When our family lived in Jerusalem in the mid-1990s — where I was working as the Tribune’s Middle East correspondent — we were awed by the hope among both Israelis and Palestinians that the 1993 Oslo Accords might end their age-old conflict. The agreement signed on the White House lawn that year gave real hope for peace in modern times.
Then an extremist Jewish settler slaughtered 29 Palestinian men and boys as they knelt in prayer in a Hebron mosque in 1994. Hamas suicide bombers blew up buses to butcher Israelis on Jerusalem’s streets. A Jewish extremist shot and killed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at a peace rally in Tel Aviv in 1995. People on both sides overwhelmingly supported the Oslo process, but hateful extremists in each camp refused to share the Holy Land. So, they started killing Oslo. Thirty years later, its promise remains on life support.
Today, new extremists on both sides are determined to drive nails into any possible peaceful resolution to the conflict and the dream of a two-state solution. President Joe Biden must not let that happen. Too much is at stake. The impact of the brutal war raging in the destitute Gaza Strip echoes way beyond the Middle East and could radicalize a new generation of terrorists.
Since the bloody, barbaric attack by Hamas on Oct. 7 massacred 1,200 Israeli men, women, children and elderly near Gaza and touched off the war, there has been no concrete plan advanced by the combatants for the day after the fighting between Israel and Hamas stops — whether it’s weeks from now, or perhaps, months away.
Biden needs to start working forcefully now to outline that vision and build support for it among Israelis and Palestinians, as well as allies in the region and around the globe. Both sides must see a horizon with hope, security and justice, or they will face endless violence, war and death. There is no military solution to this conflict. Only a two-state endgame offers a viable, long-term political solution that could one day work — even if, after all this trauma, it takes years to happen.
The president should lay out the strategy in a prime-time Oval Office address and call on moderate Arab states, the European Union and the U.N. for support. Arab states will not be eager to help fund the reconstruction of Gaza without a serious commitment to a two-state pathway.
It likely will require leadership changes. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a longtime opponent of two states. That’s a problem. His failure to focus sufficiently on Israel’s security may have left Israel vulnerable to attack near Gaza, and his days as prime minister could be numbered. A formal commission of inquiry should await him at the end of the war. Israelis are demanding accountability. His popularity has fallen in polls, and 80% of Israelis believe he should accept responsibility for the staggering failures in security that led to the Oct. 7 attacks.
“The only way we believe there can be a successful vision for the day after is with a different Israeli government,” said Adina Vogel-Ayalon, chief of staff of J Street in Washington, D.C., a pro-Israel, pro-peace organization advocating for U.S. policies that promote Jewish and democratic values for Israel.
“That is one of the many obstacles at this moment in time,” she told me. “This Israeli government is resisting every plan for the day after that this administration has been promoting.” J Street advocates for post-conflict arrangements that establish a path to an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel in the future, and steps to get there successfully.
In the middle of this horrifying war, this may seem like a pipe dream, but the sheer scale of this violence could ultimately shock the two parties into the realization that war is not the answer. The Yom Kippur War led, years later, to Camp David and an Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.
For the Palestinian Authority, increasingly ineffective and unpopular under President Mahmoud Abbas, elections must be held in the West Bank and Gaza after the war to revitalize the self-rule government, so eventually it can take over governing Gaza from a transitional authority of some kind when Israel pulls out. Netanyahu has said Israeli forces will stay there indefinitely, but Biden has rightly warned Israel not to reoccupy Gaza. That would be a mistake that could further radicalize Gazans and prolong conflict. Unlike Hamas, the Palestinian Authority is committed to a negotiated solution, and Biden envoys are right to seek a security role for it in Gaza.
By pledging America’s ironclad support to Israel during the last 70 days of war in Gaza, the United States now owns this conflict too. The Biden administration must use its leverage with Israel to help end it, as soon as possible, once Israel decimates Hamas, and to help ensure a transition first to a multinational force, and ultimately, to the Palestinian Authority.
Israel has every right to defend itself. Hamas is a terrorist organization that has no interest in peace. Make no mistake, its goal is to kill Jews and destroy Israel. Its Oct. 7 attack was the deadliest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust. Hamas has pledged to do it again. It puts Gazan civilians in the crossfire and hides under hospitals. Israel cannot and should not have to live with that threat on its border. America wouldn’t.
Hamas took 240 hostages on Oct. 7, and an estimated 135 of them — including 10 Americans — remain captive in the dark tunnels under Gaza. The atrocities, rapes and murders of Israelis were unspeakable. Some of the dead were so badly burned or mutilated that they are only now being identified through DNA. The trauma is ongoing, and so are the funerals.
“Everyone walks around pretending to be normal,” one Israeli friend told me, “but the whole country is suffering from trauma. It will be years until Israel begins to resemble its old self.”
Israel’s retaliation has been fierce. The Israeli military campaign has leveled much of Gaza’s infrastructure and claimed the lives of at least 18,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to Gazan health officials. Some 80% of the population of 2.3 million has been displaced. Israel estimates thousands of Hamas fighters have died. Still, the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding there is raising alarm around the world. Biden’s unwavering support remains strong, but his administration is calling on Israel for a more targeted strategy.
“I want them to be focused on how to save civilian lives. Not stop going after Hamas, but be more careful,” Biden said last week, warning that Israel could lose international support because of the “indiscriminate bombing that takes place.”
One Palestinian friend lost 14 members of his extended family in the bombing. “It’s so painful,” he wrote to me, “when one, every two or three hours, searches the lists of the death toll with fear of finding names of his relatives or friends.”
The fear is that the longer this goes on, the more radical the Palestinian population will become, so that any plan for peace, stabilization and reconstruction the day after the war will be harder to achieve.
“I don’t think there is a day after. I don’t think this is going to stop,” observed Rashid Khalidi, co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies and professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University. “I don’t think the Israelis will bring resistance to an end. I don’t think there is a stable Gaza coming.
“The fighters they kill will have little brothers and others who will go on fighting for years,” Khalidi told me. “What they have done is produced a situation that is not going to have a clear end.”
That is the challenge, but Biden has to forge bold diplomacy and lay out the road map for a better future for Israelis and Palestinians. There have been five wars over the past 15 years, and this is by far the deadliest. Clearly, Israel’s strategy of blockading and containing Gazans in an open-air prison, as some call it, is not succeeding. Netanyahu’s strategy has left Israelis more at risk.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has also warned Israeli leaders they might win a tactical victory against Hamas but risk “strategic defeat” in the long run if they fail to heed warnings about the impact of the rising civilian death toll.
The U.S. must support Israel’s effort to degrade Hamas so that it is no longer a threat, but it should continue to urge a more careful military strategy within the bounds of international law to protect Palestinian civilians who had nothing do with the Hamas attack. The pressure campaign may eventually lead to another pause in the fighting to allow Hamas to give up more hostages, but Hamas leaders are not likely to leave Gaza. They know Israelis will hunt them down when they come out of their tunnels, as well it should. They must be driven out.
When the war ends, the U.S. must lead an international campaign to restore all humanitarian aid and rebuild Gaza, along with the Israeli communities attacked by Hamas. Israelis must have security guarantees they will be safe in the aftermath, and Palestinians must be offered hope for justice and self-determination in Gaza, the West Bank and east Jerusalem.
When distributing U.S. military aid, Biden should join a group of Democratic senators insisting it should come with zero tolerance for settler violence, settlement expansion, blockades and the expulsion of Arabs from their homes or villages. Some extremist, anti-Arab members in Netanyahu’s coalition continue to provoke violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
Both sides deserve peace, economic opportunity and a safe place to raise their children. They pledged at Oslo to work together toward those goals. That work remains unfinished.
It may seem naive — even a fool’s errand — to talk about peace plans at a time like this. The wounds on both sides are so deep, it may take years to get the parties back to the table, let alone trust that there is a true partner for peace on the other side. But that is the only way this ends without more violence, with a two-state outcome and two peoples living side by side in peace.
Storer H. Rowley, a former national editor and foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, teaches journalism and communication at Northwestern University.
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