Palestinians and Israelis: What have we learnt from Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip, and what we need to do about it?

The president asked the military and political leaders to learn from the America’s rush to war after Sept. 11, which took our soldiers deep into the dead ends and dark alleys of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The president said he understands and many Americans does the same. “You can’t look at what has happened here to your mothers, your fathers, your grandparents, sons, daughters, children, even babies and not scream out for justice. Justice has to be done. But I caution this — while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. We were angry at the United States after 9/11. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”

The president was referring to Israel’s response in the Gaza Strip to the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks that killed more than 1,400 Israelis, with about 200 kidnapped and held hostage.

There have been several airstrikes and preparations for a ground assault in Gaza that will kill a lot of Palestinians, inflaming tensions in the region. More than 3,400 people have been killed in Israel’s attacks on Gaza, and more than 12,000 injured, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

Jimmy Carter’s 1979 Framework for Peace in the Middle East: The Failure of the American-Israeli Interaction During the Six-Day War

President Jimmy Carter was asked by Egypt to broker a peace deal that would lead to peace between Israel and Egypt, as well as resolve Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. He hosted the leaders at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland.

Carter and his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, aimed to accomplish Arab recognition of Israel’s right to exist, Israel’s withdrawal from territories it had occupied since the end of the Six-Day War, a guarantee that Israel’s security would not be threatened and securing an undivided Jerusalem.

Carter said that he tried to have Begin and Sadat come together during the first three days. The two men were yelling at each other and walking out of the rooms. They didn’t see each other for the next 10 days. We had to talk to them isolated from one another.

Eventually, the two sides came together. The “Framework for Peace in the Middle East” is a set of official agreements. The deal recognized the “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people” and full autonomy within five years for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, territories that had been controlled by Jordan and Egypt, respectively, prior to the Six-Day War.

The talks failed to produce much as Palestinian representatives refused to participate and the difference of positions between Egyptian and Israeli on Palestinian self-government was noted in the US State Department’s history.

James Hershberg, a professor of international affairs and history at George Washington University, says that the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt signed in Washington D.C. on March 26, 1979 is the lasting legacy of Carter’s efforts.

The peace between Israel and Egypt did not end despite the 1981 assassination of Sadat by Islamic extremists in Cairo. Many in the Islamic world cheered Sadat’s assassination, regarding the Egyptian leader as a traitor for having made peace with Israel.

“[F]or most Arabs he had betrayed the Palestinian cause at the Maryland summit meeting and was considered a traitor and an outcast by 1981,” Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote in 2021.

Eric Altman, a professor at City University of New York and author of We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel, says that the Bush administration tried to move the peace deal forward but failed.

Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, spent months trying to bring representatives of the Arab nations together with Israel, eventually getting Egypt, Syria and Lebanon to attend talks hosted by Spain and co-sponsored by the United States and the Soviet Union. A joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation was also present.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir didn’t give any ground. Shamir “refused everything and he never offered anything,” Altman says. “Baker is considered a genius for bringing Madrid together, and he did work very hard for it — but all he got was a meeting.”

Toward the end of Clinton’s second term, Prime Minister Ehud Barak wanted to try again to reach a deal with the Palestinians. The people met at Camp David.

Clinton believed that it would be easier for Israel to pull back from the Golan Heights than withdraw from the West Bank, according to the State.

The agreement they reached was signed in Washington just a month after Oslo talks concluded. The signing ceremony yielded a famous photo of Clinton presiding over a handshake between the two men.

The 1948 Oslo Accords: The First Treaty between Israel and the Palestinians, and the Second Israeli–Palestinian War on Terrorism

The PLO, in turn, renounced terrorism and recognized Israel’s right to exist in peace, bringing an end to the Palestinians’ first Intifada or uprising against Israel that had begun in 1987 — and spawned a more radical offshoot of the PLO, known as Hamas.

It seemed like significant progress, but the spirit of the agreement was quickly undone, Hershberg says. And almost immediately, the “two-state solution” began unraveling.

It was in 1994 that a mosque in Hebron was attacked by a Jewish settlers on the West Bank. Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli settlers opposed to the agreement. Rabin had come to symbolize the Oslo Accords, and his death marked their symbolic collapse.

After Rabin’s assassination in 1995, there was no hope for peace, according to Patrick Maney, who retired as a Boston College history professor.

“Arafat didn’t want to come to Camp David because he didn’t think that they had been prepared sufficiently in advance or he wasn’t ready or he didn’t want peace,” he says.

Maney says that a lot of people on the Clinton team said this was close. “Barak had said yes to all all of this, and Arafat had said no. And so Clinton really blamed Arafat. … I have to say, there is some disagreement about that.

The al-Qaida attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent “war on terror” so preoccupied the administration of President George W. Bush that Middle East peace efforts were put on hold.

Obama’s maiden trip as president to the region was in Egypt, where he delivered a speech that reassured the Muslim world that America and Islam were not exclusive and need not be in competition. His first presidential trip was to Israel.

Most people think that Obama made two big mistakes. “The first one was going to Egypt first thing and not stopping off in Israel. The second demand was a freeze on settlements in the West Bank.

The new peace effort, called the Abraham Accords, which had been signed at the White House by President Trump, included normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states.

The deal was “mostly the result of a fear of Iran and Shiite countries as opposed to any acceptance [by the signatories] of Israel’s legitimacy,” Hershberg says.

At Biden’s urging, Israel agreed to allow some aid into Gaza and the U.S. announced $100 million in humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

History will be the judge of his visit’s impact — but the involvement of U.S. presidents in trying to foster Middle East peace seems likely to continue, even as specific goals change.

Speaking on NPR’s All Things Considered on Tuesday, journalist and editor Susan Glasser, had this to say: “The failure of the great dream of so many American presidents, this idea that there was a viable two-state solution to be negotiated and that the U.S. president would become the broker of that … that foundered, and really is sort of no longer even really flickering as a dream of U.S. presidents.”

Hershberg says that may be true for now, and likely for the foreseeable future. If anything ever happens, he says that the U.S. role is inevitable because it has the most leverage.

The Palestinian authority needs to choose a new leader soon so that it can build a series of good institutions in a noncorrupt way that earns its people’s respect and legitimacy. The Palestinian Authority, which is ready to coexist with the Jewish state, needs to be able to actually win a free and fair election against Hamas in the West Bank or Gaza.

During the first week of war, the Supreme Leader of Iran and the leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon appeared to have a very tight control on militiamen in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. But as the second week has gone on, U.S. officials have picked up increasing signs that both leaders may be considering letting their forces more aggressively attack Israeli targets, and maybe American targets if the United States intervenes.

I was told by senior U.S. officials that the threat of a regionwide war is much greater today than it was five days ago. As I write on Thursday night, The Times is reporting that a U.S. Navy warship in the northern Red Sea on Thursday shot down three cruise missiles and several drones launched from Yemen that the Pentagon said might have been headed toward Israel. missiles were fired at US forces in Iraq and Syria and at Israel from Lebanon.

Iran is likely to try to hit Israel with its proxies but Israel will not allow it. Anything can happen if that happens. Israel is believed to have submarines in the Persian Gulf.

What makes the situation triply dangerous is even if Israel acts with herculean restraint to prevent civilian deaths in Gaza, it won’t matter. Think of what happened at Gaza City’s Ahli Arab Hospital on Tuesday.

As the Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea pointed out to me, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (P.I.J.) achieved more this week with an apparently misfired rocket “than it achieved in all of its successful missile launches.”

That is why I believe that Israel would be much better off framing any Gaza operation as “Operation Save Our Hostages” — rather than “Operation End-Hamas-once-and-for-all” — and carry it out with surgical strikes and special forces that can still get the Hamas leadership, but also draw the brightest possible line between Gazan civilians and the Hamas dictatorship.

Where I have a vote — just one — is in America. The president, in his prime-time speech Thursday night, vowed to ask Congress for an additional $14 billion in assistance for Israel to get through this war, along with an immediate injection of $100 million in new funding for humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Should Israel need weapons to protect itself from Hezbollah, then it is reasonable to ship them. But in terms of broader economic aid for Israel, it should be provided only if Israel agrees not to build even one more settlement in the West Bank — zero, none, no more, not one more brick, not one more nail — outside the settlement blocs and the territory immediately around them, where most Jewish settlers are now clustered and which Israel is expected to retain in any two-state solution with the Palestinians. (Netanyahu’s coalition agreement actually vows to annex the whole of the West Bank.)

I am well aware that Hamas has been committed to eliminating the Jewish state since its inception — not because Israel has expanded settlements in the West Bank. If Israel hopes to make a reconciliation with the Palestinians in the long term that will bring about a two state solution, then the settlement project must stop and it should be stopped now.

Without those two sets of conditions being met, there is no future for moderation in the world, there is no chance of a sustainable peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia, there is no chance of normal ties between the two countries, even if Israel eliminates every Hamas leader, foot soldier and rocketmaker

We are not going to tell Netanyahu what to do in Gaza. We’re just going to tell him what we’re not going to do anymore — because we happen to be a sovereign country too.

I am not just talking settlements, America has been indirectly funding Israel’s suicide. Look at what Netanyahu did last June. Netanyahu wants to keep himself out of jail on corruption charges, which is why his government gave the ultra-Orthodox an unprecedented increment in allocations. Ben- David said that the budgetary increment alone was more than Israel invests each year in higher education. It is crazy.

If this is the season of war, it also has to be a season for answers about what happens the morning after. I’m not the only one who wants to know. As the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari wrote in an essay this week in Haaretz about Netanyahu’s government: If it “does dream of exploiting victory to annex territories, forcefully redraw borderlines, expel populations, ignore rights, censor speech, realize messianic fantasies or turn Israel into a theocratic dictatorship — we need to know it now.”