Part of the essence of realism in international affairs is to recognize things as they are and to deal with those actual circumstances prudently and practically, as opposed to dwelling in a realm of things as we wish they would be. In the land that Israelis and Palestinians inhabit, two major features of reality have become undeniable. One is the persistence and bloodiness of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, despite efforts to “shrink” the conflict, to sidestep it, or simply to ignore it. The conflict has become increasingly bloody lately, with violence surging over the past year.

The other reality is that Israel’s policies since its conquest of the West Bank fifty-six years ago have institutionalized a single state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. The large-scale Israeli colonization of the conquered territory—with the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem now exceeding 750,000 and growing—has been accompanied by the construction of physical and legal infrastructure to serve their needs the same as for any other Jewish Israeli citizens. Israel treats that land as an integral part of its own territory for whatever purposes it suits Israel to treat in that way.

There already is a one-state “solution” to the conflict, although it is a solution only for those content with a system of one ethnically defined group oppressing and subjugating another group that is denied political rights and self-determination, with all the resentment and potential for violence that such an arrangement inevitably involves. Meanwhile, a two-state solution, which has been part of the standard vocabulary of diplomats and politicians for decades, has been pushed ever farther out of reach and, in the view of many informed observers, is dead.

In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami have described this reality and observed that “It is no longer possible to avoid confronting a one-state reality.” The resistance to recognizing that reality—and the implications for U.S. policy that flow from that recognition—remains strong among those determined to stick up for Israeli policies and to advocate continued U.S. condoning of those policies. Thus there inevitably has been pushback against the Barnett, et al. article, including in a recent piece in this publication by Dennis Ross and David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Ross and Makovsky invoke many of the old chestnuts long used by American sympathizers with Israel in ways that may have been valid fifty-six years ago but now seem stuck in a time warp. They open their piece with a flourish about how the recent demonstrations in Israel against the Netanyahu government’s plan to emasculate the judiciary show “the depth of the Israeli public’s commitment to democracy.” But the democracy about which the demonstrators have been chanting has nothing to do (as Ross and Makovsky later acknowledge) with the several million Palestinians whom Israel rules and who have no say in choosing their rulers. The commitment to democracy (of some Israelis, and not, according to Ross and Makovsky’s own logic, those who back the extreme right-wing government that is pushing the judicial overhaul) may be deep insofar as it applies to themselves, but it is narrow in not applying it to other people next to whom they live.

The chestnuts also include the familiar image of Israel surrounded by hostile neighbors supposedly determined to destroy it. Ross and Makovsky write of how “Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas deny Israel’s right to exist, support terror against it—and would even if there was no occupation—and acquire and develop weapons to act on their aims.” Such an image ignores the entire question of capabilities, and how Israel’s building of what is now by far the most capable military in the region—even at the conventional level, let alone beyond that level—makes its existence assured even in the face of any foe that might prefer that it not exist. The image also ignores the intentions of foes, such as Hamas, which, notwithstanding its extreme rhetoric, long ago made clear that it would accept a hudna, or long-term truce, as part of an arrangement of living peacefully beside a continuing Israel.

The Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory has been a big part of Israel’s conflicts with its regional foes. It obviously is with a Palestinian group such as Hamas, whose goal is to be the government for all Palestinians. It also is for Iran, which has long backed Palestinian resistance groups both because of sympathy for subjugated Palestinians and Tehran’s awareness of how much resonance the issue has elsewhere in the Arab world. And the occupation of Palestinian territory is the sole reason most Arab governments have still not begun full diplomatic relations with Israel.

To the extent that animosity toward Israel goes beyond issues related to the occupation and conflict with the Palestinians, Israel’s actions have had at least as much to do with that hostility as have the actions of the neighbors. Hezbollah, for example, was able to establish itself in the 1980s as a major political player by presenting itself as the champion of resistance to an Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the years-long occupation of a portion of that country. As for animosity between Israel and Iran, a cursory look at the rhetoric from each regime about the other shows hostility by Israel against Iran to be much more all-consuming than hostility in the other direction. It is not just rhetoric that displays this imbalance. Israeli sabotage and lethal terrorism in Iran are unmatched by anything Iran has done to Israel.

Even more to the point at hand, how exactly can the ritual invocation of Israel living in an unfriendly neighborhood constitute a rationale for clinging to the occupied Palestinian territory? It is not as if the occupation somehow bolsters Israeli security. To the contrary, it detracts from it. Besides being the main stimulants for regional resentment against Israel, the occupation and West Bank settlement project constitute a major burden on the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) that lessens its ability to respond to any foreign threats.

Ross and Makovsky strive to convey the impression that Palestinians have been primarily responsible for the absence of a resolution to their conflict with Israel. A careful review of the decades-long history of the conflict shows that impression to be false. And never do Ross and Makovsky acknowledge the biggest asymmetry of the conflict today, which is that Israel, not the Palestinians, is the side with the military power, with control of the land, and thus with the ability to change the status quo if it wanted to.

In a manipulation of cause and effect, Ross and Makovsky repeatedly explain away Israel’s actions that have prolonged or intensified the conflict as responses to Palestinian behavior, without ever mentioning how much of what one sees on the Palestinian side is a response to Israeli behavior. For example, in response to the observation by Barnett and his co-authors that Israel’s “withdrawal” from the Gaza Strip is somewhat of a misnomer in that Israel retains to this day a suffocating control of Gaza’s airspace, sea lanes, and borders, Ross and Makovsky note that nasty Hamas is in Gaza and has attacked Israel even after the Israeli “withdrawal.” Never do they consider how the Israeli-imposed plight of the Gaza Strip as an open-air prison has much to do with a group like Hamas gaining and maintaining as much popular support as it has.

Not surprisingly, Ross and Makovsky dislike the use by Barnett et al. of the A-word. Ross and Makovsky define apartheid, implicitly referring to the South African experience, as a legal edifice involving the oppression of a majority by a minority, and declare that this is not true of Israel. So are we supposed to be less appalled when one racial or ethnic group oppresses another group that happens to be numerically inferior? Even their minority/majority semantic stratagem—which, by the way, is hardly part of any consensus conception of apartheid—breaks down when applied to the West Bank, where Palestinian residents are a clear majority and where a legal edifice institutionalizes oppression based on ethnicity.

An even bigger motivation for these two denizens of the Washington policy world to take issue with the article by Barnett and company is that article’s policy recommendation to condition U.S. aid to Israel “on clear and specific measures to terminate Israel’s military rule over the Palestinians.” The Israeli occupation is contrary to U.S. interests on multiple grounds, including its contribution to persistent instability in the Middle East and the association of the United States with ethnically-based repression. The end to the military rule also would be necessary to realize any version of a two-state solution, which Ross and Makovsky claim to support.

With no direct answer to those facts, Ross and Makovsky try to argue that any loosening of the unconditional U.S. support to Israel would somehow embolden Israel’s regional foes. They ask how “the Iranians, Hezbollah, and Hamas would react to an American cut-off of military assistance to Israel” (in a formulation that implicitly assumes that Israel, given the chance to continue receiving voluminous U.S. aid if it ends the occupation, would refuse that option). Wouldn’t those foreign foes, they suggest, “perceive great opportunity in such a circumstance?”

Ross and Makovsky support this line of speculation by pointing to the schadenfreude-laden reactions to Israel’s current internal political turmoil by the likes of Ayatollah Khameini and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. But that turmoil has nothing to do with the status of U.S. aid to Israel. It instead stems from the efforts of the far right in Israel to cement its power.

If U.S. aid to Israel were to be cut off, it is unlikely any of those foreign foes of Israel would change their calculations—Israel would still be by far the most powerful military power in the region. Given Israel’s wealth, it can afford to maintain that superiority by itself. The difference the U.S. aid makes is that American taxpayers rather than Israeli taxpayers pay for some of that military power.

If making U.S. aid conditional were, despite all the indications of Israeli obstinacy, to lead to an end to the occupation and a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, security challenges to Israel from regional foes would not become more likely and probably would become less so. The biggest regional grievance against Israel would be gone, the change would take the wind out of the sails of the Iranians and others who have used the issue to seek influence elsewhere in the region, and the IDF would no longer have the major distraction of administering the occupation.

Ross and Makovsky are right that Palestinian violence does not contribute to a solution to a conflict and has only exacerbated the problem at multiple points in the conflict’s history. But their repeated suggestion that if only Palestinians would act differently then something good “could” happen to them is of a piece with how the whole so-called peace process has understandably become, in Palestinian eyes, a never-ending charade about a promised land that is frequently pledged but never arrives.

The authors state that “a serious Palestinian move to reform the Palestinian Authority or a determined and more public and peaceful form of Palestinian protest against occupation could help stimulate the debate in Israel” about how best to resolve the conflict. But the Palestinian Authority was intended as a temporary transitional arrangement and passed its sell-by date a quarter-century ago. It has become little more than a security auxiliary to the IDF, as such has lost credibility among the Palestinian people, and it will hardly be a needle-mover whether reformed or unreformed.

As for a “more public and peaceful form of Palestinian protest,” consider one of the most time-honored forms of peaceful protest—the boycott—which in the Palestinian case has taken the form of the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement. Far from stimulating a constructive debate, let alone any constructive Israeli policy changes, the Israeli response has been a no-holds-barred (and mostly successful) effort, extending into the United States and elsewhere abroad, to extinguish support for any boycott by asserting that the entire movement, not just some elements in it, is an illegitimate and antisemitic campaign to destroy Israel.

Ross and Makovsky also are right about the strength of nationalism among both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, and how a two-state arrangement would be the best way of accommodating the nationalist impulses of both. Or make that “would have been” the best way. There was an opportunity to do this, but the policies that have entrenched the one-state reality may mean that the two-state solution will have to enter the history books alongside the U.S. failure to join the League of Nations and other departures that would have been beneficial but never were taken.

Ross and Makovsky present themselves as being on the good side of advocacy in charting a course for Israel and take pains to distinguish themselves from Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, and other extremists in the Israeli government. They say they support a two-state solution, but they in effect are advocating a continuation of the current one-state “solution” with unchanged Israeli subjugation of the Palestinians. Too much history has transpired to believe otherwise. It has not only been fifty-six years since the conquest of the West Bank, but also thirty years since the Oslo Accords, which created the supposedly transitional Palestinian Authority. There is no reason to think that the same tired talk of support for a two-state solution and intimations that nice things “could” happen if only the Palestinians would behave better will bring about—absent a fundamental change in U.S. policy toward Israel—any more results than they have in the last several decades. With the political trend in Israel having brought to power those who are more explicit than ever in rejecting any self-determination for Palestinians, there is strong reason to believe that the tired talk will bring about no positive results at all.

Paul Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was as a National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. Professor Pillar also served in the National Intelligence Council as one of the original members of its Analytic Group. He is also a contributing editor for this publication.

Image: Shutterstock.