It’s not easy but some people do it well
Haggai Matar, Israeli peace activist, journalist and executive editor of @972mag has written one of the best analyses of the crisis in Israel and Gaza that I’ve read. I highly, highly recommend that you take the time to read the whole thing. It recognizes all the complications of the situation and doesn’t sugar coat anything. It’s such a relief to read something that’s nuanced and empathetic toward all the innocent people who are caught up in this hideous situation. It’s profoundly distressing.
But it’s important to read it all and understand just how difficult this is for everyone involved. I’ll just share the part where he looks to the future:
I will leave important discussions about the Palestinian leadership and struggle, broader regional dynamics, and the role of foreign powers for future analysis, which we will be publishing in the coming weeks and months on +972. For now, I wish to focus on the issue of Jewish-Israeli politics.
Two changes seem very clear to me at this point: the end of the Netanyahu era, and the end of the dominance of the “conflict management” discourse in Israeli society, giving way to a renewed public discussion on the future of Jewish-Arab relations.
Netanyahu is finished. I know this has been said many times before, and this leader has shown incredible survival abilities, but with what has happened in the past month, we are beyond that point. All polls since October 7 show that the vast majority of Israelis, including a considerable majority within his Likud party, believe he is to blame for Israel’s military defeat at the hands of Hamas, and that he has to go. Some of his allies in the media and in government are already turning on him, preparing for the day after.
This is one more reason that Netanyahu is so dangerous right now, believing — rightly, as things stand — that as long as the war goes on, no one will bother with the politics of replacing a prime minister. He may still find that even Israelis have a limit, and either before or after the war ends, in one way or another, he will be ousted.
Much more importantly than Netanyahu himself, though, is the Netanyahu doctrine, which has become the near-consensus of Jewish-Israeli politics. This doctrine held that Israel has beaten the Palestinians, that they are no longer a problem to contend with, that we can “manage” the conflict on a “low flame,” and that we should focus our attention on other matters.
Throughout his near-continuous rein since 2009, this perception won the hearts and minds of Israelis, and the question of “what to do with Palestinians” — which used to be the main fault line of Israeli politics — has been removed from the agenda almost entirely, contributing to the hubris that led the army to drop its guard around Gaza. Last month, Hamas decimated that notion for years and maybe decades to come.
In the next Israeli elections, whenever they are held, we are likely to see a reorganizing of the political map, potentially creating three distinct blocs. It is too early to say how much traction each of these camps will have, but here is what they could look like.
The first is of course the far right, which has already been gaining traction since 2021, and which will try to capitalize on recent events. Led by the likes of Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, probably joined by some from Likud, this camp will say that no matter how this war will end, it just wasn’t enough. Israel, they’ll argue, needs a definitive solution based on large-scale ethnic cleansing, because, in their eyes, the entire land belongs to us and there is no room for the Palestinian people to stay here as a collective.
A second approach, probably led by Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, will likely center on unilateral steps, such as a “second disengagement” from the West Bank, pulling down settlements east of the separation barrier, annexing the rest, and fortifying the walls encaging Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza with more concrete, more tech, and more soldiers than ever before. Part of this approach may also include the “mowing the lawn” strategy — essentially, periodically recurring military campaigns — to prevent Palestinians from developing significant armed capabilities.
The third camp is likely to be a reconfiguration of what used to be Labor, Meretz, and parts of Yesh Atid, in which a key role may be played by the newfound hero of the Zionist center-left: former Meretz MK and army general Yair Golan, who spent October 7 as a volunteer one-man commando unit, going in and out of fighting arenas with his gun and private car, rescuing survivors under fire. This camp will likely propose a return to the two-state separation paradigm, to be achieved through negotiations with the PLO. It may also try to advance some discourse of coexistence within Israel, promoting different forms of Arab-Jewish partnership in civilian life.
The latter two camps will be emboldened by strong anti-settler sentiments that have been growing in the Israeli public, especially since anti-government protesters rightly began identifying the link between the far right’s judicial overhaul and its ideological sources in the religious Zionist movement in the occupied territories. The rejection of settler pogroms, like the one in Huwara last February, has only increased, with many Israelis seeing current settler attacks in the West Bank as provoking a third front in the war.
Moreover, the knowledge that the Israeli army had redeployed forces from the Gaza fence to guard extremist settlers in remote West Bank outposts in recent months, which may have paved the way for the success of Hamas’ military operation on October 7, has strengthened hatred and resentment of these settlers. That said, Israeli hatred toward Palestinians has skyrocketed far more, and the remote possibility of a one-state or confederate solution being accepted by Israelis has further shrunk.
Forward into the unknown
This is a grim and trying time for those of us who are committed to opposing apartheid and promoting a solution grounded in justice and equality for all. On the one hand, achievements hard won over decades of shared struggle have been erased by Hamas’ massacres, and will be hard to regain. Our movement is in disarray, and despair abounds. Thousands of lives have been lost, thousands more still may perish, and the collective traumas we carry are intensifying by the day.
On the other hand, once the war is over, there will have to be a reckoning within Israeli society, which could open up new opportunities for us to seize. Much of what we have been fighting for will become ever more relevant, with more people locally and globally willing to recognize that the system we live under is unjust, unsustainable, and offers none of us real security. We must double down on our commitment to promoting a peaceful political process, with the stated goal of ending the siege and the occupation, recognizing the right of return of Palestinian refugees, and finding creative solutions to materialize that right.
But the new reality will require some realignments. Alongside our commitment to the full realization of all Palestinians’ rights, our progressive, anti-apartheid movement will have to be explicit about the collective rights of Jews in this land, and to ensure that their security is guaranteed in whatever solution is found. We will have to contend with Hamas and its place in this new reality, ensuring it can no longer commit such attacks on Israelis, just as we insist on the security of Palestinians and their protection from Israeli military and settler aggression. Without this, it will be impossible to move forward.
Until then, there are two extremely urgent calls upon which to center our efforts right now: freeing civilian hostages, and an immediate ceasefire. Now.
They have instituted four hour ceasefires to allow people to leave northern Gaza and the numbers we’re seeing do that just shows how many people have been stuck there under bombardment. It’s hell on earth.
Read the whole thing.
