Having jettisoned the ceasefire accord on March 18 and resumed its war, Israel hopes to reoccupy the Strip, and perhaps even

While few in the West rejected Israel’s right to retaliate following the October 7 atrocities, the ferocity and duration of its war of retribution have turned public opinion in the West against Israel as never before. The protests on American college campuses have been all but shut down following pressure from the Trump administration, Congress, powerful pro-Israel organizations, and wealthy donors. Even so, they illustrated the outrage produced by the relentless killing in Gaza.

It’s common to hear that the demonstrations — on and off campuses — sprang from antisemitism or “pro-Hamas” ideology. This claim ignores the reality that it was the humanitarian catastrophe created by Israel’s war that ignited the protests and that Jews have been the most statistically overrepresented community in the antiwar demonstrations. And on 8 May, 38 leaders from some of the most prominent American Jewish organizations, which have been Israel’s most stalwart supporters, took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to warn the Jewish community against permitting Trump to undermine universities, civil liberties, the freedom of speech, and the rule of law, all in the name of stamping out antisemitism.

Referring to Israel’s war in Gaza as genocide is routinely painted as antisemitic. But this indictment, which has been echoed by the Trump administration, has begun to ring hollow given that the genocide charge comes from people like Omer Bartov, a renowned Israeli-born historian of genocide. Bartov, who did not rush to judgement, concluded recently that “it has been impossible to describe the Israeli operation as anything but genocidal”. He is not alone. Numerous other scholars of the Holocaust, and Jewish history more generally, have reached a similar conclusion—including more than 20 from Israel itself. The Oxford professor Avi Shlaim — who, like Bartov, grew up in Israel — who has rendered this same verdict in a recent book. And if criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza and occupation of the West Bank stem from antisemitism, Bernie Sanders, a Jew, would qualify as the Senate’s most antisemitic member.

American Jews between the ages of 18 and 34 remain strongly supportive of Israel. Still, the Gaza war has created a noticeable divide between them and their parents, and more so their grandparents. For the latter two generations, October 7 rekindled traumatic memories of the Shoah, strengthening their conviction that Israel is a haven for Jews that needs to be defended unconditionally. The younger cohort tends to be more critical of the war and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians more broadly. As for the wider American population, public opinion polls show that goodwill toward Israel has decreased substantially as Gaza’s catastrophe has worsened and become more widely known. The drop-off in Americans’ support for Israel isn’t new. As Mitchell Bard, an expert on US-Israel relations, noted in late March, referencing Gallup polls: “Sympathy for Israel peaked at 62% between 2010 and 2019 but has dropped every year since, falling to just 46% in 2025 — the lowest since 2001. Meanwhile, sympathy for the Palestinians hit a record high of 33%.”

The Gaza war has contributed to these shifts. As Gallup observed in late March, “the 46% expressing support [for Israel] is the lowest in 25 years of Gallup’s tracking of this measure.” These findings are replicated in other polls: a 2025 Pew Research Center survey showed that 53% of Americans viewed Israel unfavorably, compared to 42% in a 2022 poll. Since 2000, meanwhile, over half of all Americans have supported the creation of a Palestinian state, something that Netanyahu, and more so the members of his cabinet who lead far-Right religious parties, state publicly and repeatedly that they will never permit.

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More to the point, Israeli plans could make the relationship with the US even more fraught. If Israel’s current government follows through on its vision of resettling Gaza (Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dismantled the settlements there in 2005), and expelling some or all its Palestinian population, Israel’s reputation will take a much bigger hit. The reintroduction of settlements in Gaza and the expulsion of its Palestinian population isn’t, by the way, a fanciful scenario. Netanyahu has endorsed, more than once, Trump’s idea of relocating Gazans and turning their homeland into “the Riviera of the Middle East”. In March, Defense Minister Israel Katz created a “Voluntary Emigration Bureau” for the Strip, while Israel and the US have reportedly approached officials in Sudan, Somalia and Somaliland about resettling Palestinians. If Gazans refuse the offer, what then?

Then there’s the West Bank, where settlement-building, land confiscations, and evictions have increased sharply since 2000 — and especially in recent years. The settlement project, to which the Israeli far-Right is deeply committed, has turned the West Bank into Swiss cheese, making it all but impossible to transform the disconnected areas ruled, with varying degrees of authority, by the Palestinian Authority into a territorially-continuous, sovereign Palestinian state, especially since Israel claims exclusive jurisdiction over Area C, which comprises 60% of the West Bank and contains more than 400,000 settlers living in 125 settlements and 100-plus impromptu “outposts”. The prospects for a Palestinian state would diminish further were Netanyahu to deliver on his 2019 pledge to annex the Jordan Valley, which encompasses nearly 30% of the West Bank.

Israel has long enjoyed unconditional support from the United States. But the Gaza war and the continued settlement of the West Bank, could make that less reliable. Yes, Donald Trump’s professed devotion to Israel has been celebrated by many of its diehard American supporters, including Jews. But as Eric Alterman recently warned, trusting in Trump is a terrible idea because the President himself has a history of antisemitism — and anyway threatens the rule of law and the civil liberties that have protected them for so long. Trump has denied the details concerning antisemitism, but whatever one’s view of Alterman’s thesis, this much seems clear: Trump has shown that his moves won’t necessarily align with those of an Israeli government and may actually undercut them.

Netanyahu dreams of destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities, with American military assistance; Trump is pursuing a deal with Iran to end its nuclear enrichment program. The US reached a truce with the Houthis of Yemen (who, in solidarity with Gazans, have fired rockets at Israel); the terms didn’t, however, extend to Israel. American officials recently conducted direct negotiations with Hamas, to secure the release of Edan Alexander, the sole surviving American hostage, apparently bypassing Israel. Israel has been encroaching on Syrian territory and carrying hundreds of airstrikes against military targets in that country; Trump has now raised the possibility of lifting sanctions so that the new government can have a “fresh start.

Putting aside the famously capricious Trump, what might a loosening of US-Israeli ties mean for the Jewish state? The short answer is that it would make a very big difference for the country—and not in a good way. Between Israel’s founding in 1948 and 2024, American economic and military aid, adjusted for inflation, totaled $300 billion. To put this figure in perspective, the second-largest recipient, Egypt, received only a little more than half as much. Netanyahu said this week that “we will have to detox from US security assistance”. Perhaps Israel should, and can, become militarily self-sufficient, but for now the reality is that it could never have waged war in Gaza on the scale that it has without the steady supply of American weaponry. Nor would it be anywhere near as secure as it has been in the tumultuous Middle East.

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Beyond its foreign alliances, Israeli plans could produce problems for its future on other fronts. If its leaders continue to annex the West Bank, settle Gaza, and expel its people, the two-state solution, already on life support, will die. Israel will then be left with only one solution, if that’s the appropriate word: the continued occupation and policing of Palestinians, who won’t abandon their dream of self-determination, let alone disappear. The mix of occupation and repression will ensure the continuation of a self-perpetuating cycle of violence and accelerate a trend that’s been increasingly apparent since 2000: the increasing power of the country’s religious Right, already a major force in its politics. According to one 2016 survey, 48% of Israelis, and a much higher proportion among those who identify with the religious Right, favored the forcible expulsion of Arabs.

Taken, the erosion of democracy, greater political polarization, the increasing influence of groups and parties wedded to religious messianism, and continual violence created by the occupation may induce Israel’s best and brightest to emigrate. This is not a far-fetched scenario. In December, Israel’s Census Bureau reported that the sharp increase in departures from the country last year — half of those who left were between 20 and 45 years of age, more than a quarter were teenagers or younger — produced “net negative migration” and contributed to slower population growth.

Israel’s internal transformation toward illiberalism, a metamorphosis produced partly by its repression and occupation of Palestinians and the violence it begets, is hardly foreordained. But if the country continues to move in that direction, its international isolation will increase, and goodwill toward it will diminish, even in the United States, which if not irreplaceable as a patron and protector, comes pretty close. Hamas cannot, of course destroy Israel, but if the country undermines itself, its archenemy will have scored a victory.

For one thing, Netanyahu rejects his generals’ assessment that Hamas cannot be defeated. And in order to keep the hardline finance minister Bezalel Smotrich in his cabinet, he has assured him that a ceasefire wouldn’t end the war permanently. If Netanyahu does restart the war, he can count on even more political and material support from Trump than he received from Biden — which, in both spheres, was enormous and virtually unqualified.

Last week, the ceasefire seemed done for. Hamas and Israel accused each other of violating its terms. And, true to form, Trump sprung a surprise, declaring that Israel should resume the war if Hamas failed to free all of the remaining hostages — at that point 76 remained, including those presumed dead — by Saturday 15 February. He seemed not to know, or care, that the deal stipulates a staggered handover during its first two phases.

Netanyahu increased the confusion by initially intimating that he agreed with Trump and might return to war now that the American president had given him political cover. Hamas, for its part, listed 270 Israeli violations of the ceasefire, some verified by independent sources, and threatened to withhold the three hostages scheduled to be freed on Saturday — though it eventually relented. Netanyahu forwent the opportunity Trump gave him, confirming his commitment to the agreement, providing Hamas released the next batch of hostages, which it did.

Of course, Hamas could also defenestrate the deal, and recently nearly did. But, leaving brinksmanship aside, Hamas lacks a self-evident motive to tear it up. The terms meet all of its longstanding demands, and the end of the war allowed it to demonstrate that it remained unvanquished and had won. With Trump back in the White House, Hamas could end up with a much worse result if turned back to fighting. Though Hamas’s current standing among Gazans remains unclear, exposing them to even more death and destitution certainly won’t improve its popularity.

Yet dwelling on the ceasefire’s fate can obscure a larger question: what will happen in and to Gaza even if the agreement survives? Trump’s answer is to expel Gazans en masse to Egypt and Jordan forever, claim American ownership of the Strip, and build a second Riviera on its coast. This scheme is unworkable, and an attempt to implement it would be a flagrant violation of international law, not to mention elemental ethical principles. No Arab government has endorsed it — nor would any dare for fear that “the street” would erupt, especially now that Netanyahu, in his Sunday meeting with Secretary Marco Rubio, praised it once again, this time as “a bold vision”.

Still, the question of Gaza’s postwar governance must be resolved by negotiation, most likely during the ceasefire agreement’s third phase. That will create new complications. Hamas remains standing, but Netanyahu has ruled out its return to power. And yet he also doesn’t want the Palestinian Authority in charge. Israeli rule will be rejected by Palestinians and the Arab states, who will see it as a pretext for expelling Gazans — something that has significant support in Israel, not just on the far-Right but also among Jewish Israelis generally. A government comprised of Gaza’s notables, perhaps? Possibly, but only if Israel can be convinced that they won’t be stalking horses for Hamas.

Then there’s the fact that Israel’s war hasn’t ended. It has shifted to the West Bank, targeting armed Palestinian groups, whose presence there increased following the Gaza War. Since 21 January, the IDF’s “Operation Iron Wall” has killed dozens of Palestinians, displaced 40,000 more — mainly in the refugee camps of Jenin, Tulkarem, and Tubas — and bulldozed or blown up numerous buildings. Add to that the increase in armed Jewish settlers’ long-running attacks on Palestinian communities, and the Israeli government continuing evictions of Palestinians from their homes and greenlighting of new settlements and housing blocks.

The West Bank consists of three areas: areas A and B, small islands run by the Palestinian Authority, are separated by area C, which comprises 60% of the territory and is ruled solely by Israel. This political geography has eviscerated the two-state solution, which, in any event, has lost even more support in Israel following October 7. And the one-state solution, favored by many supporters of Palestinians’ rights on the Left outside Israel, has very little purchase among Israelis. In December 2022, only one-fifth of Israelis favored it. Even those on the Left want Israel to remain a Jewish state.

What the future holds, then, is continued upheaval and violence. Israel will revert to its standard “mowing the lawn” strategy: quelling intermittent Palestinian uprisings but leaving their underlying source, the occupation, intact. That strategy will empower extremists on both sides.

In Israel, far-Right groups and parties, whose members believe that the West Bank is among the lands divinely bequeathed to Jews, have become increasingly influential, reflecting a trend that long predates October 7. A 2015 Pew poll found that nearly half of Israeli Jews backed the expulsion of Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza; the proportion was substantially higher among Jews who are Orthodox or strongly religious. Support for expulsion has increased even further since the war began. In a January poll, 43% of Jewish Israelis said that Trump’s Gaza plan was practical and should be pursued. Another 30% liked it but doubted its feasibility. In all, then, nearly three-fourths of them backed Trump’s population transfer proposal, which some in Israel have labelled “Trumpsfer”.

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Extremism will increase among Palestinians as well, especially if Israel continues to rely on repression, thereby decreasing Palestinians’ hope — which by now barely exists — in a political settlement that gives them a full-fledged state. In 1993, the Palestinian Liberation Organization recognized Israel as a Jewish state, renounced violence and pledged to pursue the two-state solution. Not only does today’s Palestinian Authority (PA) have nothing much to show for its efforts, but it has become Israel’s enforcer (note, for example, its active role in Iron Wall, the IDF’s West Bank military offensive). Most Palestinians consider it feckless and corrupt. That, too, benefits the proponents of armed resistance. Israeli leaders often complain that they lack good-faith interlocutors, but that, in part, owes to the conditions they have created in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel’s continued reliance on force will increase its already considerable international isolation, including in Europe. That will make it even more dependent on the United States — a safe situation to be in but only as long as American attitudes toward Israel stay unchanged. They may not. Opinion polls show that the Gaza war has cost Israel considerable goodwill in the US — though the decline in support precedes it. The extent varies considerably by age group, and is most apparent among Millennials, including American Jews. Less than half of Jewish Americans under 30 expressed a strong attachment to Israel in 2020.

Palestinians will face a different, albeit familiar, form of isolation. The major Arab states will continue to voice support for them while accepting their domination by Israel. Their focus will remain on preventing the ripple effects of upheaval and bloodshed in Gaza and the West Bank from breaching their borders. Iran will provide rhetorical support but lacks the wherewithal to alter the overwhelming imbalance of power between the Palestinians and Israel — the more so after the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria. And with Trump’s return, Netanyahu, who has long wanted to attack Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, may, as recent US intelligence reports concluded, be emboldened to give it a go.

When it comes to Israeli-Palestinian matters, then, there is little hope that the dark clouds will dissipate. On this much, Israel Jews and Palestinians do agree.

More importantly, the agreement has made a huge difference to people’s lives, above all to Gazans. Those still living — at least 48,000 have been killed, even as The Lancet suggests that figure could be much higher — have been stalked daily by death, seen their homeland reduced to 42 million tons of rubble, and been deprived of life’s most basic necessities. That fear has been lifted, and hundreds of trucks laden with humanitarian aid have begun to enter the Strip. As for the family and friends of the hostages snatched by Hamas on October 7, they have waited in agony for the return of their loved ones, even as some know that all they can expect is their loved one’s corpse. Of the 33 hostages who are to be freed by the end of Phase 1 of the agreement, only seven have come home so far. The joy of the families, and of Israelis more generally, has been palpable. If everything goes according to plan, the remaining 61 hostages will be freed in Phase 2 of the agreement.

There’s more. Under the terms of Phase 1, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will redeploy to a narrow buffer-zone within Gaza’s border, before withdrawing completely by the end of Phase 2. Hamas is happy about this provision, but so are Gazans generally — it decreases the odds of the war’s resumption. Phase 3 calls for a detailed plan to rebuild Gaza, with satellite imagery showing 60% of buildings damaged or destroyed. Reconstruction, it goes without saying, is crucial if Gazans are to anything resembling normal lives.

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Now that we’ve got the “in fairness” bit out of the way, let’s turn to the ways that the agreement could collapse, even before the 42 days of Phase 1 elapse, but more likely at the end of Phase 2 — an additional 42-day period when Hamas is required to release the remaining 65 hostages.

Could Hamas violate the deal? Of course. Recall that immediately after the ceasefire began, thousands of Hamas fighters and police appeared on the streets. Having endured punishing blows from one of the world’s most powerful armies and survived, and apparently recruiting enough fighters to replace those killed, Hamas has claimed victory. Such hubris could ultimately convince its leaders that Israel can be humiliated even further, via a renewed bout of fighting. Or, by reneging on its promise to release the hostages, Hamas may try to wring more concessions from Israel. It could, for instance, demand the freeing of even more Palestinian prisoners. That includes Marwan Barghouti of Fatah, the most famous (and popular) of all Palestinian prisoners. Since 2002, he’s been locked in an Israeli prison, serving five life sentences for murder. If Hamas ever demanded his release, or made additional demands, Israel would almost certainly say no — and the war would resume.

Yet, it’s hard to see why Hamas would wreck the agreement. The January 15 deal gives it just about everything it has long sought (and received, in a May 2024 accord, which Israel rejected). One important gain here is the IDF’s redeployment away from Gaza’s major population centers, as a prelude to a complete withdrawal. Another is Israel’s release of nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, based on an overwhelmingly favorable hostage-for-prisoner ratio, and that’s before you recall the comprehensive plan for rebuilding Gaza.

Why would Hamas abandon these gains — especially when there’s not much more it can realistically squeeze from Israel, and when reigniting the war would inflict far more pain on Hamas than the IDF? The point here is not that Hamas is fastidious about honoring the terms of deals it signs, merely that, like other states and groups jousting in the pitiless arena of international politics, it’s a self-interested actor.

Israel, on the other hand, does have reasons — again based on self-interest — to breach the terms of the peace. Netanyahu vowed that he would continue the war until Hamas was destroyed: not just diminished but totally wiped out. He has failed to achieve that goal, something the IDF has itself acknowledged. Worse, Hamas has replenished its ranks and rebuilt much of the labyrinthine tunnel network, the very same infrastructure that made freeing the hostages so challenging for Israeli troops.

Netanyahu, in short, has unfinished business, and has openly stated he reserves the right to restart the war. No less striking, the prime minister is under pressure from his own coalition. One of his hardline cabinet members, Itamar Ben-Gvir, national security minister and head of the Otzma Yehudit party, resigned in protest after Netanyahu agreed to sign the ceasefire deal. Ben-Gvir urged Bezalel Smotrich, another hardliner, to follow suit. Netanyahu persuaded Smotrich to stay by promising (among other things) that the ceasefire wouldn’t mean a permanent end to the war. Smotrich, for his part, has publicly highlighted this assurance.

For good measure, the finance minister added that there would be “a gradual takeover of the entire Gaza Strip” to ensure that “humanitarian aid will not reach Gaza as it has until now.” To summarize, then, Netanyahu has consistently sought to ensure that he has the support of the far-Right religious parties. But if he delivers on his deal with Smotrich, defenestrates the ceasefire, and restricts aid flows once more, the whole arrangement will collapse.

And what of Donald Trump? He paraded the ceasefire, which he clearly wanted signed before Inauguration Day, as something he alone made happen. Wouldn’t its implosion make his boast seem hollow, and make his coveted Nobel Peace Prize even less likely? None of this is likely to be as big a problem as it might seem. Trump makes lots of promises — remember his vow to end the Ukraine war within 24 hours of being sworn in? — and takes credit for all manner of things. But his base expects this, so he won’t pay any political price if the Gaza war restarts. If the bloodshed resumes, he’ll blame Hamas, or Netanyahu, or perhaps even Biden.

The American domestic context matters here too. Trump has long relied on the support of groups and individuals, both Jewish and Evangelical, unconditionally supportive of Israel. The President, who always fancies himself a maverick, could break faith with these supporters. Yet nothing he has done with respect to Israel suggests he’s so inclined. During his first presidential term, after all, he moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Accepting Israel’s claim that the unified city is its eternal capital, that’s something only five other countries have done.

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Trump also recognized the Golan Heights — Syrian sovereign territory that Israel occupied after the Six-Day War in 1967 — as legally part of Israel. In 2023, meanwhile, he declared that Israel has “no better friend or ally” than him. No sooner did his current term start than he lifted the sanctions Joe Biden had imposed on far-Right settlers building illegal settlements in the West Bank. Soon after that, he nixed Biden’s ban on supplying 2,000-pound bombs to Israel. Plus, Trump has apparently assured Netanyahu that Israel would enjoy his full backing to restart the fight if Hamas violates the deal. In fact, the prime minister has already accused the militants of doing just that, and responded by temporarily blocking displaced Gazans from returning to the territory’s north.

None of this means that Israel, confident of US backing, is sure to breach the ceasefire. Nor is it necessarily planning to, especially since the hostages won’t all be released until the end of Phase 2. Though he’ll have more flexibility thereafter, Netanyahu may yet decide to stick with the agreement. For one thing, he may be deterred by the surprisingly high casualty rates among the IDF, with nearly 900 battle deaths in Gaza alongside 38 suicides. For another, Netanyahu may be unsure whether Hamas can truly be destroyed. Still, of the two parties that have signed the deal, Israel has stronger motives to breach it than Hamas — something to bear in mind if violence really does return.

In order to convince them, Jolani must create political stability while distancing himself from Assad-era repression. This means ending such practices as casting offenders into dungeons, common under both Bashar al-Assad and his father. It also means the disbanding of Assad’s security services. Nor will Jolani pardon any officials, civilian and military, who have committed egregious human rights violations. Syrians will want to see such offenders brought to justice: especially senior members of the military, the Ba’ath Party, and the mukhabarat (secret police). They will also want the hated shabiha (“ghosts”) to be held accountable. These citizens groups, armed and trained by the Assad regime, have been accused of kidnap, torture and murder on a vast scale. To deliver justice and accountability there must be new legal codes and a new judiciary with people who are both qualified and trusted by the public.

Jolani’s biggest long-term challenge, though, will be reviving Syria’s battered economy. For a time, perhaps, Syrians will blame their economic hardships on the Assad regime. But, in time, they will hold their new rulers responsible, and fulfilling economic expectations will prove a formidable task. Syria’s per capita GDP has plummeted from $3,000 in 2011 to a pitiable $421 in 2021: that’s 86%. At the same time, the World Bank reports that “consumer price inflation” increased by 93% in 2023, even as 69% of Syrians live in poverty.

It hardly helps that 13 years of civil war have killed 500,000 people, displaced more than seven million, and turned six million others into refugees, the majority in Turkey. Then there are the half a million people who’ve fled into Syria from Lebanon — escaping punishing Israeli airstrikes — and the million more displaced during the recent HTS offensive. With the economy in ruins, resettling returnees will be costly. Mohammad al-Bashir, the interim prime minister until elections next year, has urged Syrian refugees to return and rebuild their country. But even if only a small fraction of them heed his call, they will still need to be housed, fed, and provided with basic necessities to help them reintegrate into society.

Given Syria’s pervasive poverty, the new government won’t have much of a tax base to stimulate growth. In theory, income from oil sales could help: Syria produced 387,000 barrels of oil a day in 2010 and exported about a third. But the oil fields are largely in Syria’s east and northeast, the stronghold of Syria’s Kurds, now known as the Autonomous Administration for North and East Syria (AANES). Run by Farhad Abdi Shaheen (better known by the nom de guerre Mazloum Abdi), leader of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which is backed by American troops as part of Washington’s fight against the Islamic State (IS).

Jolani, who has called for a new Syrian settlement featuring regional autonomy, could strike a deal with Abdi to share oil revenue in return for Kurdish autonomy. Abdi, for his part, has sent positive signals in return. He ordered that the post-independence national flag adopted by HTS be flown by all administrate bodies within the AANES and declared that his enclave is part of Syria and will participate in a new political settlement encompassing the entire country.

Yet a deal between Jolani and Abdi could run into an obstacle, one that highlights the interplay between internal governance and external relations. Tayyip Recep Erdoğan, Turkey’s leader, has now gained even greater influence in Syria, especially in its northeast, following Assad’s fall. And he could have an even freer hand if Donald Trump, who said recently that the United States “should have nothing to do” with Syria, withdraws American troops from the AANES, something said he’d do in 2018 but did not. Erdoğan may oppose any deal between Syria’s new government and Abdi’s SDF: he considers the latter a branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been waging a secessionist war against Turkey since 1984.

Since the start of Syria’s civil war, Turkey has invaded northern Syria repeatedly. In concert with the Syrian National Army (SNA), its local proxy, it has also occupied stretches of territory west of the Euphrates River deep inside Syria. After Assad’s fall, the SNA, backed by Turkish air and drone strikes, has pushed into several border towns, forcing local residents to flee. Erdoğan had also pressed Assad for the right to patrol Kurdish-populated areas across Turkey’s border with Syria. Jolani may therefore find himself forced to stand with Abdi to oppose Turkey’s increasingly extravagant demands.

Jolani is also under pressure from Israel, which has “temporarily” occupied the UN patrolled demilitarised area beyond the Golan Heights, created in 1974, as well as some territory beyond it. It also launched hundreds of airstrikes to destroy the Syrian army’s weapons stocks and chemical weapons sites, the latter strangely never discovered before despite Israel’s vaunted Intelligence capabilities. Israel also acted without first trying to engage HTS to see whether this zone could be preserved and an agreement reached to keep the Syrian army’s weapons out of the hands of terrorist groups and to secure and then destroy Syria’s chemical weapons stocks.

Jolani has called for an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied lands, but Tel Aviv has refused: and there’s no reason to expect the United States will side with Jolani. The rebel leader knows, of course, that his efforts to improve Syria’s economy could be derailed if tensions between Syria and Israel boil over into violence. While he has called Israel’s attacks and incursion unjustified — and criticised its “unwarranted escalation” — he isn’t spoiling for a fight. Syria, Jolani conceded, is just too weak, and should focus on economic reconstruction and diplomacy with Israel instead.

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As expected, Jolani has asked for the lifting of economic sanctions on Syria — imposed by the EU and far more broadly by the United States — which didn’t diminish the living standards of Assad and his cronies but did hit ordinary Syrians hard. The West, though, won’t provide sweeping sanctions relief anytime soon: it will first test HTS’s governance practices, especially its declared commitment to be inclusive and abandon terrorism. The West will also expect Jolani to battle IS, which has conducted close to 700 attacks in Syria this year alone. The problem is that Jolani won’t have many resources at his disposal: Israel’s airstrikes destroyed as much as 80% of the country’s military power.

Then there are the Russians and the Iranians. Both have suffered serious setbacks but will surely seek to regain the influence they enjoyed under Assad. The Russians have apparently already cut a deal with Syria’s new rulers to retain their airbase in Khmeimim and the naval base at Tartus. That stake may induce them to avoid stoking instability. But Iran has no comparable motivation, and has anyway suffered a much larger loss of influence following the triumph of HTS. If HTS fails the governance test, Iran may decide to back such opposition forces as emerge. As Naim Qassem, the leader of Hezbollah, Iran’s ally, noted recently, his group has lost its supply route from Iran — but could regain it if “a new regime” emerges in Syria.

Outsiders jostling for position, let alone arming local surrogates, could make the already-daunting governance challenges HTS faces even harder. Syria is too strategically important to be left alone, but meddling foreigners bent on shaping its political future should be careful. The upheavals resulting from their rivalries will affect them too, through another surge in refugee outflows or an increase in terrorism or narcotics trafficking. Sadly, based on the past, there isn’t much hope that they will act any differently.

One year on, Netanyahu is determined to continue his war in Gaza at all costs — not just to Gazans, of whom more than 40,000 have been killed and another 1.9 million (90% of the population) displaced, but to the Israeli hostages as well. His future and the outcome of the war are now inseparable.

Even before October 7, Netanyahu was highly polarising. Liberal Israelis turned up in vast numbers to protest his policies, denouncing him as a threat to democracy and the rule of law, while those on the Right saw him as a peerless leader, even a saviour. Attitudes towards him have only hardened. The families of the remaining hostages believe that only a ceasefire will bring their loved ones home and that Netanyahu refuses to agree to one because he is obsessed with destroying Hamas entirely. Other Israelis are convinced that Netanyahu is bent on prolonging the Gaza war to remain in power so as to avoid facing the pending corruption charges against him. More still see him as a threat to rule of law in Israel. Many Israelis hold all three of these opinions. In a late July interview, the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert went to far as to warn that the country could descend into civil war — a view shared by nearly half the respondents in an August poll.

Yet despite this, Netanyahu’s vow to destroy Hamas has proven chimerical. And his refusal to abandon it has created a rift between him and the most hawkish members of his cabinet — National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who lead far-Right religious parties — and senior Israeli military officers and intelligence officials who insist that Hamas cannot be vanquished.

But what does it actually mean in practice, to destroy Hamas? The IDF’s overwhelming superiority in soldiers, military technology and firepower may well demolish its fighting force, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and eliminate its senior commanders. (The Brigades’ leader, Mohammed Deif, has most likely already been killed.) And even if the Brigades don’t disappear, they will have been battered badly. But destroying Hamas entirely is all but impossible. It is a political movement with a distinctive ideology, which includes ending Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and control of Gaza through a draconian blockade. So long as both continue it will have a cause to which it can rally support. Thousands of vengeful young men whose mothers, fathers and siblings have been killed by Israel’s war machine will continue to join up, the suffocating Israeli blockade fuelling their resentment.

Regardless of Hamas’s future, when the war eventually ends, Israel will have to arrange for Gaza’s governance. But none of the available choices is workable. Netanyahu has ruled out a coalition government containing the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas or even one run solely by the PA. As for a government staffed by Gaza’s notables, that would be almost impossible. Anyone who steps forward will be condemned as a Quisling: the more acceptable they are to Israel, the less they will be trusted by Gazans. Alternatively, Israel could run Gaza through a military occupation but that, sooner or later, would restart the familiar cycle of repression and resistance.

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The No-State Solution

By Rajan Menon

To complicate matters, Israel is waging a war of sorts on a second front, the West Bank, where tension and violence are increasing. State-sanctioned seizures of land there have accelerated, with the largest single authorisation in three decades taking place in July. The number of housing units has nearly doubled over the past five years, according to the European Union which doesn’t include the nearly 200 “outposts”, many of which eventually gain legal status despite being illegal under Israeli law. Meanwhile, settlers’ attacks on Palestinians have surged along with their destruction of Palestinians’ olive groves, gardens and orchards; the killing and stealing of sheep and cattle; the demolition and defacement of schools; and the takeover of water sources, sometimes assisted by the IDF.

Worse, as +972 Magazine reports, the security forces and settlers have killed nearly 700 West Bank Palestinians since October 7. Israel’s far-Right parties have praised these attacks, denouncing foreign criticism as smears. Ben Gvir has even relaxed gun ownership laws for the settlers: within the first two months of Hamas’s attack, 250,000 firearm applications were filed, more than in the past 25 years. In fact, the Government’s relentless, accelerated approval of West Bank settlements has all but destroyed the already-dim prospects of a two-state solution.

Unsurprisingly, support for armed resistance among Palestinians has increased. Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, and to a lesser extent Hamas have sunk deep roots in the territory. Overall violence in the region — by the IDF, settlers, and militant Palestinian groups — had increased by 50% even in the 12 months preceding the Gaza war. Current trends suggest the very real possibility of a third Intifada. David Shulman, a scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, warned recently in the New York Review of Books that, if left unchecked, the actions of Israeli settlers “will lead to Hamas and Islamic Jihad taking control of the West Bank”.

Further inflaming the situation, Israel has now launched a ground invasion in southern Lebanon, opening a third front against the Lebanese Shiite political party and paramilitary force, Hezbollah. It’s the culmination of almost a year of hostilities: since October 7, Hezbollah has been aiming missiles and drones at northern Israel, while Israel has been retaliating with air strikes on Hezbollah redoubts in southern Lebanon. While Hezbollah has vowed to continue its attacks so long as the Gaza war persists, Netanyahu is bent on enabling the return of people displaced from their homes, and it appears he will take great risks to do so.

But by invading Lebanon, Netanyahu is taking on a foe far more formidable than Hamas. As retired Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Brik wrote in Haaretz: “The IDF, which failed to destroy Hamas, certainly won’t be able to destroy Hezbollah, which is hundreds of times more powerful than Hamas.” Israel’s ground forces have been cut by 66% in the past 20 years, Brik explains, which means that Israel “doesn’t have enough troops to remain for a long period of time in any territory it conquers, nor does it have troops to relieve those who are fighting”.

Then there’s the question of how Israel will respond to Iran’s barrage of missiles fired yesterday evening. And whether the United States will limit itself to helping Israel shoot down Iran’s missiles, as it did in April, or decide to strike Iran directly. In response, Iran could go so far as to close the Straits of Hormuz, a step whose ripple effects could course through the networks of the global economy.

One year on from October 7, the combination of increasing violence in the West Bank, an Israeli war in Gaza and ground invasion of southern Lebanon, and an Iran that feels pressure to shore up its credibility given Israel’s attacks against its allies — Hamas and Hezbollah but also the Houthis of Yemen — amounts to a tinderbox. The consequences of an explosion are impossible to predict with precision. But this much is clear: we will only see more death, destruction and suffering. Wars are easy to start but hard to end — and quickly spiral out of the control of those who initiate them.

Israeli leaders have long claimed that they cannot negotiate with Hamas, which regards the Jewish state as the culmination of a colonial-settler project produced by Zionism. Yet this insurmountable barrier to a political settlement does not exist in the West Bank — or, more precisely, has not since the Palestinian Liberation Organisation forsook terrorism in 1988, recognised Israel’s right to live in peace, and agreed to negotiate with Israel to create a Palestinian state encompassing the West Bank and Gaza. The PLO’s historic decision paved the way for its leadership’s return, first to Gaza and later to the West Bank, the formation of a governing body, the Palestinian Authority (PA), and the quest for a political settlement that would yield a Palestinian state.

Negotiations that started in 1991 led to two agreements, Oslo I (1993) and Oslo II (1995), with the United States acting as a mediator. The latter accord provided for a tripartite division of the West Bank that gave the PA (qualified) governing rights in Areas A and B and Israel exclusive control over Area C, which made up 61% of the territory. Even now, the PA exercises unshared civil and military authority solely in Area A (18 % of the West Bank). Plus, in both of its zones, the PA’s rights are defined narrowly: Israel controls the West Bank’s airspace, border crossings, telecommunications, water resources and other natural resources.

Moreover, in Areas A and B, the Palestinian population is scattered across “165 disconnected islands”, in contrast to Area C, a sprawling continuous expanse that contains all the Jewish settlements, as well as 200,000 or more Palestinians. Hagai El-Ad, an Israeli and former executive director of the human rights organisation B’Tselem, aptly likens the West Bank’s political geography to Swiss cheese. Israel has never been willing to make the hard choices required to change this patchwork into a territorially continuous sovereign Palestinian state — not even in 2000 at Camp David, despite the mythology that Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat, the PA’s leader at the time, a state covering almost all of the West Bank, only to be spurned. In reality, Israel did not present documents or maps, let alone agree to a fully sovereign Palestinian state with a unified territory.

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Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s plan, proposed in September 2008 following a series of meetings with PA president Mahmoud Abbas, went much further; but by then, Olmert was on his last legs politically, and Abbas refused to accept in haste a plan whose future was uncertain. Since then, the two-state concept has withered on the vine, and that has revived the idea of a single state that would provide equal rights to Jews and Palestinians alike.

The resulting frustration revived the idea of a single state that would guarantee equal rights to Jews and Palestinians alike, proposed in Zionism’s early decades by Jewish intellectuals, including Gershom Scholem, Judah Magnes, Martin Buber. Its more recent Israeli proponents have included Meron Benvenisti, Jerusalem’s former deputy mayor, and Oxford historian Avi Shlaim. Among Palestinians, this formula has been advocated by the late Columbia University literary scholar Edward Said, Sari Nusseibeh, a philosophy professor and former president of Al-Quds University (1995-2014) in Jerusalem, and Columbia University historian Rashid Khalidi. Their conceptions of a single and inclusive state’s architecture, while not necessarily identical, rested on the premise that the proliferation of Jewish settlements had made the creation of two separate national states infeasible.

By definition, this solution contradicted the animating principle of the Zionist movement articulated by Theodor Herzl, and later picked up by Ze’ev Jabotinsky and David Ben Gurion: the essentiality of a nation in which Jews have special rights. The vision of one state in which Jews and Palestinians have equal rights appeals, particularly to people on the political Left but is fated to remain on the drawing board. It will never be accepted by the religious parties of the far-Right, represented in the current Israeli coalition government by Itamar Ben Gvir, leader of the Otzma Yehudit party and Minister of National Security since 2022, and Bezalel Smotrich, head of the Religious Zionist Party and Finance Minister, also since 2022; or the secular Right-wing parties, such as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud or Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu.

Nor does the one-state model have much public support. A December 2022 poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and Tel Aviv University’s International Program for Conflict Resolution and Mediation found that only 20% of the wider Israeli population approved of a single democratic state. It didn’t fare much better among Palestinians: 23% favoured it. The Rightward trajectory of Israel’s politics during the past several years and the deep mistrust produced by Hamas’s October 7 attacks will, if anything, reduce its appeal in both communities.

If the one-state solution stands no chance, might it be possible to resuscitate the two-state version? No — and for several reasons.

Most obviously, there’s the formidable task of transforming the West Bank’s current geographical and political configuration into a Palestinian state worth the name. The territory is speckled with 146 settlements containing 700,000 people (229,000 of whom live in East Jerusalem) as well as 191 “outposts” populated by another 20,000. Added to this, there is the security barrier built east of the Green Line, the Israelis-only roads, the expanded borders of East Jerusalem, and the IDF’s “firing zones” that encompass more than half of the Jordan Valley and Dead Sea littoral. None of these obstacles will be easily swept away, especially since the far-Right religious parties in Israel’s current ruling coalition have made settlement expansion a priority. So far this year, 5,852 acres in the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley, have been declared state land, far more than in any previous year, making them sites for future settlements and other construction projects. And in 2023 alone, the number of settlers increased by 15% during the last five years and by almost 3% last year alone.

Partly as a result, the already deep distrust between Israelis and Palestinians has become deeper because of both the Gaza war and events in the West Bank: the expulsions, destruction and seizures of homes and farmland, persistent torture of Palestinian prisoners (many held without being charged or tried) and, as the Army looks on, attacks by armed settlers against Palestinians. During the past decade, the U.N. recorded 3,372 acts of violence by West Bank settlers; and frequency has increased: between October 7 and early May there were nearly 800 incidents.

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A recent example was the rampage by settlers through the town of Huwara to avenge the shooting of two Jewish brothers by a Palestinian. The mob set homes, businesses and vehicles alight, leaving one person dead and hundreds more injured. Israeli security forces accompanied the attackers but did nothing to stop the violence, which Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, head of the IDF’s Central Command (which covers the West Bank), condemned as a “pogrom” that desecrated Judaism’s values. By contrast, Finance Minister Smotrich called for Huwara to be “wiped out.” But this lawlessness cannot be blamed solely on individuals such as Ben Gvir; it reflects something deeper — the changing make-up of the Israeli military. According to Yehuda Shaul, who served in the IDF and co-founded the research organization Ofek (The Israel Center for Public Affairs) as well as Breaking the Silence, an association of IDF veterans that exposes the mistreatment of Palestinians, settler violence has increased in recent years because the proportion of nationalist-religious individuals in the infantry’s “cadet officer corps” tied to the settlements jumped from less than 3% in 1995 to 40% by 2015 — a far greater than their share of Israel’s total population.

An optimist might retort that the two-state solution can nevertheless be salvaged and buttress the claim with an array of facts. The largest settlements, such as Ariel, Ma’ale Adumim, Modi’in Illit and Beitar Illit are near the Green Line and could be folded into pre-1967 Israel, with the Palestinian state compensated with land swaps involving Israeli territory. An optimist could also add that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dismantled the settlements in Gaza in 2005, so a future Israeli leader could do the same, even in the West Bank’s interior and far reaches.

But the fact remains that the settlement enterprise has continued since 1967 regardless of the political bent of Israeli governments and the settler population nearly doubled even between 1994 and 2000, the hope-laden years of the peace process. Plus, the current Right-wing government is determined to expand construction and settlements on the West Bank, which, as Smotrich has stated openly, it sees as essential to block a Palestinian state, the very idea of which was rejected in a declaration adopted by the Knesset in July. Unless Israel’s politics undergo a dramatic transformation, what Sharon did in Gaza in 2005 cannot be replicated in the West Bank. Especially since, compared to the settlements in Gaza, those in the West Bank are not only far more numerous and populous — they have infinitely more historical and religious significance. What is Gaza’s equivalent of the Tomb of the Patriarchs or Rachel’s Tomb?

Israel cannot of course accept Hamas’s objective in Palestine: that would amount to self-liquidation. But by failing to do what’s needed for a meaningful two-state solution, it has made the PA appear feckless in the eyes of Palestinians. Hamas’s electoral victory in the 2006 legislative elections in the West Bank and Gaza owed in no small measure to the fact that the Palestinian Liberation Organization, having rejected terrorism in 1988 and committed itself to negotiations with Israel, failed to deliver. In short, Israel’s policy of “mowing the lawn” — a euphemism for the intermittent quelling of Palestinian revolts — has helped Hamas.

Today, most Palestinians see the PA as a corrupt entity and the local gendarme Israel needs to perpetuate the occupation. The PA hasn’t held an election since 2006 and would be roundly rejected if it did. In a poll conducted soon after the Gaza War began, 90% of West Bank Palestinians said that PA president Mahmoud Abbas should resign. Conversely, a US intelligence assessment concluded that the war had substantially increased the popularity of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the West Bank. Palestinian politics, in other words, are not moving in a direction conducive to a two-state solution.

On the other side of the ledger, the occupation has led to Israel’s increasing global isolation. The most recent example is the International Court of Justice’s July ruling that the occupation violates international law, including parts of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Hague Regulations. Elsewhere, a May General Assembly resolution on admitting Palestine as a full member of the UN was approved by 143 countries, with 25 abstaining, and nine opposing the resolution. To attain that status, Palestine needs the Security Council’s approval, with a minimum of nine positive votes and no vetoes by permanent members. Still, it’s notable that an April Security Council resolution proposing full membership for Palestine received 12 positive votes; two countries (the UK and Switzerland) abstained and the US cast its veto.

Since then, Israel has seemed determined to turn itself into an international pariah. It has continued to expand its settlements; there are reports of the torture and sexual humiliation of Palestinian prisoners; its bombing campaign in Gaza, enabled by American backing, continues to claim the lives of children and civilians.

Sadly, absent a fundamental change in Israeli politics and an end to unqualified US support, political and material, what lies ahead is the continuation of the deadly and dead-end “mowing the lawn” reflex. The consequences, the past tells us, are all too predictable. To invert the quip of the muckraking American journalist Lincoln Steffens on a trip to the Soviet Union, we have seen the future, and it does not work — for the Palestinians and Israelis alike.

Worse, Israel’s standing in the United States, its most stalwart supporter, has suffered, its popular support fallen and falling. More broadly, the war has led to an unprecedented erosion in support for Israel above all among Democrats and young people, including American Jews. For the first time, an American president seeking re-election worries that his support for Israel, typically an asset in any political campaign in the United States, could contribute to his defeat. His campaign rallies have been interrupted by hecklers yelling “Genocide Joe” and berating him for abetting war crimes. According to recent survey, nearly a third of American adults believe the Gaza war amounts to genocide. And now, American university campuses are roiled by anti-war protests, which some Jewish students have joined.

More pertinently for the immediate situation in Gaza, Israel’s government appears to lack any post-war plan. And that matters. Even in the unlikely event that Netanyahu achieves all his started objectives in Gaza — freeing the hostages while also destroying Hamas seems impossible — more than nine million Israelis and more than five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are fated to live cheek-by-jowl. Neither community plans to depart, nor can they be expelled. The dreams of the most radical Palestinian movements of destroying the Jewish state and the calls from some within Israel’s hard-Right to expel Gazans en masse are equally fantastical. So, what can we expect after the war ends?

The most likely scenario is that Israel’s leaders will continue the policy that, despite intermittent negotiations with the Palestinians, has been in place since 1967, when Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza following the Six-Day War. Often called “mowing the grass”, it boils down to the open-ended occupation and suppression of Palestinians, using massive force when deemed necessary. One example of the latter is Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009), which followed peaceful Palestinian protests that gave way to rocket and mortar attacks by Hamas. Over 22 days, the IDF killed some 1,400 Palestinians, including 300 children, its deadliest war in Gaza before the current one. Another, Operation Protective Edge (2014), left nearly 1,400 Palestinians civilians dead, including 500 children. On a smaller scale, mowing the grass features intermittent clampdowns on Palestinian resistance to occupation and dispossession. The by-product of this approach has been, and will surely continue to be, an endless cycle of bloodletting. The sole uncertainty: how much time will elapse between one phase of violence and the next and how long each lasts.

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Yet mowing the grass doesn’t rely on naked force alone. To avoid directly ruling the West Bank Israel has relied on the Palestinian Authority (PA) for day-to-day governance. To replicate this arrangement in post-war Gaza, Israel will have to persuade people who enjoy legitimacy and respect in the community to serve as administrators in place of Hamas. The alternative, military rule, is a recipe for rebellions and violence that will entrap the IDF indefinitely. And the problem here is that, after the carnage and destruction in Gaza, few if any non-Hamas notables will rush to volunteer. Some eventually may, but risk being viewed as quislings and discredited as the PA has been. Aside from its corruption and ineptitude, the PA has come to be seen as Israel’s subcontractor.  In a November-December 2023 survey by the Palestinian Center for Survey Research, 60% of West Bank residents said they wanted the PA dissolved.

Despite the pitfalls, perhaps local notables will agree to govern their territory, either because the IDF succeeds in destroying Hamas or because Hamas has forfeited Gazans’ support by perpetrating the October 7 that led to the pitiless Israeli bombardment in the first place. Then again, the many thousands of young men who have seen their parents and siblings killed, their homes and neighbourhoods demolished, and their own lives upended, may equally become a deep recruitment reservoir for follow-on armed resistance movements. Israel may end up creating more extremists than it has killed. Though Hamas may die, its animating ideology could live on.

Though far from homogenous, the anti-war Left that has organised around this war shares a simple ambition: Israel should jettison this “mowing the grass” model and resume negotiations aimed at a two-state solution, which has only been pursued in fits and starts since the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995. Those summits did have some concrete accomplishments: Israel’s recognition of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as the representative of the Palestinian people; the PLO’s renouncing of terrorism and accepting the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state; and the creation of the Palestinian Authority. All this was a pathway to a Palestinian state, albeit with undefined contours, encompassing the West Bank and Gaza.

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That ultimate goal seemed achievable on at least two occasions: the first was the 2000 Camp David talks between PA Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, with President Bill Clinton mediating, exerting pressure, and presenting a far-reaching proposal. Then, in 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert put forward his own two-state proposal. Both initiatives envisioned Israel living in peace alongside a Palestinian state encompassing most of the West Bank and Gaza, with a corridor between the two places, the incorporation of the largest West Bank Jewish settlement blocks (such as Ariel and Ma’ale Adumim) into Israel, and the Palestinians compensated through “land swaps”. The negotiations failed for many reasons, including the status of East Jerusalem (who would control what and how) and the right of return for Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948 (how many and where).

These structural obstacles remain. But the two-state solution also becomes progressively harder to achieve so long as Israel, while mowing the grass, keeps building Jewish settlements on the West Bank and ignores the “outposts” proliferating there — along with roads reserved for Jews — despite the lack of the government’s consent. A record 23 outposts were built in 2023, and there are now 160 West Bank settlements inhabited by 520,000 people, not counting another 250,000 in East Jerusalem; add to that the outposts in which as many as 30,000 people live. Not only are additional settlements (with 3,500 homes) planned, the hard-line Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently urged the legalisation of 68 outposts. Following the Gaza War, the government also announced the appropriation of 800 hectares in the Jordan Valley to build more settlements — the biggest confiscation of Palestinian land in 30 years. In a move that further fragments the West Bank, the government recently earmarked $940 million for renovating and constructing roads for the exclusive use of settlers. Steps like these demonstrate its rejection of the two-state solution and its determination to create “facts on the ground” that will make it even harder for future Israeli leaders to achieve that goal.

True, the settlers are a small segment of Israel’s population, but they are also a powerful one. They regard the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) as a divine gift bequeathed to Jews for eternity, and Right-wing parties draw strong support from them. True, largest settlement clusters could be joined to Israel as part of a two-state deal and balanced by land swaps, but Palestinians are right in arguing that all settlements are illegal under international law, no matter that Israel has insisted they must demonstrate their readiness to compromise by accepting them. This point of view is increasingly in the political ascendant following the collapse of the Israeli Left, the growing power of Right-wing parties and movements, the increase in settlements, and the expropriation of more and more Palestinian land to make way for them. Unsurprisingly, polls show that disillusionment with this 30-year quest has reduced support for it: less than a third of Jews and only 37% of Palestinians back it.

The most modish panacea to this intractable problem, a one-state solution — a single state that stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and ensures equal rights to Jews and Palestinians (Muslims and Christians) alike — is even less likely. It contradicts the fundamental principle underlying the Zionist project, namely that Jews must have their own homeland. Moreover, there’s little evidence that replacing the Jewish state created in 1948 with one that provides Jews and Palestine the same rights has much appeal even among Israelis on the Left. It would be an even harder sell now because it will require Israelis to abandon deeply rooted conceptions of self and nation at a time when the Gaza war has increased their both distrust of Palestinian leaders and their vigilance about security.

For now, there is no chance that this idea will take wing. The Netanyahu government, which rejects a two-state solution, won’t even entertain the thought of a one-state solution — unless it involves a single one between the river and the sea with no more than a small minority of Palestinians in it. The same goes for future governments that are formed by or include parties from the political Right. As for the long run, the Right-ward trajectory of Israel’s politics — partly due to demographic trends favouring Right-wing voters — all but guarantees that the one-state vision will remain just that.

In times of stress and uncertainty people hold fast to what’s familiar. Perhaps the Gaza war will be an exception and prove to be a catalyst that shakes things up and — despite the fear and suspicion on both sides, Israelis and Palestinians — creates the conditions for the bold political choices required to achieve the two-state solution. That would be nice but not likely — not until the passage of time reduces the Gaza War’s psychological grip on Israeli Jews and Palestinians, the ideology of extremists in both communities lose ground, and a new generation rooted in the centre and Left moves Israel in a different direction. Until then, Israeli leaders will fall back on “mowing the grass”. But we know, now better than ever, where that can lead.

The current mood of pessimism stems partly from Kyiv’s failure to punch through Russia’s defences in the south during the summer-autumn counteroffensive of 2023. No less important has been the doubts about continuing American military aid. President Joe Biden’s request to Congress for another $61 billion in assistance for Ukraine — most of it military — seems dead in the water thanks to dogged opposition in the House of Representatives from legislators loyal to Donald Trump.

This is already having repercussions in Ukraine: the fall of Avdiivka last week, representing Russia’s greatest territorial gain in nine months, has been directly linked to dwindling supplies of ammunition. Zelensky referred to this shortage as an “artificial deficit” created by slow delivery of supplies, and continued military support from the United States, supplemented by Britain and Europe, could still help Ukraine regain momentum, even if not this year.

However, if American support falters or ceases, Britain and Europe have the power not only to keep Ukraine in the fight, but, eventually, to help it make the advances needed to reach a favourable negotiated settlement. The second of these two outcomes will require Europe to rethink its military role in ways that it has never had to do since the formation of Nato in 1949. But if it proves up to the task, the repercussions will extend well beyond this conflict. Before the invasion, Russia was widely heralded as one of the world’s two superpowers. In the event that Ukraine can regain at least some additional territory and bring the war to a satisfactory end, Russia will forever be seen in a different light: as a threat Europe can manage largely on its own.

The ground game

That said, there’s no denying that Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive failed. It didn’t break through the Russian-held part of Zaporizhzhia province (on the Dnipro’s left bank) to Tokmak (an important supply hub) let alone to Melitopol further south. Russia had prepared well to foil that gambit, relying on the kind of extensive, layered trenches and fortifications — the so-called “Surovikin lines” — not seen in Europe for a generation.

Moreover, Russia’s increased investment in drones helped batter Ukraine’s armoured and mechanised brigades, while the improved accuracy of its artillery and helicopter gunships disabled Ukraine’s American-supplied mine-clearing systems. Belying stereotypes of a rigid and hyper-centralised force, the Russian army also learned from its mistakes, adapting better electronic countermeasures against the US-supplied HIMARS missiles and Excalibur artillery shells. During my most recent visit to Ukraine, in December, a drone operator described the advantage Russia had acquired in FPV (first-person view) drone variants, and its vastly improved electronic jamming technology — its new Izdeliye-55 miniature FPV quadcopter, is reputedly all but immune to jamming.

Still, the fact that Ukraine — which lacked sufficient airpower, long-range missiles and general materiel — failed to retake swathes of territory during its counteroffensive remains the war’s “dog bites man” story. The true surprise is that Russia is not only still fighting Ukraine two years after invading it, confident of a quick victory, but that it barely shifted the frontlines in the whole of 2023. Its net gain was a bare 180 square miles (for comparison, Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, covers 324 square miles), and that owed mainly to advances in and around Bakhmut, a town for which it fought for nine months, relying heavily on prisoners, a private army, and various militias. The conquest of Avdiivka similarly required four months of fighting and some 20,000 casualties, notwithstanding Russia’s massive numerical superiority in weaponry (8:1 in artillery shells, for example).

Despite Russia’s vast and continuing advantage in every measure typically used to assay military balance between states, it has failed to transform that superiority into juggernaut-like results. A vivid example can be found in the small beachheads Ukraine established in mid-November on the Russian-held bank of Kherson province, mainly in Krynky village, after a river crossing under heavy fire. Though Ukraine had only a small number of marines and no armour or artillery on site to speak of, it has preserved or extended the area it holds through repeated Russian assaults, killed numerous troops, and destroyed many armoured vehicles. All this from what a New York Times analysis painted as Kyiv’s Krynky “suicide mission”.

In Russian media, there is no such misconception: one military blogger lambasted the “idiots” who kept sending armour to Krynky, only to have “90%” of it destroyed; others demanded the sacking of Colonel General Mikhail Teplinsky, the army commander in Kherson. And Krynky is not an aberration — Russia’s equipment losses have been remarkably high elsewhere. Returning to Avdiivka, one single extended assault in November led to the destruction of 100 Russian tanks and 250 armoured vehicles.

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Russia has also suffered many more casualties than one would have expected against a much weaker opponent: according to British estimates, 302,000 by late November plus “tens of thousands of deserters”. By contrast, US intelligence estimates around 70,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed and 120,000 wounded by last autumn. (This would bely Russia’s implausible claim, widely circulated, that 300,000-350,000 Ukrainian troops have died.)

The losses in some Russian units are devastating. Russia’s elite 155th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade was almost eviscerated when Russian commanders insisted upon their habitual “meat wave” assaults on Vuhledar — so high were the losses that the marines turned on their generals. A year into the war, the losses of the 155th at Vuhledar and elsewhere were so bad that the unit had to be reconstituted multiple times.

Russia’s overall equipment losses have also been staggering. The Oryx data base, which tracks destroyed, abandoned, or captured stock, lists as of mid-February: 2,735 tanks; 3,421 infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs); and 1,020 artillery systems. Tank losses have been severe enough to require the requisitioning of models dating back decades. Ukraine’s corresponding losses have been significantly lower: 742 tanks, 848 IFVs, and 472 artillery pieces. Russia had an overwhelming superiority in tanks when the war began but, because of these losses, by July the two armies were nearly at parity.

Some of Russia’s best weapons — the S-400 air defence system, the supposedly unstoppable Kinzhal ballistic missile, and Yastreb-AV counterbattery radar, which costs $1.5 billion and was destroyed soon after its first appearance — have not lived up to their vaunted reputation. Ditto the famed, top-of-the-line T-14 Armata tank, withdrawn from the battlefield soon after its debut. Western weaponry has been essential here. Without American and European tanks, air-defence missiles, anti-tank guided missiles, multiple rockets systems, and cruise missiles (the Anglo-French Storm Shadow/SCALP) Ukraine could never have withstood the Russian army’s assault, much less have inflicted such large losses on it.

Russia at sea

Perhaps even more surprisingly, though it lacks a fully-fledged navy, Ukraine has severely hampered Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, based in Crimea. Using missiles, aerial and naval drones, and commando raids, it has hit the Fleet and its infrastructure so many times (beginning with the triumphant early sinking of its flagship, the Moskva, in April 2022, using a homemade R-360 Neptune missile) that Moscow has had to relocate ships and submarines — in some cases all the way to Russia’s mainland Krasnodar region.

But Ukraine targeted the latter as well, damaging one Ropucha-class landing ship in August, before attacking the Black Sea Fleet’s Sevastopol headquarters in September, claiming to have killed 34 officers. The Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missiles have been indispensable here and, in all, Ukraine claimed to have damaged or disabled about a third of the Fleet’s vessels: 25 ships and one submarine according to most recent figures.

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These victories have had several repercussions, not least in sowing discord at the top of the Russian leadership. One attack early this month on the Crimean airbase at Belbek killed air force Lt Gen. Alexander Tatarenko, before Ukraine sunk another Ropucha-class landing ship (the Caesar Kunikov) using a swarm of sea drones, precipitating the firing of the Fleet’s commander, Admiral Viktor Sokolov, on 15 February. Any proper naval strategy these commanders might have developed has also been sabotaged. It has become much harder for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet ships to fire cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities, forestalling wintertime strikes on Ukraine’s electrical network.

Ukraine has also managed to maintain a sea corridor for food exports from its own Black Sea ports (even after Russia exited the Black Sea grain deal) despite persistent Russian attacks on its port infrastructure. Earnings from food have dropped significantly since the war started, but a blockade would have dealt the cash-strapped country a body blow. By January though, Ukraine’s seaborne exports (not just in grain, but all shipping) actually reached pre-war levels. 

“An army marches on its stomach”

This aphorism, attributed by some to Frederick the Great and others to Napoleon, highlights how essential supplies from the rear are for success at the front — not just armour and artillery, but food, fuel, and medicine. Ukraine has done a remarkable job of starving Russia of these supplies. To take an example, the 12-mile-long Kerch Strait Bridge was under repair for months following the October 2022 truck bomb explosion engineered by Ukraine. They then attacked the bridge again last July, this time with sea drones. Though bridge’s railway tracks remained intact this time, the damage to the roadway necessitated lane closures until November. Fears of attack also led to traffic suspensions on the bridge at least three times in 2023.

Ukraine similarly struck the Chonhar Bridge, which connects north Crimea to Kherson province, last June, July and August. And other military-related Crimean sites targeted include Saky, Yevpatoria, and the Zaliv shipyard in Kerch. These strikes have disrupted supplies headed to Russian forces in the south via Crimea, the main conduit, forcing Moscow to rely more on the land corridor it created after the invasion between Crimea and south-western Donbas. Yet that passageway too has come under Ukrainian fire. On top of that, in January and February, Ukrainian drones struck Russia’s energy infrastructure — loading terminals, oil refineries, and storage sites — in the Baltic Sea, the Bryansk region, and in Volgograd and Ryazan.

A RAND analysis recently asked whether logistics would prove to be “Russia’s undoing in Ukraine”. This much is clear: an important Russian weakness has been laid bare. This week, Western officials claimed that Russia was suffering from severe shortages of ammunition and weapons of its own. And, apart from making it harder to sustain prolonged offensives, supply shortfalls have deprived new recruits of the basics — in some cases family members have had to provide essentials. Morale has therefore become a chronic problem for Russian commanders, and played a role in the Wagner Group’s June rebellion. 

A vision of victory

The Russian army is certainly not, as they say in Texas, all hat and no cattle. But, amid the negative coverage of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, its considerable flaws and failures have been overlooked. Still, the Ukrainian army’s successes would have been impossible absent the massive inflow of Western weaponry — some $100 billion since the invasion — and in particular the US capacity to send close to half, in dollar terms, of what its Nato allies have provided. But given the Russian army performance in Ukraine, the oft-heard claims that Ukraine’s defeat would expose Nato to attack has become dubious.

To be clear: Russia retains a formidable army that can still do considerable damage to Ukraine. What’s more, Ukraine’s vulnerability has increased because of the mounting shortages its forces now face and the uncertainty surrounding future American military assistance. Despite Russian losses, Putin has not seriously called for negotiations. On the contrary, he stated recently that the goals of the “special military operation” remained unchanged, would be pursued till victory, and that Western support for Ukraine would eventually dissipate.

Nor have the war’s human and material costs sparked sustained mass discontent among Russians, let alone threatened Putin’s grip on power. He seems confident that time is on his side. To push Ukraine into negotiating now would amount to decreeing its partition — and at a moment when Russia, despite assertions to the contrary, is hardly on a roll. That said, maximalist territorial goals — the ones originally advocated by the Zelensky government and its strongest Western supporters — will likely prove as unrealistic as betting on Putin’s political demise.

But an outcome in which Ukraine retakes even more of the territory it has lost since February 2022 would still be a major victory and, if it comes to negotiations, Kyiv will be in a stronger position if it has gained more ground. It should demonstrate to Moscow its readiness to fight on: by mobilising its planned 500,000 new soldiers and breaking up the corrupt, murky, and intricate system that helps men dodge military service (you can find plenty of these fellows in Kyiv’s trendy restaurants). The Ukrainian army must reconstitute itself and adopt a strategy of what Mykola Bielieskov calls “active defence”; not mount a major offensive that would risk high losses in troops and materiel, something it can ill afford. Russia may have lost more soldiers than Ukraine, but it also has a far larger pool of military-aged men to draw from.

Further gains by Ukraine will require not only Congress’s approval of the 2024 aid package, but also Europe’s willingness to play a much bigger role. But, having long neglected its defence industries because of the ironclad American military guarantee, Europe cannot step in quickly. To take an example, the Europe Union was supposed to deliver one million artillery shells by March; so far it has sent half that amount and expects to meet its target only by the end of this year. At best, an increase in European help can keep Ukraine in the fight for the rest of this year so that a larger flow of weapons from Europe down the line will enable it to make bigger advances. That will not happen easily or quickly, which means that Ukraine is vulnerable in the near term.

But Europe does have the means to begin boosting military spending and investing more in its defence industries — and it should, if not only to gain a measure of strategic autonomy and reduce its generation-long reliance on America.

Sheer geography dictates that Ukraine’s fate will always matter more to Europe than it will to the United States, which will focus increasingly on China in the years to come. In addition to arming Ukraine, Europe should eventually take the lead in training and equipping Ukraine’s armed forces so that Kyiv has the capacity to adopt a policy of long-term, armed neutrality. Some describe this as the “Israel model”, though Finland’s defence strategy from the end of the Second World War until it joined Nato in April may be the better comparison. Alternatively, a subset of Nato states could guarantee Ukraine’s security, but on the understanding that any resort to force against Russia to defend Ukraine would not trigger Article V of the 1949 Nato Treaty, the commitment to collective defence. This would scarcely substitute for Nato membership, but it would give Ukraine more protection than armed neutrality.

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If the uncertainty regarding future American military aid to Ukraine marks a turning point for Kyiv, it does the same for Europe. It is often said that Europe cannot organise defence arrangements of its own because a large, disparate collection of states cannot act in consort. But that is belied by the centralisation the European Union and its associated institutions have undergone. And the EU has already taken some steps toward arming Ukraine autonomously: the European Peace Facility, established in March 2021, has provided Kyiv more than $5 billion in war-related aid.

The political obstacles to greater European defence autonomy and the challenges of ramping up European defence industries are well-known — Europe’s leaders have never looked less united around its continental institutions. Yet given the combination of the shortages Ukraine faces, the doubts about continued assistance from the United States, and the prospect of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Europeans ought to consider charting a new course, one that does not require them to dispense with Nato, but adapts it to the present. The impediment to such a change is not a lack of means, but the inertia created by an entrenched way of thinking that makes change seem impossible. The alternative risks not only Ukraine’s long-term future, but Europe’s too.

Don’t look to Netanyahu for the answer. He has been clear about the war’s objective: to destroy Hamas, particularly its military wing, the Izzedine ad-Din al-Qassem Brigades. Some of his far-Right politicians have gone further, calling for the levelling of Gaza, perhaps even with nuclear weapons, or expelling its entire population. But these amount to more of the same: rage-fuelled impulses. Neither Netanyahu nor anyone else in Israel’s government (some key members of the political opposition joined the cabinet after October 7) has yet articulated a coherent post-war strategy for Gaza, let alone for the larger dispute between Israelis and Palestinians. This failure bodes ill for both communities.

Even if the IDF eviscerates Hamas, Israel’s leaders will — regardless of whether Netanyahu survives politically — have to figure out how to organise Gaza in order to create and sustain stability there. Departing in haste from a place, large swathes of which have been reduced to rubble, will elicit universal condemnation. Worse, that step will not produce conditions within Gaza that increase Israel’s security, the justification for the war from the outset. The United States could walk away from its failed wars of regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya; those countries are distant from the American homeland. Israel cannot do the same with its neighbour.

Israel could decide to stay and occupy Gaza indefinitely. But given how much death and destruction has been wrought, IDF soldiers will police a hostile population of 2.3 million people, some proportion of whom will eventually turn to armed resistance, even if leaderless. The Israeli army has demonstrated, more than once, that it has the firepower to quell revolts; but heavy-handed repression coupled with a prolonged occupation will beget a self-sustaining cycle of violence out of which, in time, a variant of Hamas will emerge. The more draconian Israel’s occupation, the more likely a renewed intifada of sorts — one that will most probably spread to the West Bank. This means Israel will end up policing two Palestinian territories, resorting regularly to arrests, interrogations and military raids — all without diminishing Palestinians’ determination for a state they can call their own. Moreover, the United States, the one country truly indispensable to Israel, has already stated that an occupation of Gaza would be unacceptable, save for a “transition period”.

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As an alternative, a multinational peacekeeping force could be deployed in Gaza. But which countries will provide troops to patrol Gaza indefinitely given the calamitous conditions? The United States, Britain and France have been involved in discussions. But these countries have long been staunch supporters of Israel, and Gazans will understandably see their soldiers as Israel’s enforcers, if not impartial protectors. Deploying an all-Arab force might be a way around that problem, but because Israel’s war has aroused intense anger across the Middle East, the region’s rulers will be skittish about being seen as collaborators. And Egypt, a potential leading candidate in a peacekeeping operation, has joined Israel in blockading Gaza for nearly 20 years, inflicting tremendous suffering on its people, who are unlikely to welcome its troops. A UN peacekeeping force could be the answer. Yet the historical record casts doubt — Bosnia and Rwanda, for example — on their capacity to restore and maintain order in the face of large-scale violence, which cannot be ruled out in Gaza.

More fundamentally, peacekeeping troops, no matter their nationality, cannot provide day-to-day governance any more than a city’s police force can run the quotidian operations required for basic services, such as healthcare, education and housing (to say nothing of managing war-shattered Gaza’s reconstruction). Administering the territory in a manner that eventually meets the minimal needs of its citizens will be a multi-year task at minimum, and will require a government with local roots and popular legitimacy. Israel will understandably not allow any role for Hamas, but it has also ruled out one for the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority. In any case, the PA commands scant respect among Palestinians. A recent poll found that a majority believes it should be dissolved and that it serves Israel’s interests more than theirs. That owes partly to the failure of its negotiations with Israel (since the 30-year-old Oslo Accords) to produce anything that remotely resembles a Palestinian state, or even to resist the construction of Israeli settlements on the West Bank and the (continuing) evictions of Palestinians from their homes and grazing and farm lands.

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The failed lessons of Libya

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A viable governing authority in post-war Gaza will, therefore, have to be staffed by local notables who have earned public goodwill and respect. But those who do enjoy grassroots esteem are precisely the ones who will worry about forsaking it by joining what Gazans may come to view as a collection of quislings propped up by Israel to do its bidding. Netanyahu’s insistence that Israel will “continue to control security” in Gaza after the war suggests that one Israeli demand could be guaranteed access to Gaza for the IDF. His statement that the IDF could remain there for “an indefinite period” suggests that Israel may ask for much more than that. Even a government run by respected Gazans will lose legitimacy if it accedes to either demand, especially the second.

Aside from Israel’s lack of a strategy for post-war Gaza, since 1996 it has not had (with some exceptions such as Ehud Barak) a leader with a plan for addressing the political aspirations of Palestinians. And its Right-ward political trajectory since the latter half of the Nineties, and especially in recent years, makes it unlikely that one will emerge without fundamental political change. Yet history and geography dictate that Israelis and Palestinians must live side by side.

American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib was recently vilified, and later reprimanded by the House, for using the slogan “from the river to the sea”, which Hamas has used in calling for Israel’s destruction. (Tlaib clarified that her plea was for equal rights in that space for Israeli Jews and Palestinians alike.) But it bears remembering that Right-wing Israeli politicians have long used these same words to underscore their pledge to continue the occupation and never allow a Palestinian state, of any kind. Or that the 1977 platform of Netanyahu’s Likud Party likewise declares that “between the Sea and the Jordan [river] there will be only Israeli sovereignty”. If Israel remains determined to reject a Palestinian state, it will perforce revert to quarantining Gaza, as it has since 2007, and managing the West Bank in the manner that it has since 1967. Based on the past, that amounts to a formula for continued violence — perhaps not on the scale of October 7 but bad enough to intermittently unsettle the lives of Israelis and Palestinians alike, though not in equal measure.

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Sadly, as things stand, even a mediator determined to kickstart talks between Israelis and Palestinians toward a two-state solution — that Biden has said he will revive after the war to ensure “a vision of what comes next” — will find that the pathways to it have been all but blocked by now. The West Bank has been chopped up: Israel fully controls Area C, which accounts for 60%  of its area and contains its richest agricultural lands. Area A and Area B, both under the authority of the PA, albeit to varying degrees, are archipelagos cut off from each other by roads reserved for Israeli Jews and a constellation of settlements. Moreover, settlement construction has soared since 2000, and the number of settlers living in those deemed legal under Israeli law plus the illegal “outposts” has increased from under 200,000 in 2000 to more than 485,000 today. What’s more, even as the war in Gaza continues, the Israeli government seems intent on building additional new settlements.

How, under these circumstances, can any West Bank state that even minimally meets Palestinians’ aspirations be created so as to marginalise Hamas-like movements? To make matters worse, the atrocities Hamas committed could make those Israelis who have warned that any Palestinian state, regardless of location and configuration, will pose a mortal threat to the Jewish state much more influential in the country’s public square. The dismaying upshot, then, is that Israel has no coherent strategy for managing post-war Gaza, or for resolving the larger Israeli-Palestinian dispute — save for a tougher version of business-as-usual. And that, it ought to be clear by now, is a dead end.

Though forgotten by the media in the face of more immediate Middle-Eastern tragedies, a UN mission is attempting to restore order. But such ambitions, reasonable in theory, fundamentally depend on the domestic political situation and whether the government in charge is competent or, as in Libya’s case, broken. Such analysis of Libya as a “failed state” is a longstanding characterisation in the West, and has similarly been revived in recent months as an explanation for the renewed flow of refugees to Europe.

But while blaming this on the breakdown of governance in Libya is a logical first step, we mustn’t stop there. That would be to ignore the roots of the dysfunction, which can be traced to the Nato-led intervention launched on 19 March, 2011. Libya’s state didn’t passively “fail”; the West triggered its failure through its programme of so-called humanitarian interventionism.

This isn’t to say that the description of state failure inside Libya is incorrect. It’s undeniable — indeed at present there isn’t a “state” to speak of. Not only does the country contain two rival governments (one in the capital, Tripoli, the other in Tobruk), but a Gaddafi-era general, Khalifa Haftar, acts autonomously and answers to neither administration, though he nominally backs the one in the east. Beyond him, a multitude of armed militias dominate fragments of the country and thrive by running illicit businesses. Terrorist groups and drug and human trafficking networks add to the mayhem. Outsiders — including Turkey, Russia, Egypt, Syria and the United Arab Emirates — have worsened the turmoil and violence by backing different Libyan clients.

These circumstances have made even the minimally competent governance needed to manage disasters such as Derna impossible. The nation’s infrastructure, especially Derna’s dams, had fallen into a state of disrepair, some of it damaged by the persistent violence. This was no secret: Libyan engineers had long been sounding the alarm. But institutions capable of taking responsibility for such critical tasks have become scarce since Libya’s state disintegrated in 2011.

For 42 years before that event, Muammar Gaddafi, a military officer who toppled the Western-supported monarchy of King Idris in 1969, ruled Libya in a brutal, authoritarian manner. But the country did at least have a central authority capable of policy-making and state action. Everything changed once the sudden shockwaves of the Arab Spring reached Libya and Gaddafi faced a popular uprising, which he promptly sought to crush. But as it gathered strength, clashes between protestors and security forces led to increasing bloodshed, and Western leaders, notably France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain’s prime minister David Cameron, demanded intervention to protect Libyan civilians.

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Within a month of the intervention, some 600,000 people had fled, seeking safety in adjacent countries, most of them migrants from sub-Saharan Africa originally lured to the country by the prospect of finding jobs. But economic desperation soon induced migrants from neighbouring countries — the bulk of them from Niger, Egypt, Sudan and Chad — to head to Libya again, some seeking work, others a passageway out of Africa. It did not take long for Europeans to feel the ripple effects. Though there were refugee flows from Libya to Europe even during Gaddafi’s rule, the country’s coast was more effectively policed because there was a functioning government. Gaddafi also cooperated directly with European leaders to reduce the exodus in exchange for cash: at one point he had demanded €5 billion annually, but in 2010 settled for €50 million over three years. But once the intervention put an end to Gaddafi’s regime and mayhem ensued, migrants from Libya and other African countries started crossing the Mediterranean to Europe in far larger numbers, many in makeshift boats.

Since then, this movement has ebbed and flowed, but never ceased. In March a legislator from Italian PM Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, citing intelligence reports, claimed that nearly 700,000 people are in Libya awaiting the opportunity to get to Europe. Though UN officials dismissed that figure, this much seems certain: whatever the precise number, Libya will remain a launch pad for destitute people eyeing Europe, no matter the EU’s payments to various African countries, and even Libyan militias, to stanch the flow. And the arrival of droves of refugees on Europe’s shores has aggravated the discord within the EU as member states bicker over how the burden ought to be shared. The first refugee crisis peaked in 2015, but it is once again remaking European politics as far-Right parties exploit xenophobic tropes and play upon public anxieties to increase their appeal. Libya’s “state failure” has washed across the Mediterranean and into the countries of the leaders who precipitated it back in 2011.

In seeking a prime mover for the disaster in Derna and the refugee crisis however, we must return to the Nato-led intervention and the mindset that drove it. As I show in my 2016 book, The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, the 2011 uprising in Libya was never as peaceful as was widely reported; nor, as was often alleged, did Gaddafi’s forces train heavy weapons on demonstrators with abandon. Gaddafi’s opponents also exaggerated the number of civilians that were killed by his security forces, as did Western advocates of armed intervention. The frightening estimates of those who were still in danger of being killed ultimately amounted to guesswork. (White House Middle East expert Dennis Ross’s warning that 100,000 people in Benghazi — which then had a population of about 674,000 —  would die was an egregious example.) Likewise, as US intelligence officials subsequently stated, the claim of Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the UN that Gaddafi had distributed Viagra to his troops so that they could commit mass rape lacked evidence.

Still, as the violence in Libya continued, demands for forceful action to stop it intensified, in part because the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P), which offered a plan to stop mass atrocities, was in its heyday. Its principles had even been included in the Outcome Document the UN adopted in 2005, its 50th anniversary. The essence of R2P — elaborated upon in a report from December 2001 — was that state sovereignty was not unconditional. When governments proved demonstrably incapable of fulfilling their basic responsibility to protect their people, or worse were subjecting them to atrocities, the international community was duty-bound to step in, using military force if other means had failed. This was the moral reasoning that led the UN Security Council to pass Resolution 1973 on 17 March, 2011, as Gaddafi’s crackdown continued.

The resolution authorised a military operation — led by Nato but including states outside the alliance — whose remit was to protect Libyan civilians. But the campaign quickly morphed into one that, whether by design or default, overthrew Gaddafi, who was eventually murdered by rebel forces. The power vacuum was soon filled by the anarchy and violence that persists to this day. That denouement was preventable. R2P didn’t merely call for military intervention, as a last resort, to save civilians from harm; it also stressed the importance of establishing order and helping to promote economic recovery thereafter. But the countries that spearheaded the 2011 intervention were not nearly as enthusiastic about the former as they were about the latter. Ironically, one of R2P’s originators later described the intervention as a “textbook case of the R2P norm working exactly as it was supposed to”.

In the event, it proved to be a wrecking ball that shattered the Libyan state and saddled its people with the task of making their broken country whole again. Strikingly, while the major Western powers vigorously called attention to the dangers facing Libyan civilians in 2011, they do not display the same fervour today, never mind that the confirmed deaths in Derna alone far exceed the total for all of Libya in 2011. Nor have the high priests of humanitarian intervention outside officialdom demanded action in Derna or even publicised its plight with the passion they summoned back in 2011.

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Samantha Power, now the head of the US Agency for International Development, then a National Security Council staffer, visited Armenia and Azerbaijan recently to take stock of the refugee crisis that was created by the Azerbaijan’s army conquest of Nagorno Karabakh, the country’s Armenian-majority enclave that declared its independence in 1992. Derna, however, was not on her travel schedule, even though she was among the prominent voices that called for the 2011 humanitarian intervention that left Libya in the disarray that soon earned it the “failed state” moniker. As for the press, after an initial spate of reportage, the coverage of Derna’s suffering has trailed off, even though the miseries of its people are still very much in evidence.

The humanitarian intervention movement, and R2P, its programme, was motivated by a high-minded mission: eliminating or at least mitigating  the persistent, serious harm of mass atrocities committed mainly by governments. Yet the lesson offered by Libya — and Iraq and Afghanistan too — is that deploying military force in other countries in order to stop bloodshed and oppression can unwittingly promote prolonged disorder and violence, upending the lives of the intended beneficiaries. Perhaps Western leaders have learned this lesson. Then again, the hubris produced by overweening power dies hard. Some neoconservatives and liberal internationalists of a markedly millenarian mindset continue to believe that their earlier failures were rooted not in extravagant ambitions but in deficiencies of planning and implementation that can be fixed. As long as this delusion continues, more Libya-like interventions animated by visions of benevolent social engineering await.