The last time that I visited the West Bank, occupied by Israel since 1967, was almost 20 years ago. In a camp outside Bethlehem a delightful 31-year-old woman named Hanavi Ramban, mother of five children, said to me: “A Palestinian state is the only hope for us the refugees, who have been waiting 50 years for it. Someone like you can come here and write about it, but you cannot understand what it is like to live with fear. I was only 15 at the time of the first intifada and I couldn’t believe that my own children would see worse things. Now, I can see it continuing for my grandchildren.”
And so it has. The plight of the Palestinians is worsening, as is that of Arab citizens of Israel. This month’s escalating violence, in which both Israelis and Palestinians have died, reflect both radical new Israeli policies and responses to them by Hamas militants.
And, as someone who has seen five decades of conflict around the globe, including Israelis fighting for their nation’s very survival, I know this bodes ill for the Jewish state just as it does for the nationless Palestinians.
Inch by inch, Israel is moving toward de facto annexation of the West Bank of Jordan. This is Arab land, viewed by most of the international community as the core of an intended Palestinian state, one element of the so-called two-state solution to a century-old struggle. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has always been, at heart, an advocate of “Greater Israel” — I heard him say as much, more than four decades ago.
Now, Netanyahu leads a coalition that constitutes the most radical right-wing government in his country’s history. His minister of security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has declared that Palestinian-ruled Gaza, too, should properly belong to Israel, and that “the Palestinians can go to Saudi Arabia or other places, like Iraq or Iran.”
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, an avowed Jewish supremacist, is charged with promoting the interests of the half million settlers on the West Bank and, implicitly, with sweeping aside those of Palestinians. Smotrich also questions the whfether the two million Arabs within the borders of Israel should keep citizens’ rights, or even live there.
Today’s strife has deep historical roots, and my own nation is still coming to grips with its prominent role. A century ago, Britain’s foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, wrote the first chapter of the modern story of the Holy Land with an imperial arrogance characteristic of his generation. He publicly promised British Zionist leader Lord Rothschild that his government would support making Palestine — then part of the tottering Ottoman Empire — “a national home for the Jewish people.”
My old friend Roy Jenkins, a British Labour statesman and former head of the European Commission, used to recall how, following World War II, the creation of a Jewish state seemed to his generation of liberals — backed by U.S. President Harry Truman — “the only possible honourable and compassionate response to the revelation of the Holocaust.”
Yet the story is of course far more complex. The distinguished Oxford historian Avi Shlaim, a Jew born in Baghdad in 1945 and whose family emigrated to Israel in the early 1950s, wrote in a new memoir: “Britain had no legal, political or moral right to turn over the land of one people to another.” When it received a mandate from the League of Nations to govern Palestine after World War I, it merely secured the power to do so.
Shlaim is a contrarian who has spent a lifetime at loggerheads with most other Israeli historians. But his background as a child in Iraq gave him sympathy for the Palestinians: “I could see Arabs not just as an enemy but as a people, worthy of recognition and dignity.” Shlaim deplores the policies of modern Israel toward the Palestinians, which he regards as a formula for perpetual struggle.
Yet most of us who think of ourselves as realists acknowledge how little the world seems to care about what the Netanyahu government is doing. Let us be honest: There isn’t great love for the Palestinians, not even among Arabs. The 2020 Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states including the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, reflected the fact that the parties’ common economic interests, and indeed prosperity, gave them more in common with each other than what shared Arab identity gives those states with the impoverished Palestinians.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has expressed strong criticism of some policies of the Netanyahu government, not least its ongoing attempt render the nation’s independent judiciary subject to political dominance.
But an overpowering reality is that Washington is paying less heed to the Middle East than at any time in living memory. It is preoccupied with China and Ukraine. There is no stomach for a big falling out with Jerusalem, and Netanyahu understands this.
The White House appears even to accept Israel’s indifference to the Ukraine war, a neutrality rooted in a desire to keep open Netanyahu’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In London recently, I met an Israeli opposition leader who expressed disgust that his country does not support Ukraine: “Given our own history, it is morally essential that we should be seen to stand up for the rights of a nation facing unprovoked aggression.”
This friend — an ex-soldier, as are so many Israeli politicians — asserted that there are legitimate security objections to supplying Israel’s Iron Dome anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine, as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has requested. But he finds inexcusable Jerusalem’s indulgence of Putin. Nonetheless, Netanyahu’s policies are unlikely to change, and the U.S. apparently lacks the will or clout to make him do so.
Netanyahu’s most notable diplomatic achievement over the past four decades has been to forge a concord with U.S. Republicans and especially Christian evangelists, founded upon mutual flattery and perceived shared interests. Not only is there no Palestinian who can match his rapport with the foreign constituency most serviceable to Israel’s interests; there is no one in the entire Arab world who can achieve this.
European governments, and their peoples, are more exercised than Americans about the fate of the Palestinians. Again, however, most are too preoccupied with domestic issues to start a big fight about it. In March, Netanyahu, with hundreds of thousands of opponents taking to the streets to protest his proposed constitutional changes, was able to engineer a visit to Britain, to shore up his tottering domestic image. He was courteously received by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Protesters on British streets were numbered in hundreds, not thousands.
Informed international opinion is today divided about whether we should admit that the two-state solution is dead; that the Palestinians will never have their own nation because Israeli military and political heft will prevent it. As a matter of common sense, it is impossible to envisage a viable Palestinian state in territory now densely populated by Jewish settlers.
Dahlia Scheindlin, a Tel Aviv-based academic and columnist for the liberal newspaper Haaretz, argues that “Washington’s support for those policies only lends credibility to the Vladimir Putin school of international relations, which portrays the rules-based international order as a farce.”
A group of American academics headed by Michael Barnett argue in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs: “Israel’s radical new government did not create this reality but rather made it impossible to deny. The temporary status of ‘occupation’ of the Palestinian territories is now a permanent condition.”
An Israeli Arab, with no sympathy for Israel’s government, nonetheless said to me way back: “The Palestinians have failed. They live in a fantasy world. When you ask them where they are from, they don’t name a refugee camp, they speak of some village from which their parents were driven out in 1948. This is crazy.”
When I was in Gaza in 2004, an old man living in a squalid refugee shack with 25 other family members produced for my scrutiny a rusty iron box, from which he extracted the deeds to a family property in Askelon, across the border in Israel proper. The documents were headed, beneath the British royal crest: “This certificate of ownership is issued under the Land Settlement Ordinance 1928.” For their own sakes, the Palestinians must be disabused of their illusions that they can ever recover what their forefathers lost and what mine promised them.
I have always believed that the best hope of persuading the Palestinians to behave rationally is to give them something to lose, instead of keeping them locked in captivity with their economy, such as it is, intermittently devastated by Israeli firepower.
My instinct, having known the region for so long, is that the Israeli right will, over the next decade or two, succeed in forging a Greater Israel, including the entire West Bank, because they have the military power to do so. Nations that crush their enemies on the battlefield — as Israel did the Arabs in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 — have very often used their power to secure territorial booty. For Israel to do likewise does not make it a worse offender than other victors, merely no better.
My longtime friend the British historian Michael Howard, who was Jewish, once said to me, “It is very dangerous for a state to base its policies upon an assumption of indefinite military superiority,” as Israel has been doing for years. The creeping annexation of the West Bank entrenches Palestinian rage and institutionalizes the long-term threats from Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran. It diminishes prospects of securing foreign, and explicitly American, support if conflict with those violent forces escalates.
There is no “solution” to these intractable problems, merely a range of expedients. We can only cling to the hope that the Israeli government can be persuaded or coerced into choosing the least base and cruel.
I once knew a lovely old kibbutznik named Benny Porat, born in 1923, who emigrated from Berlin 10 years later when his father grasped the significance of Hitler. Benny must now be long dead, but when we talked at his house by the sea south of Haifa ages ago, he said: “Today we have great military power, but morally in some ways we are weaker than once we were. Israel is rich in material things, poorer in others. Only the prophets know what Israel’s future will be. In the Middle East no one can guess, because the future is always what we do not expect.”
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Max Hastings is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former editor in chief of the Daily Telegraph and the London Evening Standard, he is author, most recently, of "The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962."
