In 2012, I argued in the pages of this journal that Israel is a nineteenth-century European project completed neither in the nineteenth century nor in Europe.Footnote1 The State of Israel was born against a perishable backdrop of post-Holocaust philosemitism in Europe and the United States. It was my view that this era was ending and that the Zionist flavor of nationalism would lead Israel to come under global siege, reviving the communal sense of Jews as perennial outsiders that the existence of the Jewish State was supposed to erase. While this clearly would lead to further armed conflict, I also focused on the threat to Israel posed by the “semi-soft” universe of ideas and actions based on the nonviolence of Gandhi, Thoreau, and Gene Sharp—the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The one (unlikely) shot at mitigating Israel’s perilous status was, in my view, the choice by a critical mass of Israelis and Palestinians to construct a shared layer in their identities through which they would embrace a common dissatisfaction with their own politicians, religious hardliners, and ineffective international actors.
Obviously, a lot has happened since 2012. The uprisings against Arab dictators the year before, welcomed so breathlessly in the West, have long since fizzled out. What once appeared to be a world dominated by post-Cold War American power has given way to a disorienting global polyarchy and a cascading implosion of politics and social cohesion in the US. The existence of “Western values” is being called into serious question by the challenge posed by the spread of populist governance to the elite- and activist-driven multiculturalist narrative. The longshot hope for Israeli–Palestinian communal convergence has been made fantasy by the horror of the war in Gaza, Israel’s inability to bridge political division and its secular–halachic chasm, and the deepening of the legitimacy of Hamas as the heroes of the Palestinian resistance. Global rejection of Israel’s muscular approach to security and intercommunal relations has intensified, and it appears that the Jewish State’s future as an anachronism has become its present condition.
The spectacularly successful Hamas assault on October 7 came in the context of a tectonic shift in the Middle East. For the first time, the fulcrum of power and wealth has moved from the Mediterranean seaboard to the Arabian/Persian Gulf. The latter has historically been peripheral to regional security even as it provided important trade routes and entrepôts. In the context of longstanding Roman/Byzantine rivalry in the area and the violent conflict-resolution process involving the Jewish Kingdom of Himyar in Yemen, the eruption of Islam and Arab power out of the region was an enormous strategic surprise. The area remained peripheral as a geopolitical actor even as its petroleum deposits brought it wealth in the 1930s. The denial of oil to the West in 1973 temporarily thrust OPEC and the Gulf into the headlines, but the Arab Gulf States were still bit players as opposed to lead actors in matters of global security, even during the two American-led invasions of Iraq.
This has changed with the emergence of ambitious rulers in Saudi Arabia and the UAE in the context of growing international polyarchy. Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh have become central actors in international finance, active players in diplomacy related to the Israel–Palestine conflict, and increasingly influential in international sports and other significant soft power arenas.
The willingness of wealthy and engaged emirs and princes in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar to consider ties with Israel threatened to push to the sidelines an already foundering Palestinian cause. The Trump administration deserves credit for taking advantage of this development to scrap the serially feckless “peace process” in favor of diplomacy focused on the Gulf States. China took note and is following suit. However, on October 7, Hamas terrorists not only killed or kidnapped Israelis but provoked a predictably furious Israeli response, thus forcing Gulf notables to push Israel away—but for how long is both a major and open question.
The Failure of Anti-Antisemitism
The Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow is a pile of red sandstone typical of the architectural style that defines the celebration of wealth and power consciously evoked by Glaswegians in the heyday of Victorian imperialism. In the gallery’s collection is a huge mega-portrait of those attending a fundraising gala that made Kelvingrove’s construction possible. Queen Victoria, her son Prince Henry, and some of the many notable Scots who made empire possible are crowded into the scene. An explanatory note attached to this work identifies her, her son, and a selection of the pictured military and business elites as imperialists, enslavers, and capitalist exploiters. Other pieces of art around the building highlight the same narrative in an effort to acknowledge the shame of the imperial behavior of Britain (and therefore Scotland).
The contents of the gallery and other public institutions suggest some self-expiation by contrasting this abhorrent record with Scotland’s early and consistent support for Nelson Mandela and the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa. Scottish opinion makers use this theater of repentance to justify the moral and ethical judgments they make on the behavior of former colonies and everyone else around the world. On the other hand, I am not aware of any mention in Glasgow of Idi Amin’s philo-Scottish sentiments as portrayed in the movie “The Last King of Scotland.”
It is important to understand this filter of the imperial past as a large piece of the explanatory matrix behind the strong global opposition to the nineteenth-century-style Israeli state expressed by both former imperial centers and postcolonial successor states. To Europeans who still enjoy the fruits of wealth and power gathered on the backs of colonized and enslaved peoples, Israel is an unwelcome mirror of their own behavior. In Ireland and the global South, Israel is seen as guilty of establishing settlements and expelling natives based on its disputed claim to a right of Jewish return. This perception meshes with local memories of imperial domination and thus Israel becomes a natural target for politicians and other public figures.
There is no doubt that antisemitism is present in the global reaction to Israel’s massive military response to the shocking success of the October 7 massacre. Nevertheless, tarring every critic and every anti-Zionist as antisemitic is as ineffective as it is inaccurate. To be sure, many of Israel's detractors have adopted traditional antisemitic tropes, but some do not focus on Jews or Israel at all. Israeli politicians and too many of Israel's presumably well-meaning advocates outside the country further weaken a losing hand by refusing to distinguish those who suggest that Israeli behavior replicates the era and values of the imperialist European milieu, and as such, is criminal, from others who judge perceived Israeli brutality as defining the essence of Jews and Judaism and therefore can fairly be characterized as antisemitic.
This context feeds into the hypocrisy of focusing on Israeli actions while ignoring or downplaying horrors going on elsewhere. Europeans can enjoy the comfort of paying ritual attention to the destruction and displacement of people in Syria, Myanmar, Sudan, or elsewhere while using these situations to justify the continuing relevance of former imperial masters to their former colonial subjects. At the same time, rulers in India and other places in which emancipation from imperial control has led to politics of racism and/or communal repression can use the easy Israeli target to distract domestic and foreign audiences from their own behavior. However reprehensible, only a part of this involves antisemitism.
The Stain of “Genocide”
All of this plays into the likelihood of Israel being branded as a genocidal state—as some already have done. Make no mistake, this problem is not just a meaningless process of legalism and is not going to disappear when the fighting ends. Two related developments involving the definition and use of the term “genocide” will determine the issue going forward.
The first has received some attention as partisans dispute the term’s applicability to Israel’s behavior in Gaza. “Genocide” no longer always means what Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-born Jewish scholar who coined the term, and others intended. To be sure, the original definition still gets used; a recent report accused Ethiopia of acting with intent to destroy the Tigrayans as an ethnic group. However, some jurists, analysts, and commentators are assigning the word to conditions in which they deem the impact of perpetrators’ actions unacceptable regardless of intent. So, to them, Israel is guilty of genocide because its use of firepower and restrictions on aid to Gaza result in the deaths of masses of people and create conditions of famine that threaten the existence of the enclave’s Palestinian population.
This trend blurs the distinction between genocide and other crimes against humanity. Currently it seems that it is not enough to accuse individuals or states of mass murder or other offenses; nothing short of the charge of genocide will do. This leads to the second point: “Genocide” has become an epithet as much as a legal term, a badge of honor for traumatized communities and a mark of shame for those accused of committing this most stigmatized crime.
If a community has suffered murder, rape, and other forms of violent or even non-violent assault, its activists insist on having these horrors termed “genocide.” If this does not happen, they complain that their people are being doubly victimized. At the same time, accused perpetrators insist that whatever happened absolutely cannot be seen to have been genocide. They might acknowledge that bad things took place but will fight tooth and nail to avoid the stain of that term.
Nuremburg was an aberration, not the norm. West Germany accepted moral responsibility for the Holocaust, but East Germany did not. For decades, Japan denied having committed crimes in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia and remains circumspect on the “G word.” Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs continue to vehemently reject the notion that the murder of 7,000–8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995 qualified as a genocide. In 2019, Bosnian Serb strongman Milorad Dodik convened two commissions (one chaired by an Israeli scholar) clearly intended to deny the stain of the genocide label regarding Srebrenica and Bosnian Serb activities in and around Sarajevo. The century-long dispute over whether Ottoman Turks (and Kurds) committed genocide against the Armenians during World War I remains in question as far as Turkey is concerned, no matter how many legal rulings or moralizing tracts say it has been resolved.
The point is that Israel is going to shoulder a real burden if the International Court of Justice deems it a genocidal state. The rhetorical hyperbole involved in sanctifying the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as the most moral military in history demonstrates the pain already being felt by the Jewish State on this point. The perception of Israel as a settler/conquest state—a nineteenth-century European project completed neither in the nineteenth century nor in Europe—would align with the genocide label, should the court apply it. Hamas, Iran, and Israel’s other enemies would be able to claim that no Jewish citizen of that state can be considered innocent, not because they are Jews but because they are criminals. It would become even easier for politicians and activists without a strong interest in the Israel–Palestine conflict to use Israel as a rhetorical punching bag. In that case, it would become more difficult to identify and respond to antisemitism, because it would have become legally acceptable to express collective hatred of Israelis as citizens participating in the actions of a formally designated genocidal state.
Options and Contingencies
States—all of them—exist by force at least as much as by right. The late Charles Tilly did not exaggerate much when he suggested that war made the state and the state made war. Israel, more than most, depends for its continued existence on its hard power. It must not only win wars, but—while it is contemplating or carrying one out— must thoughtfully conceptualize what will happen when the fighting stops. This does not mean that Israel needed a “day after” strategy regarding the political future of the Gaza Strip. It means that going forward, Jerusalem should thoroughly consider how this ongoing violent event fits in with what will remain an existential duel of undetermined duration with its regional enemies.
Failing to do that was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cardinal error after October 7. His shock and embarrassment at having been unable to provide the security he so often claimed was his gift to his country led him to promise to make this the last war against Hamas rather than plan for the war itself—just one in a series of wars Israel has fought, is fighting, and will fight in the future. If he and his fractious government had promised only to deliver a massive blow to their enemies, they might have been able to both deliver necessary pain and end this round of fighting and exchange hostages for a ceasefire. Lessons could have been learned and the global decline in Israel’s diplomacy and soft power could have been limited. After a pause, the effort to normalize relations with the increasingly important Gulf States might have continued.
As things stand, Netanyahu and the Israeli right are counting on Trump to regain the White House and give them a free hand to deal with the Palestinians as they see fit. The fact that Israel is relying on a figure as unpredictable as the former and perhaps future president for its security says a lot about its problems. If he wins a second term, the decline in America’s global position will accelerate, as will the attractiveness of China as a more reliable and better-run security and economic partner—a development that would not be lost on the Gulf States or Iran. Netanyahu’s bet could turn sour if Israel finds itself increasingly outcast globally and stuck with an erratic, weakening partner in Washington.
This contingency also would negate the competent post-October 7 professional performance of the IDF, which disproved ominous predictions by US military and media commentators that it would get bogged down in urban fighting as the Americans did during their poorly conceived and executed invasion of Iraq in 2003. IDF losses have been relatively low, and Hamas proved—and is proving—unable to do more than provide a manageable level of asymmetric resistance. Of course, it should not be assumed the same would be true if Israel were to get involved in a major war with Hezbollah.
An Israel that has already lost the diplomatic and public relations war now must use its military advantage and the situation on the ground to create the necessary conditions for a halt to the current fighting in Gaza; enable the strip’s reconstruction absent domination by Hamas; and develop a clear-eyed approach toward future conflict with Iran, Hezbollah, and whatever is the next flavor of Palestinian armed resistance to Israel’s existence. There has not been, is not, and likely will not be a “two-state solution”—too many spoilers on all sides would prevent a formall agreement along those lines from turning into peace.
The first step in this process would be to move discussion away from who is in control of Gaza to how to put that devastated patch of land and shattered community back together. The death of so many Palestinians and the destruction of families and communal structures means that the idea of moving in the near term from a ceasefire to local governance is sheer fantasy. Once the fighting stops and people can think about more than daily survival, it is likely that expressions of Palestinian anger at Israel, the US, and perhaps Hamas will increase and crowd out any Western-inspired notions of normalization in Palestinian–Israeli relations. In that context, a more constructive approach than that currently bruited about would be to turn over interim administration of Gaza to NGOs and international charitable organizations (not affiliated with any government) that are experienced in reconstructing shattered places. These bodies should get together to decide who does what and where. They should choose which Palestinians to work with as long as Hamas is out of bounds. Security would be provided by an international force unencumbered by the IDF or other administrative Israeli roadblocks. Over time, the rebuilding of neighborhoods in Gaza and other Palestinian structures would produce future political leaders. Eventually they and the transnational functional administrators would decide how to facilitate the emergence of a new government and legal framework.
Palestinians Might Have Other Ideas
No Israeli, international, or transnational strategy can preclude the possibility that the Muslim Brotherhood, whatever remains of Hamas, or other actors resisting Israel’s existence will implement their own idea of a “day after.” The war has once again underscored the gap between some Arab governments and their populations on how to handle the Zionist state. Authorities in Egypt likely harbor bad memories of the 2011 uprising.
Jordan’s assistance to Israel’s defense against Iran’s missile/drone barrage did not sit well with its Palestinian majority population. It may not be possible for the Brotherhood to replicate the riots in Tahrir Square or Mohammed Morsi’s electoral victory of 2012. However, Jordan’s minority dynasty may be more vulnerable to regime change. It is unclear whether the help Israel received from Jordan has shaken support for the government among the country’s Bedouins, but activists and Muslim Brotherhood supporters within the majority Palestinian population could try to find out. Replacing the Hashemites with a country renaming itself “Palestine” would not be a step toward a two-state solution. Rather, a renamed trans-Jordan Palestine would proceed to establish formal diplomatic relations with states already recognizing Palestinian sovereignty in a place outside Israeli control. This would set the stage for future wars focused on the eventual establishment of a single Palestine running from beyond the river to the sea.
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David B. Kanin
David B. Kanin is an adjunct professor of European Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. In 2010, he retired as a senior analyst from the Central Intelligence Agency. He was a founding member of the Red Cell, a group focused on the analysis of alternatives to mainline judgments. Dr. Kanin holds a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University.
Notes
1 See David B. Kanin, “Israel: The Future as an Anachronism,” The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, VI: 1 (2012), 33–42.