On Jan. 20, 2029, in the early evening, a new occupant will sit down in the Oval Office at the White House. In front of the cameras, following the tradition of the last decade, he’ll sign a long string of executive orders that will instantly and sharply alter the course of the great American aircraft carrier. If he’s a Democrat, and the odds of that now stand at 50% at least, among the stack of papers his aides hand him will likely be recognition of a Palestinian state, a ban on importing goods from the settlements, sanctions on a string of right-wing Israeli politicians and more still to come.
It’s remarkable how little connection there is between the shabby, substance-free Israeli election campaign that’s been running here these past months and the real issue of the next term: the head-on collision approaching between Israel and the world over the Palestinian question.
This is the diabolical legacy of the tormentor Yahya Sinwar, the senior Hamas leader who, in dying, bequeathed the return of this issue to the center of the international table at the exact moment Israel has run out of supporters for establishing a hostile Islamist terror state next to the central city of Kfar Saba, given the bitter experience of Kfar Aza.
The only one who has proposed anything along these lines is Avigdor Liberman. His plan to bring Jordanian forces into the territories of Judea and Samaria is, in my view, a bitter mistake and a terrible error, but at least he understands that Israel has to seize the initiative rather than keep sailing calmly toward the iceberg. Gadi Eisenkot swings back and forth between visiting Gush Etzion and reversing Bezalel Smotrich’s moves in the West Bank; the coalition’s answer is to stick with the current course—another dunam, another goat—in the hope that the world will get used to it.
“This isn’t a foregone conclusion,” a source who knows a thing or two about U.S.-Israel relations tells me. “Even a hostile Democratic administration won’t rush to drop the automatic veto at the Security Council or recognize a state if we’re on a stable, positive track.”
He, for instance, laments the scrapping of the annexation clause in Trump’s “Deal of the Century,” whose absence has let settlement efforts sprawl across the whole territory instead of gaining legitimacy for applying sovereignty.
But looking ahead, he says, the real story is Gaza. That’s where everything started, and that’s where everything will be decided. The Trump plan that ended the war is a significant achievement worth holding onto because it’s the first one that attempts to decouple the territory between the Jordan and the sea from the Oslo framework.
Judea and Samaria and Gaza are no longer linked; a different governing arrangement is replacing the Palestinian Authority; the 1967 lines are being swapped out for an Israeli presence in the Strip; and above all, the United Nations is being pushed aside in favor of the Board of Peace. A Gaza that is rehabilitated, demilitarized, run by neither the Palestinian Authority nor Hamas could be exactly what stops the world from trying the same mistake it made in Judea and Samaria in the 1990s, hoping for a different result this time.
The first clause in the Trump plan includes something Oslo and its offshoots never did: deradicalization. Israel will always have that stick to wave against any rollback, and the world can’t object to it.
The problem is that everything is stuck.
The Americans are frustrated to the point of alarm with how Israel is conducting itself in the Strip, but the truth is they couldn’t have picked a worse moment to launch their plan: at the start of an election year. Two months passed before all the hostages’ bodies were returned, then came “Operation Roaring Lion” in Iran, and by then, the campaign at home was already heating up.
A senior Israeli official drummed it into Kushner’s ears: If you want the plan to die immediately, the surest way is to push for it right now. The right will kill it, and Netanyahu will have no choice. And the opposition? the Americans asked. They’ll make sure it’s dead too, he told them. Netanyahu, after all, is being attacked these days almost entirely for being too dovish, not too hawkish.
That’s why the question of the next government’s makeup carries enormous weight. A unity government, freed from day-to-day survival struggles and including most of the parties, could make real decisions on Gaza. Incidentally, footage of surrendered Hamas weapons and demolished tunnels probably isn’t bad for a government, even if it’s not all the weapons and all the tunnels. A pilot could start in a cleared-out Rafah, then Khan Yunis, then we’ll see.
Israel has, in all likelihood, two final years with a great friend in the White House, and it’s up to Israel whether to use them to establish facts on the ground or to squander them on one election after another after another.
Originally published by Israel Hayom.
