Israel: Cease-Fire, Get Hostages, Leave Gaza, Rethink Everything

Israel needs to fight the war with the least collateral damage for civilians and the political horizon for a new relation between Israelis and Palestinians

In short, Israel would need to fight this war with the least collateral damage for Palestinian civilians and accompany it with a political horizon for a new relationship between Israelis and Palestinians, built around two nation-states for two indigenous peoples. Doing so would allow Israel to make a case to the world that this was not a war of vengeance but a war to eliminate the Palestinian people who were trying to destroy the two-state solution. That approach would have won the support, funding and, I think, even peacekeeping troops of moderate Arab states like the U.A.E.

The conduct of the war since Netanyahu engagement with Hamas has made this column important. The need was made painfully obvious last Thursday when Israeli Minister and former Jerusalem Mayor, Nir Barkat, was destroyed on MSNBC. A credible future prime minister could be Barkat. He failed when the host of the program challenged him to explain the policies of the Israeli Prime Minister.

Let’s look back a bit. America made a terrible mistake in Afghanistan by rushing into invading the country after 9/11, as I argued in October. It would have been better for Israel to focus first on getting back its hostages, and then go after Hamas leadership, because they are the ones responsible for the Oct 7 rampage. That is, a military response similar to how Israel tracked down the killers of its athletes at the 1972Munich Olympics and not how the U.S. turned Dresden into a pile of rubble during World War II.