Aaron David Miller
In the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, one could be forgiven for believing that the Palestinian issue had finally moved to the top of the international agenda. Much of the support and sympathy for the roughly 1,200 Israelis killed and 251 taken hostage would give way to a rising chorus of anger and outrage, as Israel’s air and ground campaign resulted in more than 52,000 Palestinian deaths and a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Any doubt that Palestine was now front and center would quickly fade as the Israel-Hamas war threatened to morph into regional confrontation, including strikes by Iran and Israel on each other’s territory. Indeed, by the end of 2023, as the international community found its pro-Palestinian voice and campuses across the United States exploded with protests and demonstrations not seen on any foreign-policy issue since the Vietnam War, it seemed as if the Palestinians’ moment had finally come and that the issue could no longer be denied. How could it?
Looking back, 18 months later—as U.S. President Donald Trump embarks on his first trip to the Middle East—it seems clear that rather than ensuring the centrality of the Palestinian issue, Oct. 7 has produced its eclipse. A combination of factors have pushed the Palestinians and their politics pretty far down the list of regional or international priorities: the fecklessness of the international community, the Biden and now Trump administrations’ preternatural support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, the unwillingness of key Arab states to exact any serious price from Israel (and Washington for its enabling policies), and the utter dysfunction and chaos of the Palestinian national movement. After Oct. 7 and the human misery and suffering it wrought, it’s hard to know precisely what might reenergize the Palestinian issue, let alone create a pathway for a conflict-ending solution. A West Bank intifada? New Israeli and Palestinian leadership? A peace plan from an unpredictable U.S. president looking for a Nobel Peace Prize? Regardless, the paradox of Oct. 7 is clear. On one hand, it demonstrated with a terrifying clarity that the only conceivable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a negotiated separation; on the other, it has made the attainment of anything remotely resembling a two-state outcome galactically more difficult.
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