Israel Must Choose: Confront Iran or Oppose a Palestinian State
Israel needs to make a fundamental decision about its strategic priorities.
Throughout his political career, two abiding policy principles have animated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: identifying Iran as Israel’s greatest regional challenge and opposing the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Though Netanyahu has linked these two impulses together—and they have in some ways reinforced each other—they have often come into conflict. In the aftermath of Iran’s barrage of approximately 320 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones against Israeli territory and Israel’s response against Iranian air defense systems outside of Isfahan, Netanyahu may be faced with the starkest example yet of a choice between prioritizing the fight against Iran or prioritizing the fight against greater Palestinian sovereignty.
Since reassuming the premiership in 2009, Netanyahu’s strategy toward the Palestinians was to maintain a weakened Palestinian Authority in power in the West Bank and a presumably contained Hamas in power in Gaza. The logic behind this gambit was that Palestinian statehood could be constantly deferred so long as the West Bank and Gaza were divided between two different feuding governing entities, with the bonus of Israel not reasonably being expected to negotiate with a terrorist entity like Hamas.
Even as Israel fought multiple rounds with Hamas in 2012, 2014, and 2021, Netanyahu’s strategy of responding to particularly egregious Hamas provocations without going so far as to attempt to remove the group from power persisted. The drawbacks to this divide and conquer strategy in the Palestinian arena became tragically apparent on October 7, following years of not only tolerating but empowering a terrorist Iranian proxy only hundreds of yards from southern Israeli towns. In this instance, Netanyahu allowed his desire to avoid or suppress a political process with the Palestinians to override his security concerns regarding Iran.
Making continued Palestinian division and weakening the Palestinian Authority priorities over the Iranian issue also had regional drawbacks. While Israel was able to successfully strike the Abraham Accords normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco, other states refrained from normalizing with Israel due to lack of progress on the Palestinian front—with Saudi Arabia the most prominent holdout. This failure has hindered efforts to create a more complete and seamless regional coalition to contain Iran. Israel’s inclusion in CENTCOM in January 2021 was a major step forward—one that directly enabled the successful air defense effort that rendered Iran’s April 13 attack largely toothless—but other regional states remain wary of openly working with Israel despite a shared perception that Iran and its efforts to expand its axis of resistance across the Middle East remain an acute threat.
Iran’s attack on Israel throws the tradeoffs between Netanyahu’s priorities into stark relief. The unprecedented success of the integrated air defense effort to intercept nearly all of Iran’s missiles and drones involved not only the American and Israeli militaries but early warning radar systems around the region. It constitutes the best demonstration yet of the benefits of regional normalization and security integration, and foreshadows how the U.S. and its partners can frustrate Iranian ambitions going forward. But Netanyahu’s policy toward the Palestinians—and particularly Israeli actions in Gaza—actively makes it harder to construct a more robust regional coalition. Indeed, the aftermath of the success of the regional air defense coalition saw a bizarre rush from those states denying that they had acted in Israel’s interest or even participated at all.
While the heat that still emanates from the Palestinian issue did not prevent cooperation in this instance, it created pressure that will make any similar instances of future cooperation more politically difficult for Arab states, as demonstrated most clearly by the immediate criticism within Jordan of the monarchy’s role in downing Iranian missiles and drones. If the Iranian strike represents the start of a new, more open phase of the shadow war between Israel and Iran, it will be critical for Israel to have as much assistance and coordination against Iran as possible—not have actual and potential regional partners shy away due to Palestinian issues.
This tradeoff is best demonstrated in the question of what comes next in Gaza. Israel’s military campaign against Hamas is premised on the notions that the group must be stripped of its military capabilities and must not be allowed to retain its power in Gaza. While the former issue has been mostly addressed, Netanyahu’s unwillingness to conceive of much less implement a viable plan to fill a post-Hamas vacuum has meant Hamas is beginning to return to places vacated by the IDF. This has been acute in northern Gaza, where Hamas has had the most time and space to regroup—doing so to such an extent that Israel launched a second operation to clear Hamas fighters out of Shifa Hospital following an earlier high-profile operation to do so the months earlier. Netanyahu’s failure to develop and implement any sort of viable day after plan is only perpetuating the unacceptable pre-October 7 status quo in which Iran held sway in Gaza.
The obvious way to counter this is to empower the Palestinian Authority to gradually take control of specific security and administrative functions in Gaza, with an eye towards fully governing the territory. For all its faults and drawbacks, the PA is not an Iranian proxy, and Israel’s Sunni Arab interlocutors—Jordan, Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia—have premised their cooperation with Gaza stabilization and reconstruction on a PA role in the Strip in part, at least, because it means eliminating Iranian influence there. Yet Netanyahu has consistently and adamantly refused to countenance any PA return to Gaza in even limited ways, insisting that he will accept neither “Hamastan” nor “Fatahstan,” a reference to the dominant Fatah party of PA President Mahmoud Abbas. This refusal only makes sense if trying to prevent any forward movement on the Palestinian issue—not the Iranian threat—was Israel’s greatest priority.
Netanyahu has spent decades wanting to have it both ways, decrying Iranian ambitions and influence within the Palestinian arena while doing all he can to enfeeble the segment of the Palestinian political leadership that is not under Iran’s thumb. Events have now transpired in a way that he can no longer credibly continue to do so. Without shifting course on Gaza and the PA in order to keep Iranian influence at bay, Netanyahu will make it harder for Israel to counter Iran in the wider regional arena.
Michael Koplow (@mkoplow) is Chief Policy Officer at the Israel Policy Forum.
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It’s refreshing to read this balanced view advocating a path forward out of the current mess.
Tough to negotiate with people who do not recognize your right to exist. In order to move forward on a two state solution, Palestinians will have to give up the “from the river to the sea” nonsense, and will have to reform their culture. I see no willingness to do so.