The Day After Tomorrow

There will be a day when the conflict ends, but will it end for good?

Photo: Australian Red Cross)

Every conflict ends. Rage is a force that extinguishes itself quickly, giving way to exhaustion.

Every conflict ends in an agreement, an arrangement, through dialog and diplomacy. Rarely are the arrangements entirely fair to both parties; conflict tends to end in the domination of one party over the other. But any arrangement is an opportunity to restart and carve out a new beginning.

Unlike the previous wars and conflicts and incursions that have plagued Israeli security for decades, this iteration of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has the potential to end this chapter of history.

Public attention like never before is overwhelmingly in favor of a cessation of violence and a resolution to Palestinian citizenship. Until now, the global public has largely favored Israeli offensives and right-wing policies. Issues that are highly fractious and divisive in Israeli society itself, were largely glossed over in American and European media and implicitly endorsed.

But the magnitude of the October 7th attacks and the extraordinary scale of Israeli retribution - coupled with a hurricane of social media campaigns and unfiltered footage of the conflict streaming into phones across the globe - have brought the issue of Palestinian citizenship/statehood front and center to a larger subset of the global population than ever before.

All eyes are on Israel, Hamas, the United States, the UN, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen to see where this thing is headed.

Palestinian citizenship/statehood is the crux of the matter. Israelis enjoy the full rights of citizens in an ostensible democracy. Israeli citizens live in a recognized state with a stable governing system that provides the institutional public goods and services - education, healthcare, security - one would expect in the 21st century. Israelis are free to move across borders, participate in politics, start businesses and raise families with the support and recognition of government agencies.

Palestinians, on the other hand, are, by and large, stateless and live in a state of indeterminacy. Of the more than 2 million Gazan Palestinians, nearly 3/4 are registered as refugees by the UN. Gazans, surrounded as they are by the armies of Israel and Egypt, are stateless, recognized by no government, merely present on Israel and Egypt’s periphery.

Palestinians in the West Bank have a greater degree of freedom, but are no less prone to cruel acts of arbitrary violence by Israeli settlers; no less humiliated by the daily inconveniences of power outages, infrastructural segregation, and racial animus. Fatah is the governing party of the West Bank, and to some degree there is international recognition of a Palestinian state in the West Bank. But the structural disadvantages imposed by the Israeli government (far, far stronger and more likely to get its way) represent an illegal burden against the dignity and self-determination of West Bank Palestinians.

Then, there are the Arab Israelis, Palestinian citizens of Israel, who comprise about 20% of the Israeli population. These Palestinians may be considered the best off of the group because they enjoy most of the rights and protections of any other Israeli citizen, but those rights have been hard fought and never given freely.

Certainly, Arab Israelis are denied true political, democratic representation. By splitting the Palestinian peoples into three distinct camps: Gazans, West Bankers, Arab Israelis, Palestinian representation is diluted into three discontinuous camps. The needs of Gazans are vastly different than the needs of Arab Israelis and those in the West Bank.

But separate and apart from one another, denied a contiguous territory and divided into groups of varying statuses of citizenship, what could be a country with a split majority (there are about 7 million Israelis and 7 million Palestinians), becomes three fractious entities. This artificially divided geography denies Palestinians the right to exercise their collective, political will in any meaningful way - meaning they are deprived the dignity of self-determination and the protections of participatory government.

For decades, it has been the objective of the political right in Israel to create and maintain an insurmountable Jewish majority in Israel as a means to legitimize their goals. Muslims and Christians in the millions have been forced out of their homes by gunpoint since 1948, sporadically active through the years.

While the state of Israel has achieved a high degree of legitimacy through the years, while it has cultivated the kinds of cooperative relationships with more powerful countries that bring in education, investment and economic opportunities, it has done so at the expense of the Palestinians. That expense invites the anger and ire of millions of Israel’s neighbors; their anger and rage directed Israel’s way.

It cannot be seen as prudent policy to act so cavalierly with the rights and status of millions of people that it threatens the peace and security of your own citizenry.

Neither Hamas’ guns, nor Israel’s, are going to resolve the issue of Palestinian citizenship. Where will they achieve and with whom?

Rifles are not passports, and bullets are not ballots. Precision guided missiles cannot deliver dignity. SpecOps cannot replace self-determination.

The right of Israeli and Palestinian citizens to live in peace, dignity, and recognition cannot be denied because in no other circumstance could those things be denied for any other people. For Israel to remain an exemplar of democratic values, October 7th should act as a wakeup call that Palestinian citizenship can no longer be brushed aside and wished away. If never again means now, you must play a role in making sure this cycle of violence is put to rest.

Terrorists expect their victims to overreact and discredit themselves.

Falling for their trap leads to greater and greater risk and uncertainty. Stop taking the bait and finally resolve the issue at the heart of the matter: Palestinian citizenship.