Is It Possible to Be Reasonable...

When the Subject Is Israel and the Palestinians?

A reality that had been developing for years has become viral in the aftermath of the events of October 7, 2023, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis, precipitating a war in which tens of thousands of people in Gaza died and the territory was almost completely destroyed.

Israel, the nation established after the Holocaust, settled by remnants of the Jewish populations from Europe and, later, by Jews expelled from the Arab countries and immigrants from the Soviet Union and the United States, has achieved a reputation so contentious that it has become a toxic topic whenever and wherever it is encountered.

For decades, efforts to reconcile the policies and objectives pursued by the Israelis and the Palestinians have led inexorably to failure. Is it possible to find a reasonable way forward?

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It seems that every ethnic group, nationality, race, religion, and gender identity can claim to have suffered periods of harassment, bigotry, violence, and repression. But the Jews have experienced an especially well-defined history of antisemitism, culminating in the twentieth century with Adolf Hitler’s determination to eliminate them altogether, wherever they lived. In 1939, a majority of the global Jewish population, roughly 9.5 million people, lived in Europe. By 1945, that number had dropped to 3.8 million, after the systematic annihilation across Europe that came to be known as the Holocaust.

In 1948, the State of Israel was established in a region where Jews had historically lived until they were defeated and nearly all of them dispersed by the Romans almost two thousand years ago. Over the centuries, the population of the region became primarily Arab, Muslims and Christian.

Before World War I, the Ottoman Empire ruled this land, and following the war Palestine came under a British mandate from the League of Nations. A minority Jewish population had made its way to Palestine over time, but the numbers were soon restricted by Britain’s policy of tightly limiting Jewish emigration where Arabs were in the majority.

After Hitler took power in 1933 and demonized Jews as part of official state policy, hundreds of thousands of Jews tried to leave or were expelled from Germany and, later, Austria. But no country was willing to take them in any numbers, including the United States.

In the mid-1930s, confronted with Arab revolts against the British, a royal commission concluded that the mandate would have to end and proposed a division of Palestine into an Arab-led country with a separate space and administration for Jews living there. A similar formula was adopted by the United Nations in November 1947, when Resolution 181 established two states, one Arab and one Jewish, in the land that the British would soon vacate. The Jewish population of Palestine accepted the partition plan, and Israel became a state on May 14, 1948. The United States immediately recognized Israel’s independence, followed three days later by the Soviet Union, but the Arab world unanimously rejected the new state and any Jewish political presence in the Middle East. Five Arab nations declared war on Israel.

In the chaos that followed, about 750,000 people, about half of the Palestinians living in the territory of the British Mandate, were displaced, an event known in Arabic as the Nakba. This in turn ingrained enmities that to this day define Israeli-Palestinian relations, leading to violence that has had a profound impact there, along with consequences far from the land itself.

In 1967, following another major regional war, Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, bringing millions of Palestinians directly under Israeli military rule and opening the door to Israeli settlements. Since then, recurring surges of violence, including Intifada uprisings and terrorism, were offset by what at the time seemed to be diplomatic breakthroughs. The Camp David Accords, the Oslo Accords, and Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan raised hopes that a general settlement of the abiding disputes was possible. None have achieved this goal.

In this summer of 2026, there no longer seems to be any meaningful momentum toward an agreement that could or would change the corrosive dynamics between Israel and the Palestinians.

So, what might actually make a difference in which the indisputable interests of the Israeli and Palestinian people take precedence over rhetoric and polemic?

New Leadership: The Camp David Accords were negotiated in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (who was assassinated three years later) and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, whose background in anti-British militancy and prominent position in the right wing of Israeli politics gave him the leeway to make peace with Israel’s most formidable enemy.

King Hussein of Jordan was pragmatic enough to make peace in 1994 with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by an Israeli right-winger a year later.

By contrast, Egypt’s current authoritarian president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, is a former military chief with no apparent urge to be a legendary peacemaker, as Sadat wanted to be.

The Palestinian administration on the West Bank, itself established as a result of the Oslo Accords, is now led by Mahmoud Abbas, who is too compromised and sclerotic to make history at this point. And Hamas (and its affiliates in the region) are battered but still refuse to concede defeat and agree to any form of disarmament.

Israel has been led for years by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has shifted the country’s government to the far right, supporting significant encroachments on Palestinian land by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. And since the 2023 Hamas attacks, the Israel Defense Forces have virtually destroyed Gaza, where about two million Palestinians live.

An upcoming Israeli election on October 27 might wrest power from Netanyahu and the far right because their dominance is less reflective of Israeli public opinion than their policies make it appear. (As a comparison, think of the Trump presidency and how much of the American electorate it really represents.) Deciphering the intricacies of Israeli politics beyond Netanyahu demands expertise that I do not have. In The New Yorker’s August 3 issue, the editor David Remnick, deploying exhaustive depth and knowledge, identifies Gadi Eisenkot, a retired chief of the Israel Defense Forces as having “the best chance of unseating” Netanyahu in the election. A paywall limits access to the piece to subscribers, but that is its main takeaway.

President Donald Trump’s engagement in the region has veered from dealmaking that provides financial benefit to his political allies and his own family to waging war against Iran in a complicated alliance with Netanyahu. In classic Trump style, his Board of Peace is more grandiose than meaningful.

Pecuniary Peace: In the first Trump term, the Abraham Accords normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco, with the expectation that the benefits of trade and commerce might deliver peace and prosperity to all sides.

Whatever else the Abraham Accords may have achieved, they showed that the prospect of financial and economic benefits to the parties could overcome ideological and religious divisions. Or, as Trump would argue, it demonstrated “The Art of the Deal.”

But the subsequent wars in Gaza, Iran, and southern Lebanon have undermined a trajectory of security that would be based on the traditional Middle Eastern interest in the making of money.

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The road to reason has become as rocky as the path to peace because of the scale of vituperation and violence. Can new leadership or lucrative trade actually make headway? Clearly, the current strategies are making matters worse.

On behalf of those of us with Jewish heritage I’d like to make this point: Out of the horrors of World War II, millions of Jews around the world, especially in the United States, earned a largely safe place in the societies where they lived and were accepted in ways they never really were before. How Jews have felt about Israel was always a consideration for them, with varying degrees of connection, depending on multiple aspects of family history, their experience in the United States, and the complexities of decades of religious intermarriage. In today’s circumstances, with Israel an unequivocal warrior state accused of war crimes and persecutions, discussion about Israel and Palestine invariably involves expletives and excoriation.

History has shown that while patterns persist, they can change. There were times in recent decades when that seemed possible in Israel and Palestine.

The first step toward reason is to recover our senses and recognize that outright victory for either of the antagonists would mean unfathomable suffering for peoples and a region that have already suffered far more than enough.