PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
How Long?
Summer 2025
NOTE: This piece was written before international authorities declared conditions of starvation in Gaza.
A friend recently wrote me with this query: “I am sending an article from today’s Washington Post that I would appreciate your helping me to put into some type of perspective. If this is a consequence of the existence of a Jewish State, then . . . well, I am sure you can finish the rest.”
[The article describes a teenage Gazan double amputee named Marah, one of many thousands. It is difficult reading. Her legs were blown off in an Israeli strike on Jan. 24, 2024. She was permitted to leave for the US about 6 months later and has been undergoing therapy and received a prosthesis. A few days ago she received news that her father, still in Gaza, was critically injured in an Israeli air strike. She hopes to return to Gaza.]
My reply to my friend was: “I’d maintain this is a consequence of a) the unfinished business following the creation of the Jewish state and b) the growth of a wild and fanatic nationalism that, through a set of circumstances, came to control the Jewish state.” I’ll expand on those thoughts here.
As far as I’m concerned, the debate over the establishment of a Jewish state has long been concluded as a policy question. It belongs in the realm of history and of counterfactual fiction. Whether it “should have” taken place is irrelevant. It is no more likely to be rolled back than will, for example, the British conquest and subjugation of Australia in the 18th and 19th centuries. Likewise the debates about whether it should be understood as settler colonialism or national return and revival are and should be the stuff of history books and classes forever.
I do have a caveat – and it is a serious one. I don’t believe the far messianic right will continue to effectively control the Israeli government past the next election. I see it as an aberration. If I’m wrong about that, all bets are off.
Dealing with the unfinished business of 1948, when the majority of Palestinians were dispossessed – and failed to fade into the rest of the Arab world as Israeli leaders assumed they would – should have been number 1 on the Israeli national agenda, especially after 1967. Instead, a large portion of Jewish Israelis – perhaps between 1/3 and 2/3 of them – apparently believe the at the results of the 1948 war and subsequent conflicts, especially the Six Day (June) War of 1967 are self-evident, and that Palestinians (whose national existence many of them deny) should just focus on taking care of their own families, preferably away from “historic Palestine,” comprising what is now Israel, all of Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza.
Refusal by Israel to deal with unfinished business has led to the carnage of the last quarter century, including both the massacre of October 7, 2023 and the subsequent deliberate ongoing destruction of Gaza. However, none of this was predetermined, nor is it excusable. It could have been avoided by better choices by Israelis, Palestinians, and, yes, Americans. But most of all, in my view, by Israelis – though none of those involved are by any means blameless.
The state of Israel in 1993, under the leadership of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, reversed its 45-year policy and recognized the existence of the Palestinian people, represented by the Palestinian Liberation Organization. By implication, that meant that the Palestinian people had some degree of right to the “Land of Israel” (aka “Land of Palestine.” What that right would consist of was the subject of the negotiations (and violence) of the next 7 years (including three with Bibi as prime minister), which blew up with the failure of the Camp David Summit of July 2000 and the outbreak of the Second Intifada two months later.
That should not have changed the 1993 recognition by the government of Israel that some significant degree of Palestinian self-determination and an end to the occupation were essential for peace in Israel/Palestine. This recognition was maintained – more or less – by subsequent Israeli governments, despite frequent violence, until March 31 2009, when Benjamin Netanyahu took office for his second term.
We can see in retrospect that Netanyahu never accepted the policy enunciated by Rabin 16 years earlier, Despite the facile formulations in his Bar-Ilan speech, essentially forced on him by Barack Obama, he never accepted that there could and must be a territorial settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority to end the conflict. Instead, he opted for the status quo and turned it into an art form. He encouraged Hamas to remain in control of Gaza, belittling the Palestinian Authority at every opportunity. He sought no consensual final settlement since he never believed one was possible. Thus, Bibi did everything he could to ensure that the “temporary” occupation envisaged in UN Resolution 242 would last as long as possible, preferably forever.
Bibi was able to maintain this regime through three governments and two failed elections. He even managed to combine the growing far-right push for annexation of part of the West Bank into a “peace” deal by inaugurating Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords! Even when the “Government of Change” evicted him from Balfour in May of 2021, it changed nothing. The Change Government could not agree on how to deal with the Palestinians, so they didn’t. Essentially Bibi’s “temporary” policy was maintained. The massive Palestinian frustration was ignored.
When Bibi defeated the Change Government and inaugurated his own, heavily dependent on the far right, on December 29, 2022, he probably wasn’t worried. He must have assumed would easily buy off the far right by slipping through a quick judicial overhaul and continue the “temporary” occupation.
Instead, the judicial overhaul ignited a huge firestorm throughout the country. Meanwhile, despite Bezalel Smotrich’s machinations within the Ministry of Defense to increase settlement, all seemed de facto rather than de jure.
Until October 7, of course. The Palestinians had never bought into Bibi’s calculations. While the P.A. was willing to complain from the sidelines, Hamas was not. On Oct. 7, they put the Palestinian issue front and center on the international agenda and the Israeli response ensured it would remain there.
How Bibi would have handled things had he not been in thrall to the messianic far right in his government as well as to his interminable corruption trial, we shall never know. We do know that he, the lifelong temporizer, quickly became the agent of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich and the face of the ongoing, vicious destruction of Gaza in pursuit of a chimera called “the total destruction of Hamas.” The consequences of that policy will stain the reputation of both the Jewish state and the Jewish people for generations. The hopeful promise of Oslo is seemingly buried and the furies are in control. How long?
I continue to maintain that Israel’s current extreme messianists, the unholy scion of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Zvi Yehudah Kook, and Meir Kahane, will have to end their chokehold on the government of Israel after the next election. How much better the new lot will be is another question.
And that is why Mara and thousands of others lost their legs, or their arms, or their lives. They are the 21st century’s silver platter.
Paul Scham
Paul Scham is President of Partners for Progressive Israel and Director of the Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies at the University of Maryland, where he is a Professor of Israel Studies.
