The Worst-Kept Secret of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

The Atlantic

2 days ago

One of the more poorly kept secrets of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that many of those involved would prefer to take all the land and have the other side disappear. A 2011 poll found that two-thirds of Palestinians believed that their real goal should not be a two-state solution, but rather using that arrangement as a prelude to establishing 'one Palestinian state.' A 2016 survey found that nearly half of Israeli Jews agreed that 'Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.' A poll in 2000, conducted during negotiations toward a two-state solution, found that only 47 percent of Israelis and 10 percent of Palestinians supported a school curriculum that would educate students to 'give up aspirations for parts of the 'homeland' which are in the other state.'
These stark statistics illustrate why the conflict has proved so intractable: Palestinians and Israelis subscribe to dueling national movements with deeply held and mutually exclusive historical and religious claims to the same land. After a century of violence and dispossession, it should not be surprising that many would happily wish the other side away, if such an option existed. The current American administration, though, is the first to reinforce those ambitions, rather than curtail them.
Aside from the efforts of beleaguered moderates, what restrains the region's worst impulses is not principle, but practicality. Neither side can fully vanquish the other without unending bloodshed, and the international community has long refused to countenance an outcome in which one group simply routs the other. Instead, successive American presidents—with the notable exception of Donald Trump—have insisted that Israelis and Palestinians resolve their differences bilaterally at the negotiating table.
Efforts to broker territorial compromise have repeatedly failed, but they had the effect of constraining maximalist aspirations on the ground. Consider the admission of Matan Kahana, a conservative Israeli politician: 'If there was a sort of button you could push that would make all the Arabs disappear, sending them on an express train to Switzerland where they would live fantastic lives, I would press that button,' he told a student group in a right-wing settlement in 2022. 'But what can you do? There is no such button. It therefore seems we were meant to coexist on this land in some way.' The comments leaked and Kahana was compelled to apologize, but the private recording revealed something interesting: Even a pro-settler lawmaker speaking to a sympathetic audience understood that the dream of ousting the other was unrealistic.
That began to change on October 7, 2023. Hamas, a Palestinian faction fanatically committed to ending Israel, massacred some 1,200 Israelis, and the Israeli far right saw an opportunity to attain its own thwarted ambitions. In 2005, Israel had forcibly removed all of its settlers from Gaza and ceded the Strip to Palestinian control. Eighteen years later, as Israel's army reentered the area, the radicals in Benjamin Netanyahu's government sought to turn back the clock—and to expel any Palestinians in their way.
'The sole picture of victory in this war that will allow us to lift our heads,' the lawmaker Limor Son Har-Melech declared in late 2023, 'is settlements across the entire Gaza Strip.' In November, Har-Melech and her allies spoke at a conference titled 'Returning to the Gaza Strip' in Ashdod, a city between Tel Aviv and Gaza. Weeks later, more than 100 activists gathered in central Israel under the banner, 'Practical Preparation for Settlement in Gaza.' In January 2024, 15 of the 64 members of Netanyahu's governing coalition at the time attended an even larger gathering in Jerusalem, where speakers openly advocated the 'voluntary migration' of Gazans—a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.
Polls show that a clear majority of Israelis oppose the resettlement and annexation of Gaza. Even some Israelis who dream of one day ruling the entire land balk in practice at the notion of maintaining a perpetual military occupation against a Hamas insurgency. But Israel's prime minister is beholden to the minority demanding exactly that. Netanyahu's fragile coalition received just 48.4 percent of the vote in Israel's last election, and relies on explicitly anti-Arab far-right factions to remain in power while Netanyahu is on trial for corruption. President Joe Biden understood this dynamic, and his administration undertook a public and private pressure campaign to prevent Netanyahu from acceding to his hard-right allies.
'We have been clear, consistent, and unequivocal that Gaza is Palestinian land and will remain Palestinian land,' the State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a January 2024 statement, publicly rebuking two Netanyahu ministers for their 'inflammatory and irresponsible' call to encourage 'migration' from Gaza to make way for Jewish settlement.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to the region and assured America's Arab allies that it opposed forced displacement. 'Palestinian civilians must be able to return home as soon as conditions allow,' he said at a press conference in Doha, Qatar. 'They cannot, they must not, be pressed to leave Gaza.' Blinken then traveled to Israel, where he apparently delivered the same message to Netanyahu. The next day, the Israeli leader posted a video in which he declared, 'Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population.' A member of Netanyahu's party told the press that the prime minister's stance had shifted because of American pressure. For the moment, maximalism had been shoved back into the box.
Then Donald Trump won reelection, and everything changed. The same day Trump defeated Kamala Harris, Netanyahu fired Yoav Gallant, his defense minister, who had opposed the resettlement of Gaza and publicly criticized the prime minister for refusing to commit to returning the territory to Palestinian control. In one fell swoop, the chief external (Biden) and internal (Gallant) obstacles to conquering Gaza were removed. The only pressure exerted on Netanyahu now was from the hard right. And then Trump himself seemingly joined its cause.
On February 4, sitting next to a surprised Netanyahu in the Oval Office, Trump dramatically undid all of Biden's efforts, promising to take over Gaza, relocate its residents, and turn the area into the 'Riviera of the Middle East.' The president may have conceived of this vision out of some misdirected sense of compassion, believing it would provide better lives for Palestinians now stuck in what he correctly termed a 'demolition site.' But whatever Trump's intentions, his proposal was immediately taken as affirmation of the maximalist dream of many Israelis, and an explicit warrant for ethnic cleansing by the Israeli far right. Once that prospect turned from a pipe dream into a president's plan, it quickly became an obstruction to concluding the conflict.
At a press conference in May, Netanyahu declared that implementing Trump's vision was now a condition for ending the war. Last week, the director of the Mossad reportedly visited Washington to discuss the 'voluntary' relocation of 'hundreds of thousands of Palestinians' to third-party countries. All the while, Gaza's hunger crisis has dramatically worsened, while hostages continue to languish in Hamas dungeons. Far from expediting the conflict's end, Trump's proposal has been marshaled to prolong it. And as long as the president does not explicitly reject the goal of removing the Gazan population, it will continue to bedevil his plans for the region.
That's because the maximalists are now driving events. Hamas, a messianic cult that never cared for the civilians it hid within and beneath, will happily continue fighting its unwinnable war against Israel to the last Gazan. Netanyahu will do whatever keeps his coalition in power, kowtowing to the far right and extending the war in service of their aims rather than winding it down. But this is not the outcome that Trump or his administration professes to want. The president has not raised his Riviera idea in months, and has instead begun pressuring Israel to compromise. 'MAKE THE DEAL IN GAZA. GET THE HOSTAGES BACK!!!' Trump posted on Truth Social June 29.
'The president's message on this conflict in the Middle East, which has been going on for a long time and has become quite brutal—especially in Gaza—is clear,' Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday. 'He wants the killing to end, to negotiate a cease-fire in this region, and he wants to see all of the hostages released from Gaza.' But the president's message is not clear. It is contradictory, and that is the source of the problem.
This week, Trump dispatched his Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff overseas, amid hopes of clinching a deal. But if the administration wants more than another temporary cease-fire that will inevitably collapse, it needs to stop feeding the Israeli right's dream of conquest—in Gaza, but also the West Bank. It must make clear that neither nation is going anywhere and once again confine the absolutist aspirations it unwisely unleashed.
Netanyahu may want to placate the far right, but with his coalition falling apart and elections scheduled for 2026 in any event, he absolutely cannot afford to lose the American president before his next campaign. Whatever Trump dictates, as both Israel's and Netanyahu's primary patron, the prime minister will have to accept.
A president's words have power. With his Gaz-a-Lago intervention, Trump made attaining a lasting cease-fire in Gaza—not to mention broader peace in the Middle East—much harder. But by the same token, he has the capacity to reverse that reality, if he is willing to disown his biggest blunder.