The only way for Israel to get security is to obtain peace with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbours.
Nikolaos van Dam[1]
The Hamas 7 October 2023 attack could have simply been prevented, had Israel been willing to make peace with the Palestinians a long time ago. There were various opportunities, but Israel imagined it could keep the Palestinian Occupied Territories indefinitely, with in the end as few Palestinians as possible.
Israel was convinced that it could get away with more or less everything it was doing, with impunity and without any accountability, because its innumerable war crimes and violations of international law were condoned by most of the Western world, the United States and the European Union in particular. These countries therefore share co-responsibility for Israel’s crimes.
All this, of course, did not start on 7 October 2023, when the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) attacked Israel and killed some 1,100 people. Actually, it already started in the mid-nineteenth century when Zionism first took the shape of an evangelical Christian eschatological vision and as a so-called attempt to rescue Europe’s Jews from anti-Semitism.
Towards the end of that century, Zionism had been transformed into a settler-colonial operation in Palestine, targeting its Indigenous population as alien, considering them as a major obstacle to building a modern so-called “democratic” Jewish state in the heart of the Arab world. [2]
The Israeli concept of “democracy” was applied by the Zionists to Jews only, not to the Palestinians, the original inhabitants of Palestine. These were ignored, or at most considered as an inconvenient stumbling block on the road to full Zionist Jewish domination of the whole of Palestine.
The foreign Zionists, coming from Europe, the United States and elsewhere, behaved like cuckoo birds laying their eggs in a stranger’s nest, being that of the Palestinians, monopolising it, and subsequently pushing the original inhabitants out.
Already during the 1920s and 1930s, once it had become apparent that the Zionist Jews had come to Palestine to take over the country, the Palestinians started to strongly oppose the arrival of the Zionists and they repeatedly rebelled, but to no avail. Their right to self-determination was simply ignored by the Zionists, the British Mandate and others.
The coming into existence of Israel, and its subsequent history has been based on widespread Zionist Jewish terrorism. Whereas the single date of “7 October” may be traumatic for many Israelis, there are countless dates which were much worse for the Palestinians, because of the innumerable Zionist and Israeli acts of terrorism, which certainly have not been forgotten.
I commemorate here the Deir Yasin massacre of 9 April 1948 in particular, because it was in fact the start of the so-called Israeli “Plan Dalet”, which was intended to implement the large-scale ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians. It was carried out (already before the proclamation of the State of Israel), by the Zionist terrorist group Irgun and the Stern Gang, led respectively by Menahem Begin (from White Russia) and Yitzhak Shamir (from then Poland), both later prime ministers of Israel. It would be unrealistic for the Israelis and pro-Israel groups to expect the Palestinians and others to simply forget and forgive these war crimes.
Those in the West who have supported Zionism, share one element in common: they wanted the Jews to migrate elsewhere, but not to their own countries.
This applied to both the first Christian “Zionists”, to Lord Balfour of the infamous Balfour Declaration, as well as to most foreigners who unequivocally have supported Israel. Balfour – who himself did not hide being an antisemite – did not want the persecuted Jews from Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe, to come to Great Britain. He conveniently wanted them to go elsewhere, in this case to Palestine.
A similar position was taken by many pro-Israel people. If one would ask all those pro-Israel countries and people whether or not they would be prepared to absorb and warmly welcome the millions of Jews living in Israel as new citizens in their own countries, they would probably be shocked and outraged, as they prefer continuing to shift the problem to others, in this case to the Palestinians and the Arab countries.
I once attended a lecture of an Israeli parliamentarian, who enthusiastically read out the first 18 keywords of the Balfour Declaration, saying that Great Britain viewed “with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. But the same Israeli conveniently omitted the second part saying that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civilian and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.
In other words, the Jewish immigrants to Palestine of course had to fully take account of the vast majority of 90 per cent (!) of the population. If the principles of the Balfour Declaration – in themselves illegitimate – would have been respected, it would not have been such a big problem for the Palestinians, but the Zionist Jews did not, and in practice fully ignored its second part.
At first, the Zionist Jews became Palestinian citizens under the British Mandate over Palestine. After the establishment of Israel, however, they started to deny the existence of Palestine and the Palestinians. They kept lying with their fantasy slogans such as Palestine being “a country without a people”, “predestined for the Jews”, being “a people without a country”.
The main aim of Hamas to attack Israel on 7 October 2023, called Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, cannot have been anything else but getting Palestine on the political agenda again, because there was no way in which Hamas could ever have imagined that with their hang gliders, motorcycles, machine guns and amateur rockets, they could ever have won their war against Israel, having by far the most powerful army in the Middle East.
And Hamas indeed succeeded in getting Palestine on the political agenda again, albeit at a disastrous human and material cost, which may have been much higher than they expected. Whatever the case, Hamas never had the slightest chance of threatening the existence of Israel.
Without the Hamas attack, Palestine was bound to gradually disappear from the political agendas, the more so as Israel appeared to succeed in circumventing the key issue of Palestine by separate peace agreements with various Arab states via the so-called Abraham Accords.
Israel has not learnt any lessons from the October 1973 War, which was only started by Egypt and Syria to regain their occupied territories of the Sinai Desert and the Golan Heights.[3] Israel had unrealistically imagined that it could keep these occupied territories forever. Therefore, the Egyptian-Syrian attack on 6 October 1973 came as a complete surprise, just like the Hamas attack fifty years later on 7 October 2023. Because of its arrogance of power supremacy, Israel at the time had not in the least been interested in any peace talks with Egypt, let alone with Syria.
Israel had been even less interested in any serious peace agreement with the Palestinians, because that would imply giving up the Palestinian territories it had occupied since the June 1967 War, with perhaps some exchanges of territories. After all, the ruling Likud Party had already in 1977 declared that “Judea and Samaria will not be handed over to any foreign administration” and that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”.
Whereas the pro-Palestinian slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” was forbidden and strongly criticized in various Western pro-Israel countries as being “a threat to Israel”, the similar Israeli Likud slogan was just taken for granted without any repercussions for Israel, even though it already had been implemented for decades with many war crimes at the severe cost of the Palestinians.
Taking the Likud party covenant into account, it can be taken for granted that not any Likud-led Israeli government since 1977 has ever been willing to withdraw from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, let alone to accept the two-state formula.
The presence of some 750,000 illegal Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem is the clearest indicator of Israel’s intention to stay there forever. The settlements were occasionally criticized by Western countries as not being “conducive to peace”, but that was about all.
Apart from some critical political statements, there were no sanctions, and Israel kept being romanticised by many Westerners as being the “only democracy in the Middle East”, with “the most moral army in the world”, “making the desert bloom”, and other unrealistic propagandistic Zionist clichés. And that at a time when Israel was responsible for thousands, if not millions of war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and severe forms of discrimination against the Palestinians within both Israel itself and the Palestinian Occupied Territories of 1967. [4]
The key issue now is not only a ceasefire in Gaza, but much more to achieve a final solution for the Palestinians and the Israeli presence in their country Palestine and in the Arab region. Only a peace agreement will prevent similar attacks from happening again in future, because the pretext will then have been removed. The only way for Israel to get security is to obtain peace with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbours.
What are the perspectives for the future? There appear to be two main scenarios:
1. Continued Israeli aggression as has happened from the early beginnings of the Zionist presence in Palestine till the present. This scenario means war for an indefinite period, without any real prospects for peace and security for both Israel and the region. It will create ever more enemies for Israel, just as has happened over the last century. And it will take several generations for the Arab hatred, created by Israel’s behaviour, to perhaps eventually diminish and somewhat disappear, if ever. Even after 45 and 30 years, since Egypt and Jordan signed peace agreements with Israel, their relations with Israel are still extremely cold, particularly because of the latter’s aggressive behaviour, including many war crimes.
2. Israel takes the “risk” of making peace with its enemies in the region, by fully withdrawing from the Palestinian Occupied Territories (1967) and the Golan Heights, and accepting the establishment of a Palestinian state. Achieving peace with all its Arab neighbours does not constitute an airtight guarantee, however, that no accountability will ever be demanded from Israel, and that there will not ever be any Arab attacks against Israel in the future with the aim of settling accounts for the unaccountability and impunity for Israel’s countless war crimes in the past. The Russian Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote as early as 1923 that “as long as the Arabs feel that there is the least hope of getting rid of [the Zionist Jews in Palestine], they will refuse to give up this hope”. [5]
As long as Israel maintains its military superiority, however, it will not be in real danger.
The first scenario means that there will never be peace for Israel and its neighbours. The alternative means that there will most probably be peace for Israel and its neighbours. As Israel is presently not prepared to voluntarily withdraw from the Palestinian Occupied Territories (and those of Syria), it will have to be forced to do so.
The latter is also in the interest of Israel’s supporters, certainly in the longer term. As long as the countries supporting Israel are not willing to force it, however, they have to accept that there will be war indefinitely, which is against both their own interests and those of the peoples of the Middle East.
A refusal to force Israel into peace may indirectly lead to drawing various countries unwantedly into an even wider large-scale regional war, with potentially devastating consequences, including for the Arab allies of several Western countries, if not for Israel’s own Western supporters. Rather than a supposed strategic asset to its allies and friends, Israel – with its numerous nuclear weapons – is more likely to prove to be a huge burden and danger to the entire region and beyond.
There is a way out towards a solution. It is just a matter of choosing the right alternative, to prevent further avoidable disasters.
1 Nikolaos van Dam is the former Dutch ambassador to Indonesia, Germany, Turkey, Egypt and Iraq, and Special Envoy for Syria. As a junior diplomat, he served in Lebanon, Jordan, the Palestinian Occupied Territories and Libya. He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Syria and Destroying a Nation: The Civil War in Syria.
2 Ilan Pappé, Lobbying for Israel on both sides of the Atlantic (2024), pp. 51-52.
3 Amnon Kapeliouk, Not by Omission. The case of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war (2022).
4 When adding the number of 750,000 ethnically cleansed Palestinians, the number of 750,000 Jewish settlers, the Israeli collective punishment against the more than two million Gazans, the killing of more than 40,000 civilians in Gaza since October 2023, we already have more than three and half million Israeli war crimes. In fact, the number of Israeli war crimes runs into many more millions, including those in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and various other countries.
5 https://en.jabotinsky.org/media/9747/the-iron-wall.pdf