A two-state solution looks impossible but it’s the only answer

I believe that when psychiatrists have a patient on the couch, they often ask about word association. If the word was “problem” then, unless the patient was Portnoy, the reply would probably be “solution”.  If so, psychiatry has limited use when it comes to geopolitics. In the Middle East, we are facing problems that appear to have no solution. 

After the atrocities on October 7, the Israelis were justified in feeling rage and seeking revenge. For a brief period, the country was more united than it had ever been under Benjamin Netanyahu. Reservists who had announced, in a protest against Netanyahu’s judicial reforms, that they would not serve, dusted down uniforms and rushed to their depots. Moving stuff – but revenge is not enough and rage can often be a bad counsellor.

In the immediate aftermath of October 7, there was one immediate need: hard thought. How should Israel respond? How could it ensure that Hamas would suffer losses of men and materiel on a scale that would prevent it from mounting a similar operation in the foreseeable future?

As part of this process, there were three other areas in which hard thinking was vital. The first was the fate of the hostages. The thought of their sufferings chills the blood. But there is a difficulty. With Hamas, we are dealing with a brutal foe, which hates the West and despises our values. While we extol our way of life – which could be summarised as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – they only see hypocrisy and decadence. Sophisticated Islamic fundamentalists – and they do exist – would argue that If you value life as much as we do, you are in danger of becoming too soft to protect the lives you wish to defend. Thus it is with hostages. In that horrible Clintonised insincerity, we can feel their pain, but we cannot make them an overriding priority. If we did that, we would only encourage the taking of further hostages. In effect, a whole country would be in danger of being held hostage. 

The second area for tough-mindedness is proportionality. Two million people live in the Gaza Strip. It would be absurd to pretend that Israel could strike at Hamas without inflicting collateral damage, that bureaucratic euphemism which, inter alia, covers the deaths of women, children and aid workers. But every reasonable step should have been taken to minimise that damage. Nor is this a mere moral imperative. One Israeli war aim ought to have been to drive a wedge between Hamas and the rest of the Palestinians in Gaza, for obvious reasons. Instead, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced, have heard gunfire, have witnessed bombing and destruction and, in many cases, have witnessed killing and wounding, and heard of the death of friends and relations. For weeks, much of the population of Gaza has lived with hunger, privations of all kind, humiliation – and fear.

This is hardly likely to promote sweetness and light. But what effect will it have on the Palestinian attitudes? Some, no doubt, will want peace at any price. Forget life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They would settle for life, with enough to eat and no more bombing. Yet that is unlikely to be a majority view. If Israelis felt rage and sought revenge, so, one suspects, will many young Gaza-ites, and also Palestinians on the West Bank. The danger is that for every dead Hamas fighter, the organisation will find at least ten new recruits.

The Israelis ought to have tried to mitigate this by trying to turn their campaign into a surgical strike. There seems to have been little attempt to do this. That failure brings us to the third area, where clear thinking was vital. Hamas were obviously hoping to sabotage Israeli-Arab diplomacy, especially the Abraham Accords. The Hamas leadership almost certainly hoped that the Israelis would overreact in Gaza. If so, they will not have been disappointed.

So what happens next? As the Israelis are now moving troops out of Southern Gaza, it seems likely that the planned assault on Rafah has now been cancelled, or at least postponed sine die. That is just as well. The consequences of a meat-grinder invasion of Rafah would have included a virtually terminal breach between Israel and world opinion. Plenty of Netanyahu supporters might retort that they would not care, especially if the denunciations were coming from European countries steeped in anti-Semitism. But, as small children are taught, don’t care was made to care. Israel needs allies.

That brings us to the question of arms supplies. It is too good a phrase to write off as a cliche, especially as it refers to camels, appropriate for the Middle East. The killing of the seven aid workers really was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Palestinians will point to the lack of proportion. Over thirty thousand people are killed in Gaza and everyone is upset, six western aid workers perish and the world erupts. 

That may not be an entirely rational response but it is understandable. People have been growing more and more unhappy. In Britain, the deaths of those three excellent men had a dramatic impact. They were exactly the sort of chaps who make one proud to be British. Mourning naturally grew into anger.

But we too need to be careful. The aim should not be to feel good, by cancelling arms shipments and thinking what splendid moralists we are to have taken such a bold step. Instead, we ought to work out what might do some good. It is not clear that arms sales would have any effect. Unlike the US and Germany, Britain is not a big player when it comes to weapons supply to Israel.

In the short run, there are two desiderata. The first is a determined effort to revive the Abraham Accords. The second is the removal of Benjamin Netanyahu. He has forfeited the confidence of most of Israel’s friends abroad, and many of the best Israelis at home. Perhaps his fellow charismatic narcissist Boris Johnson would still back him. The two men deserve one another.

Yet there is a third goal, vastly more important than Israeli Prime Ministers or British weaponry. The only long-term answer is a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. How could this be achieved? I have no idea. It might seem self-indulgent to wish for the impossible, but in the longer run – which may not be that long – there is no other way of promoting peace and averting tragedy. We must find a way of turning the impossible into a possibility. 

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