Fractured Societies and Illusions of Peace
Last week, President Donald Trump stood in front of an audience of heads of state and pronounced that a historic peace had been reached in the Middle East. At least one analyst compared Trump’s assertion to Neville Chamberlain’s proclamation of “Peace in our time.” If Trump is going to deliver on his promises of peace, he’s going to have to find a way to address the fault lines in both Israeli and Palestinian societies that have sabotaged peace efforts so often in the past. For the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is as much about the tensions within Israeli and Palestinian societies as it is about the competing claims to the land of historic Palestine. Both Israeli and Palestinians societies are deeply fractured that in some respects are held together through the pressures of the conflict.
Prior to 7 OCT 2023, there were near weekly protests in Tel Aviv protesting the Netanyahu government. Intense debates raged in Israel over just about everything in Israeli society. These debates often highlight divisions between religious and secular Jews and the tensions over what it means to be Jewish in Israeli society. Years ago on my first trip to Israel, I took a sherut (shared taxi) from the Dead Sea to Jerusalem. While speaking with an older Canadian-Israeli Jew, he stopped mid-sentence and pointed toward a group of Heradi Jew (branch of orthodox Jews) on a street corner and exclaimed that “those people” were the real threat to Israel. The Haredi Jews are the center of one of the most contentious debates in Israel today.
The Haredi community in Israel are intensely observant and they reject the secular world. They live in tight-knit communities centered around the study of the Torah and religious law. In Israel the community has historically been exempt from mandatory service in the IDF and many members of the community live on welfare while foregoing employment to instead study the Torah. Initially the Haredi community was a fairly small segment of Israeli society comprising less than five percent of the population in 1980. However the community’s focus on family and high birthrates have contributed to significant growth over the past five decades. Today, eighteen percent of conscription-aged Israelis are Haredi and roughly about fourteen percent of the total population. As the community has grown so have Israeli calls to end their military exemption.
The Haredi community and their military exemption highlight just one piece of the the secular-religious divide in Israeli society. Many Orthodox Jewish Israelis reject the liberalism of many of the founders of the state of Israel. Prominent Orthodox politicians like Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have called for the application of religious to Israeli society including laws that would criminalize homosexuality and enforce gender segregation in schools. Secular Israelis often highlight Tel Aviv’s thriving LGBTQ community and the openness of Israeli society. I personally believe that they primary force barely holding Israeli society together is shared perception of a common enemy in the Palestinians.
Speaking of Palestinians, if a two-state solution were realized would it really be a two-state solution or would it be a three-state solution with Hamas continuing to rule Gaza and the Palestinian Authority controlling the West Bank? Within hours of the current ceasefire, Hamas militants emerged from their tunnels and began terrorizing its opponents in Gaza as it reasserted its control over the strip. This is simply a continuation of decades-old animosities between Palestinian political factions. For much of the last 100 years, political disunity has plagued the Palestinian people. Some of that has certainly been engineered by Israeli officials seeking to sabotage Palestinian aspirations, but the cleavages are real.
In my opinion, the Palestinian divides are much more political than they are social or cultural. When speaking with Palestinians, whether from Gaza, the West Bank, or even living in the diaspora I’ve found that they are disenchanted with their political options. Both the Palestinian Authority’s and Hamas’ approval ratings hovers well below fifty percent in Gaza and the West Bank. Yet in spite of their slumping popularity, they are currently the only viable options. Perhaps if both Hamas and the parties of the Palestinian Authority spent more time trying to actually improve the lives of Palestinians rather than entrench their own power they would be more popular.
Trump’s plan gives vague details about providing some kind of Palestinian alternative to govern Gaza. There has been talk of a team of Palestinian technocrats. Egypt and Jordan are training Palestinian police to serve in Gaza after the proposed disarming of Hamas. These steps will have to be much more concrete and if they are going to be effective, they will need to be seen as legitimate in the eyes of the Palestinian people and not just puppets of international actors or the state of Israel. Forging real unity within Palestinian politics will go a long way to achieving a viable government in the future. To these ends some Israeli doves have pushed for the release of Marwan Barghouti, who is seen by many as they only figure capable of bridging the Palestinian political divides.
In the hopeful days of the Oslo Accords, the rejectionist factions within Israeli and Palestinians societies combined their efforts to sabotage efforts to move toward peace. The Israeli settler movement, led by a contingent of Orthodox Jews (not the Haredi) with messianic visions of Eretz Israel (Greater Israel) carried out attacks on both Palestinians and Israel ultimately resulting in the assassination of Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin. This combined with the repeated suicide bombings from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad helped derail attempts to achieve a durable peace. Hamas threatened, tortured, and assassinated many Palestinians it accused of collaborating with the state of state of Israel.
If the Trump plan is going to succeed, its going to have help heal the divides in both Israeli and Palestinian societies or at the very least incentivize and empower moderates in both camps to be able to crack down on the rejectionists. While a ceasefire may have been tenuously achieved in Gaza, Israeli-settlers continue to carry out regular pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank largely with the backing of the current Israeli government and the IDF. If Trump fails to do so all the boisterous statements will be for not and his peace plan will amount to no more than all those that came before it.
