Palestine's cycle of despair
New Statesman13 hours ago
In 1969 Golda Meir, then the prime minister of Israel, told a British journalist: 'There are no such thing as Palestinians… They do not exist.' This blatant falsehood lodged in my mind. Ten years later, as a reporter working with my peerless photojournalist colleague, Don McCullin, I sought to show that the Palestinians did exist and would continue to exist. We soon found tangible evidence that many hundreds of thousands of these 'non-existent' people were living in abject poverty, in or around scores of refugee camps under Israeli occupation or in the surrounding Arab countries. In 1948, as Zionist paramilitaries forcibly established the state of Israel in what had previously been Mandatory Palestine, 700,000 Palestinians had either fled or been driven from their homes. Their numbers had swelled again, by more than 300,000 during the 1967 Six-Day War, when the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) seized East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. As a result, more than a million Palestinians in these Occupied Territories found themselves under alien rule.
It seemed self-evident, then, that an increasingly hate-fuelled contest would end catastrophically for both sides, and that the better option would in due course entail what became known as the two-state solution. But it was also clear, even then, that reaching that point would be hugely difficult.
The Holocaust was the most abominable crime ever perpetrated by one group of human beings against another. In April 1945, as a BBC war correspondent, my father, in an unsparing broadcast from Bergen-Belsen, brought that hideous fact to the world's attention. His concluding words from that Nazi charnel house were, 'We must vow with all our hearts that such things must never happen again.' Today, the alarming resurrection of anti-Semitism makes those words 'never again' more important than ever.
I have never doubted Israel's right to exist within its pre-1967 borders as defined by the UN Security Council Resolution 242. The 'Land for Peace' formula adopted there required Israel to withdraw from the totality of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In return, the Palestinians were to recognise the Israeli state. In the following decades there were occasional glimmers of hope that reconciliation might be possible but these have been thwarted by extremists on both sides who have drowned out the voices of compromise.
The first glimmer of hope came in 1978 when President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Israel's PM, Menachem Begin, signed the Camp David Accords, brokered by the US president, Jimmy Carter. Although the Palestinians were excluded from the talks, they appeared to offer a solution based on Resolution 242. Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), widely regarded in the West as a terrorist organisation, had already been granted observer status at the UN, and in 1974 he had electrified the General Assembly when he declared: 'I come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun.' Two years later, though still committed to 'armed struggle', he had given tentative, partial and conditional support to Resolution 242. But, as he had not been consulted about the Camp David Accords, he joined every other Arab state in rejecting the deal out of hand. Israel was governed by the Likud party, which was committed to the permanent occupation of the Occupied Territory, and as Begin made it clear that there would be no withdrawal from the West Bank or Gaza, these embryonic negotiations remained frozen.
In the years that followed, successive Israeli governments reinforced their presence militarily on Palestinian soil, seizing Arab land, dispossessing Palestinian farmers and erecting fortified townships in their place for a growing number of 'settlers'. A high proportion of these – many thousands of whom began to arrive from the US – seemed convinced that the Jewish state had been divinely ordained to annex the West Bank, which they referred to as 'Judaea and Samaria'. This was in open defiance of the Fourth Geneva Convention. (Article 49 prohibits 'individual or mass forcible transfers' and forbids the Occupying Power to 'transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies'.)
As confrontations became more frequent and more violent, the IDF reacted severely and often brutally, beating up demonstrators, detaining and sometimes killing them while demolishing their family homes – a tactic that also appeared to violate the Fourth Geneva Convention. (Article 33 states, 'No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed,' and forbids 'collective penalties'.) In 1987, the simmering tensions exploded into a popular uprising. The young took to the streets in large numbers. They threw up barricades with burning tyres while hurling stones and Molotov cocktails at the heavily armed soldiers. In response to these rag-tag rioters, the IDF deployed 80,000 troops. Over the course of the next six years, they not only clubbed demonstrators to the ground but fired lethal plastic bullets and sometimes live rounds at their predominantly teenage assailants. By the time the First Intifada had petered out, the Israeli soldiers had killed between 1,000 and 1,200 Palestinians, of whom 240 were children, some under the age of ten. The price paid by the Israelis was the deaths of 60 soldiers and 100 civilians.
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Palestinian men, women and children forced from their homes by Israeli troops, 1948. Photo by History / Bridgeman Images
In 1989, the UN Security Council drafted resolutions both deploring Israel's failure to comply with the Fourth Geneva Convention and condemning its alleged violations of human rights during the intifada. But the US came to the Israeli government's rescue, vetoing all three drafts. Nonetheless, in the same year there was a flurry of further diplomatic movement. Triggered by the Madrid Conference in 1991, co-sponsored by the US and the Soviet Union, Palestinian and Israeli teams opened secret negotiations that culminated in the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995. It looked as though a real breakthrough was at hand. Israel's prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, consented to recognise the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and in return the PLO's Yasser Arafat agreed to recognise the State of Israel, to forswear violence and to commit the newly established Palestinian Authority (PA) to Resolution 242.
However, the two leaders were assailed by militants on both sides. Other Palestinian groups claimed Arafat had sold their birthright, and in Israel the far right rejected the surrender of Judea and Samaria to 'Arabs'. In July 1995, the new leader of Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu, led a mock funeral procession, featuring a coffin and hangman's noose, through the streets of Tel Aviv to a rally where followers chanted 'Death to Rabin!' Four months later, on 4 November 1995, an assassin shot Rabin dead as he was leaving a huge rally in support of the Oslo Accords.
Despite this, the 'peace process', as it was known, survived for another five years. In July 2000, Arafat met Rabin's successor, Ehud Barak, at Camp David, where they responded with apparent warmth to Bill Clinton's proposal for a modified version of the two-state solution. But talks broke down and neither side could get close to drawing up the details of a lasting peace. The breakdown at the Camp David summit had immediate and violent repercussions. The Second Intifada was far more deadly than the first. In addition to the now familiar barricades, rocks and petrol bombs, fanatical young Palestinian fighters from various insurgent groups resorted to acts of terror. Suicide bombers – mostly indoctrinated teenagers seeking martyrdom – infiltrated into Israel and blew themselves up in restaurants, at train stations, in buses and on street corners. The IDF launched a major offensive into the heart of Gaza. Israel advised the world that their target was the insurgents. But they killed large numbers of civilians, again including many young children. By the time this intifada was called off in February 2005, the combined death toll of combatants and civilians on both sides totalled some 4,300. The ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths was somewhat more than three to one. On both sides, civilians were the principal victims.
There are no figures for how many young men then flocked to the insurgents but observers noted that they were sure to have recruited at least as many fighters as they had lost. These recruits believed they were joining a resistance movement so it became a badge of honour to be labelled a terrorist by their enemies. Barak's successor, Ariel Sharon, a controversial figure with a well-earned reputation as a ruthless general and hard-line politician, appeared to recognise this. The drain of asymmetric warfare against the allied militant groups that had succeeded the now non-violent PLO, prompted a major rethink. He opted to dismantle all 21 Gaza settlements and to remove the 8,000 Israeli occupants, by force when necessary. But this was not a conciliatory gesture. Almost simultaneously in 2004, he had written to President George W Bush, saying 'there exists no Palestinian partner with whom to advance toward a settlement'.
Conditions for the Palestinians worsened. Tight controls imposed by Israel on the movement of goods and people in the West Bank and Gaza meant that economic growth stalled. Under constant scrutiny by IDF soldiers, everyday life became ever more humiliating and enraging. Meanwhile the PA seemed further than ever from either stopping the inflow of Jewish settlers into their lands or lifting the Israeli yoke from their shoulders. Residual support for the leadership drained away amid charges of authoritarianism, corruption and incompetence. In deepening frustration, voters used the January 2006 elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council to vent their frustration. To the horror of the outside world, they deserted Fatah (which, as the largest faction in the PLO, was committed to non-violence) in favour of Hamas. Hamas was pledged by its founding constitution to destroy Israel and to replace it with an Islamic state that would rule the entirety of Mandatory Palestine 'from the River to the Sea'.
The election result was a devastating blow to the PLO and to Mahmoud Abbas, the PA president who had succeeded Arafat two years earlier. He sought to retrieve the Occupied Territories from this political disaster by striking a deal with Hamas under which the Islamists agreed in principle to hand back most ministerial posts to the PA and to form a government of national unity. But this fragile agreement was torpedoed by Tel Aviv and Washington, both of which refused to entertain any dealings with the political leadership of Hamas (then based in Syria).
In 2007, the insurgents seized control of Gaza and severed all political links with the West Bank. Supported by Washington, Israel tightened its blockade on the territory – and deployed a new weapon. Tel Aviv's decision to cut food supplies to Gaza from 400 to 67 lorry loads a day was later acknowledged by government officials to be 'partly intended to put pressure on Hamas by making the lives of people in Gaza difficult'. It was hard to interpret this move as anything other than a form of collective punishment.
It was also counterproductive. Far from being weakened, Hamas recruited more fighters while establishing a harsh but efficient administration to meet the basic needs of food, water and healthcare, notwithstanding the fact that many Palestinians felt they were simultaneously being held hostage to Hamas's extremist ideology. International aid agencies testified that Hamas rarely obstructed them.
Palestinian rural village life under occupation in the South Hebron Hills, West Bank. Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
In December 2008, the IDF made another attempt to destroy the insurgents, with a combined air and ground assault into Gaza. This only goaded the militants, who retaliated by firing rockets into Israel. By the time it was over three weeks later, the IDF had killed 1,200 Palestinians, destroyed 46,000 of their homes and rendered 100,000 homeless. The insurgents had killed 13 Israelis. A UN fact-finding mission concluded that Israel had launched 'a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise the civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capability both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability'.
In 2014, frustrated by the sporadic rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza, Netanyahu launched Operation Protective Edge, which lasted 51 days. By the time it was over, the Israeli Air Force had carried out 6,000 air strikes, destroying some 18,000 buildings and much of Gaza's infrastructure. In return, Hamas fired more than 6,000 missiles into Israel. At a cost of 67 military and six civilian Israeli lives, the IDF killed 2,251 Palestinians, of whom 1,462 were civilians, including 551 children. Like its predecessors, Operation Protective Edge served only to aggravate hatred and drive more young Gazans into the arms of the insurgency.
In 2017, the political arm of Hamas published a revised version of its 1988 founding charter. At first glance this appeared to accept the notion of a two-state solution but with the proviso that all five million Palestinian refugees throughout the world should have the 'right to return' restored to them. Simultaneously, however, it reasserted its commitment to the eventual liberation of Palestine 'from the River to the Sea' and, while claiming to disavow anti-Semitism, the document also described Zionism as 'racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist'. Penetrating its ambiguities led to three possible conclusions: it was a PR exercise; it reflected unreconciled divisions within Hamas; it was a genuine olive branch. Standing in front of the television cameras, Netanyahu crumpled the document in his hand and threw it into a waste basket, saying: 'They want to destroy our state.'
As leader of Likud since 1993, Netanyahu had never repudiated the party's founding platform, which (in an uncanny echo of the Hamas document) declared that 'between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty'. As prime minister, he had occasionally hinted that he might be open to the prospect of a two-state solution, but the more he came to depend on political and religious extremists for survival, the clearer he made it that this would never be his agenda. In November 2022, in new guidelines for his cabinet, Netanyahu reiterated that 'the Jewish people have an exclusive right to the entire Land of Israel'. To achieve this, he had convinced himself that the gulf between Hamas and the PA must remain unbridgeable. To that end, he encouraged Qatar to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars into Gaza for Hamas to administer. He has been open about this. As he explained to his Likud parliamentary caucus in March 2019: 'Whoever opposes a Palestinian state must support delivery of funds to Gaza because maintaining separation between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza will prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.' In his complacency, he had allowed himself to presume Qatar's aid combined with a sea blockade and sporadic, lethal IDF operations – which he referred to as 'mowing the grass' – would sedate Gaza indefinitely. It was a fatal miscalculation.
By 2023, the predicament facing Gaza had become acute. Virtually cut off from the outside world by the blockade, with no major industries or exports, the territory was almost totally dependent on Israel for water and electricity. According to the CIA's World Factbook, unemployment and dependence on foreign aid each hovered around 50 per cent while the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCRHA) reported that the 'humanitarian' condition of almost a third of Gaza's households was either 'catastrophic' or 'extreme'. With more than 40 per cent of the population under 15, anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder had soared to levels that were judged likely to cause 'unpredictable' behaviour.
On the morning of 7 October 2023, in a carefully coordinated attack masterminded by the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, a group of insurgents breached the border with Israel to commit mass murder on a scale unprecedented in the history of the Jewish state. This act of terrorism, which targeted innocent civilians as well as soldiers, was as carefully planned as it was barbaric. The insurgents slaughtered some 1,200 people, of whom 725 were civilians, including 36 children. However plausibly – even accurately – its apologists claim that the atrocity had its roots in decades of occupation, the massacre remains an inexcusable crime against humanity. Those individuals in the West Bank and Gaza, let alone elsewhere in the Arab world, Europe and the US, who celebrated that repellent outrage fully earned the contempt of civilised opinion. It has to be presumed that all those who celebrated 7 October as a victory were also able to discount the abduction of 251 hostages, among them frail, sick, and elderly people as well as children, either to be executed or traded as chattels.
It was inevitable that Israel would respond with force. No one, though, predicted the scale of punishment that the IDF was about to unleash on the people of Gaza. On 9 October, the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, announced that he had ordered 'a complete siege on the Gaza Strip' and that there would be 'no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel… We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.' No less ominously, Major General Ghassan Alia, the military coordinator of the government's actions in Gaza, released a video that contained a warning to all Palestinians: 'Hamas has turned into Isis and the residents of Gaza, instead of being appalled, are celebrating. Human animals must be treated as such… You wanted hell, you will get hell.'
Before long, excruciating accounts of that 'hell' started to reach the TV screens of the West. Despite Israel's strenuous efforts, it became virtually impossible to be unaware that a human catastrophe was unfolding in Gaza. Although foreign journalists were forbidden to enter the territory (except under close supervision by the military), more than enough images emerged to reveal the extent of Israel's retribution. The IDF have killed scores of thousands of civilians, a large number of whom were small children and babies. Homes, shops, schools and hospitals have been destroyed, displacing 1.5 million terrified, exhausted and hungry people and forcing them to flee multiple times from one insecure 'safe haven' to another. Swathes of Gaza have been razed in a succession of scorched-earth operations. Much of the territory has become a 'free fire' zone in which anyone is liable to be regarded as a terrorist and subject to instant execution. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are now huddled in threadbare tents in an ever-contracting small corner of southern Gaza.
Israel's increasingly dubious defence has been that the IDF takes every reasonable precaution to avoid civilian casualties. Israeli officials also excuse this loss of life by insisting that the insurgents deliberately use civilians as human shields in every building that is bombed. The evidence for this is sketchy, although when the war is being fought in such extraordinarily confined spaces, civilians are perforce shielding the insurgents merely by being in close proximity to them. But when such arguments are made by the doctors and nurses who risk their own lives to pick up the pieces of human wreckage, they have been routinely dismissed.
Palestinians wait to receive meals distributed by a charity in Gaza, July 2025. Photo by Abdalhkem Abu Riash/Anadolu via Getty Images
Simultaneously, the West Bank was smouldering. Jewish settlers, with the approval of the Netanyahu government, seized the opportunity to grab even more Palestinian territory, building new settlements in 2023 at a faster rate than at any time since the Oslo Accords. The UN warned that the rapid expansion of the illegal dwellings on the southern periphery of East Jerusalem (where more than 18,000 new units were built in that one year) made it less likely than ever that a Palestinian capital linking that part of the city contiguously to the West Bank (as envisaged in Resolution 242) could ever be established.
When, unusually, the Biden administration endorsed a formal UN Security Council statement warning that the 'continuing Israeli settlement activities are dangerously imperilling the viability of the two-state solution based on the 1967 lines', Netanyahu's office had the temerity to issue a public rebuke: 'The statement should not have been made and the US should not have joined it.' The White House has long maintained a unique relationship with Israel. Although successive presidents have sought to broker successive peace deals, they have invariably backed down when Israel demurred, watching on as Israel repeatedly ignored Security Council resolutions and international law. Even in the face of compelling evidence that Israel has committed war crimes, Washington has remained silent. There has never been a whisper of sanctions, let alone a threat, even though Israel has long relied heavily on US largesse for its economic and military security. That is a licence that no other nation enjoys.
While the world's attention was focused on Gaza, extremist settlers in the West Bank went on the rampage. Since 7 October 2023, largely unchecked or even encouraged by Israel's security forces, they have terrorised Palestinians. In an unusually strong statement, the British government told the UN General Assembly on 19 September 2024 that it was 'with grave concern' that it had witnessed 'how an increasing number of Israeli settlers have systematically used harassment, intimidation and violence to pressure Palestinian communities to leave their land'. The Israeli government ignored this protest and the attacks did not abate. Every part of the West Bank is now pockmarked by settlements, some of them the size of large towns, all of them in clear breach of international law. Between the end of 1967 and 2025, the number of Jewish settlers on Palestinian land has grown from a few thousand to some 700,000.
In January 2025, after 15 months of war, Netanyahu reluctantly agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza. Brokered by the Biden administration working closely with neighbouring Arab states and Qatar (where the political wing of Hamas had re-established its headquarters), the ceasefire had three stages that together were designed to lead to a lasting truce. The first stage, which was to last for six weeks, creaked into action on 19 January. It envisaged an exchange of hostages in return for the release of a much larger number of Palestinians held in detention by the Israelis. Chillingly choreographed by Hamas with a grotesque sense of theatre, it was a gruesome procedure to witness as, step by faltering step, the 25 hostages, some of them emaciated and bewildered, were released into the care of the Red Cross. In return, some 1,800 Palestinians were released from Israeli custody.
But as the date for the start of stage two of the ceasefire drew close, doubts grew. Each side found reason to accuse the other of breaching the deal and as negotiations stalled, it became increasingly clear that Netanyahu had no intention of taking his government into stage two, during which, in addition to a further hostage/prisoner swap, Israel was to accept a permanent ceasefire and the withdrawal of all IDF troops from Gaza. Already shimmering on the horizon was stage three, which would inevitably have entailed complex negotiations about the future status of the Occupied Territories and the route towards a two-state solution. For Netanyahu and his far-right cabal of cabinet ministers, both the second and third stages were anathema.
By this point, were the Western world not suffused by historic guilt and were Israel not regarded as a vital strategic partner in the Middle East, Netanyahu would already have been widely condemned as a bad actor hellbent on destroying Israel's hard-won status as an oasis of democracy by trampling over international law. When, in November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant indicting them for 'the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhuman acts', the Israeli prime minister's response was to accuse the ICC of 'anti-Semitic hatred'. He was apparently unmindful of the fact that the court had simultaneously issued an arrest warrant for Mohammed Deif, the head of Hamas's armed wing, on charges of 'the crimes against humanity of murder; extermination; torture; and rape and other forms of sexual violence; as well as the war crimes of murder, cruel treatment, torture; taking hostages'.
Fortunately for Netanyahu, Donald Trump had won the US election and was swift to support his demand that Hamas renegotiate their original ceasefire agreement on terms that would have allowed Israel to renege on its stage-two commitment to withdraw the IDF from Gaza and – once every hostage had been released – to reignite the war. When Hamas rejected that option, Netanyahu collapsed the agreement, ordering the blockade to be reinstated and promising an even more devastating offensive.
The renewed onslaught began during the night of 17-18 March 2025, when Israel's forces launched a bombardment by ground and air deep into Gaza. In the space of 24 hours some 400 Palestinians, mainly women and children, were killed. Once again the principal victims were innocent civilians. Day after day, as the government steadily extended the operation, the death toll mounted. Yet again, the IDF was unable or unwilling to avoid further 'collateral damage'. On 3 May, after almost six weeks of relentless bombardment, an IDF spokesman answered critics of the slaughter with a dismissive 'the military takes feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm'. The Gaza death toll by the end of April 2025 was upwards of 52,000.
The humanitarian disaster in Gaza reached a new nadir. With no supplies of any kind permitted to enter, food prices rose by 1,400 per cent; desperate families started to besiege those distribution points that had not closed; young children struggled piteously to reach the front of the queue to hold tin bowls beseechingly above their heads, hoping for a ladle of soup before supplies ran out. In vain, the UN's World Food Programme warned that unless the blockade was lifted, they would soon have to close their projects altogether. Cases of acute malnutrition began to soar.
With Gaza on the verge of mass famine and more than half its population at risk of starvation, the Israeli foreign ministry insisted 'there is no shortage of aid in Gaza'. More alarmingly, ministers also fell back on the dubious claim that Israel was under no obligation to allow aid to flow because Hamas had 'hijacked' supplies 'to rebuild its terror machine'. This is despite every international aid agency insisting that there is at best scant evidence that this has happened. By now thoroughly alarmed by the scale of the encroaching calamity, Britain, France and Germany finally roused themselves to make a rare joint statement, describing the blockade as 'intolerable' and demanding it be lifted immediately, although they shied away from adding that to starve more than two million people constitutes a war crime. Israel's furious response was to condemn their stance as 'morally twisted and wrong'.
By that point it had become impossible to avoid the conclusion that Israel was guilty of violating two further articles of the Fourth Geneva Convention. (Article 55: 'To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population…' And Article 59: 'If the whole or part of the population is inadequately supplied, the Occupying Power shall agree to relief schemes on behalf of the said population, and shall facilitate them by all the means at its disposal.')
On 28 April 2025, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) began hearing oral arguments from 40 countries, including Britain as well as China and Russia, seeking guidance on whether Israel might indeed be in breach of international law. Whether or not the ICJ ever indicts Israel, it is unlikely to have any impact on the Israeli government unless the US decides to intervene far more robustly than it has ever done before.
Israeli Jews are now deeply split over their government's strategy. The anguished families of the surviving hostages believe that the longer Israel prosecutes the war, the less likely it is that their loved ones will be released alive. With mounting fury, the protesting families have urged Netanyahu to order an immediate ceasefire to secure their safe return. However, a great many Israelis have come to believe that their country now faces an existential threat and have adopted an 'us or them' attitude towards the Gaza war as though forever doomed to be in conflict with the Palestinians. The trauma of 7 October has even convinced some of those who once believed in the two-state solution that it would merely provide another platform for further assaults on Israel.
Yet there is a significant group of critics, including some former hostages and their families, human rights activists, some former ministers and many liberals who still believe that Israel's salvation lies in the two-state solution. They have demanded an end to what they describe as Netanyahu's 'political war'. More than 12,000 men and women from every branch of the IDF, ranging from decorated commanders to reservists as well as retirees, have signed a growing avalanche of letters essentially demanding that the government get the last surviving hostages home, even if that means ending the war. The objectors' common theme is blunt: 'The continuation of the war does not contribute to any of its declared goals.' There has also been a sharp fall in the number of reservists willing to serve at the front. A former general has gone so far as to suggest that officers and men should consider disobeying orders to avoid prosecution for war crimes.
Among the severest and most cogent critics of the war in Gaza are a small number of Jewish academics, writers and historians who do not shrink from charging the government of Israel with both crimes against humanity and war crimes (as defined by both the 1948 Geneva Convention and the 1998 Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court). Among these, Michael Sfard, an eminent civil rights lawyer, has reluctantly been driven to conclude that, sanctioned by its Supreme Court, the state of Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid as defined by the Rome Statute for its 'inhuman acts' in the West Bank and Gaza. According to Sfard: 'One must turn off the lights, block one's ears, and lower the blinds to avoid the conclusion that Israeli rule in the Occupied Territories meets that definition.' Amos Goldberg, a renowned Holocaust scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has accused the government of genocide as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention, a war crime with a particular resonance for Jews, all of whom are acutely and painfully aware that the very notion of genocide arose from the Nazi Holocaust in the Second World War. (Article 2 of the Genocide Convention defines genocide as any one of five acts committed with 'intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group'. This includes 'causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part', notably by 'subjecting a group of people to subsistence diet, systematic expulsion from homes and the reduction of essential medical services below minimum requirement').
The 7 October massacres – 'a war crime and a crime against humanity' – traumatised Goldberg. For that reason, he found it 'agonising' to describe Israel's war in Gaza as genocide but, on the basis of his own scholarship and witnessing his government's clear resolve 'to turn the whole of Gaza into rubble', he has concluded: 'Yes, it is genocide. And once you come to this conclusion, you cannot remain silent.' In the April 2025 edition of the New York Review of Books, the Israeli-American professor of history and genocide studies at Brown University, Omer Bartov, made the same charge, writing that 'ethnic cleansing' did not adequately describe what is happening in Gaza and that, 'For a year now, it has been impossible to describe the Israeli operation as anything but genocidal.'
Bartov is dismayed by the failure of the international community to respond adequately to the scale of the catastrophe. And he has a compelling explanation for this: 'The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met.' It is certainly true that many European nations will never be absolved of their participation in the Holocaust. That guilt persists. When António Guterres, Secretary-General of the UN, has charged Israel with breaches of international law, ministers in Western chancelleries have sat on their hands, making muffled protests but shying away from warning that Netanyahu's government is almost certainly responsible for multiple war crimes, let alone from openly making such allegations.
If it takes courage for those Europeans who believe in Israel's right to exist to speak out against the government of Israel, this is doubly so for the Jewish diaspora. Always mindful that the history of the continent has long been stained by anti-Semitism, they are justly fearful of its resurgence. Today they observe ignorant demonstrators mindlessly chanting the slogan 'from the River to the Sea' in capital cities around Europe, and they know that, in Britain and across the continent, Jews have been assailed by threats, assaults and abusive behaviour. They hear the distant but advancing drumbeat of fascism. To many in the diaspora who support a two-state solution and who privately deplore Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, it can seem disloyal, even treacherous, to offer public criticism from abroad when many of their fellow Jews in the Holy Land believe that Israel's struggle against Hamas is for the salvation of all Jewry.
That is why an open letter to the Financial Times on 16 April 2025 from 36 leading members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, including the former president of the Supreme Court, Lord Neuberger, and the prominent author and human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, was such a moment. In breaking an omertà that has stifled so much free speech for many months, they wrote that 'out of love for Israel and deep concern for its future [we can] no longer stay silent on the war… The inclination to avert our eyes is strong, as what is happening is unbearable, but our Jewish values compel us to stand up and speak out… Silence is seen as support for policies and actions that run contrary to our Jewish values… We stand against the war. We acknowledge and mourn the loss of Palestinian life. We yearn for the 'day after' this conflict when reconciliation can start.'
This intervention might have led to an open debate within the diaspora, a beneficial side-effect of which would have been to force all but the most irredeemable anti-Semites to recognise that to be Jewish is not to be an apologist for an extremist government in Tel Aviv. Instead, the president of the Board of Deputies, Phil Rosenberg, rebuked the authors for demonstrating a 'deeply regrettable loss of perspective', and then to set up an inquiry into whether the signatories had breached the terms of their engagement as deputies.
Netanyahu has shown no sign of relenting. On 5 May his cabinet unanimously approved a revised war plan that would entail the permanent military occupation of every corner of Gaza. Already 70 per cent of the territory had either been declared a military 'red zone' or was under evacuation orders. The plan was to herd the half-starved population of Gaza into an even smaller pocket in the south, almost all of it already razed. To avoid further starvation they would be forced to pass through checkpoints to enter a handful of Israel-controlled food stations operated by private US companies. The UN and international aid agencies pointed out that the scheme would be unworkable as well as illegal. And so it has now proved. It has also been chaotic and violent.
The extremists who sustain Netanyahu have made it clear what they expect: a mass 'voluntary' evacuation of Gaza. Israel's finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, advised explicitly that within six months the territory would be 'totally destroyed', which, he noted, would force 'despairing' Palestinians to seek 'relocation' elsewhere.
Reflecting a dramatic surge of popular disgust, European politicians finally spoke out in unambiguous terms to condemn Israel's actions in Gaza. On 20 May, the British Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, declared: 'It is dangerous. It is repellent. It is monstrous and I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.' It is unfortunate that he and his European peers did not speak out many months earlier. Nonetheless, there is talk of suspending trade and applying sanctions, and – something much of the West has assiduously rejected for decades – giving formal recognition to Palestine as a state (a status granted by a majority of UN member countries in 2012). Netanyahu's instant response, repeated furiously by his spokespeople, has been to accuse them of rewarding Hamas for genocide.
But Donald Trump, who was apparently troubled by reports of starvation, could not be dismissed so easily. Overriding his far-right cabinet colleagues, Netanyahu had no choice but to allow a trickle of aid to enter the territory. But with hundreds of thousands of lives in peril, a complete lifting of the blockade would be required to avoid mass famine. Nor has there been any evidence that Netanyahu would be diverted from his major strategic objective – in which the hostages appear to be irrelevant – of placing Gaza under permanent military occupation. In effect, this would be annexation, leaving the victims to choose between exile from a 'cleansed' territory and a future of helotry as Jewish settlers or real-estate developers moved in.
Whatever happens to the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, the prospective fate for their 3.3 million compatriots in the West Bank is not dissimilar and no less alarming. With widespread popular support – even from those calling for a ceasefire in Gaza – Israel seems to be intent on swamping the territory with settlements. Before long, these Palestinians will also face a choice of accepting their lot as colonial subjects under an apartheid regime, going into exile or rising up in revolutionary fury.
If the situation in both Gaza and the West Bank is catastrophic for the Palestinians, it promises to be disastrous for the Israelis as well. The region is already chronically unstable. Public opinion in the authoritarian states that surround Israel is already consumed by rage at what they see, read and hear from the Occupied Territories. It would not take much for that mood to erupt into violent unrest with unpredictable consequences. Elsewhere, Israel's erstwhile supporters, their views reflected openly in the media, are no less aghast. For so long as the country remains in the hands of extremists, it is hard to see Europe's liberal democracies restoring Israel to its traditional place in the diplomatic firmament. In alienating these traditional allies, Israel is at risk of becoming isolated in an alarmingly unstable world whose tectonic plates are shifting in unforeseeable ways. It would also be exceptionally short-sighted for Israel to presume on America's unquestioning and enduring support. The mercurial deal-maker in the White House has just staked his claim on the region and Israel was not in his sightlines. He has already brought Syria in from the cold, and his 'transactional' relationships with the Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia (which seems to matter to him at least as much as the fate of Israel), suggest that he might easily reach the conclusion that, with Netanyahu in power, Israel is less of a strategic asset than a corporate liability. Nor, surely, is it far-fetched to imagine that his successors, with images of Gaza seared in their retinas, would be any more sympathetic unless and until Israel agrees to withdraw from the Occupied Territories in line with Resolution 242, unlikely as that now appears. But that is to peer into the unknown.
As I write, there is talk of another ceasefire. If it happens it will be excessively fragile. Unless Washington insists, nothing will stop Netanyahu once again detonating any deal once the hostages are home again. The future remains grim. In the absence of a miracle, there will be even more bloodshed, more starving and dying children, more illegal settlements, more hatred, more insurgency, more repression, more refugees shuffling towards an unknown fate, an unending cycle of despair. The prospect is tragic beyond words. Clinging to the belief that the only realistic chance of securing lasting peace is the two-state solution even as that disappears over the distant horizon, all that this chronicler can do is reiterate that the Palestinians did exist, do exist and – unless they are annihilated – will exist.
This is an edited extract from the updated edition of 'The Palestinians' by Jonathan Dimbleby and Don McCullin, which will be published in October (Quartet Books)
[See also: Israel's calculus on Syria]
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It seemed self-evident, then, that an increasingly hate-fuelled contest would end catastrophically for both sides, and that the better option would in due course entail what became known as the two-state solution. But it was also clear, even then, that reaching that point would be hugely difficult.
The Holocaust was the most abominable crime ever perpetrated by one group of human beings against another. In April 1945, as a BBC war correspondent, my father, in an unsparing broadcast from Bergen-Belsen, brought that hideous fact to the world's attention. His concluding words from that Nazi charnel house were, 'We must vow with all our hearts that such things must never happen again.' Today, the alarming resurrection of anti-Semitism makes those words 'never again' more important than ever.
I have never doubted Israel's right to exist within its pre-1967 borders as defined by the UN Security Council Resolution 242. The 'Land for Peace' formula adopted there required Israel to withdraw from the totality of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In return, the Palestinians were to recognise the Israeli state. In the following decades there were occasional glimmers of hope that reconciliation might be possible but these have been thwarted by extremists on both sides who have drowned out the voices of compromise.
The first glimmer of hope came in 1978 when President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Israel's PM, Menachem Begin, signed the Camp David Accords, brokered by the US president, Jimmy Carter. Although the Palestinians were excluded from the talks, they appeared to offer a solution based on Resolution 242. Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), widely regarded in the West as a terrorist organisation, had already been granted observer status at the UN, and in 1974 he had electrified the General Assembly when he declared: 'I come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun.' Two years later, though still committed to 'armed struggle', he had given tentative, partial and conditional support to Resolution 242. But, as he had not been consulted about the Camp David Accords, he joined every other Arab state in rejecting the deal out of hand. Israel was governed by the Likud party, which was committed to the permanent occupation of the Occupied Territory, and as Begin made it clear that there would be no withdrawal from the West Bank or Gaza, these embryonic negotiations remained frozen.
In the years that followed, successive Israeli governments reinforced their presence militarily on Palestinian soil, seizing Arab land, dispossessing Palestinian farmers and erecting fortified townships in their place for a growing number of 'settlers'. A high proportion of these – many thousands of whom began to arrive from the US – seemed convinced that the Jewish state had been divinely ordained to annex the West Bank, which they referred to as 'Judaea and Samaria'. This was in open defiance of the Fourth Geneva Convention. (Article 49 prohibits 'individual or mass forcible transfers' and forbids the Occupying Power to 'transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies'.)
As confrontations became more frequent and more violent, the IDF reacted severely and often brutally, beating up demonstrators, detaining and sometimes killing them while demolishing their family homes – a tactic that also appeared to violate the Fourth Geneva Convention. (Article 33 states, 'No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed,' and forbids 'collective penalties'.) In 1987, the simmering tensions exploded into a popular uprising. The young took to the streets in large numbers. They threw up barricades with burning tyres while hurling stones and Molotov cocktails at the heavily armed soldiers. In response to these rag-tag rioters, the IDF deployed 80,000 troops. Over the course of the next six years, they not only clubbed demonstrators to the ground but fired lethal plastic bullets and sometimes live rounds at their predominantly teenage assailants. By the time the First Intifada had petered out, the Israeli soldiers had killed between 1,000 and 1,200 Palestinians, of whom 240 were children, some under the age of ten. The price paid by the Israelis was the deaths of 60 soldiers and 100 civilians.
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Palestinian men, women and children forced from their homes by Israeli troops, 1948. Photo by History / Bridgeman Images
In 1989, the UN Security Council drafted resolutions both deploring Israel's failure to comply with the Fourth Geneva Convention and condemning its alleged violations of human rights during the intifada. But the US came to the Israeli government's rescue, vetoing all three drafts. Nonetheless, in the same year there was a flurry of further diplomatic movement. Triggered by the Madrid Conference in 1991, co-sponsored by the US and the Soviet Union, Palestinian and Israeli teams opened secret negotiations that culminated in the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995. It looked as though a real breakthrough was at hand. Israel's prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, consented to recognise the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and in return the PLO's Yasser Arafat agreed to recognise the State of Israel, to forswear violence and to commit the newly established Palestinian Authority (PA) to Resolution 242.
However, the two leaders were assailed by militants on both sides. Other Palestinian groups claimed Arafat had sold their birthright, and in Israel the far right rejected the surrender of Judea and Samaria to 'Arabs'. In July 1995, the new leader of Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu, led a mock funeral procession, featuring a coffin and hangman's noose, through the streets of Tel Aviv to a rally where followers chanted 'Death to Rabin!' Four months later, on 4 November 1995, an assassin shot Rabin dead as he was leaving a huge rally in support of the Oslo Accords.
Despite this, the 'peace process', as it was known, survived for another five years. In July 2000, Arafat met Rabin's successor, Ehud Barak, at Camp David, where they responded with apparent warmth to Bill Clinton's proposal for a modified version of the two-state solution. But talks broke down and neither side could get close to drawing up the details of a lasting peace. The breakdown at the Camp David summit had immediate and violent repercussions. The Second Intifada was far more deadly than the first. In addition to the now familiar barricades, rocks and petrol bombs, fanatical young Palestinian fighters from various insurgent groups resorted to acts of terror. Suicide bombers – mostly indoctrinated teenagers seeking martyrdom – infiltrated into Israel and blew themselves up in restaurants, at train stations, in buses and on street corners. The IDF launched a major offensive into the heart of Gaza. Israel advised the world that their target was the insurgents. But they killed large numbers of civilians, again including many young children. By the time this intifada was called off in February 2005, the combined death toll of combatants and civilians on both sides totalled some 4,300. The ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths was somewhat more than three to one. On both sides, civilians were the principal victims.
There are no figures for how many young men then flocked to the insurgents but observers noted that they were sure to have recruited at least as many fighters as they had lost. These recruits believed they were joining a resistance movement so it became a badge of honour to be labelled a terrorist by their enemies. Barak's successor, Ariel Sharon, a controversial figure with a well-earned reputation as a ruthless general and hard-line politician, appeared to recognise this. The drain of asymmetric warfare against the allied militant groups that had succeeded the now non-violent PLO, prompted a major rethink. He opted to dismantle all 21 Gaza settlements and to remove the 8,000 Israeli occupants, by force when necessary. But this was not a conciliatory gesture. Almost simultaneously in 2004, he had written to President George W Bush, saying 'there exists no Palestinian partner with whom to advance toward a settlement'.
Conditions for the Palestinians worsened. Tight controls imposed by Israel on the movement of goods and people in the West Bank and Gaza meant that economic growth stalled. Under constant scrutiny by IDF soldiers, everyday life became ever more humiliating and enraging. Meanwhile the PA seemed further than ever from either stopping the inflow of Jewish settlers into their lands or lifting the Israeli yoke from their shoulders. Residual support for the leadership drained away amid charges of authoritarianism, corruption and incompetence. In deepening frustration, voters used the January 2006 elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council to vent their frustration. To the horror of the outside world, they deserted Fatah (which, as the largest faction in the PLO, was committed to non-violence) in favour of Hamas. Hamas was pledged by its founding constitution to destroy Israel and to replace it with an Islamic state that would rule the entirety of Mandatory Palestine 'from the River to the Sea'.
The election result was a devastating blow to the PLO and to Mahmoud Abbas, the PA president who had succeeded Arafat two years earlier. He sought to retrieve the Occupied Territories from this political disaster by striking a deal with Hamas under which the Islamists agreed in principle to hand back most ministerial posts to the PA and to form a government of national unity. But this fragile agreement was torpedoed by Tel Aviv and Washington, both of which refused to entertain any dealings with the political leadership of Hamas (then based in Syria).
In 2007, the insurgents seized control of Gaza and severed all political links with the West Bank. Supported by Washington, Israel tightened its blockade on the territory – and deployed a new weapon. Tel Aviv's decision to cut food supplies to Gaza from 400 to 67 lorry loads a day was later acknowledged by government officials to be 'partly intended to put pressure on Hamas by making the lives of people in Gaza difficult'. It was hard to interpret this move as anything other than a form of collective punishment.
It was also counterproductive. Far from being weakened, Hamas recruited more fighters while establishing a harsh but efficient administration to meet the basic needs of food, water and healthcare, notwithstanding the fact that many Palestinians felt they were simultaneously being held hostage to Hamas's extremist ideology. International aid agencies testified that Hamas rarely obstructed them.
Palestinian rural village life under occupation in the South Hebron Hills, West Bank. Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
In December 2008, the IDF made another attempt to destroy the insurgents, with a combined air and ground assault into Gaza. This only goaded the militants, who retaliated by firing rockets into Israel. By the time it was over three weeks later, the IDF had killed 1,200 Palestinians, destroyed 46,000 of their homes and rendered 100,000 homeless. The insurgents had killed 13 Israelis. A UN fact-finding mission concluded that Israel had launched 'a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise the civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capability both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability'.
In 2014, frustrated by the sporadic rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza, Netanyahu launched Operation Protective Edge, which lasted 51 days. By the time it was over, the Israeli Air Force had carried out 6,000 air strikes, destroying some 18,000 buildings and much of Gaza's infrastructure. In return, Hamas fired more than 6,000 missiles into Israel. At a cost of 67 military and six civilian Israeli lives, the IDF killed 2,251 Palestinians, of whom 1,462 were civilians, including 551 children. Like its predecessors, Operation Protective Edge served only to aggravate hatred and drive more young Gazans into the arms of the insurgency.
In 2017, the political arm of Hamas published a revised version of its 1988 founding charter. At first glance this appeared to accept the notion of a two-state solution but with the proviso that all five million Palestinian refugees throughout the world should have the 'right to return' restored to them. Simultaneously, however, it reasserted its commitment to the eventual liberation of Palestine 'from the River to the Sea' and, while claiming to disavow anti-Semitism, the document also described Zionism as 'racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist'. Penetrating its ambiguities led to three possible conclusions: it was a PR exercise; it reflected unreconciled divisions within Hamas; it was a genuine olive branch. Standing in front of the television cameras, Netanyahu crumpled the document in his hand and threw it into a waste basket, saying: 'They want to destroy our state.'
As leader of Likud since 1993, Netanyahu had never repudiated the party's founding platform, which (in an uncanny echo of the Hamas document) declared that 'between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty'. As prime minister, he had occasionally hinted that he might be open to the prospect of a two-state solution, but the more he came to depend on political and religious extremists for survival, the clearer he made it that this would never be his agenda. In November 2022, in new guidelines for his cabinet, Netanyahu reiterated that 'the Jewish people have an exclusive right to the entire Land of Israel'. To achieve this, he had convinced himself that the gulf between Hamas and the PA must remain unbridgeable. To that end, he encouraged Qatar to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars into Gaza for Hamas to administer. He has been open about this. As he explained to his Likud parliamentary caucus in March 2019: 'Whoever opposes a Palestinian state must support delivery of funds to Gaza because maintaining separation between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza will prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.' In his complacency, he had allowed himself to presume Qatar's aid combined with a sea blockade and sporadic, lethal IDF operations – which he referred to as 'mowing the grass' – would sedate Gaza indefinitely. It was a fatal miscalculation.
By 2023, the predicament facing Gaza had become acute. Virtually cut off from the outside world by the blockade, with no major industries or exports, the territory was almost totally dependent on Israel for water and electricity. According to the CIA's World Factbook, unemployment and dependence on foreign aid each hovered around 50 per cent while the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCRHA) reported that the 'humanitarian' condition of almost a third of Gaza's households was either 'catastrophic' or 'extreme'. With more than 40 per cent of the population under 15, anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder had soared to levels that were judged likely to cause 'unpredictable' behaviour.
On the morning of 7 October 2023, in a carefully coordinated attack masterminded by the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, a group of insurgents breached the border with Israel to commit mass murder on a scale unprecedented in the history of the Jewish state. This act of terrorism, which targeted innocent civilians as well as soldiers, was as carefully planned as it was barbaric. The insurgents slaughtered some 1,200 people, of whom 725 were civilians, including 36 children. However plausibly – even accurately – its apologists claim that the atrocity had its roots in decades of occupation, the massacre remains an inexcusable crime against humanity. Those individuals in the West Bank and Gaza, let alone elsewhere in the Arab world, Europe and the US, who celebrated that repellent outrage fully earned the contempt of civilised opinion. It has to be presumed that all those who celebrated 7 October as a victory were also able to discount the abduction of 251 hostages, among them frail, sick, and elderly people as well as children, either to be executed or traded as chattels.
It was inevitable that Israel would respond with force. No one, though, predicted the scale of punishment that the IDF was about to unleash on the people of Gaza. On 9 October, the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, announced that he had ordered 'a complete siege on the Gaza Strip' and that there would be 'no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel… We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.' No less ominously, Major General Ghassan Alia, the military coordinator of the government's actions in Gaza, released a video that contained a warning to all Palestinians: 'Hamas has turned into Isis and the residents of Gaza, instead of being appalled, are celebrating. Human animals must be treated as such… You wanted hell, you will get hell.'
Before long, excruciating accounts of that 'hell' started to reach the TV screens of the West. Despite Israel's strenuous efforts, it became virtually impossible to be unaware that a human catastrophe was unfolding in Gaza. Although foreign journalists were forbidden to enter the territory (except under close supervision by the military), more than enough images emerged to reveal the extent of Israel's retribution. The IDF have killed scores of thousands of civilians, a large number of whom were small children and babies. Homes, shops, schools and hospitals have been destroyed, displacing 1.5 million terrified, exhausted and hungry people and forcing them to flee multiple times from one insecure 'safe haven' to another. Swathes of Gaza have been razed in a succession of scorched-earth operations. Much of the territory has become a 'free fire' zone in which anyone is liable to be regarded as a terrorist and subject to instant execution. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are now huddled in threadbare tents in an ever-contracting small corner of southern Gaza.
Israel's increasingly dubious defence has been that the IDF takes every reasonable precaution to avoid civilian casualties. Israeli officials also excuse this loss of life by insisting that the insurgents deliberately use civilians as human shields in every building that is bombed. The evidence for this is sketchy, although when the war is being fought in such extraordinarily confined spaces, civilians are perforce shielding the insurgents merely by being in close proximity to them. But when such arguments are made by the doctors and nurses who risk their own lives to pick up the pieces of human wreckage, they have been routinely dismissed.
Palestinians wait to receive meals distributed by a charity in Gaza, July 2025. Photo by Abdalhkem Abu Riash/Anadolu via Getty Images
Simultaneously, the West Bank was smouldering. Jewish settlers, with the approval of the Netanyahu government, seized the opportunity to grab even more Palestinian territory, building new settlements in 2023 at a faster rate than at any time since the Oslo Accords. The UN warned that the rapid expansion of the illegal dwellings on the southern periphery of East Jerusalem (where more than 18,000 new units were built in that one year) made it less likely than ever that a Palestinian capital linking that part of the city contiguously to the West Bank (as envisaged in Resolution 242) could ever be established.
When, unusually, the Biden administration endorsed a formal UN Security Council statement warning that the 'continuing Israeli settlement activities are dangerously imperilling the viability of the two-state solution based on the 1967 lines', Netanyahu's office had the temerity to issue a public rebuke: 'The statement should not have been made and the US should not have joined it.' The White House has long maintained a unique relationship with Israel. Although successive presidents have sought to broker successive peace deals, they have invariably backed down when Israel demurred, watching on as Israel repeatedly ignored Security Council resolutions and international law. Even in the face of compelling evidence that Israel has committed war crimes, Washington has remained silent. There has never been a whisper of sanctions, let alone a threat, even though Israel has long relied heavily on US largesse for its economic and military security. That is a licence that no other nation enjoys.
While the world's attention was focused on Gaza, extremist settlers in the West Bank went on the rampage. Since 7 October 2023, largely unchecked or even encouraged by Israel's security forces, they have terrorised Palestinians. In an unusually strong statement, the British government told the UN General Assembly on 19 September 2024 that it was 'with grave concern' that it had witnessed 'how an increasing number of Israeli settlers have systematically used harassment, intimidation and violence to pressure Palestinian communities to leave their land'. The Israeli government ignored this protest and the attacks did not abate. Every part of the West Bank is now pockmarked by settlements, some of them the size of large towns, all of them in clear breach of international law. Between the end of 1967 and 2025, the number of Jewish settlers on Palestinian land has grown from a few thousand to some 700,000.
In January 2025, after 15 months of war, Netanyahu reluctantly agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza. Brokered by the Biden administration working closely with neighbouring Arab states and Qatar (where the political wing of Hamas had re-established its headquarters), the ceasefire had three stages that together were designed to lead to a lasting truce. The first stage, which was to last for six weeks, creaked into action on 19 January. It envisaged an exchange of hostages in return for the release of a much larger number of Palestinians held in detention by the Israelis. Chillingly choreographed by Hamas with a grotesque sense of theatre, it was a gruesome procedure to witness as, step by faltering step, the 25 hostages, some of them emaciated and bewildered, were released into the care of the Red Cross. In return, some 1,800 Palestinians were released from Israeli custody.
But as the date for the start of stage two of the ceasefire drew close, doubts grew. Each side found reason to accuse the other of breaching the deal and as negotiations stalled, it became increasingly clear that Netanyahu had no intention of taking his government into stage two, during which, in addition to a further hostage/prisoner swap, Israel was to accept a permanent ceasefire and the withdrawal of all IDF troops from Gaza. Already shimmering on the horizon was stage three, which would inevitably have entailed complex negotiations about the future status of the Occupied Territories and the route towards a two-state solution. For Netanyahu and his far-right cabal of cabinet ministers, both the second and third stages were anathema.
By this point, were the Western world not suffused by historic guilt and were Israel not regarded as a vital strategic partner in the Middle East, Netanyahu would already have been widely condemned as a bad actor hellbent on destroying Israel's hard-won status as an oasis of democracy by trampling over international law. When, in November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant indicting them for 'the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhuman acts', the Israeli prime minister's response was to accuse the ICC of 'anti-Semitic hatred'. He was apparently unmindful of the fact that the court had simultaneously issued an arrest warrant for Mohammed Deif, the head of Hamas's armed wing, on charges of 'the crimes against humanity of murder; extermination; torture; and rape and other forms of sexual violence; as well as the war crimes of murder, cruel treatment, torture; taking hostages'.
Fortunately for Netanyahu, Donald Trump had won the US election and was swift to support his demand that Hamas renegotiate their original ceasefire agreement on terms that would have allowed Israel to renege on its stage-two commitment to withdraw the IDF from Gaza and – once every hostage had been released – to reignite the war. When Hamas rejected that option, Netanyahu collapsed the agreement, ordering the blockade to be reinstated and promising an even more devastating offensive.
The renewed onslaught began during the night of 17-18 March 2025, when Israel's forces launched a bombardment by ground and air deep into Gaza. In the space of 24 hours some 400 Palestinians, mainly women and children, were killed. Once again the principal victims were innocent civilians. Day after day, as the government steadily extended the operation, the death toll mounted. Yet again, the IDF was unable or unwilling to avoid further 'collateral damage'. On 3 May, after almost six weeks of relentless bombardment, an IDF spokesman answered critics of the slaughter with a dismissive 'the military takes feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm'. The Gaza death toll by the end of April 2025 was upwards of 52,000.
The humanitarian disaster in Gaza reached a new nadir. With no supplies of any kind permitted to enter, food prices rose by 1,400 per cent; desperate families started to besiege those distribution points that had not closed; young children struggled piteously to reach the front of the queue to hold tin bowls beseechingly above their heads, hoping for a ladle of soup before supplies ran out. In vain, the UN's World Food Programme warned that unless the blockade was lifted, they would soon have to close their projects altogether. Cases of acute malnutrition began to soar.
With Gaza on the verge of mass famine and more than half its population at risk of starvation, the Israeli foreign ministry insisted 'there is no shortage of aid in Gaza'. More alarmingly, ministers also fell back on the dubious claim that Israel was under no obligation to allow aid to flow because Hamas had 'hijacked' supplies 'to rebuild its terror machine'. This is despite every international aid agency insisting that there is at best scant evidence that this has happened. By now thoroughly alarmed by the scale of the encroaching calamity, Britain, France and Germany finally roused themselves to make a rare joint statement, describing the blockade as 'intolerable' and demanding it be lifted immediately, although they shied away from adding that to starve more than two million people constitutes a war crime. Israel's furious response was to condemn their stance as 'morally twisted and wrong'.
By that point it had become impossible to avoid the conclusion that Israel was guilty of violating two further articles of the Fourth Geneva Convention. (Article 55: 'To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population…' And Article 59: 'If the whole or part of the population is inadequately supplied, the Occupying Power shall agree to relief schemes on behalf of the said population, and shall facilitate them by all the means at its disposal.')
On 28 April 2025, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) began hearing oral arguments from 40 countries, including Britain as well as China and Russia, seeking guidance on whether Israel might indeed be in breach of international law. Whether or not the ICJ ever indicts Israel, it is unlikely to have any impact on the Israeli government unless the US decides to intervene far more robustly than it has ever done before.
Israeli Jews are now deeply split over their government's strategy. The anguished families of the surviving hostages believe that the longer Israel prosecutes the war, the less likely it is that their loved ones will be released alive. With mounting fury, the protesting families have urged Netanyahu to order an immediate ceasefire to secure their safe return. However, a great many Israelis have come to believe that their country now faces an existential threat and have adopted an 'us or them' attitude towards the Gaza war as though forever doomed to be in conflict with the Palestinians. The trauma of 7 October has even convinced some of those who once believed in the two-state solution that it would merely provide another platform for further assaults on Israel.
Yet there is a significant group of critics, including some former hostages and their families, human rights activists, some former ministers and many liberals who still believe that Israel's salvation lies in the two-state solution. They have demanded an end to what they describe as Netanyahu's 'political war'. More than 12,000 men and women from every branch of the IDF, ranging from decorated commanders to reservists as well as retirees, have signed a growing avalanche of letters essentially demanding that the government get the last surviving hostages home, even if that means ending the war. The objectors' common theme is blunt: 'The continuation of the war does not contribute to any of its declared goals.' There has also been a sharp fall in the number of reservists willing to serve at the front. A former general has gone so far as to suggest that officers and men should consider disobeying orders to avoid prosecution for war crimes.
Among the severest and most cogent critics of the war in Gaza are a small number of Jewish academics, writers and historians who do not shrink from charging the government of Israel with both crimes against humanity and war crimes (as defined by both the 1948 Geneva Convention and the 1998 Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court). Among these, Michael Sfard, an eminent civil rights lawyer, has reluctantly been driven to conclude that, sanctioned by its Supreme Court, the state of Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid as defined by the Rome Statute for its 'inhuman acts' in the West Bank and Gaza. According to Sfard: 'One must turn off the lights, block one's ears, and lower the blinds to avoid the conclusion that Israeli rule in the Occupied Territories meets that definition.' Amos Goldberg, a renowned Holocaust scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has accused the government of genocide as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention, a war crime with a particular resonance for Jews, all of whom are acutely and painfully aware that the very notion of genocide arose from the Nazi Holocaust in the Second World War. (Article 2 of the Genocide Convention defines genocide as any one of five acts committed with 'intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group'. This includes 'causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part', notably by 'subjecting a group of people to subsistence diet, systematic expulsion from homes and the reduction of essential medical services below minimum requirement').
The 7 October massacres – 'a war crime and a crime against humanity' – traumatised Goldberg. For that reason, he found it 'agonising' to describe Israel's war in Gaza as genocide but, on the basis of his own scholarship and witnessing his government's clear resolve 'to turn the whole of Gaza into rubble', he has concluded: 'Yes, it is genocide. And once you come to this conclusion, you cannot remain silent.' In the April 2025 edition of the New York Review of Books, the Israeli-American professor of history and genocide studies at Brown University, Omer Bartov, made the same charge, writing that 'ethnic cleansing' did not adequately describe what is happening in Gaza and that, 'For a year now, it has been impossible to describe the Israeli operation as anything but genocidal.'
Bartov is dismayed by the failure of the international community to respond adequately to the scale of the catastrophe. And he has a compelling explanation for this: 'The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met.' It is certainly true that many European nations will never be absolved of their participation in the Holocaust. That guilt persists. When António Guterres, Secretary-General of the UN, has charged Israel with breaches of international law, ministers in Western chancelleries have sat on their hands, making muffled protests but shying away from warning that Netanyahu's government is almost certainly responsible for multiple war crimes, let alone from openly making such allegations.
If it takes courage for those Europeans who believe in Israel's right to exist to speak out against the government of Israel, this is doubly so for the Jewish diaspora. Always mindful that the history of the continent has long been stained by anti-Semitism, they are justly fearful of its resurgence. Today they observe ignorant demonstrators mindlessly chanting the slogan 'from the River to the Sea' in capital cities around Europe, and they know that, in Britain and across the continent, Jews have been assailed by threats, assaults and abusive behaviour. They hear the distant but advancing drumbeat of fascism. To many in the diaspora who support a two-state solution and who privately deplore Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, it can seem disloyal, even treacherous, to offer public criticism from abroad when many of their fellow Jews in the Holy Land believe that Israel's struggle against Hamas is for the salvation of all Jewry.
That is why an open letter to the Financial Times on 16 April 2025 from 36 leading members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, including the former president of the Supreme Court, Lord Neuberger, and the prominent author and human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, was such a moment. In breaking an omertà that has stifled so much free speech for many months, they wrote that 'out of love for Israel and deep concern for its future [we can] no longer stay silent on the war… The inclination to avert our eyes is strong, as what is happening is unbearable, but our Jewish values compel us to stand up and speak out… Silence is seen as support for policies and actions that run contrary to our Jewish values… We stand against the war. We acknowledge and mourn the loss of Palestinian life. We yearn for the 'day after' this conflict when reconciliation can start.'
This intervention might have led to an open debate within the diaspora, a beneficial side-effect of which would have been to force all but the most irredeemable anti-Semites to recognise that to be Jewish is not to be an apologist for an extremist government in Tel Aviv. Instead, the president of the Board of Deputies, Phil Rosenberg, rebuked the authors for demonstrating a 'deeply regrettable loss of perspective', and then to set up an inquiry into whether the signatories had breached the terms of their engagement as deputies.
Netanyahu has shown no sign of relenting. On 5 May his cabinet unanimously approved a revised war plan that would entail the permanent military occupation of every corner of Gaza. Already 70 per cent of the territory had either been declared a military 'red zone' or was under evacuation orders. The plan was to herd the half-starved population of Gaza into an even smaller pocket in the south, almost all of it already razed. To avoid further starvation they would be forced to pass through checkpoints to enter a handful of Israel-controlled food stations operated by private US companies. The UN and international aid agencies pointed out that the scheme would be unworkable as well as illegal. And so it has now proved. It has also been chaotic and violent.
The extremists who sustain Netanyahu have made it clear what they expect: a mass 'voluntary' evacuation of Gaza. Israel's finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, advised explicitly that within six months the territory would be 'totally destroyed', which, he noted, would force 'despairing' Palestinians to seek 'relocation' elsewhere.
Reflecting a dramatic surge of popular disgust, European politicians finally spoke out in unambiguous terms to condemn Israel's actions in Gaza. On 20 May, the British Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, declared: 'It is dangerous. It is repellent. It is monstrous and I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.' It is unfortunate that he and his European peers did not speak out many months earlier. Nonetheless, there is talk of suspending trade and applying sanctions, and – something much of the West has assiduously rejected for decades – giving formal recognition to Palestine as a state (a status granted by a majority of UN member countries in 2012). Netanyahu's instant response, repeated furiously by his spokespeople, has been to accuse them of rewarding Hamas for genocide.
But Donald Trump, who was apparently troubled by reports of starvation, could not be dismissed so easily. Overriding his far-right cabinet colleagues, Netanyahu had no choice but to allow a trickle of aid to enter the territory. But with hundreds of thousands of lives in peril, a complete lifting of the blockade would be required to avoid mass famine. Nor has there been any evidence that Netanyahu would be diverted from his major strategic objective – in which the hostages appear to be irrelevant – of placing Gaza under permanent military occupation. In effect, this would be annexation, leaving the victims to choose between exile from a 'cleansed' territory and a future of helotry as Jewish settlers or real-estate developers moved in.
Whatever happens to the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, the prospective fate for their 3.3 million compatriots in the West Bank is not dissimilar and no less alarming. With widespread popular support – even from those calling for a ceasefire in Gaza – Israel seems to be intent on swamping the territory with settlements. Before long, these Palestinians will also face a choice of accepting their lot as colonial subjects under an apartheid regime, going into exile or rising up in revolutionary fury.
If the situation in both Gaza and the West Bank is catastrophic for the Palestinians, it promises to be disastrous for the Israelis as well. The region is already chronically unstable. Public opinion in the authoritarian states that surround Israel is already consumed by rage at what they see, read and hear from the Occupied Territories. It would not take much for that mood to erupt into violent unrest with unpredictable consequences. Elsewhere, Israel's erstwhile supporters, their views reflected openly in the media, are no less aghast. For so long as the country remains in the hands of extremists, it is hard to see Europe's liberal democracies restoring Israel to its traditional place in the diplomatic firmament. In alienating these traditional allies, Israel is at risk of becoming isolated in an alarmingly unstable world whose tectonic plates are shifting in unforeseeable ways. It would also be exceptionally short-sighted for Israel to presume on America's unquestioning and enduring support. The mercurial deal-maker in the White House has just staked his claim on the region and Israel was not in his sightlines. He has already brought Syria in from the cold, and his 'transactional' relationships with the Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia (which seems to matter to him at least as much as the fate of Israel), suggest that he might easily reach the conclusion that, with Netanyahu in power, Israel is less of a strategic asset than a corporate liability. Nor, surely, is it far-fetched to imagine that his successors, with images of Gaza seared in their retinas, would be any more sympathetic unless and until Israel agrees to withdraw from the Occupied Territories in line with Resolution 242, unlikely as that now appears. But that is to peer into the unknown.
As I write, there is talk of another ceasefire. If it happens it will be excessively fragile. Unless Washington insists, nothing will stop Netanyahu once again detonating any deal once the hostages are home again. The future remains grim. In the absence of a miracle, there will be even more bloodshed, more starving and dying children, more illegal settlements, more hatred, more insurgency, more repression, more refugees shuffling towards an unknown fate, an unending cycle of despair. The prospect is tragic beyond words. Clinging to the belief that the only realistic chance of securing lasting peace is the two-state solution even as that disappears over the distant horizon, all that this chronicler can do is reiterate that the Palestinians did exist, do exist and – unless they are annihilated – will exist.
This is an edited extract from the updated edition of 'The Palestinians' by Jonathan Dimbleby and Don McCullin, which will be published in October (Quartet Books)
[See also: Israel's calculus on Syria]
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