by Christopher Datta
I support Israel’s right to exist and its right to defend itself. Hamas is a terrorist organization and the attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7, 2023, was an outrage and a war crime. Hezbollah in Lebanon is also a terrorist organization, and Iran is a rogue state.
However, the atrocities committed by Israel’s enemies cannot be allowed to obscure the fact that Binyamin Netanyahu and his policies have condemned Israel to eventual collapse. Sadly, Israel as a Jewish state is now locked into a trajectory that it cannot survive in the long run. This has major implications for the future of American foreign policy in the region.
Primarily, this is because of the end of the two-state solution. Netanyahu has spent his entire long career working to annex the West Bank, and his settlement policies have succeeded to all intents and purposes in doing just that. It only remains for Netanyahu to one day make annexation official.
According to Peace Now, the Israeli movement advocating for peace, as of 2024 there are 141 settlements in the West Bank (settlements in the West Bank were officially established by the government, East Jerusalem excluded) and 224 outposts (outposts are settlements that were established since the 1990’s without government approval and are considered illegal according to Israeli law). According to the same source, there are almost 504,000 Jews living in those settlements and outposts, with just under 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank,
Israeli settlers consider the West Bank Jewish land, their land. They are determined to keep it and they are well armed. Any attempt to remove them will spark a civil war within Israel. A conversation I had with a group of these settlers brought home to me the depth of their feelings. They said the solution to what to do with the Palestinians in Israel was to push them all into Jordan, or else kill them. They then praised Baruch Goldstein, the man who in 1994 attacked the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron and killed 29 people, including children, wounded 125 others, and was himself killed. The settlers said he was a hero, and they wanted to build a shrine to him.
The Demographic Challenge
According to the Jewish Virtual Library, there are 2,089,000 Palestinians living in Israel, 7,427,000 Jews, and 564,000 non-Arab Christians and others. However, with the annexation of the West Bank, the Arab population in Israel will increase to almost 5 million. Counting Druze and Christians, the non-Jewish population is even higher. With the addition of Gaza, the Arab population would be close to equaling the Jewish one, which is why Israel will never annex Gaza (although there is talk among some to build new settlements there).
The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics put the annual growth rate of the Muslim population in 2023 at 2.0% (2.2% in 2022). The Jewish growth rate in Israel is a sensitive issue and an exact figure is hard to find, but Peace Now puts the figure at about 1.8%. However, this includes Jewish immigration, which has been on the decline.
The fastest growing segment of the Jewish community in Israel is the Ultra-Orthodox. The men in this community, however, almost entirely devote their lives to studying the Tora and resist service in the Israeli Defense Force, almost exclusively living off government support. This is already beginning to stress the social cohesion of Israel, a problem that will only grow worse over time. In addition, as the Ultra-Orthodox become a larger proportion of the overall Jewish population, support for annexation will increase as will resistance to full political participation for the growing non-Jewish population.
Given these demographics, including the addition of West Bank Arabs, Jewish and Arab population numbers will eventually equalize, and Israel will no longer be a Jewish state. This could well take 50 to 100 years, well after the departure of Netanyahu from power, but with the now irreversible de-facto annexation of the West Bank, this outcome is only a matter of time.
Netanyahu will certainly resist granting the Palestinians in the West Bank citizenship. But annexation without Arab citizenship makes Israel an apartheid state, which will make Israel a pariah in the international community. Eventually, international pressure will almost certainly force Israel to absorb the West Bank Arabs. Slavery existed in the United States for almost 250 years, and apartheid in South Africa for about a century, but such social inequality is never stable in the long run.
There is No Military Solution
There is also no military solution to the conflict between the Israelis and their neighbors, including the Palestinians. Israel will never entirely eradicate Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran as a threat any more than the US was able to eradicate the Taliban in Afghanistan. The conflict that Netanyahu has locked Israel into is a forever war. It will ebb and flow but will never be resolved permanently. Too much blood has been spilled on both sides, and both sides have wasted too many opportunities for peaceful coexistence. The Palestinians have refused multiple opportunities to negotiate a reasonable resolution to their grievances, and the Israelis have destroyed any chance for a two-state solution, which was absolutely necessary for a peaceful resolution to the conflict, and which could have persuaded Israel’s neighbors and the Palestinians to accept the Jewish state.
In contrast to Netanyahu, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was a gifted Israeli leader of vision and true insight. He recognized the necessity of a two-state solution to allow Israelis and Palestinians to coexist, and he intended to implement it. In order to prevent that, he was assassinated by a right-wing extremist. It worked, and the real opportunity for coexistence sadly died with the murder of Rabin and the rise of Netanyahu to power.
Binyamin Netanyahu is a master short-term strategist, as proven by his longevity as prime minister. But he and his radical right-wing partners have failed to grasp the long-term consequences of their policy of West Bank annexation for the future of Israel. The annexation is a poison pill of epic proportions, because it means long-term violence, death on both sides, and the eventual collapse of Israel as a Jewish state. Unlike Netanyahu, Rabin understood that it did not have to end this way. The right wing in Israel killed Rabin and is now in the process of committing national suicide.
What This Means for the US
A forever conflict involving Israel, its Palestinian population and its neighbors will present a persistent challenge to American policy, especially in the coming years as the conflict between the Ultra-Orthodox and the Orthodox communities continues to undermine the internal stability and social cohesion of Israel.
The following are policies the US ought to consider, but that said, I am pessimistic they will be. As I have laid out here, the two-state solution is gone, and never coming back. The settlers are never going to leave the West Bank, and pretending otherwise is a waste of time. In accomplishing the annexation of the West Bank, Netanyahu has locked Israel onto a path on which it cannot survive as a Jewish state, even after he is out of power. More than likely, someone worse might well take his place. I think Netanyahu’s eventual goal is to push all Palestinians out of Israel and into Jordan and/or Egypt, which neither country will accept and would, in any case, be ethnic cleansing, a war crime that would again make Israel a pariah in the world community, with steep consequences for Israel.
As stated earlier, Israel cannot afford to annex Gaza because absorbing the Arab population there would almost immediately cause the demographic collapse of Israel as a Jewish state. American policy, therefore, should aim at pushing Israel to allow Gaza to become an independent state, which would require us to help strengthen the non-Hamas elements in Gaza in favor of more democratically aligned Palestinians, and would require guarantees by the international community that Gaza will not be allowed to be a threat to Israel. This would mean the introduction of an international peacekeeping force, probably made up mostly of military and police forces from Arab states supported logistically and financially by the United States and Europe, along with support for the rebuilding of Gaza.
The attack by Hamas on Israel and the nearly complete devastation of Gaza by Netanyahu, with the accompanying deaths of thousands of men, women, and children on both sides, have created a bitterness that will be difficult, if not impossible, to overcome. But we must try.
And, finally, American policy should be geared to programs helping Israeli Jews and Palestinians integrate their communities so as to live together in peace. This recognizes that while the West Bank settlers will never be forced out without sparking a Jewish civil war, they have to be brought under control by the government and not be allowed to harass and threaten their Palestinian neighbors, and vice versa. This also means Israeli Palestinians must be given equal rights and opportunities with Jews, so that 50 to 100 years from now, when the populations equalize, the end of a Jewish state does not mean the end of Israel as a nation with a diverse, but united, population of Jews, Palestinians, Druze and Christians.
Sadly, I have severe doubts this can be accomplished, mostly because the enlightened leadership required among the Israelis and Palestinians, and in the international community, including in the United States, does not currently exist. Tragically, without that kind of commitment and leadership on all sides, the eventual demographic end of the Jewish state, combined with the decades of hate and violence, could result in a slaughter of truly horrific proportions on all sides. It could well become one of the greatest catastrophes of human history.
But hope springs eternal. Or, as Mark Twain said: …it is a blessed provision of nature that at times like these, as soon as a man’s mercury has got down to a certain point there comes a revulsion, and he rallies. Hope springs up, and cheerfulness along with it, and then he is in good shape to do something for himself, if anything can be done.
– A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Christopher Datta is a retired Foreign Service Officer. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Department of State. Mr. Datta is the author of a memoir recounting the story of his diplomatic career in conflict zones, Guardians of the Grail. He also has written a book about the dog he adopted in South Sudan (Run Scout Run), four novels and two children’s books.