Less than two weeks ago, Hamas militants entered Israel and murdered 1,400 people, the vast majority of whom were civilians. They killed entire families, burned people alive, massacred young people at a music festival, and filled babies with bullets.
Israel responded by choking off access to water, food, fuel, and electricity to the more than 2 million residents of Gaza and then proceeded to inundate the densely populated strip with more than 6,000 tons of bombs. Thus far, Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 3,000 Palestinians, including 1,000 children, according to the Palestinian health ministry. Forty-seven entire Gazan families have reportedly been killed. Nearly 13,000 Palestinians are injured. Other Palestinians have reportedly been reduced to drinking seawater. Conditions threaten to grow even more dire if and when Israel launches its impending ground invasion.
In the debate over the war, commentators often posit an inescapable conflict between ensuring Israel’s security and minimizing civilian casualties in Gaza. To prevent Hamas from menacing Israel, the thinking goes, the Israel Defense Forces must destroy its military capabilities. Yet since Hamas embeds itself in civilian infrastructure, Israel cannot defeat its enemy without killing innocents by the thousands.
But Yousef Munayyer believes that the supposed choice between Israel’s security and Gazans’ human rights is a false one. A Palestinian citizen of Israel and the head of the Palestine/Israel program at the Arab Center Washington, D.C., Munayyer argues that there is no military solution to Israel’s security dilemma. Reducing Gaza to rubble will only render it an even more fertile ground for violent extremism, guaranteeing that the region’s cycle of violence continues in perpetuity. In his view, the only way for Israel to win peace and security for its residents is to honor the Palestinians’ demands for freedom.
I spoke with Munayyer on Monday about conditions in Gaza, the failures of America’s Middle East policy, the case for a ceasefire, the “one-state solution,” how the October 7 attacks will change Israeli politics, and various objections to his outlook, among other things.
What is your sense of the current situation in Gaza? How does today’s humanitarian crisis compare to those generated by the war in 2014?
It’s a completely different order of magnitude. It’s hard to describe what we’ve been hearing. International humanitarian organizations are saying this is different than anything that happened previously. People who live in Gaza — we often talk about how we should understand that these are human beings, but I think to survive what they have survived, they must be superhuman in some way — but people who have lived through multiple wars and siege and occupation, they’re saying this is the worst that they have seen by far.
Of course, access to very necessary resources is cut off — electricity, water, fuel for backup generators. The basic services that people need. The hospitals are overflowing with the injured; ice-cream trucks are now being used because the hospital morgues no longer have capacity. Yeah, I don’t know. We could talk for an hour or days. You had a thousand children that have been killed already in nine days, which is double the number that the Israelis killed in the 2014 war, which lasted for over 50 days.
The Biden administration said Sunday that Israel would restore water to southern Gaza. But some reports out of that region suggest that water is still largely inaccessible. Have you heard anything about that issue from your connections in the region?
There’s some reports that people have limited and temporary access to water. But you have to remember that most of the water in Gaza — in normal times — is not fit for human consumption. And so often people rely on bottled water, especially in times like these. And there’s of course a limited supply of that. And so a basic necessity for human life is practically impossible to get now for many, many people. And those who do have limited supplies, they are dwindling very, very quickly. And that’s just one of the challenges that they’re facing right now.
As dire as the situation is today, it stands to grow worse upon Israel’s ground invasion, right? Do Gazans have any clear sense of what that would entail? Is there anything one can do to prepare for such a calamity?
To the extent that people are preparing for it, I can tell you that they are saying their good-byes. They are writing their last wills. They are huddled together with family members thinking that if they are going to be killed, at least they’ll all be killed together. When you have these massive bombardments in Gaza, entire families get wiped out. But other times, a family will have one lone survivor. Sometimes it’s an orphan child that has to live with that reality for the rest of their life. And there are many people who make sure to stay as close as possible to their loved ones, particularly as the bombardments increase in the areas that they’re in, so that if they’re killed, they’re all killed together.
Obviously, you consider Israel’s military campaign abominable for the contempt it’s shown toward civilians. And I agree. But for Israel, what do you think a just and rational response to the October 7 attacks would have looked like? How should Israel have responded to the murder of 1,400 people?
Well, I can tell you what it definitely doesn’t look like. It definitely doesn’t look like what we’re seeing now. This is not the first time that we have had this kind of bombardment of Gaza. This is something that has been repeated over and over again. It’s a policy that accepts the inevitable return of the same episode. Israeli policymakers refer to this as “mowing the lawn.” And there’s no morality in a war whose repetition is preplanned. This is about the absence of responsibility for protecting people. It’s only accepted because there is a sense that there’s no alternative.
And I think this line of thinking is incredibly dangerous for everyone involved, first and foremost for Palestinians because it’s always Palestinians that suffer in the greatest numbers — but not just for Palestinians. Do you think Israelis are going to be any safer because of the way that they’re torturing their neighbors in Gaza right now? Gaza is the most surveilled, most militarized spot on earth. All of the planes and the navy and the high-tech surveillance and the artificial-intelligence guns and under-the-ground tunnel detection and the high-tech missile interceptors and the troops and the every-other-year bombing the hell out of the place. How has that protected anyone?
There is always an alternative to mass killing. And the way I think this needs to be addressed is by resolving the underlying political grievances and the conditions that allow this to perpetuate. You have to remember that Israel occupied Gaza for 38 years on the ground before they pulled their troops out and continued their occupation from the outside. It was under those conditions that the Islamic resistance movement Hamas grew. So the idea that somehow Israel is going to do whatever it’s going to do in Gaza, and somehow the issue is going to go away or there’s going to then be security — it’s just an insane way to think about this.
Netanyahu’s government might respond by saying that they agree “mowing the lawn” has failed, which is why they have ramped up bombardment so viciously, and plan to mount a ground invasion that will (supposedly) destroy Hamas.
The Israeli philosophy has been that to deter Palestinians from fighting back, we must hit them harder and harder. And each time that they have done that, the Palestinian fighters in Gaza have demonstrated greater capabilities, including in ways that, just a few days ago, shocked the Israeli security establishment. At the same time, Palestinians have not become less opposed to what Israel is doing to them. They’ve only become more opposed. So there is something fundamentally broken here.
Let’s say that they do this ground invasion. First of all, it wouldn’t be the first time. They invaded in 2008, 2009. They did so in 2014. Each time that they went in on the ground, the number of civilian casualties spiked significantly and the Israelis began to take heavier losses as well. A short, easy military incursion into Gaza is not going to accomplish their stated objectives. And even a prolonged incursion, which it’s not clear that the Israeli military can carry out, won’t necessarily achieve the stated goal of dismantling Hamas. And in the end, what is left? What is left both in terms of Gaza as a place that’s home to millions of people that will no longer be habitable? And what is left in terms of the political situation on the ground? Who’s holding it, who’s responsible for it, who’s governing it? The Israelis. So we’re back to ‘67 and the same conditions that produced the resistance movement there to begin with. So it’s a commitment to a cycle of failure.
You’ve suggested that there is no military solution to Israel’s security problem and have counseled Israeli leaders to instead focus on resolving the “Palestinians’ core political grievances.” I can see (at least) two objections to that argument from the Israeli point of view. First, if Israel were to respond to a mass-casualty terror attack by making unprecedented concessions to Palestinian rights, would that not have the effect of increasing Hamas’s popular legitimacy and incentivizing further attacks? And second, could a government accountable to the Israeli electorate really mount no military response both to an attack at the scale of October 7 and to rocket attacks that are still ongoing? Would the Israeli public tolerate a government that took that stance?
The reason that you see political violence is because of an absence of rights and an absence of freedom. And when those things are genuinely addressed, the incentives to use political violence don’t go up, they go down, unless you believe that Palestinians are fundamentally and innately incapable of living in peace with other people. I just don’t believe that that’s the case. I will reject that time and time again because it’s flat wrong, it’s racist, and I don’t believe that about anybody.
So if we create the political conditions that address the core issues, the incentives for political violence go away and get reduced. And no one is saying that’s going to be done by flipping a switch or that it happens overnight. I understand that it doesn’t work like that. But I also understand that if we don’t move in that direction, then we are condemning everybody involved to repeated cycles of this, especially Palestinians who are going to pay the highest price. And I said the same thing in 2008. I said the same thing in 2012 and 2014 and 2021, the commitment to repeating these horrors has to be broken.
Certainly, it is deeply racist to suggest that Palestinians are somehow uniquely incapable of peaceful coexistence. But far-right Israeli settlers routinely launch attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, even though those settlers aren’t lacking in rights or freedom. So, doesn’t that suggest that hateful ideologies can lead people to engage in racist violence, even when they are not being systematically oppressed? And if that is the case, then do we have basis for assuming that Hamas would become less violent if Israel began honoring Palestinians’ basic rights? Or is the hope merely that Hamas would become marginalized, as Palestinians began to see a peaceful path to liberation?
You can’t kill ideas. You can only make them less popular. And there is no shortage, as you noted, of hateful political ideologies among Israelis, including that of the ruling party in the Israeli government. Which of course has far more power to affect outcomes on the ground than any Palestinian group does.
So the question is how one makes these ideologies less popular. And I don’t think you make Hamas’s ideas less popular by committing unprecedented killings of Palestinians. It just doesn’t make sense to me. And again, it’s not like the military approach hasn’t been tried. They’ve done this over and over and over and over again. Each time that they do it, they say that they have eliminated Hamas’s leadership. They have been killing leaders of Hamas for longer than probably anybody that was involved in the assault was alive. So how does this end?
If ending the conflict requires resolving the Palestinians’ political grievances, what would that entail? What would you say the core grievances are?
The denial of freedom to Palestinians in their homeland. It’s simple as it gets. That’s what is at the foundation of this. There are books written about this. We can get into the details of every little policy, but that’s what it boils down to.
And what would providing the Palestinians with freedom in their homeland require?
I’ve written on this extensively in a number of different places. I do not see a way in which a partition of this land works. I think the attempts at partitioning this land have been one of the drivers of the conflict, going back to 1947. I think that we have a one-state reality today. In the aftermath of the horrors that we’re seeing now, we will probably be in an even more entrenched one-state reality. So I think we have to address the issue from that starting point. The reality is that, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the land is effectively entirely controlled by one state. And in that state, there are millions of people who are denied basic rights to equality, the right to vote, the right to move freely, the right to equal treatment, before the law, the right to citizenship. All of those things have to be addressed for us to resolve these grievances in a comprehensive way.
As an American with cosmopolitan sensibilities, and a distaste for ethnic nationalism, I find the idea of a single democratic state in Israel-Palestine appealing. Yet most of the people in the region seem to feel differently at the moment. In one recent poll from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, just 8 percent of Palestinians expressed support for a “one democratic state” solution. By contrast 33 percent expressed support for a two-state solution, and 12 percent for a single state in which Jews do not have equal rights. Among Israelis, support for a one-state solution stood at 10 percent, while 29 percent favored a single apartheid state and 34 percent, a two-state solution.
So, a skeptic might look at those results, and at the depth of enmity that nearly a century of conflict has instilled in these two peoples, and conclude that proponents of a one-state solution are kidding themselves. We’re cosmopolitan idealists who are willfully ignoring the overwhelming desire among both Palestinians and Israelis for their own ethno-states. How do you think about that objection?
On the question of what’s realistic, I think it’s important to recognize that the status qup – which is one state that is devoid of freedom and equality – is not realistic. It is not sustainable.
No one’s lost money betting against peace in the Middle East. The easiest position in the world to take is that it’s not even worth trying. Change requires political courage. It’s hard to imagine in moments like this, but again, what are the alternatives? How many generations do we want to condemn to repeated versions of this into the future? And the ones that come in the future may very well be uglier than what we are seeing now. The idea that we just have to remain stuck here; I think that’s a moral failure and it needs to be rejected.
Speaking of moral failure, you wrote a few days ago that the United States was enabling mass atrocities in Palestine. What precisely is wrong with U.S. policy in this moment, and how could Washington better address both the immediate crisis in Gaza, and the broader obstacles to a lasting peace?
U.S. policy is wrong in so many ways. We have to understand that U.S. policy is complicit in creating the conditions that have enabled political violence and have prevented a peaceful solution or genuine negotiations that address the core issues. And, as it relates to Gaza, when we’ve seen these repeated episodes of violence, once the ceasefires are ultimately negotiated, the American response has been to be content and walk away. Sometimes, they contribute to cleaning up the mess on the ground, sometimes we leave it to others to do the reconstruction. But the fundamental political problem remains. And the message that sends to the Israelis, and to everybody else, is that we think this is sustainable.
It’s never been. And I think especially in the last several days, the American approach has essentially been to give the Israelis carte blanche. There’s been a persistent failure to condemn the constant Israeli rhetoric about creating tent cities and making Gaza unlivable. Or the targeting of the entirety of the population with cuts to water and fuel and electricity. And that’s sending entirely the wrong message. The same goes for sending U.S. aircraft carriers to the region. We are telling the Israelis that we will give them space to do whatever they need to do in the Gaza Strip, even as they’re talking about targeting all of the people there. It’s unconscionable.
The Biden administration clearly made a decision that, after October 7th, they were going to publicly hug the Israelis as tight as they possibly could. And that may have made a lot of sense for domestic political audiences. But the way it was received in the Arab world, particularly some of the rhetoric around ISIS and around this being a religious war – which to be fair Senator Lindsey Graham said, not the Biden administration – but the emphasis on referring to the Holocaust and making this some sort of global religious confrontation was really seen very negatively throughout the Arab world. Because the Arab world simply does not see the Israeli-Palestinian issue that way.
So what are the biggest levers that the U.S. could pull if it had the will, in terms of pushing the Israelis toward a different course?
The first and most important thing is to try to get an immediate ceasefire in place and end the bombing of 2.2 million people who’ve been trapped in the Gaza Strip. What we are seeing in Gaza now is unbearable, and it might be nothing compared to what we’d see if the Israelis go in on the ground. And what we would see then might be nothing compared to what we’ll see if that situation becomes a regional conflagration.
And I think we are much closer to that than anyone is really talking about honestly in public. We are getting closer to a stage where miscalculations are more likely and it becomes harder and harder to get this situation under control. And it will have devastating impacts for the region. It’ll have devastating impacts for American interests as well, and may very well draw the United States into a major regional war. But our officials are not talking to the American public about the stakes involved here in any honest way. But that is very much a possibility if the situation in Gaza continues to get worse.
To be clear, a regional conflict would look like Iran encouraging Hezbollah to attack, or Iran directly getting involved, or what is that calamity most likely to look like?
It’s all of the above and more. We haven’t even mentioned the Palestinian arena. People in the region are horrified by what they are seeing happen in Gaza. We are not seeing this because our media is presenting an alternate reality to what the region is seeing. And whether one thinks that’s right or not, it is shaping the perspectives of hundreds of millions of people. There have been massive demonstrations throughout the Middle East and North Africa in support of Palestinians. There is a real chance of greater destabilization in a number of these countries that are seen as complicit in this because of their normalized ties with Israel and their relationship with the United States as well.
We can’t ignore the possibility that what’s happening will further destabilize Egypt as well. And we haven’t even talked about, of course, all of the different militias in the area who are part of a network that may very well be activated either individually or collectively if a ground incursion happens or as a ground incursion escalates. And so when we start sending aircraft carriers to the region to effectively signal to the Israelis, “You can have your way in Gaza,” this is dangerous brinkmanship.
Relatedly, one reason we got here is that U.S. policymakers refused to recognize the risks inherent to their own policy in the region. So many leaders in the Middle East were telling us that if you don’t address this issue, it’s going to turn into a regional explosion that we may not be able to control. And when all of those messages from American allies are ignored repeatedly, it becomes hard to get them to listen when the explosion finally comes.
How much power does the U.S. have to dictate terms to Israel? We obviously provide them with military aid. But that’s a byproduct of domestic politics not geopolitical necessity. Israel is a rich country with one of the world’s most powerful militaries. It doesn’t actually need U.S. handouts to invade Gaza. So beyond withdrawing aid, what tools could the U.S. theoretically use to twist Israel’s arm?
Obviously, the Israelis have the weapons to do a tremendous amount of damage on their own. They don’t need more American weapons to do that. But the Israelis also rely on the Americans and other Western allies to give them political cover to do what they will in Gaza. So withdrawing that cover is one thing.
In the last several days, Washington’s public messaging has started to evolve a little bit. But it has been overwhelmingly supportive of Israel. We saw some strange comments from Biden the other night saying that Israel shouldn’t reoccupy Gaza, as if it doesn’t effectively control it already. And it just makes you wonder what the actual goal of U.S. policy is, in terms of an end game. Or if the U.S. was so unprepared for this moment that they don’t even understand what an end game could be, which is very dangerous given the stakes here.
If only a political settlement can resolve Israel’s security problem, what does the path to such a settlement look like? Right now, there doesn’t seem to be much of any political will within Israel to make substantial concessions to the Palestinians. So how does that change? Who has the agency to create the political space necessary for such concessions, and how can they go about doing so?
Israeli society is in a state of profound shock now over these events. And I think they will be asking some very difficult questions moving forward about what their future looks like and what a path to security alongside Palestinians looks like. And again, I think it’s hard to argue, after everything we’ve seen, that military tools are somehow going to work. Bigger guns, higher tech detection, and tighter sieges, all of that failed. And it was not just a failure of equipment and intelligence, it was a failure of the state, which I think in some ways presents an existential question for Israelis.
Not because there are forces that are capable of actually challenging the Israeli military in a material way, but because the state failed in its primary goal, which was supposed to be, as they say, the protection of the Jewish people. Is the state capable of that? I think a lot of Israelis are going to be asking the question about whether or not the state is capable of delivering on that promise with the tools that it has been using. And if not, then what is the answer? And surely there will be some Israelis who will say, “Military tools are not going to work so long as there is a Palestinian population in our midst. And we are going to have to ethnically cleanse them all or commit genocide and then batten down the hatches and become even more of a garrison state.”
But I would like to think that there are people who will take a different approach, who understand that there is no alternative to living in justice and equality with Palestinians, that without that, Israelis too will not have security and safety.
So you think that this shift can happen internally from changes in Israel’s domestic politics? Or is some form of international pressure, such as state sanctions or boycotts in response to Israel’s violations of international law necessary to give Israeli leaders the incentive to change course?
Those things go hand in hand. I think there is an obligation on global civil society to be in solidarity with those whose human rights are being denied. And I think there’s a need for international accountability mechanisms to function. We’ve heard a lot about war crimes and condemnations in recent days. But if we want a rules-based order and not the law of the jungle, the rules need to apply to everybody, including Israel. One thing we need to learn from this moment is that there are gigantic dangers for failing to enforce international law.
I think we have barely begun to understand the implications of these events for Israeli politics. But I think there is going to be a massive earthquake. Netanyahu has built an entire political career around the idea that he knows how to provide security for Israelis better than anyone else, that all of his political opponents are failures at security at best and Arab lovers at worst. And he has presided over the single biggest security catastrophe in Israeli history. There’s no escaping that. And I think the implications of that will be profound for Israeli politics. I don’t know how soon they will start to happen. But I think we get closer to that every day. And I think Israelis are outraged at the failures of their government. What they decide to put in its place will be interesting to see. But the implications of this for Israeli politics will be long-lasting. It’s not going to be about the next immediate government. It may shape Israeli politics for years to come.
More on the Israel-Hamas War
- Trump’s Gaza Plan Is Ethnic Cleansing for Israel
- Why the Gaza Cease-fire Probably Won’t Last
- The World Reacts to Reported Israel-Hamas Cease-fire: Photos
