Israel’s War of Survival and the End of the Two-State Solution

By Kenneth Timmerman, AFPI                                    23 January 2024

THE OCTOBER 7 ATTACKS: HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?

October 7, 2023 was the single largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. “Never again” actually happened—again—for every Jew in Israel to see.

Three generations of Israelis have grown up believing that the events of the Third Reich were history and that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) protected Jews from similar massacres. On October 7, they woke up to see the atrocities happening again, but this time inside Israel.

The sheer size of the October 7 attack—15 times as many causalities per capita as 9/11 in the U.S.—has affected every Israeli. In addition to the families of those killed and taken hostage are the families of some 300,000 IDF soldiers and reservists currently fighting Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in northern Israel. Every Israeli family has someone directly involved.

How could Israel so thoroughly have let down its guard?

Just one week before the October 7 massacre, Israel concluded a new “ceasefire” agreement with Hamas, reopening the border and increasing the number of permits for Gazans seeking to work in Israel.^[i] Both the IDF and the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the Defense Ministry agency that manages aid to the Palestinians, argued that greater prosperity would encourage stability.^[ii] While this latest increase in work permits did not specifically enable the attacks, the mindset of the IDF and COGAT did.

On the day of the killings, survivors said they heard Hamas attackers calling them by name, calling their children by name—even calling the names of their dogs. “The Hamas invasion succeeded so well because the terrorists had an intimate knowledge of the communities they were targeting because they had worked there or had intelligence from those who had worked there.” The guest workers came back “as Hamas rapists and killers.”^[iii]

Hamas cynically used the “ceasefire” as a means of lulling the Israelis into a false sense of security, into believing Hamas “did not want a fight.”^[iv]

While the post-war inquiry into how the IDF and the security establishment missed the warning signs of war has yet to begin, much information has already surfaced.

Israeli and U.S. media reported in November of multiple warnings from low-level intelligence officers and border guards that were discounted by IDF leadership.^[v] But the most sweeping report of the intelligence failures leading up to October 7 was published on November 30, 2023, by U.S.-Israeli reporter Caroline Glick.

Glick pointed the finger directly at IDF intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, who allegedly suppressed numerous reports specifically warning of the attack and, most significantly, failed to present those warnings to Prime Minister Netanyahu.

In addition, Haliva’s own family members—including his ex-wife and mother of his children, Shira Margalit—were major figures in the anti-Netanyahu protests that rocked Israel for months before October 7, according to Glick. Since the massacre, Haliva has publicly contradicted Netanyahu, in particular when the prime minister claimed Israel was fighting an “existential” war akin to a “second war of independence.” Speaking to graduates of the Intelligence Corps officer training course, Haliva said, “It’s a war we have no choice but to fight. It isn’t an existential war,” Glick reported.

Here are just a few of the warning signals Haliva rejected prior to October 7, according to Glick:

• Months ahead of the attacks, female intelligence officers of the Field Observers unit at the Nahal Az base (that was overrun on October 7) reported observing Hamas terrorists “practicing taking hostages and blowing up tanks” and “probing the fence for weaknesses.” Instead of being rewarded, they were told to stop reporting such incidents by “unnamed top-level officers in the intelligence corps.”

• A civilian hacker contracted by the IDF reported on Hamas training exercises “involving invading Israel, penetrating the security fence at multiple points, taking over communities, committing mass murder and kidnapping” in increasingly great detail. Five months before the assault, the IDF seized his electronic surveillance gear and stopped working with him on orders from “senior leadership.”

• A tactical intelligence non-commissioned officer and Hamas expert in the IDF’s signals intelligence Unit 8200 “began providing detailed reports on Hamas’s preparations for the invasion in May 2022… Her reports included all aspects of the invasion that took place on October 7, including Hamas’s use of paragliders, pickup trucks, and motorcycles.” Her reports were rejected, even after they were conveyed up the chain of command, where they were blocked by Haliva, who “dismissed their warnings” and never communicated them to Shin Bet, the IDF chief of staff, or the prime minister.^[vi]

While many observers believe Prime Minister Netanyahu will become a political casualty of the failure to detect and prevent the October 7 Hamas attacks, his advocacy for “massive strikes” against Gaza on two separate occasions in 2019,^[vii] as well as Maj. Gen. Haliva’s apparent dereliction of duty, could mitigate the blame ascribed to him by a post-war inquiry. While the odds remain against it, Netanyahu could very well survive.

ISRAEL’S WAR TO DESTROY HAMAS

Unlike most of Israel’s recent wars, which have ended inconclusively following intense international pressure, “Operation Swords of Iron” is likely to continue for some time. The Israeli war coalition government has set three war goals: eliminating Hamas, the return of Israeli hostages, and ensuring that Gaza never again becomes “a focus of terrorism, incitement and attacks” against Israel.^[viii]

Even after Israeli soldiers mistakenly killed three hostages who had escaped their captors and after public pressure from other hostage families intensified to pause the fighting to allow for another prisoner exchange, Prime Minister Netanyahu reiterated those war goals, citing a letter from families of fallen soldiers. “The people are strong, with a steadfast spirit,” the prime minister quoted them as writing. “The heroic civilians and soldiers are determined to reach absolute victory. You have a mandate to fight; you do not have a mandate to stop in the
middle.”^[ix]

And while international pressure on Israel to declare a lengthy “humanitarian pause” intensified at the United Nations and elsewhere, as of this writing (mid-January 2024), Israel’s chief ally, the United States, refrained from joining that chorus. As Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared during a joint press conference with his Israeli counterpart in Tel Aviv on December 18, “I am not here to dictate timetables or terms” to Israel.^[x]

Arguably, one reason for the U.S. restraint has been Israel’s standing among its new Arab partners following the announcement of the Abraham Accords in December 2020, the first expansion of countries to sign formal peace treaties and establish economic ties with Israel since the agreement with Jordan in 1994. While Israel’s Arab partners have condemned Israel for civilian casualties in Gaza and called for a UN ceasefire, so far, they have not threatened wider action, such as an oil embargo or severing economic ties, despite mounting pressure from Arab media commentators and the Arab street.^[xi]

Many Arab leaders, notably in the UAE, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, have themselves fought the Muslim Brotherhood (the parent organization of Hamas, al Qaeda, and ISIS), and their leaders had criticized Hamas publicly before the October 7 massacres.^[xii]

According to a November 16, 2023, Economist analysis, “Many Gulf states would like Israel to get rid of Hamas, even as they fear that doing so will awaken extremism in their own countries.”^[xiii]

Even before the Abraham Accords, Arab support for the Palestinian cause was on the wane, with most Arab leaders “distancing themselves from their Palestinian brothers.”^[xiv] Coming to terms with the Jewish state was seen not only as economically beneficial but as a deterrent against Iran.

Contributing to the apparent U.S. ambivalence to pressure Israel to stop fighting could be the sheer indecency of Palestinian support for the gruesome attacks themselves. An opinion poll taken during the truce of November 24 to December 1 showed overwhelming Palestinian support for Hamas, with an astonishing 72 percent agreeing that Hamas was “correct” to launch the October 7 massacre (82 percent in the West Bank and 57 percent in Gaza).^[xv]

A Hamas fighter shot 21-year-old Mia Schem in the arm as she tried to flee the music festival and took her to Gaza, where she was held by a family in their home. For three days, she received no medication or treatment for her wound. Children opened the door to taunt her. Their father leered at her “with rape in his eyes.” At one point, someone told her she was not going back alive. “I experienced hell,” she told an Israeli TV channel. “Everyone there are terrorists. There are no innocent civilians, not one.”[xvi]

RUSSIA IS EXPLOITING U.S. WEAKNESS AND TRYING TO PLAY THE SPOILER

From the beginning of Russia’s involvement in the Syrian civil war in 2015 until just recently, Russian President Putin has maintained a cordial relationship with Israeli prime ministers. He became particularly close to Netanyahu, and the two met frequently during Netanyahu’s successive terms in office, from March 2009 through June 2021.^[xvii]

Just four months before Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia reaffirmed its “deconfliction” mechanism with Israel, allowing the Israeli air force to strike Iranian targets in Syria without interference from Russian air defenses, while Israel refrained from targeting Russian positions.^[xviii]

Israel initially took no position on the war in Ukraine, providing humanitarian aid to Ukraine while refusing to condemn the Russian invasion. At one point, Israel offered to serve as an intermediary between the two for ceasefire talks. Israel’s ambivalence caused Ukrainian President Zelenskyy and the Biden administration to publicly pressure Netanyahu in February 2023 to distance himself from Putin and to provide Ukraine with Israel’s upper-tier, long-range missile defense system, David’s Sling.^[xix]

Following this pivot by the current Netanyahu government, which took office in December 2022, relations with Moscow became increasingly frosty. Putin ultimately took what for him was an unprecedented step, just one week after the October 7 massacre, of comparing Israel’s actions against Hamas to the Nazi siege of Leningrad during World War II, which lasted 872 days and took the lives of an estimated 1.5 million people.^[xx] Historians have called Leningrad the longest and most costly siege in the history of warfare.

Since then, Russia has voted at the United Nations to condemn Israel and has supported every resolution to impose a ceasefire in Gaza, blaming the conflict on U.S. policies with rhetoric reminiscent of Soviet propaganda during the Cold War.^[xxi]

A December 22, 2023, UN Security Council resolution pressing for urgent steps to allow expanded aid into Gaza passed with 13 votes in favor and two abstentions by the U.S. and Russia. The U.S. abstained because it did not include a condemnation of Hamas. Russia abstained after the U.S vetoed its amendment calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities.^[xxii]

Putin has exploited the perceived weakness of the Biden administration to “poach” in a region once dominated by the United States, sending his foreign minister to the COP 28 climate change conference in the UAE, where he lashed out at Israel’s “collective punishment” of Palestinian civilians in a forum attended by U.S. Climate Change Special Envoy John Kerry.^[xxiii]

Putin flouted an international arrest warrant against him by visiting the UAE and Saudi Arabia on December 6, where he was greeted warmly by both rulers, and reminded UAE President Sheikh Mohammad bin Zayed that “[t]he UAE is “Russia’s main trading partner in the Arab world.” The following day, December 7, Putin received Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi in Moscow, where the two pledged to expand their already extensive strategic and military ties.^[xxiv]

Since the Ukraine War began, Iran has been supplying Moscow with armed drones and, earlier this year agreed to build a drone assembly plant in Russia^[xxv] in exchange for long-range ballistic missile technology, Su-35 fighter jets, Mi-28 attack helicopters, oil and gas swaps, and broad-ranging political and diplomatic support.^[xxvi] On December 27, the two nations agreed to use their respective currencies instead of the dollar for bilateral trade, shielding them from U.S. sanctions.[xxvii]

Russia has been angling for the past decade to re-establish its strategic presence in the Middle East, which it lost at the end of the Cold War. The Israel-Hamas war has accelerated those efforts.

THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION IS DEAD

The United States and many Arab states have publicly promoted a post-war settlement based on the two-state solution. Secretary Austin added his voice to this chorus during his trip to Israel on December 18, 2023. As will be discussed later in this paper, Biden Administration officials recently doubled down on this idea with a peace plan it developed with Qatar and Egypt without Israel’s involvement and apparently over its objections.

The British Peel Commission (named after its chairman, Lord Robert Peel) first proposed partitioning the League of Nations mandate in Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states in 1937. Ten years later, the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine also called for separate Jewish and Arab states. Successive Israeli governments have offered the Palestinians an independent state on several occasions. The latest version of the two-state solution, the Trump Administration’s “Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People” (often called the Deal of the Century), would have given the Palestinian Authority $50 billion in development aid for their new state. Palestinian leaders rejected all of these proposals.[xxviii]

For Israelis, October 7 put an end to the notion that a Palestinian state could live peacefully side by side with Israel. Even some liberal Jews today acknowledge that Israel cannot allow an enemy that continues to vow not only the destruction of the Jewish state but the extermination of every Jew in Israel to acquire the attributes of statehood.

Max Abrams, a Northeastern University associate professor of political science who specializes in international security and terrorism, had long been an advocate of the two-state solution. After October 7, he acknowledged, “not all problems are solvable… Hamas has opposed every single two-state-solution peace process, explicitly,” he said. “It has intentionally used terrorism to derail a two-state solution. And so there is no bargaining space.” ^[xxix]

Ilan Benjamin, a cousin of beheaded U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl and a self-avowed supporter of a two-state solution until October 7, wrote a passionate appeal to fellow progressive Jews in The Free Press:

When you killed my family, I forgave you. When you killed my people, I forgave you. But when you killed my idealism, I had no forgiveness left… To friends who dare justify what has happened you are not friends. You are nothing but Nazi supporters dressed up in leftist intellectual language.^[xxx]

Prime Minister Netanyahu has been categorical that Israel cannot repeat the mistakes of the Oslo “peace process” begun by the Clinton Administration in 1993, with its goal of implementing the two-state solution. Netanyahu made this clear in a December 16, 2023 statement, after learning that IDF soldiers had mistakenly shot and killed three escaping Israeli hostages in Gaza. Netanyahu said:

I will not allow us to replace Hamastan with Fatahstan, that we replace Khan Yunis with Jenin. I will not allow the State of Israel to repeat the fateful mistake of Oslo, which brought to the heart of our country and to Gaza, the most extreme elements in the Arab world, which are committed to the destruction of the State of Israel and who educate their children to this end.

The debate between Hamas and Fatah is not ‘whether’ to eliminate the State of Israel but ‘how’ to do it. According to a poll that was carried out a few days ago, 82% of the Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria justifies the horrific massacre of October 7th. As of this moment, the Palestinian Authority senior leadership simply refuses to condemn the massacre and some of them even praise it openly. They will control Gaza on ‘the day after’? Haven’t we learned anything? As the Prime Minister of Israel, I will not allow that to happen.

It is important to make this clear now because among friends we must tell the truth and not foster illusions, how much more so on an existential and fateful issue such as this. Then I reiterate to our friends: After the elimination of Hamas, the Gaza Strip will be demilitarized, will be under Israeli security control, and no element in it will either threaten us or educate its children to destroy us.^[xxxi]

Former Trump administration Middle East Envoy Jason Greenblatt pointedly remarked just three days after the attacks that the widespread “glorification of the slaughter of Jews” had disqualified Hamas and Fatah from achieving an independent state. He said:

Israel cannot achieve peace with Palestinians when a segment of the Palestinian population still intends to destroy it. Israel cannot make peace when the leaders of the Palestinians include Hamas. Or when a member of Fatah… celebrates a “morning of victory, joy and pride” and urges all Palestinians to participate in terror against Israel.

[…]Israel, like communities of Jews throughout history, will always need to protect itself from haters. As a consequence, any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, if ever one is to present itself, must always address the need for Israel to defend itself, control security over whatever the Palestinian areas might become and do what it needs to protect its citizens.^[xxxii]

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