Israel-Hamas war: What’s left of the pro-peace camps?

An air of subdued resignation hangs thick above the desk of Ahmad al-Deek, the Palestinian Authority’s deputy foreign minister.

His television screen shows constant news of the devastation in Gaza, hour after hour, as it has for more than three months of Israel’s anti-Hamas offensive, which has pulverized infrastructure and left more than 24,000 dead.

Israel’s brutal military assault is a response to Hamas’ savage attack Oct. 7, which left 1,200 people dead and 240 taken hostage, and shook the Jewish state to its core.

For decades, there have been Israelis and Palestinians who have tried to see beyond the violence of the moment to seek dialogue and a negotiated peace.

Yet the carnage on Oct. 7 and since has deepened the challenge of finding any path forward, as the embattled peace camps fight to be heard over the roar of the war.

“Now that the Israelis feel hurt, and Palestinians feel they are more hurt, is the solution going to be something that will look into root causes?” asks Mr. Deek, with tired eyes. In the corner of his office is a small, faux Christmas tree left undisturbed from a year ago.

“We are working day and night to utilize [Oct. 7] as an event that shows the world that there is a problem that requires a solution,” he says. “At the beginning of the war, nobody was willing to listen to us. ... But people are seeing what is happening in Gaza.”

Indeed, even as the extreme violence has caused a hardening of views – proving to many that coexistence is impossible – it has also clearly demonstrated to others that the status quo must change.

Two states on the agenda?

At the highest diplomatic levels, at least, the conflict has resurrected talk – for the first time in years – of a just and viable two-state solution.

After U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s meetings in Israel and the occupied West Bank last week, for example, the State Department said the United States “supports tangible steps towards the creation of a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel, with both living in peace and security.”

Yet for those who have actively sought peace for decades, the Israel-Hamas war has made visions of peace, such as a two-state solution, less likely, says Daniel Levy, president of the U.S./Middle East Project.

“A peace camp which is on both sides, and pulling in the same direction, is when there’s a solution there that can be gotten over the finishing line, that has enough to offer both sides,” says Mr. Levy, a former Israeli negotiator with the Palestinians under former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin. “We’re not at all there now.”

He cites as hurdles multiple Israeli governments that have actively opposed any form of a Palestinian state, and encouraged illegal Jewish settlement-building in the West Bank. On the other side, Mr. Levy says Palestinian rule has been “discredited” because of poor governance and “security collaboration” with the Israeli occupation.

“The talk now of a two-state solution isn’t just divorced from reality and cynical; it’s actually pernicious,” says Mr. Levy. “Why, when [Western powers] won’t even get Israel to stop the massacre that it is undertaking at the moment, would anyone think that you can get Israel to withdraw from the territories and allow for a Palestinian state?”

Like the Palestinian peace camp, the Israeli peace camp, too, has been in retreat since Oct. 7, he says.

“Those on the Israeli side who even say ‘two states’ – and there are very few politically who do – what they mean by a Palestinian state wouldn’t be recognizable as such to anyone who carries a law book or a dictionary,” adds Mr. Levy.

“What they’re really saying is, ‘It is a Bantustan. If you want to put a flag on it and call it a state, that’s all right by us.’ But even that camp is small,” he says.

Radicalized societies

Polls since Oct. 7 show reversing such trends will not be easy. A survey of 1,231 people in the West Bank and Gaza by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found in mid-December that Palestinian support for a two-state solution had risen only slightly since September, to 34%. In the same time frame, support for armed struggle in the West Bank had risen from 54% to 68%.

Indeed, while renewed expectations of a two-state solution may resonate in Washington and London, it barely registers in Jerusalem, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leads the most far-right government in Israeli history and has boasted that he is “proud” of preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Such voices from Israeli decision-makers are one reason Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian peace negotiator in the early 1990s, says there is little common ground right now between societies “radicalized” by current events.

“The Israel that we are talking about [today] is no longer the Israel that we negotiated with and reached agreement with 30 years ago,” says Mr. Khatib, who held senior Palestinian posts for years and now teaches at Birzeit University in the West Bank.

Still, peace activists persist, in the fervent belief that there is no alternative.

“Some things are being worked on now to rebuild support in Israel and Palestine for the two-state solution,” says Gershon Baskin, an Israeli peace process adviser and negotiator.

“What has been dead for years is now all of a sudden the issue – the issue on the agenda – so I think they can find a significant number of Israelis and Palestinians who will publicly say this is what they want to see,” he says.

A “wasted” crisis?

But converting that aspiration to reality would almost certainly require new leadership on both sides.

“Looking at the hyper-traumatized feelings of this moment, and trying to create a trend line from that of what the possible outcomes are, would be a mistake,” says Gershom Gorenberg, an Israeli historian and journalist.

“If we end the war with a new version of the same stalemate, the crisis will have gone to waste,” he says. One poll among Israelis showed a significant drop in support for a two-state solution, he notes, though no other alternative had gained ground.

“This war makes it more difficult to deal with that problem, because the trauma and the pain have increased people’s sense on both sides that they can’t trust the other, that they ‘just want to get rid of us,’” adds Mr. Gorenberg. But “it only reemphasizes that nobody is going away, and there has to be an alternative to the war.”