Earlier this week, Hamas and Israel agreed to a ceasefire that included the release of the twenty living hostages who remained in Gaza and some two thousand Palestinians who are held in Israeli jails. The success of the exchange has raised hopes that the devastating war may really be coming to an end. President Donald Trump, who took credit for the deal after pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept it, now wants both sides to implement his twenty-point peace plan, which would require Hamas to disarm and Israel to leave Gaza. (Israeli officials told the New York Times that they are now considering punitive measures after Hamas said late on Wednesday that the remains of more than a dozen Israeli hostages—who are also supposed to be returned to Israel—were unable to be located. Separately, Israeli forces that still operate in Gaza have continued to kill Palestinians since the ceasefire began.)
I recently spoke by phone with Nathan Thrall, a former director of the International Crisis Group’s Arab-Israeli Conflict project. Thrall, who lives in Jerusalem, is also the author of the book “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama.” I wanted to talk to Thrall about what the Palestinian national struggle might look like going forward. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed his fears about what lessons Israel may have taken from the war, why America is so unwilling to use its leverage to help resolve a conflict it has exacerbated, and whether Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, was a strategic as well as moral catastrophe.
In terms of the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict, what has changed most in terms of the way you thought about it on October 6, 2023, versus today?
The largest change that has happened in the past two years is that the possibility of large-scale ethnic cleansing has become very real. Of course, we’ve already seen large-scale ethnic cleansing within Gaza. But what I have seen over the past two years is an Israeli society that is powerful, that faces very few obstacles, and that has the ability, and, in the right circumstances, the willingness, to expel huge numbers of Palestinians and, in the view of many Israelis, resolve the Palestinian issue once and for all.
I’m talking about all of the territory under Israel’s control, so, historic Palestine. Seventy-eight per cent of historic Palestine is within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. This doesn’t include the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which make up the remaining twenty-two per cent. But the West Bank is occupied by Israel, and, prior to October 7th, if you totalled the entirety of the territory actually under the control of Palestinians—meaning where the Palestinian Authority has control in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza—that together made up about ten per cent of historic Palestine. And, of course, Israel still made raids into those areas at will. So we are talking about Israel administering directly around ninety per cent of historic Palestine.
There’s a distinction between ethnic cleansing within the occupied territories—what we’ve seen both in the West Bank and on a much larger scale in Gaza over the past two years—and what might come next, which is the possible expulsion of large numbers of Palestinians to areas outside of historic Palestine. The Arab states’ fear of precisely this outcome, and the destabilizing effects it might have on their own regimes, was one of the reasons that they unified around a deeply problematic Trump plan for Gaza, even though that plan offers no assurance that Israel will fully withdraw from the territory or cease attacks on Palestinians within it.
So, in your mind, October 7th and the ensuing war changed the idea of what’s possible for Israelis, because despite some pushback from the international community, and lots of stories that indicate that Israel’s reputation is the lowest it’s ever been, the actual lesson is that they can do what they want?
Yes. And what has really changed is that ethnic cleansing has become a part of the mainstream public discourse. It is something that I had previously thought was not unimaginable but very unlikely outside of some major regional war. Now it is discussed. People are polled on it. One poll found that eighty-two per cent of Israeli Jews favored expelling Gazans. You can quibble with one poll or another, but you have clear Israeli Jewish majorities in favor of pushing Palestinians outside of Gaza. At some level, many Israelis feel that their basic predicament, the predicament of Zionism, is unresolved so long as there are millions of Palestinians living in the territory under their control.
When you say this has become part of mainstream discourse, what are you referring to?
I’m talking about leading figures in the media, ministers in the government, and members of the Knesset discussing expulsion. I’m talking about Israelis from the center left putting forward plans for what they call voluntary “transfer” from Gaza. Ram Ben-Barak, a Knesset member from a centrist party, was the co-author of one of these plans. This is not a fringe notion anymore. And this comes from the fact that Israelis are unwilling to give Palestinians a state, or equal rights. What is left is either the continuation of apartheid or ethnic cleansing—and ethnic cleansing is appealing because it feels like a solution. Whereas apartheid feels like it may be sustainable, but is a nonsolution. It feels like the issue is not resolved.
O.K., but why hasn’t the international condemnation and Israel’s falling popularity registered with Israelis and convinced them that they should change course? Why do you think they have drawn the opposite lesson?
There is a huge difference between a change in public opinion and policy changes that actually affect Israelis. And we have really not seen the latter. During a genocide, the Israeli arms industry was booming. They were making record profits. And we have at a bare minimum almost seventy thousand dead in Gaza. It took that to even get the first bills for banning settlement products introduced in some countries in Europe. But you still cannot get an E.U.-wide ban on settlement products. It’s a non-starter. So Israelis don’t feel any real consequences.
I agree with everyone on the left who believes this shift in global public opinion is important, but what it means is so often overstated. The U.S. is arming Israel, and the Europeans are Israel’s No. 1 trading partner. It’s embarrassing to see how many people are calling this deal a peace deal—not just Trump but Chancellor Friedrich Merz, of Germany. The Europeans will likely reverse even their modest steps. The Eurovision Song Contest was going to hold a vote, in November, on not having Israel compete next year, and that vote has now been postponed. You see headline after headline about how Europe is preparing to reëmbrace Israel.
