The October 7 Hamas al-Aqsa Flood invasion from its independent entity of the Gaza Strip that included Palestinian Gazans of all ages and gender, focused on massacring, burning, raping and looting, and abducting Israeli babies, children, women and elderly, is embedded as a day of Palestinian pride. Its aftermath, in the form of Israel’s counterattack into the weapon-and-tunnel-infested, densely populated Gaza Strip, has generated unprecedented antisemitic and anti-Israeli tones, and hate crimes in the Western world. This quake possesses a new challenge for Western statesmanship.
The terrifying chant “from the River to the Sea” in streets from Sydney through London and down to small-town USA (not to mention academic havens) reflects a decisive turning point in the future of Western society. This chant, which demonstrates a vision of the full destruction of democratic Israel and its Jewish and (20%) Muslim inhabitants, still appears to be equivocally unaccepted by Western governments.
However, these governments in turn and to portray poor equity, strongly and optimistically advocate for a seemingly win-win effort – the two-state solution of a yet-to-be-founded, non-democratic Palestinian state bordering the current State of Israel. This vision comprises a continuation of 30 years of attempts to manifest the 1993 Oslo Accords into a Palestinian state. The repetitive Palestinian turndown of these statehood offers is strong evidence of their overarching intentions as explained below.
Due to the criminal intent and actions of October 7, the two-state vision is unforeseeable by an unprecedented Israeli majority. In February, the Knesset backed Prime Minister Netanyahu’s declaration opposing any “unilateral” recognition of a Palestinian state, in response to a growing international call for the revival of efforts to establish such a state.
This decision appears to have been one the catalysts of a supposed rift between Israel and its Western allies. But it is also a call to craft more creative efforts to stabilize the Palestinian-Israeli and, essentially, the Arab-Israeli conflict that since October 7 has generated immense and mounting impact even on internal policies of Western countries. This link between the al-Aqsa Flood murder spree and the streets and Western world parliaments needs to be understood and monitored.
Two-state solution based on several hypotheses
The two-state solution is based on several fundamental working hypotheses. One, that Israel will finally be accepted as a legitimate Jewish state by the Palestinians; two, a Palestinian state will be an economically and socially sustainable one, opposed to the degraded and sensitive internal situation of the four Arab states that border Israel; three, that this agreement will be accepted by the world and, in particular, by the Islamic Middle East states; four, that Israel and the Palestinian state will not be hostile to each other and five, in the wake of hostilities anticipated to be initiated by the Palestinians as has occurred numerous times, the world will provide efficient armed forces to monitor such escalations.
DESPITE THE fact that even the first clause has never been achieved, the Hamas invasion demonstrated to Israel that its forces, obstacles, surveillance and hi-tech intelligence, along with Western support, have limitations in anticipating, blocking and counter-attacking Palestinian invasions. As a result these rationales for a two-state solution have, painfully, virtually dissolved. However, many Arabs and westerners still claim that if there was a Palestinian state, there would be no rationale for the Hamas onslaught. Accordingly, such a state has never been timelier?
The war against Hamas and the different perceptions of it between the West and Israel, contemporaneous with the political and military strengthening of the Russia-China-Iran axis, demonstrates that a global turning point is imminent. Fully perceiving the situation requires in-depth understanding of the driving forces of the conflict. Indeed, the last months were helpful in elucidating some of the dormant motives of the Palestinians and many of their Western supporters.
The emerging genocidal River-to-the-Sea call, despite not being fully understood by many Westerners, is nothing new for any educated Muslim nurtured between Pakistan and Morocco. In many Muslim countries and even in Western academic journals, the State of Israel is not recognized in any fashion. The consequent stream of this canceling call signifies that dark parts of Islamic culture are deeply embedded and established in significant parts of non-Islamic populations of the West.
This Islamic-sourced call and the total abandonment of discourse or verification of facts naturally radiates a domino-like, antisemitic fervor upon local Jewish populations. The cancel culture in social media further paralyzes the masses that possess empathy for both sides.
Altogether, this new social map, supported by indigenous and woke populations, is challenging. The aggressive progressives appear to be depleting the diplomatic and legislative toolbox of Western leadership to efficiently deal with Islamic expansion and physical and vocal violence in Western countries.
Actually, the terminology and narrative of the two-state solution comes in handy to deeply grasp the geopolitical dynamics. The “solution” has been adopted to assume that a newly established Palestinian state alongside Israel will be a grand resolution to the Palestinian-Israel, Arab-Israel and possibly Islam-West conflicts. The River-to-the-Sea call, its derivatives, and the everlasting call of Hamas and most other Palestinian organizations to eliminate Israel, clearly imply that two states of any sort are unacceptable. Furthermore, the notion of a solution is self-deceiving.
THE PRESERVATION of the Palestinian resistance narrative and unprecedented, fossilized UNWRA refugee status exemplifies that a solution can only be reached when the descendants of the refugees will be allowed to become Israeli residents while areas considered to be allocated for a Palestinian state will be clean of Jews – an absurd scenario. In other words, even two states in any type of configuration is not a solution for both the Palestinians and most of Islamic countries, rather a stage in the Islamic-fueled fantasy that one day an Islamic entity will fully occupy historic and modern Israel between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
This fantasy allows non-democratic Arab regimes to explicitly and consistently resist providing haven for Palestinians and passively to actively enjoy supporting the bloody conflict between the Palestinians and Israel. This tailored conflict is also anticipated to weaken Israel and deplete it from international support due to Israel’s one-sided moral obligations to abide by international law. As such, and so unfortunately, the Palestinian-Israel, and also Arab-Israel and Islam-West conflicts appear to continue to be inevitable.
To turn the tables of the current Arab-Israel war the above understandings have to be explicitly reoriented into action. Wishful Western solutions have to be discarded and original approaches that boldly confront the inner motives of the regional players are needed. Leading nations are obligated to provide new and previously unaccepted opportunities that require significant action.
Palestinian autonomous existence in Judea and Samaria and possibly complex rehabilitation in the destroyed Gaza Strip can continue only under condition that these Arabs fully obliterate their terror culture; there is no evidence of such a trend. Therefore, Palestinians need to be allowed, as many of them sincerely want, basic human rights and freedom to emigrate to a wide range of Arab and Western countries to pursue better lives.
As part of this pan-Palestinian plan, Israel will need to provide assistance, such as unification of families and full citizenship of its original Arab residents of east Jerusalem, upon their formal acceptance of the State of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people. Isolated Yemen Houthis, Hezbollah or/and Iranian strategic assets, have to be subdued by coalition forces.
If such a road map is clearly pursued, Gulf-oriented Arab countries will likely continue their quest to better their economies and defense by cooperating with Israel, which could – in time – lead to improved human rights in these countries. This process may be a positive tipping point for other Islamic regimes. Uprooting the 75-year Palestinian lockdown may partially undermine hardcore Islamic regimes and approaches, possibly in significant parts of the Middle East and its enrooted tentacles in the West.
This axis of development that will reinforce Western cooperation in the Middle East is crucial to unite the Western world into a rejuvenated stand against rapidly growing threats from the rapidly emerging Asian coalitions. But if Western academia, policy institutes, and governments continue to tread stagnating water on these issues, and focus on comfort-zone climate change and internal issues along with equity-oriented policies, a wave of bloody floods that may dwarf the Russian invasion of Ukraine may soon become imminent.
The writer is a geologist and geographer, and a faculty member of the Department of Environment, Planning and Sustainability at Bar-Ilan University.