On 10 May, the Joint Chamber of Palestinian Resistance Factions in the Gaza Strip issued an ultimatum, declaring that Israel had until 6pm local time to withdraw its forces from Al-Aqsa and Sheikh Jarrah, and to release all those it had detained during these events. Shortly after the deadline expired, Hamas fired a series of rockets toward Jerusalem. Israeli forces retaliated by launching airstrikes on Gaza, killing 28 people, including nine children, in the first few hours, and threatening an expanded response lasting days , including a ground invasion.
That sense has deepened over the last couple of years with the Abraham Accords normalising relations between Israel and important Gulf Arab states and the continued rise in the Israeli economy and living conditions. Israeli leaders also saw Hamas break from its Gazan confines by using its escalation with Israel to attempt to negotiate concessions on Jerusalem, not solely the lifting of the blockade on Gaza, as it had done in the past.
In so doing, Hamas appeared to be usurping leadership of the Palestinian national movement from President Abbas and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority.
While the , , and wars were all focused on Gaza, the new round of fighting, including in Gaza, has reaffirmed the centrality of Jerusalem in the conflict. The evolving situation in East Jerusalem — at the Holy Esplanade and in neighbourhoods such as Sheikh Jarrah — has come to epitomise the fundamental elements underlying the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the experiences of Palestinians living through it.
With growing frequency, Palestinians in these protests raised calls for Hamas, a self-described Islamic national liberation and resistance movement, to step in and do something, clearly positioning the movement in Palestinian eyes as a bulwark against Israeli aggression in contrast with Fatah in the West Bank.
At these same protests, Palestinians hurled insults at Abbas and the PA for their ineffectiveness at defending Jerusalem, particularly after they had used the city as the pretence for cancelling Palestinian legislative elections. Indeed, throughout the events that have transpired over the past month, the PA has been consistently mocked. In turn, the PA and Fatah have been relatively silent about these developments, while also cracking down on protests in the West Bank that have erupted in solidarity with Palestinians in East Jerusalem.
The novelty this time around, which will inevitably carry longer-term ramifications, was the popular agitation of Palestinians throughout Israel-Palestine, as if boundaries — and particularly the Green Line, marking the armistice line after the war and today separating Israel from the West Bank — had vanished.
The mobilisation occurred despite decades of Israeli attempts at territorial cantonisation that had in effect cut off East Jerusalem from its West Bank hinterland, of which it is an intrinsic part, in the two and a half decades since the signing of the Oslo accords, and separated Palestinian citizens of Israel from Palestinians in the occupied territories since The widespread nature of the fighting and unrest means that a single ceasefire is not going to restore calm, even if it may take the edge off the worst of the violence.
In the wake of the 23 March Israeli elections, from which a new coalition government has yet to emerge, Israeli politicians are taking hawkish stances. There is currently no end date for the operation.
Others criticise the government for its lack of strategy regarding Gaza since Israel pulled soldiers and Jewish settlers out of the strip in The state is evading other options. It is not even discussing other strategies. Israeli commentators and military analysts have started assembling a victory narrative, talking about how heavy a hit Hamas has taken, giving the appearance that the war may wind down within a matter of days.
Meanwhile, on the domestic front, Bennett has called off efforts to form an alternative coalition with Lapid, saying he will go back to negotiating with Netanyahu to form a government.
Alternatively, Israel would go to yet another election. In either case, Netanyahu would succeed, for now, in his effort to stay in power. Hamas has issued a list of demands, all of which, unlike in past escalations, have centred on Jerusalem. It has made clear that it will not consider a ceasefire until Israel ceases its expulsions in Sheikh Jarrah, and evacuates its forces from Al-Aqsa mosque, allowing for freedom of access to and worship at the mosque.
Beyond these two central demands, Hamas has also called for the release of all prisoners detained in these recent events and Israeli acquiescence to Palestinian legislative elections including in East Jerusalem. Hamas is unlikely to see its demands regarding Jerusalem fulfilled — no Israeli government can afford to make concessions in that respect.
In Gaza, the Islamist movement will have to consider how much destruction it can allow, given that the task of rebuilding will fall on its shoulders.
The polling shows receptiveness in Gaza to practical U. Shifts in Palestinian public opinion also suggest that Israeli overtures, or at least Israeli restraint, may prompt more moderate Palestinian attitudes. Conversely, hardline Israeli policies—whether on settlements, security, or economic relations—may negatively shift Palestinian public opinion.
For example, the polling data reflect a period in which former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly stated that Israel would annex parts of the West Bank. American interests in both short-term stability and medium-term coexistence might counsel underscoring this connection to our Israeli partners.
Even so, the sobering reality is that there is still no Palestinian popular majority that supports permanent peace with Israel, including a majority even among the younger generation. Beyond the practical challenges of negotiating the final status of a two-state solution, real reconciliation remains a distant dream.
This article was originally published on the American Purpose website. Jul 23, Also available in Arabic. Also published in American Purpose. About the Authors. David Pollock. Catherine Cleveland. Daniel Seidemann, a leading expert on Jerusalem and the geography of the conflict, told me that Israel would have to withdraw and rehome about , settlers to make a two-state solution viable.
This is a logistical challenge but hardly an impossibility: Seidemann points out that, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Israel successfully absorbed roughly a million Jews seeking a new home in Israel. The politics of evacuating Israelis from settlements are much harder than integrating Jewish immigrants from abroad.
And yet they are infinitely easier than those of asking Israel to commit what Jewish citizens see as national suicide. If forced to choose between withdrawal and destruction by some kind of pressure campaign, Israel would have both the power and the will to choose the former. Since the split, there have been repeated negotiations between the two sides and several interim agreements on power-sharing. These agreements, of course, broke down. But part of the problem is that the Palestinians were working with limited international support.
Support for a one-state solution is born of a justified sense that the two-state paradigm is failing to deliver. But the argument that it is somehow more realistic than two states only works if one ignores the basic realities on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides of the conflict.
One-state advocates are not unaware of these barriers. They believe they can be overcome by the moral force of the one-state democratic vision: an ideal that could galvanize a political movement akin to the South African anti-apartheid struggle, changing the way that people on both sides of the conflict think about themselves and their historic enemies.
And that makes two states not only more feasible than one, but also in certain respects more desirable. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not just a fight for individual rights, though it is that. To overcome that, leaders and ordinary citizens on both sides would need to fundamentally change their national aspirations: Jews would need to reject Zionism and Palestinians reject Palestinian nationalism. That would involve not just changing political institutions, but changing the sorts of identities people have and care about.
That is not impossible, but it is exceptionally difficult to imagine in this case. Far more likely is a situation in which one national vision dominates the other, either by force of arms or force of numbers. In either case, one side will feel unrepresented by a one-state reality — which is a recipe for disaster. This analysis depends, crucially, on exclusive national identities on both sides running quite deep. For instance, during the recent war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, communal violence between Jews and Arabs erupted on the streets of demographically mixed cities within Israel.
This fighting reflected the deepening mistrust between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel , fed by anti-Arab sentiment among Jews and a justified sense among Arabs that the Jewish majority does not consider them full and equal citizens. And yet, Arab Israelis, also known as Palestinian citizens of Israel, had been part of the Jewish state for decades — and, in recent years, had made significant strides toward integration in Israeli social and cultural life.
The first step, these experts say, should be to abandon the US-led peace process as traditionally conceived. The goal of a deoccupation strategy is to halt and eventually reverse the processes that are pushing the two sides further away from two states, with the ultimate aim of returning to final status negotiations when conditions have changed.
It involves three key aspects: 1 raising the costs of the status quo for Israel; 2 changing the political equation on both sides; and 3 rethinking what an acceptable two-state solution might look like.
It also means using US leverage over Israel to push it back on a better path. This kind of approach used to be unthinkable in Washington, given staunch pro-Israel sentiment on both sides.
But a dramatic shift in attitudes on the Democratic side — both in public opinion and on Capitol Hill — has created an opportunity for the US to use its leverage over Israel in pursuit of peace. It has the support of both prominent legislators like Rep. This means both supporting the pro-peace camp in Israel and, more controversially, working to reconcile Hamas and Fatah to create a unified Palestinian leadership that could make authoritative promises.
Tzipi Livni, the current Kadima opposition leader in Israel, who had been foreign minister during the Gaza attacks, cancelled a visit to Britain after she received word that a warrant for her arrest upon arrival had been issued. Even if Israeli impunity is not overcome, the authoritativeness of the Goldstone report lends weight to calls around the world to disrupt normal relations with Israel by boycotting cultural and academic activities, by disrupting trade relations through divestment moves or through refusals to load and unload ships and planes carrying cargo to or from Israel, and by pressuring governments to impose economic sanctions.
The historic inspiration for this legitimacy war is the anti-apartheid campaign waged with such success against the racist regime in South Africa.
Israeli official and unofficial support groups have recently recognized the threat posed to their expansionist settler colonial grand strategy by this recourse by Palestinians to a legitimacy war. As with other Israeli tactics, in their defensive approach to the legitimacy war, there is an absence of self-criticism involving an assessment of Palestinian substantive claims under international law.
For Israel a legitimacy war is a public relations issue pure and simple, a matter of discrediting the adversary and proclaiming national innocence and virtue. Despite its huge advantage in resources devoted to this campaign, Israel is definitely losing the legitimacy war.