Amos Schocken is the publisher of Haaretz, an Israeli publication founded by his grandfather, who was a publisher and founder of a chain of department stores in Germany who left for Palestine in 1934. His father edited Haaretz for 50 years and served in the Knesset.
He wrote the following editorial, which was titled “A Palestinian State Would Rescue Israel. It Would Not Be a Reward for Hamas.”
He began:
The Netanyahu government is already perpetrating a Nakba against the Palestinians of the West Bank, and is planning to inflict another on the Palestinians of Gaza. It’s time to end the disaster that the settlement movement has inflicted on Israel, end the war and establish a Palestinian state.
It’s now clear what plan Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir are following: A Nakba for all the Gaza Strip’s Palestinian residents. The Netanyahu government seeks to throw all the Palestinians out of their homes and pack them into a section of southern Gaza in inhumane conditions. It’s also looking for countries willing to take them in.
The government is already perpetrating a Nakba against the Palestinian residents of the occupied territory in the West Bank, via the settlers and the army. They’re throwing Palestinians out of their homes, perhaps with the goal of concentrating them all in Area A, the part of the West Bank that the Oslo Accords assigned to full Palestinian control.
The flip side of these Nakbas is annexing the territory and building Israeli settlements in all the areas cleared of Palestinians. This violates international law and the United Nations Charter, which states that territory may not be acquired through war, even a victorious war. It’s hard to see how, once the government’s plan is implemented, it will be possible to live in Israel.
Normal life in Israel can only exist if the 100-year war with the Palestinians ends. And today, it’s accepted around the world, including in the Arab world, that this war should end with the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The New York Declaration – the concluding statement of last month’s conference at UN headquarters in New York, led by France and Saudi Arabia with many other countries taking part – is the basis for ending the conflict.
The declaration states that the participants “agreed to take collective action to end the war in Gaza, to achieve a just, peaceful and lasting settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on the effective implementation of the two-state solution, and to build a better future for Palestinians, Israelis and all peoples of the region.
It adds: “Recent developments have highlighted, once again, and more than ever, the terrifying human toll and the grave implications for regional and international peace and security of the persistence of the Middle East conflict. Absent decisive measures towards the two-state solution and robust international guarantees, the conflict will deepen and regional peace will remain elusive.”
Turkey’s representative at the conference said that given Israel’s conduct over decades, Palestinian militant organizations will not give up their arms without the establishment of an independent, sovereign, contiguous Palestinian state in the 1967 boundaries with East Jerusalem as its capital, or pursuant to the provisions of a peace treaty.
The final statement was approved by France, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Mexico, Norway, Qatar, Senegal, Spain, Britain, the European Union and the Arab League.
The declaration calls for an immediate end to Israel’s war in Gaza and backs the efforts by Egypt, Qatar and the United States to mediate a cease-fire deal between the parties. It stresses the need for a cease-fire, the return of all the hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners and a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. After the cease-fire, a temporary committee will be set up to run Gaza under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority.
The declaration says Gaza is an integral part of the Palestinian state and must be united with the West Bank. It adds that governance, law enforcement and security throughout this state will rest exclusively with the Palestinian Authority, backed by international support. It welcomes the PA’s call for “one state, one government, one law, one gun” and pledges to support this.
The declaration also adopts the conference participants’ proposals for full cooperation with the cases against Israel being conducted at international courts.
Israel’s leaders claim that recognizing a Palestinian state would reward Hamas for its attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. But this wouldn’t be a reward for Hamas, because Hamas is like Smotrich but in reverse: It opposes the existence of a Jewish state in the region.
If anything, a Palestinian state would be a reward for Israel, which would be freed of the brutal apartheid regime over the Palestinians that Israeli governments, always serving the interests of the Gush Emunim settlement movement, have carried out in the occupied territories for 58 years now. Palestinian terror is the result of the situation that Israeli settlements created in the territories. And despite an occupying power’s obligation to enable residents of occupied territory to live normal lives, Israel has done the opposite, heaping abuse on the Palestinians.
Fourteen years ago, in November 2011, I published an op-ed in Haaretz, “The Necessary Elimination of Israeli Democracy.” I quoted a speech to the Knesset by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in January 1993.
“Our assessment is that Iran today has the appropriate manpower and sufficient resources to acquire nuclear arms within 10 years,” Rabin said. “Together with others in the international community, we are monitoring Iran’s nuclear activity. They are not concealing the fact that the possibility that Iran will possess nuclear weapons is worrisome, and this is one of the reasons that we must take advantage of the window of opportunity and advance toward peace.”
With a state, security cooperation with the PA will only grow stronger, and there will be no reason for terrorism.
I said that Israel had adopted a political strategy whose implementation began with the Oslo Accords. This included ending the preferences given the settlement movement and improving the treatment of Israel’s Arab citizens. And if things had developed differently, I wrote, the Iran situation might look different today. But this strategy clashed with a stronger ideology – that of Gush Emunim.
That ideology saw the Six-Day War as a continuation of the War of Independence. It held that the borders acquired in the 1967 war are the right ones for Israel, and it imposed a hard-line policy on the Palestinians in the occupied territories based on depriving them of rights, installing apartheid and encouraging them to leave.
This is an ideology driven by religious rather than political concerns, and it assumes that the Land of Israel belongs exclusively to the Jews. Because of this, Israel’s Arab citizens are also exposed to discrimination and the risk of being stripped of their citizenship. This ideology has no problem with criminal acts because it rests on what it deems a higher law that lacks a connection to either Israeli or international law. That’s how it led to Rabin’s murder.
I said in that piece that since 1967, no group in Israel has had as much ideological power as Gush Emunim, which has also gained American support and influenced the legislation aimed at undermining the Supreme Court and human rights groups. I warned that this unstable, dangerous situation prevents Israel from realizing its full potential and could lead to the collapse of the peace agreement with Egypt, a third intifada and Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, just as Rabin warned.
Today, the time has come to finally end the disaster that Gush Emunim and the settlement movement have brought down on Israel by denying it the possibility of agreeing to a Palestinian state and requiring it to fight the Palestinians, who, just like the Jews, still want sovereignty, independence and responsibility for their own fate and national honor.
One argument made against establishing a Palestinian state is that it will threaten Israel’s security. For instance, Gilad Erdan, Israel’s previous UN ambassador, considers such a state an immediate existential threat to Israel. “Any area in the hills of Judea and Samaria that is handed over could be used tomorrow morning as a zero-distance base for launching missiles and ground invasions that would threaten the heart of the country,” he wrote in the Israel Hayom daily on June 29.
But this is a ludicrous claim. The Palestinian state will be demilitarized, the existing security cooperation between the PA and Israel will only grow stronger, and when the Palestinians become citizens of their own country – and we have to assume that the connection with Israel will give them certain advantages – there will be no reason for terrorism, only for good relations.
If Netanyahu understood the blow that October 7 was to his policy, he would opt for a state led by the PA, which Hamas hates.
Netanyahu has consistently opposed any involvement by the PA in resolving the situation in Gaza, contrary to the New York Declaration, which views such involvement favorably. He has two arguments. One is that the PA supports terror – a false claim, since Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said explicitly at his inauguration that he opposes violence and will pursue diplomacy only. The second argument is that the PA education system promotes hostility to Israel.
The PA is convenient for Israel’s government because if Israel were responsible for the 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank, it would need an enormous budget. And Netanyahu’s complaints about the PA education system are utterly hypocritical.
First, he never sought a meeting with Abbas in an effort to fix the things he doesn’t like about the PA. And have you ever heard Netanyahu talk about the education of the “hilltop youth” or other settlers who abuse Palestinians in the service of the government’s interests? Haaretz has reported on their violent actions nonstop, but that doesn’t interest Netanyahu.
Or have you ever heard him urge his Knesset colleagues to do what should be obvious in any democracy? That is, leave prominent Arab Israeli lawmaker Ayman Odeh alone, because his presence in the Knesset is important to Israel. No, Netanyahu hasn’t done that either. So he has no grounds to complain about the Palestinians’ education.
How did we get here? The answer is clear: Netanyahu is spearheading a policy that is dangerous to Israel’s future and to its citizens, who are the victims of the ongoing Palestinian terror and are now loathed by many people around the world. His policy is also dangerous to the Jewish people, who are suffering from rising antisemitism due to the death and destruction in Gaza. The policy he has implemented throughout his terms as prime minister completely ignores the Palestinians’ aspirations for self-determination and political independence.
Netanyahu has supported the ultra-Orthodox and the settlers, who continue to do as they please with the country. No decent person would dare form a government with Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, extremist settlers who hate Arabs. But Netanyahu’s government guidelines with them say that only Jews have rights throughout the Land of Israel. In this way, too, he invited the October 7 attack. Nor would any decent person facing charges in court dare assault the legal system the way he has.
Netanyahu shamelessly continues to postpone any discussion of postwar arrangements. If he were smart and understood that October 7 was a decisive blow to his policy of ignoring Palestinian interests, he would have decided on his own to establish a Palestinian state led by the PA – which Hamas hates – enshrined in suitable agreements. If he had decided on this quickly, it would have spared the lives of many Palestinians and Israeli soldiers.
In January 2024, I published an op-ed in Haaretz saying that Israel would win if it got all the hostages back – even in exchange for Palestinian prisoners – and agreed to then-U.S. President Joe Biden’s stance favoring the establishment of a Palestinian state. A month later, I reiterated this in an op-ed whose headline called for a return of the hostages and the establishment of a Palestinian state.
In response to Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations in September 2024, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi held a press conference at the UN with Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan, Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty and Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa. Safadi said that “all of us in the Arab world here, we want a peace in which Israel lives in peace and security … in the context of ending the occupation, withdrawing from Arab territory, allowing for the emergence of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state on the June 4, 1967 lines. … That’s our narrative.”
He continued: “After 30 years of efforts to convince people that peace is possible, this Israeli government killed it. … We want peace, and we have laid out a plan for peace. Ask any Israeli official, what is their plan for peace? You will get nothing because they are only thinking of the first step – we are going to go and destroy Gaza, inflame the West Bank, destroy Lebanon. … We have no partner for peace in Israel.”
The past 30 years have largely been Netanyahu’s watch. And he has brought disaster down on Israel.