The New Yorker:

The need for a new paradigm after October 7th.  

By Isaac Chotiner

Hamas’s attack on Israel, and the ensuing Israeli response, has brought new energy to discussions of restarting a peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, which has been dormant for years. To understand how such a process might develop, I spoke with Nathan Thrall, the former director of the International Crisis Group’s Arab-Israeli project, and an expert on the conflict, who lives in Jerusalem. He is also the author of the recent book “A Day In The Life Of Abed Salama,” which tells the story of the occupation through a Palestinian man’s search for his son after a fatal bus accident. (I first spoke to Thrall in the immediate aftermath of the October 7th attack. Since then, a number of Thrall’s book events have been cancelled.) During our conversation, the transcript of which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Hamas’s incursion may have changed Israeli politics, whether debates about a one-state solution versus a two-state solution are helpful, and America’s role in the conflict.

How are you thinking about a possible resolution to this conflict differently from how you did before October 7th?

I had a book come out on October 3rd, and the question of what I saw as a viable political solution to the conflict was one that came up in every talk. I always gave the same answer, which is one I’ve been giving for years now, which is that all of the talk of solutions is a distraction. A one-state solution isn’t on the horizon. A two-state solution isn’t on the horizon. A confederation isn’t on the horizon. All of this talk of which of these possible utopias one prefers serves to distract us from the everyday reality of violent oppression. But now I think that the war has forced me to think about what is actually realistic, because every crisis is also an opportunity, and the war has made things possible that were not possible before.

What are those things?

So, one of the main things that it has done is that it has convinced the vast majority of Israelis that the model in place prior to October 7th is not working. The price of October 7th is far too high for Israel to pay if that is what it means to manage the conflict.

When you say “manage the conflict,” I assume you mean the Israelis letting it fester without any long-term resolution.

Yeah, I mean precisely that phrase. “Managing the conflict” is one phrase that is used by Israeli officials to describe what their policy has been for the past decade. That means a system in which Israel is the sole sovereign between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. There are seven million Israeli Jews and seven million Palestinians living under Israeli rule. The vast majority of those Palestinians don’t have basic civil rights, and Israel has no intention of resolving that fundamental issue, and instead seeks to make minor adjustments to its system of control in order to make the burden of that occupation and oppression lighter. “Managing the conflict” has meant both those minor adjustments and these periodic bouts of great violence in Gaza. So the onus now is on the Israeli government to provide the public with an answer to how October 7th won’t happen again. There is no plausible answer that they can give that doesn’t include actually resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

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