Over the two decades prior to Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, Israelis had grown complacent about the country’s vulnerability to large-scale violence from Palestinians. In the absence of a meaningful threat, they relegated negotiations for a resolution of the conflict with the Palestinians to the backburner or worse. Many, particularly on the Israeli right, promoted the narrative that there was no Palestinian partner for peace negotiations, despite the fact that this was demonstrably false at many points over that time. Some had even convinced themselves that an agreement with the Palestinians was no longer necessary.
The attack on Oct. 7 put an end to those illusions. Since then, the latest chapter in the war between Palestinians and Israelis has led to thousands of mostly civilian deaths on both sides, with many more likely as long as the conflict continues.
The events of the past three months serve as a painful reminder that the truths of this conflict do not go away simply because they are ignored. Acknowledgment of the conflict’s realities is necessary to avoid further repetition of violence, particularly against civilians, and to take concrete steps toward a resolution that minimizes future killing. Five truths, in particular, bear underlining.
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is now a century old. Many narrative accounts of the conflict begin in 1948 and place an emphasis on the events since then. Others start the clock in the 1990s, with the signing of the Oslo Accords. However, the cycle of violence between Palestinians and the Jewish immigrants who subsequently became Israelis actually dates back a century. Upon gaining control of Palestine in 1920 as a League of Nations mandate following World War I, British authorities began promoting the territory as a Jewish national home, including permitting largely unfettered Jewish immigration, irrespective of how that policy affected the Arab population already living there. The resulting dislocation to Palestinian economic and social life triggered the earliest stirrings of Palestinian nationalism, and both secularists and Islamists participated in the effort to oppose Zionism and achieve an independent Palestinian state.
Palestinian Arab riots first erupted in the 1920s protesting Jewish settlement in Palestine, and they turned into full-blown skirmishes in the 1930s. One of the earliest Islamist activists to agitate against the Zionists was Izz al-Din al-Qassam, whose followers helped trigger the 1936-1939 revolt against Zionist and British political and economic interests. Hamas’ Qassam military wing, which conducted the brutal Oct. 7 attacks in southern Israel, is named after him.
The idea that Israel can ignore the conflict, use its military to keep Palestinians in check and implement any policies in the Palestinian territories it sees fit without seeing an increase in violence is simply unrealistic.
Since then, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has continued to this day, and it will continue into the future absent a peace process that allows Israelis and Palestinians to co-exist, whether alongside each other or isolated from each other. Over the past century, the conflict has seen Jewish terrorist attacks against Palestinian and British interests before Israeli statehood; numerous Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israelis and Israeli interests in and out of the region in the decades following Israeli statehood, conducted primarily by secular groups; the Israeli occupation in 1967 of the Palestinian territories—the West Bank and Gaza Strip—that emerged out of the 1948-1949 war, with the subsequent domination by Israel of Palestinian political and economic life in them; Israeli construction of settlements, now comprising over 700,000 Jewish Israelis in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem; two Palestinian uprisings, first in 1987, from which Hamas emerged, and then another particularly violent one in 2000; countless terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or PIJ, and others; and the continuing Israeli blockade of Gaza, implemented in 2007 with Egyptian collaboration, which restricts the movement of Palestinian people and goods into and out of the territory.
In short, Palestinians have been in conflict with the idea and the reality of Israel for over a century. Given the reality of a vibrant and strong Israeli state, Palestinians who have not already done so, like Hamas and other militants, will now have to relinquish a maximalist vision of what will constitute the state of Palestine. However, the absence of Palestinian self-determination and Israel’s domination of Palestinian lives remain the core causes of the conflict, both in the immediate and the long term. As such, there is nothing isolated or unprovoked about Hamas’ attack against Israel on Oct. 7. It is merely the latest chapter in a longstanding and tragic conflict that has seen atrocities committed by both sides.
Israelis are not invulnerable. For extended periods, Israelis convinced themselves that the Palestinians had accepted the lot that Israel had determined for them. However, the reality is that as long as there is no independent Palestinian state to fulfill the Palestinians’ yearning for self-determination, there will be explosions of violence in which Israelis will be killed. While the Israeli state is not in any existential danger from Palestinian terrorist violence, individual Israelis are and will remain so.
Although the vast majority of Palestinians do not engage in terrorism, many are likely drawn to the violent narrative promoted by Hamas and PIJ as the quality of their lives deteriorates. Since Israel began its blockade in 2007 after a brief intra-Palestinian conflict left Gaza under the control of Hamas, living conditions there have gradually and increasingly eroded. The territory’s civilian population suffers from extreme poverty levels and experiences high levels of casualties with every Israeli military operation, as Israeli forces target schools, hospitals, mosques and churches in their pursuit of Hamas and PIJ leaders, militants and arsenals. In the West Bank, increased violence by a growing number of settlers, expropriation of Palestinian lands and the failure of the corrupt Palestinian Authority, or PA, to protect ordinary civilians contributes to Palestinians’ despondency. Moreover, as Israel continues to build settlements deeper into the West Bank, instigating greater settler-Palestinian friction, violence is likely to increase.
The idea that Israel can ignore the conflict, use its military to keep Palestinians in check and implement any policies in the Palestinian territories it sees fit without seeing an increase in violence is simply unrealistic. Hamas and PIJ enjoy support from Iran and its Lebanese client Hezbollah in the form of weapons and technology transfers. And as the attack of Oct. 7 made clear, with this support, Hamas is capable of tactical innovation and improved effectiveness in its terrorist violence. Israeli retaliation, which has already claimed thousands of innocent Palestinian lives, will inevitably contribute to Hamas’ ability to recruit more members. The absence of negotiations and a political horizon to achieve Palestinian self-determination fuels broader despair and likely strengthens Palestinians’ acceptance of violence.
The Palestinians cannot be sidestepped. Many in Israel, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have argued that normalization with Arab states in the region is possible without having reached a peace deal with the Palestinians. This idea was reinforced with the conclusion of the four Abraham Accords in 2020 and 2021 between Israel on the one hand and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan on the other.
That premise was always dubious, but the events of the past three months have underscored why. Within days after the Hamas attacks, when Israel had only just begun its own military reprisals in Gaza, the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council—including the UAE and Bahrain, which are signatories of the Abraham Accords, as well as Oman and Qatar, which have cooperative though unofficial relations with Israel—issued a statement calling for a durable cease-fire, the immediate release of civilian hostages and detainees, and a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thousands of protesters shouting anti-Israel slogans gathered on the streets in Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere. Since then, the pressure on and from Arab governments to seek an end to the fighting and a return to negotiations toward a final settlement have only grown louder and stronger.
For Arab populations, the conflict has emotive power, underscoring broad sympathy for the Palestinians across the Arab world, and the domestic cost for Arab leaders of normalizing relations with Israel while Palestinians continue to suffer from repressive conditions can be high. For the Israelis, it is important to note that normalization with Arab states would not make the Palestinians disappear or abandon their objective of independence, meaning the potential for violence of the kind currently on display would remain. And all evidence indicates that Israel’s Arab peace partners will support the Palestinians, at least rhetorically, in any resulting confrontation.
Resolving the conflict and defusing the motivations of Palestinians who would join or support Hamas and groups like it would contribute significantly to the safety of Israelis. Groups like Hamas will likely never accept Israel, aspiring as they do to repossess all of historical Palestine. But the appeal of Hamas’ violent narrative would be severely undercut among Palestinians if they gained control of their own state, including a representative government and unfettered economic activity without Israeli interference in their lives.
The Palestinians’ current situation is unsustainable. Putting aside the violence inherent in an unresolved Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Palestinians’ current conditions are simply untenable. According to a March 2022 report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel’s entrenched rule satisfies the “prevailing evidentiary standard definition” for apartheid, as Israelis and Palestinians living in neighboring communities in the occupied West Bank live under different sets of laws. The system provides comprehensive rights for Jewish Israeli settlers while imposing military rule and control on Palestinians without reference to basic protections or rights under international law.
A commission of inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territories mandated by the U.N. Human Rights Council concluded in June 2022 “that continued occupation, as well as discrimination against Palestinians, are the key causes of recurrent instability and protraction of conflict in the region.” The commission of inquiry further reports that the Israeli government has engaged in extrajudicial killings, detention without trials, torture and collective punishment of Palestinians in the West Bank. All of this is enabled by the United States, as Israel’s primary patron, via billions of dollars of annual military assistance, decades of shielding Israel diplomatically from international condemnation at the U.N., silence with regard to Israeli practices in enforcing the occupation, a double-standard in its reaction to Israeli civilian deaths versus Palestinian civilian casualties and absence of leadership with regard to a sustained, effective peace process.
Israel’s settlement expansion in the West Bank since 1967 appears aimed at permanently altering the demographics of the occupied territories. Apart from the hundreds of thousands of Jewish Israeli settlers, Amnesty International estimates that, in over 50 years of occupation, Israel has appropriated about a quarter of a million acres of land from Palestinians and has demolished over 50,000 homes across the territories to punish the families of alleged terrorists.
Without the optimism that a political horizon can engender, narratives of violence on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will continue to have appeal.
Even within the already deleterious Israeli administration of the territories, the Gaza Strip remains a special case. With over 2 million Palestinians living within roughly 140 square miles—including Palestinian refugees from the 1948-1949 war—it is one of the world’s most densely populated territories. Half of Palestinians living in Gaza are under age 19, and they have few prospects for economic advancement and limited access to the outside world.
Although Israel argues it ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip in 2005, it has maintained a land, air and sea blockade—deemed illegal by Amnesty International—on Gaza since 2007, when Hamas took over the Gaza Strip after a brief armed battle for control with the PA. Since then, Israel has not only tolerated the Hamas government in Gaza, it has engaged in a series of indirect negotiations—usually following briefer periods of conflict—with the group that over the years created a status quo that included allowing outside assistance to reach Hamas, primarily from Qatar.
Rather than damage Hamas, the Israeli-Egyptian blockade has had a devastating effect on Palestinian civilians. By limiting imports and nearly all exports, the blockade has driven Gaza’s economy to near-collapse, with unemployment rates above 40 percent, according to the World Bank. More than 65 percent of the population lives under the poverty line, according to the U.N., with 63 percent of Gaza’s residents deemed “food insecure” by the World Food Program.
All of this was before the vast destruction that Israel has visited upon Gaza’s population and its infrastructure in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, including “a complete siege” of the territory that had initially cut off deliveries of electricity, fuel, food and water to the enclave. Conditions for civilians in Gaza, already dire before this conflict, have dramatically worsened. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have died and almost the entire population of 2 million has been displaced within Gaza as a result of Israeli strikes, which have created conditions that are tailor-made for Hamas recruitment: poverty, vulnerability, helplessness, anger and despair, combined with the absence of a process to end the conflict.
In short, while Israelis may have been surprised by the failures of their security and intelligence services on Oct. 7, they should not be surprised that the conflict continues and that violent elements among the Palestinians will seek to target any Israeli that they can reach.
Negotiations will be difficult, but necessary. It is perhaps a truism that one can only make peace with one’s enemy, but it nonetheless applies to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Unless the Israelis decide to unilaterally lift the siege of Gaza should they manage to destroy Hamas militarily—a most difficult goal—and withdraw fully from the West Bank without preconditions, a negotiating process will be necessary to set the terms of the agreement that would allow Israelis and Palestinians to co-exist peacefully, or at least with a significantly reduced frequency and level of violence. Here, the principles broadly accepted during the Oslo process are instructive.
According to most observers, the three most contentious issues that the two parties must agree on are: final borders, including accommodation of some Israeli settlements in the West Bank and land swaps as compensation; resettlement of Palestinian refugees—mainly in Palestine, but perhaps with a small, symbolic number in Israel—and compensation for lost properties; and the status of Jerusalem, including the location of the Palestinian capital and the status of Muslim—and Christian—holy sites. A lot of other details will also have to be settled, including security cooperation, economic activity, airspace and unfettered movement of people and goods between the two Palestinian territories and from them to the outside world.
Initiating successful negotiations will be difficult, as there is virtually no trust between the two sides. Among other issues, Israelis do not trust Palestinians to refrain from violence, and some Palestinian elements will indeed try to torpedo any peace process with violence. For their part, Palestinians do not believe that Israelis will respect a commitment to permanently withdraw from the West Bank and refrain from interfering in Palestine thereafter. The failed Oslo process gives support to both views.
The Israelis also have their own violent elements, as was seen when an opponent of the peace process assassinated then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Without the optimism that a political horizon can engender, narratives of violence on both sides will continue to have appeal. In order to prevent future conflict, the critical outcomes of any peace process must be Palestinian self-determination and the economic viability of the resulting Palestinian state, along with security for both peoples. With regard to process, the negotiations should be quick, with identifiable milestones set to build confidence. The longer the negotiations go on, the easier it will be for spoilers—both Palestinian and Israeli—to disrupt them with violence.
The PA’s deficiencies include a long-expired mandate, corrupt leadership and officials, financial weakness due to Israel stripping it of tax revenues, and most importantly an inability to protect Palestinian civilians from violence by Israeli security forces and settlers. As a result it has become untrustworthy to many Palestinians, making it a poor representative in any negotiations.
It also remains unclear how the PA will be affected by the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, standing as it is on the sidelines. While Hamas is perceived to be taking the fight to Israel, the PA is popularly viewed as doing Israel’s bidding on security and targeting Hamas and other violent groups in the West Bank, rather than making progress toward fulfilling Palestinian political and economic aspirations. Nonetheless, the PA is the only game in town, and a leadership change at the top could perhaps reinvigorate its legitimacy.
The odds are clearly against any negotiations leading to a sustainable resolution to the conflict. But the absence of successful talks is certain to result in more violence. Israelis may convince themselves otherwise, but they will never have peace and security until Palestinians do, too.
Amir Asmar was a senior executive and longtime Middle East analyst in the U.S. Department of Defense. The statements of fact, opinion or analysis expressed in this article are strictly the author’s and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Defense Department or the U.S. government. Review of the material does not imply Defense Department or U.S. government endorsement of factual accuracy or opinion.