Hypothetical but plausible: How to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for good, right now
A rainbow stretching across the sky as a man sits on the promenade in Haifa, on the day of the Israel-Hezbollah cease-fire in November 2024
Dahlia Scheindlin writes in Haaretz on 23 January 2025:
If Israel maintains its current path, it will soon complete the de facto annexation of the West Bank. The cease-fire arrangement in Gaza will collapse after the first stage, the hostages will die, fighting resumes and Israel establishes a military government to occupy Gaza, with settlements to follow. The Palestinian national movement is smashed, Israel becomes a theocratic imperial actor ruling through subjugation of noncitizens mounting permanent insurgency, while suppressing residual dissent and opposition among its citizens forever.
This option should no longer sound shocking – and certainly not to readers of this column. Until recently, no global force proved willing or capable of halting this process as it has taken shape during the war. And over decades, Israel has a well-established pattern of leveraging wars, even defensive wars, to conquer, hold, historicize and annex territory. This pattern is so successful, it has become a paradigm for Israeli policy.
But there are other trajectories and scenarios. In a parallel world, Israel and the Palestinians could seize on the cease-fire as a gateway to a comprehensive, long-term vision for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by political agreement. So the chances look like nil? So what?
History also serves up stunning overnight upheavals. These have marked my adult life: From the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the paradigm of the global order for my entire childhood, to the recent revolution that chased Bashar Assad out of Syria like a rat after decades of his family’s reign. Paradigms collapse.
It was Thomas Kuhn who introduced the term “paradigm shift” in his seminal 1962 book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” He argued that, historically, scientific knowledge changed when natural laws we thought were true failed to explain things we experienced. Empirical observations puzzled scientists when they did not flow logically from those paradigms they held to be true. An accumulation of such anomalies generated a crisis as certainties collapsed, but gave way to more accurate understandings of important stuff – like gravity.
Kuhn also explained why it’s so hard to see these cumulative revolutionary processes while they’re brewing. In 1900, the celebrated physicist William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, declared the notion of X-rays to be a hoax. We expect things to fit the paradigm, and sublimate countervailing evidence until the pieces converge and change everything.
It was Thomas Kuhn who introduced the term “paradigm shift” in his seminal 1962 book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” He argued that, historically, scientific knowledge changed when natural laws we thought were true failed to explain things we experienced.
As for changing geopolitics, take Assad. He didn’t just wake up and run away – his regime collapsed under the weight of forces underway for years: his longtime dependence on Iran and Russia; Turkey’s support over recent years for Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other rebel groups; the deep demoralization of the Syrian army. Russia became consumed by its war in Ukraine; Iran lost significant footing after Israel’s assault on its axis and the direct exchange of fire between the two.
It wasn’t only escalation that tipped the scales but de-escalation. According to one report, the cease-fire in Lebanon had Hayat Tahrir al-Sham rebels worried that Hezbollah forces would be freed up to defend Assad again – providing one of the final triggers for the start of its offensive.
Call it the perfect storm that swept Assad away.
Elusive paths or irreversible steps
If we wait for hindsight about the end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we may be waiting for a long time. Instead, here’s an exercise on what would have to happen to upend the current path. The steps are hypothetical, but plausible. Let this mental exercise double as a suggestion to anyone who shares the overall aim.
First, the Trump administration is indicating that it will hold both Israel and Hamas to full implementation of the extremely tenuous agreement. If it all goes through, what next? President Donald Trump’s special envoy to the Mideast, Steve Witkoff, told Israel’s Channel 12 that getting to yes involved both pressure and incentives for the parties. If he offered incentives, such as a wink and nod for Israeli annexationist moves in the West Bank – Israel will continue on its current course. UN Secretary-General António Guterres expressed this fear on Wednesday, against the background of the Israeli army’s Jenin operation this week.
But “pressure and incentives” could also entail ending the war in Gaza in order to advance a Saudi normalization deal. This is certainly plausible, if far from imminent. But it’s an opening in the other direction.
In that case, the next question is just how much such a deal would demand of Israel regarding Palestinian self-determination: would it be the elusive “pathway to a Palestinian state.” or the more decisive “irreversible steps”? Either one would force Israel to accept a change of course, even in theory.
The opposition in Israel will be formidable. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has hammered home his role as the bulwark against a Palestinian state. Israeli public support for two states has dropped to just about one-third.
But go back to the cease-fire: In just under six weeks, the second stage is supposed to begin, including an end to the fighting. A governing coalition crisis looms: Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party left the government, and the coalition has just 62 seats – a slim majority. Bezalel Smotrich has said his party will also quit if the fighting ends.
This isn’t a prediction, but it is a possibility: Over the next six weeks, the Trump administration commits itself fully to the big Saudi normalization deal. The kingdom and the Americans together offer a coordinated rollout – maybe even delivered by these unsavory national leaders, Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – to drive home the gravitas.
And what if it’s not just the two of them? The two sides can mobilizes the as-yet mostly aspirational framework known as the Global Alliance for Implementation of the Two State Solution, established late last year by Saudi Arabia, the European Union and Norway, with 85 countries represented at the third meeting held recently in Oslo. The EU would of course provide toothless but enthusiastic moral support to any two-state plan.
Get Qatar and Egypt, already deeply involved in brokering and implementing the cease-fire terms, to leverage their influence in favor of this final-status political agreement for Palestinian self-determination (wrapped up in the Saudi deal). These countries’ support is not theoretical: Israelis are well aware of their major role in helping get their hostages home.
Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon broke radically with their prior ideologies. The Egypt peace accord has been a remarkable success. Sharon’s policy was ultimately a failure – but it only helped him politically. We all know what drives politicians. The United Arab Emirates could well join the bandwagon of political but also material support. That’s plausible enough – the U.A.E. is close to Saudi Arabia, and its prominent longtime diplomat Lana Nusseibeh wrote months ago that the country would participate in an intervention to rehabilitate Gaza if the political conditions were right.
There are essential political pieces to such scenarios. Imagine that while these forces are brewing, Israel’s government collapses over the second stage of the cease-fire (or over the budget, or the Haredi draft bill). Imagine the pitched battles during three months of election campaigns are waged over the merits of continuing the cease-fire deal, while the parties opposed to Netanyahu insert the bigger plan for historic change in the Israeli-Palestinian paradigm of misery. The global headwinds make this into an electoral debate that Israel cannot deflect.
No one knows what would happen, but recent polls show what’s plausible: a January survey by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies asked about Israeli support for a “regional arrangement including a peace agreement with Saudi Arabia, building a regional coalition against Iran and a path toward separation from the Palestinians, backed by the Trump government and moderate Arab states.”
The wording is heavily skewed toward mainstream Israeli Jewish sensibilities, but the findings are striking: 71 percent support the idea – and fully three-quarters of Jewish respondents. Shave off some points when rightists attack a “Palestinian state,” a term the survey avoided. That’s still a very high starting point. Israelis who are sick of permanent war and global hatred might favor parties that support such a path.
All serious electoral polls for two years show the parties opposed to Netanyahu dominating in the next general election. If the security-oriented but non-fundamentalist right-wing wins, someone like Benny Gantz or even Naftali Bennett could lead a major policy and ideological shift.
Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon broke radically with their prior ideologies (Begin returned Sinai to Egypt, while Sharon uprooted settlements from Gaza). The Egypt peace accord has been a remarkable success. Sharon’s policy was ultimately a failure – but it only helped him politically. We all know what drives politicians.
All this will take time. Another six weeks until the cease-fire agreement precipitates a process that might lead to coalition collapse; then three months until the election, and months of coalition wrangling after that.
In that time, magically, the Palestinian political scene gels. Some combination of leaders and civil society, or technocrats, reach a transitional but unified leadership. That administration lays the groundwork and timeline for an election. But even the interim leadership has the authority to agree to the globally backed plan. Like most Palestinians, I wouldn’t wish to see the Palestinian Authority in that role, but this is another plausible option.
Crisis and opportunity – not coincidence
This wish list sounds wild. If you disagree with it, suggest an alternative route – I’ll take anything at this point.
The “perfect storm” concept is legitimate, but also lacking. It implies an arbitrary constellation of stars that might or might never align. The “paradigm shift” is more optimistic: It’s not based on chance, but on a fundamentally deeper and more truthful understanding.
After the wretched events since 6:29 A.M. on October 7, Israel’s political actors have overwhelming evidence that their conceptzia of cost-free rule over Palestinians until they vanish and we own everything was disastrously wrong. Palestinians should know by now that depraved leaders peddling civilian slaughter as “resistance” bring hell home. Global power brokers should never have succumbed to the lullaby of “conflict management.”
Kuhn wrote: “Failure of existing rules is the prelude to a search for new ones.” Peace may have become a bad word in the region; paradigm shift is not.
This article is reproduced in its entirety