have given rise to a hypothesis
that only a catastrophe of biblical proportions could persuade either side to rethink their
delusional national creeds. The unfolding events in Israel and Gaza may suggest that both
sides have not yet suffered enough. But perhaps this hypothesis is not rooted in reality,
either.

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TOM SEGEV is an Israeli historian and the author of A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-
Gurion.

MORE BY TOM SEGEV

Israel Palestinian Territories Diplomacy Geopolitics Politics & Society Civil & Military Relations
More:
Ideology Security Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Israel-Hamas War Hamas Benjamin Netanyahu

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