At the time, Hamas proposed a hudna (long-term cease-fire) with the Israelis, even up to 50 years. In response, the Israeli government, perhaps understandably, said it would only agree to a full peace agreement with the Palestinians like the ones Israel has with Egypt and Jordan.

Was that a mistake, a missed opportunity on the part of Israel? Perhaps. Then again, the fact that Palestinian President Yasir Arafat didn’t accept Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s offer at Camp David in 2000, and that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas didn’t say yes to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s even more generous offer in 2007–08—weren’t those mistakes as well?

Israelis and Palestinians share responsibility for missed opportunities.

On September 30, 2021, a few months after one of the periodic Israel-Gaza mini-wars, Hamas organized the “Promise of the Hereafter” conference at the Commodore Hotel in Gaza City, which dealt with the group’s plans for the day after the conquest and destruction of the State of Israel and the establishment of a Palestinian state in its place. In April 2024, senior Fatah members based in Cairo told Haaretz journalist Shlomi Eldar that they thought the Hamas people were crazy when they came to them after the conference suggesting that they assume responsibility for professional roles in the new Palestinian state that would replace Israel.

We now know that Hamas was preparing the October 7 attack for more than a year. Was its goal to strike a blow at the Zionist enemy, to prevent a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, to demonstrate that violence, and not diplomacy, was the only way to successfully struggle for Palestinian rights? Possibly a combination of all of the above and more. And it also knew that the Israeli military response, with a vastly superior force, would be deadly for the Palestinians in Gaza. To my mind, one of the most astonishing comments about the situation came from senior Hamas official Mousa Abu-Marzook. When asked by a foreign reporter why Hamas didn’t use its extensive tunnel infrastructure to protect the Palestinian civilians from the Israeli attack, he responded, “Protecting Gaza civilians is the responsibility of the United Nations and Israel.… We have built the tunnels to protect ourselves from getting targeted and killed.”

We also know—according to the polls by Dr. Khalil Shikaki, director of the highly respected Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah—that over 70 percent of Palestinians believe that the Hamas attack on October 7 was correct. However, that doesn’t mean that 70 percent believe in Hamas’s Islamic ideology. That support exists because the attack placed the Palestinian issue back on the agenda after it had been ignored for so long by the Israelis and the international community, and it delivered a blow to Israeli hubris. That same majority also denies that Hamas committed the clearly documented atrocities against Israeli civilians, men, women, and children on October 7. And yet, according to the latest March poll by PCPSR, support for Hamas as a political party has fallen to 34 percent among Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, a 12-point drop from December 2023. And courageous Haaretz journalist Amira Hass, the only Israeli journalist who has actually lived in Gaza for a period and who is constantly branded a traitor by Israeli rightists, wrote an April 1 article based on conversations with her contacts about how Gazans hate the local Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar for bringing all this death and destruction upon them.

None of what I have written above is meant to justify Israel’s response to the October 7 attack, carried out by the most extreme government in the country’s history.

There is no doubt that the messianic religious fundamentalists represented by Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich and his National Religious Party, and the racist followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane—National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and his Jewish Power Party—are Jewish fundamentalist mirror images of the Palestinian religious fundamentalist Hamas in Israel. Smotrich’s 2017 “Decisive Plan” is the Israeli version of the exclusivist Hamas approach to the future of Israel/Palestine. Many Knesset members of Netanyahu’s Likud party also have the same approach.

All Israelis went into a collective state of shock on October 7—the worst, most deadly day in Israeli history since the establishment of the state in 1948: over 1,200 people killed, over 2,500 wounded, 251 hostages, southern kibbutzim and towns overrun for a few days, and over 150,000 people displaced from their homes.

It was clear that Israel was going to respond militarily. The army had to make up for its intelligence and strategic failure on October 7. And the government, which had a total systems collapse in the first few days while all support for the families affected by the attack was provided by civil society, felt it had to order a retaliatory strike against Hamas to reassert Israel’s deterrent capacity. Many Israelis were also feeling a primordial rage for revenge after the atrocities that were committed that day.

However, as the campaign has entered its sixth month, it is clear that this is not just another typical Hamas-Israel round of fighting. The devastation in Gaza is immense, and by March at least 32,000 Gazans have been killed—the majority being civilians, men, women and children, with at least two-thirds of the 2.3 million population displaced from their homes. Much of international public opinion is understandably aghast at the level of death and destruction, while most Israelis haven’t even see it since—with the honorable exception of Haaretz—the mainstream electronic and print media in Israel have been focusing on our pain, stories about those who died on October 7, the 100-plus remaining hostages and their families, the Israelis displaced from their homes in the south and north, and young soldiers who are dying almost every day.

And it is clear that both Hamas on October 7, and Israel since the beginning of its massive military response, have committed war crimes.

Now, the challenge is to end the fighting as soon as possible, to find a way to release the remaining Israeli hostages who are still alive, and to begin the process of rebuilding Gaza. The Arab countries, the European Union, and the American government have all said that they are not ready to invest in rebuilding until there is path to an end to the conflict. That requires a clear path to an end to the occupation and the creation of a two-state solution, a Palestinian state based on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital, alongside the State of Israel. That is still possible, with the addition of a 4-5 percent land swap which would include 80 percent of the settlers within the sovereign state of Israel, neutralizing them as a problem.

However, any notion of a possible Israeli readiness for a one-state solution is a pipe dream. Both Israeli and Palestinian society are living in a state of tremendous trauma, filled with anger at the other. If the Czechs and Slovaks, the Indians and Pakistanis, and all the components of former Yugoslavia couldn’t stay together in one state, how can anyone seriously imagine a one-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians in any foreseeable future?

Palestinians justifiably want an end to the occupation and an independent life of their own. The grass roots also aspire to Palestinian unity between Fatah and Hamas. This would require that Hamas join the PLO. The Fatah leaders say that their condition for that is that Hamas has to accept the 1993 Declarations of Principles (the Oslo Accords) between the PLO and the Israeli government, which is based on mutual recognition. Unless Hamas changes its ideology and accepts the idea of the existence of the State of Israel alongside the future Palestinian state, it cannot be a partner to a two-state solution—the only solution that can provide both Palestinians and Israelis with the possibility of a dignified and secure life.