This is the package that could end the war in Gaza and bring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to an end:
• Hamas will release the Israeli hostages, and Israel will end the war and withdraw from the Gaza Strip.
• Hamas will end its rule in Gaza, and its leadership will move to another place where Israel will grant it immunity from assassination.
• The entity that will take over the management of the Gaza Strip will be the Palestinian Authority, in cooperation with countries in the region and beyond, who will be willing to put “boots on the ground,” finance the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, and participate in its temporary administration.
• Israel and the PLO will resume their negotiations on the permanent agreement, which can be based on both Trump’s “Deal of the Century” from January 2020 and the “Saudi Initiative” from 2002.
There is no way that the current Netanyahu government will be willing to support such a move, as long as it depends for its existence on a group of extremist politicians, whom no government in Israel’s history has ever thought of sharing in running the country.
The Center-Left parties, which currently have 35 seats in the Knesset, have refused to join Netanyahu’s government since he was indicted on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust.
Personally, I thought that Benjamin Netanyahu could not be elected prime minister when he was accused of such serious offenses, especially since his testimony in court, several times a week, would impair his ability to handle Israel’s day-to-day affairs, and even more so stay in office after the massacre by Hamas on October 7, 2023, in the wake of which Israel entered a state of emergency at its highest level.
I had hoped that if these parties did not join Netanyahu, he would get the hint and give up the bid to be elected prime minister, but apparently, he thought that when he came to court as prime minister, the panel of judges would treat him with more consideration. He made one of the most terrible decisions of his life: to include in his government, in very senior positions, people found guilty of incitement to racism and support for a terrorist organization.
Netanyahu's paranoid approach to power
Netanyahu's conduct at a certain stage in the war seems to be derived directly from the ultimatum of the extreme right-wing parties to continue the war at all costs and to prevent humanitarian aid from the residents of Gaza.
These people speak in biblical terms, believe that Israel can shut itself in, that power is the only component of international relations, that all international institutions are cynical, hypocritical, and antisemitic, and therefore there is no need to take their decisions seriously, or take into account the global media.
They are always convinced that military operations ended too soon, and that a little more effort was enough to eliminate the enemy. They do not downplay the fact that the continuation of the war is more important than the effort to rescue Israelis kidnapped by Hamas.
Netanyahu’s adherence to power exceeds all imagination. The young prime minister, who was first elected almost 30 years ago, the brilliant orator, the one who reminded many of the image of a Republican senator, who managed to charm many world leaders despite his hawkish positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and who defended the court and Israel’s democratic norms, has become a disgruntled elder.
He is paranoid, believes in the existence of a “deep state,” and is convinced that the entire judicial, military, media, and academic system conspired against him. He is also convinced that only he, with his many years of experience, with the knowledge he has accumulated, and with the international connections he has acquired, knows exactly what is the right thing to do from a political, economic, legal, and diplomatic point of view.
He refuses to understand that he “lost it” a long time ago and has been ignoring the polls for almost two years in a row, because, according to them, he has no chance of becoming the next prime minister. He is not willing to set up a state commission of inquiry to understand what led to the horrific massacre carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023, what happened that same day, and what mistakes were made later.
He believes that he was right in his chilling policy of preferring Hamas over the Palestinian Authority, in order to avoid the need to divide the country and achieve peace, but he fears that an investigative committee will see this as a dramatic mistake.
I assume that I was not the only Israeli who thought that the commission of inquiry would be established soon, that Netanyahu would apologize to the public and resign from his position, as Golda Meir did after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. I also thought that he would be replaced by a joint government of the Likud and the Center, without the extreme right-wing parties, in order to begin the necessary process of rebuilding Israel after the worst disaster that has befallen the Jewish people since World War II.
This did not happen. Israel began a just war that became the longest war in our history after it achieved its main goals, and even after it realized that the release of the hostages who remained alive would be possible only through an indirect arrangement with Hamas and not through a heroic military operation.
The price paid by Israelis and Palestinians
More and more Israelis understand that the continuation of the war is the result of Netanyahu’s desire not to face a broad demand to establish a state commission of inquiry and advance the elections.
Israelis and Palestinians have been paying a heavy price in the past year and a half, since Hamas continues to hold the abductees as its insurance policy, while Israel is a regional military power, whose counterattack, naturally, is very severe, harming terrorists, but also innocent people, many of whom, unfortunately, are children.
Gaza is, in fact, a huge and crowded kindergarten. Some 47% of its residents have not yet reached the age of 18. The “collateral damage” of the bombings in Gaza is children.
Israel is paying a very heavy price in terms of its political isolation in the world, in the enormous economic burden of long-term reserve mobilization, in double and triple security spending, and in the fact that its ongoing response has awakened dormant or semi-dormant antisemitic sentiments around the world.
Most importantly, the abductees, who constitute the main explanation for the continuation of the fighting, are languishing to death in places where they are scattered in the Gaza Strip.
A situation may arise in which there will no longer be anyone to save, God forbid. If we add to this the fallen IDF soldiers; the legislation that imitates, to a large extent, the Hungarian approach of “illiberal democracy” (which is, of course, an oxymoron); the conclusion is that the current situation must change immediately, because the key to ending it is the end of the war versus the release of the hostages. The end of the war will only happen by a political change in Israel.
Politically, this is a kind of Queen’s Gambit: the Center-Left parties will have to renege on a very central principle in their election promises, but no one predicted what would happen in Israel and how we would become a country whose days of mourning have no expiration date, whose best friends are distancing themselves from it, and whose airport is almost empty of non-Israeli planes.
If there is a state of emergency, it is the state of emergency in which the 35 relevant Knesset members must offer Netanyahu a safe continuation of his term until October 27, 2026, in exchange for restoring Israel to sanity. The alternative to this is to continue serving in the opposition, to lose seats in the polls to Naftali Bennett, who is more hawkish and right-wing than Netanyahu, and to pray for Bennett’s victory in the next elections.
Should political talks with the PLO begin, I would strongly recommend that the parties thoroughly examine the establishment of a confederation between the two countries, in the spirit of the European Union, which would allow, among other things, to solve the most difficult impediment to peace – the large number of settlers in the West Bank.
The proposal of the authors of the document on the Holy Land Confederation is that all settlers who find themselves within the agreed borders of the future Palestinian state will be able to choose to remain there as Israeli citizens and permanent residents of Palestine. The same number of Palestinian citizens will be able to move to Israel as permanent residents. Resolving the settlement issue will be the key to resolving the conflict.
The writer is a former justice minister, and the initiator of the Oslo process, and Taglit-Birthright. He is currently chairman of the Jewish student organization Hillel in Israel.