The Blogs: We Must Admit Our Peace Policies Failed | Joseph P. Rhinewine

I have belonged to the Zionist left for nearly forty years.

I began as a teenager in Hashomer Hatzair. I believed that peace with the Palestinians and the Arab world would eventually come through territorial compromise and mutual recognition. Over the years, the proposed arrangements changed. There was binationalism, partition, two states, confederation, and various attempts to combine separation with cooperation.

I wanted these ideas to work. I still do.

I am also an Israeli citizen, I vote in elections to the World Zionist Congress, and Israel’s future is more than a subject of political debate for me. At some point, hope must answer to experience. I have reached the point where I can no longer claim that the policies I supported offer Israel a plausible path forward.

They have failed.

Those of us who advocated them should take some responsibility. We did not create the conflict, and we never had the power to resolve it alone. We did promote political programs with confidence, then repeatedly explained away the evidence that they were not working.

The two-state solution gradually became insulated from events. Negotiations collapsed, proposed agreements were rejected, terrorism continued, and Palestinian politics failed to produce a leadership both willing and able to conclude a durable peace with Israel. Each development became another obstacle on the road to two states. Almost nothing was allowed to raise the possibility that the road itself had disappeared.

The immediate objection is obvious: What about Netanyahu?

It is a fair question. Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Right have spent years entrenching the conflict. Settlement expansion has made territorial compromise harder. Netanyahu tolerated the flow of Qatari money into Gaza while pursuing a policy that helped preserve the division between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. His governments treated Palestinian weakness as strategically useful and convinced themselves that Hamas could be contained. Meanwhile, parts of the settler movement grew more violent and openly annexationist.

October 7 was a catastrophic failure of that strategy.

Netanyahu and much of the Israeli Right promised that Israel could manage the conflict indefinitely while expanding its control over the West Bank. It mistook deterrence for acceptance and temporary quiet for security. Netanyahu bears a grave share of responsibility for the conditions that left Israel vulnerable.

I have no interest in shielding him from that judgment. I also refuse to use his failure to avoid examining my own political camp.

The fact that Netanyahu undermined prospects for peace does not establish that a willing Palestinian partner was available. Settlement growth cannot explain a century of rejectionism, or the strength of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Iranian regime. Netanyahu’s cynicism made an appalling situation worse. It did not create the regional hostility toward Jewish sovereignty, and his departure would not by itself dissolve it.

We have grown accustomed to arguing as though one side’s culpability proves the other side’s readiness for peace. History offers no such convenience. Israeli policy can be destructive while Palestinian rejectionism remains real. Netanyahu’s strategy failed, and the peace policies of the left failed as well. We are responsible for thinking clearly about both.

The political forces capable of making peace with Israel remain weak in Palestinian society and across much of the surrounding region. Rejectionism still carries greater legitimacy than reconciliation. Antisemitism is widespread, and acceptance of a sovereign Jewish state is still commonly portrayed as capitulation or betrayal.

This can change. The Abraham Accords showed that governments can reassess their interests and that relationships once considered impossible can emerge. Political cultures also change over time. Policy, however, must begin with the people, institutions, and movements that exist today.

Israel still bears responsibility for its own conduct. Settlement expansion, settler violence, Jewish racism, annexationist fantasies, attacks on democratic institutions, and indifference to Palestinian suffering are damaging Israel from within. Their wrongness does not depend on whether opposing them produces a Palestinian partner for peace.

The left should continue to defend human equality and Palestinian dignity. We should remain committed to Jewish self-determination and to an Israel capable of exercising power without losing its moral bearings. These are principles. A particular map or diplomatic formula is a political instrument, subject to evidence like any other.

We lost sight of that distinction. We allowed moral aspiration to stand in for analysis. We underestimated the power of religion, nationalism, historical trauma, and hostility to Jewish sovereignty. When events contradicted our expectations, we preserved the expectations and found new explanations for the events.

That failure has helped make the Israeli left politically irrelevant. Israelis will not entrust their safety to a movement that appears unable to recognize the dangers they face. If the left speaks fluently about Palestinian suffering while seeming uneasy about national defense and Jewish solidarity, few Israelis will trust it to govern. Its valuable positions on democracy, inequality, corruption, education, health care, and public life will scarcely be heard.

A recovery is possible. It begins with returning to the practical values of Labor Zionism: building institutions, honoring work, accepting responsibility for defense, and sustaining a society whose members feel responsible for one another. Israel needs a left concerned with the country that exists now, including its security, economy, democratic character, and fraying social bonds.

For the foreseeable future, that work may lack the romance of a peace agreement. Israel must defend itself against enemies who seek its destruction. It must also protect its democratic institutions and restrain the racism and messianic nationalism growing within Jewish society. We should improve Palestinian lives where we can, reduce unnecessary suffering, and remain receptive to genuine openings for negotiation. Pretending that such an opening currently exists serves nobody.

I have spent most of my life hoping that the peace policies of the Zionist left would succeed. Admitting their failure is painful. Continuing to advocate them as though another century of insistence will make them viable would be worse.

We do not currently know how the conflict will end. We can say so.

That honesty would make the left more credible and harder to dismiss. It would also free us to return our attention to work we can actually do: building a strong, democratic, socially responsible Jewish state that is prepared for peace when peace becomes possible.

Joseph P. Rhinewine, PhD, is a licensed psychologist, writer, and Israeli-American based in Portland, Oregon. He writes about Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, American politics, psychology, artificial intelligence, and the moral and psychological dimensions of contemporary public life.