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This transcript is from a CSIS event hosted on October 7, 2024. Watch the full video here.
Jon B. Alterman: Good afternoon and good evening. I’m Jon Alterman, senior vice president, the Brzezinski Chair of Global Security and Geostrategy, and the director of the Middle East Program at CSIS. We’re convening today to discuss the solemn events of October 7th, a day that kicked off a tremendous amount of violence and suffering in the Middle East a year ago, creating deepening trauma for communities throughout the region.
To discuss these events, but more importantly, to analyze their impacts on the current and future trajectory of the region, I’m joined by three colleagues. Our goal today is to have an interactive conversation from different perspectives to understand how the events of October 7th last year helped shape the region and where the region’s going.
I’m joined first by my colleague, Natan Sachs, director of the Center for Middle East Policy and a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. I am also joined by my friend and colleague, Dan Byman, who is a senior fellow with the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at CSIS, a professor at Georgetown University, and the director of its Security Studies Program. I am also joined by Professor Dana El Kurd, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Richmond and a senior non-resident fellow at the Arab Center in Washington. All of us come to this with a tremendous amount of focus, but also with very different backgrounds and perspectives. I’m really interested in understanding how we can learn from each other as we look forward to the future of the region. Dana, why don’t you start?
Dana El Kurd: Thank you so much for having me. I had a question for Natan on Israeli society and how it’s metabolizing some of these changes and shifts in the conflict. Yesterday, Prime Minister Netanyahu said that Israel was defending itself on seven fronts against “the enemies of civilization.” Could you tell us more about where Israeli society stands on this? What’s public opinion showing about their appetite for negotiations or continued conflict? I’m trying to understand the societal component of all of this.
Natan Sachs: Thanks, Dana. It’s good to be with you all despite the day. Today, especially, is an extremely solemn day—certainly in Israel—and a day of real profound mourning. Not to diminish in any way anyone else’s suffering, but of course in Israel, the events from a year ago are still very much being processed. People have referred to Israelis, Palestinians, and now Lebanese as being in some post-traumatic state. The truth is they’re not post-traumatic. They’re very much still in the midst of a trauma, and that’s very much true of Israelis as well, who are still living and reliving the events a year ago. Israelis sometimes refer to today as day 367 of October, in part because some of the hostages are still in captivity, and in part because the war continues. Israeli society, writ large, still feels a very profound sense of vulnerability in a way that would surprise its neighbors that view it as very strong and powerful.
Israelis, especially given the events of October 7th, feel extremely vulnerable. There’s a lot of fear on a very personal basis—something that is often a fuel of civil wars. I used to say that Palestinians and now Lebanese certainly feel the same way in different ways, and that is very dangerous. That kind of fear fuels these kinds of conflicts. This sense that if you do not defend yourself, strike first, and protect yourself with everything you have, your loved ones could suffer a fate like that of October 7th a year ago. That means that Israeli society is very risk averse.
The idea of negotiations is certainly open. There’s a clear majority of Israelis in favor of negotiating—even with Hamas—for a ceasefire in return for the hostages, despite the severe costs in their mind. But there is also a deep aversion to negotiating over anything that they think would risk Israel again, including a Palestinian state at this stage. There are fears that a Palestinian state in the West Bank would mean that the major civilian populations in central Israel would face the same kind of crisis as those who neighbored Gaza.
You mentioned Netanyahu. His rhetoric is often bellicose. I often find it offensive. He is deeply unpopular in Israel and is seen as responsible for October 7th for being the one at the helm. It’s not that Israelis are against the aims of the war, especially the two clear aims in Gaza—which are bringing down Hamas as the governing power there, which has mostly been achieved, and returning the hostages—or degrading the rest of the Iranian-backed “Axis of Resistance,” particularly Hezbollah. However, you see a lot of disunity over his tactics, means, and what as many Israelis think is him prioritizing his own political fate.
I can think of an example from today, then I’ll end there to let others speak. Today, there are two main ceremonies commemorating October 7th in Israel. One is state sponsored. Then, the families immediately objected to the idea that this government, the same government that was the government on October 7th, would organize it. So, there is a second ceremony that they call “the national one” or other names, organized mostly by hostage families and bereaved families from October 7th.
Today, on a real day of grieving—and I think we see it abroad too—one of the first casualties of war is empathy and appreciation for the sanctity of life, writ large any life. That is certainly true from my vantage point. I see it in people’s inability to accept a mourning for October 7th with demonstrations in front of memorial services, but not to evade the question, I think that’s very true of Israeli society when looking at Gaza or others. They see the strategic objectives—sometimes correctly—but have a deficit of empathy still stemming from that trauma. It’ll take a long time to recover from it, if it begins to recover. Only then can we think about productive negotiations, hopefully sooner than later.
Daniel Byman: Natan, can I push you a little bit on the Netanyahu question? A question I often get asked and frankly don’t know the answer to is when you look at Israel’s continuing operations, especially in Gaza, where it does seem that they’ve hit diminishing returns, at least militarily? How much of the war is continued because of Netanyahu’s own political agenda versus a broader strategic concept?
Dr. Sachs: It’s a very hard thing to answer, in part because it’s within the mind of one man. He’s so analyzed, reviled by so many, and adored by others that I’m usually rather skeptical of anyone who claims to know the true answer to what Netanyahu is exactly thinking. Let me partially evade your question but say the more important point here. If a leader, during a time of war and the deepest crisis a country has faced with many ramifications in terms of economics, international standing, and more, has lost the trust and the faith of at least half the population, who are not sure that he is conducting things only for the best of the country and not his own political survival, he cannot function properly.
There is certainly the very strong and just suspicion that his own political survival is important, at least in part. I think he’s come to the stage of leadership where he truly believes that any other leader would be extremely damaging to Israel. “The state is I,” the old French adage, right? That is a very dangerous stage of leadership. Not coincidentally, he’s a very long-standing leader, and that’s characteristic of it.
Dr. Alterman: Dan, let me ask you a question about Israeli strategy. I don’t know the extent to which we can talk about it being Netanyahu’s strategy or the Israeli government’s strategy. A year into this war, I’ve lost track of what a discrete concept of victory is on the Israeli side. As the war has spread into Lebanon, I don’t know what victory in Lebanon looks like in any real military terms. As somebody who’s thought a lot about fighting irregular warfare, is there something unique about this? Is there something misguided about the way Israelis are conceptualizing this?
Dr. Byman: I think we can go theater by theater and get different answers but let me really focus first on Gaza and then on Lebanon. In Gaza and in general, the goal seems to be to destroy capacity. With Hamas in Gaza, the goal is to make it so they have no military ability, but defining that in a very expansive sense. You could say Hamas as a military organization is shattered compared to what it was a year ago, but I think Israel wants to ensure that not only are they not a threat today, but they will also never be a threat. That’s an exceptionally difficult bar, right? I don’t actually know how you do that on a practical level. In Gaza, Israel seems to want to eradicate or destroy Hamas, but not do what the United States would say is necessary, which would be a mix of having lots of troops there so you can keep Hamas down and at the same time putting in place some sort of political structure that replaces Hamas.
As far as I can tell, Israel is kind of in whack-a-mole mode right now; it has a presence that goes after Hamas leadership. Hamas occasionally pops up, whether it’s in a traditional stronghold or some part of Gaza where Israel has moved its presence away, and then Israel tries to suppress that presence there. Then, Hamas pops up somewhere else. This can go on for a long time. As Natan said, Israeli society is willing to bear significant costs and deal with very low risk thresholds, but to me, that’s not a winning strategy for the long term. I don’t know what Israel gains or has gained in the last three or four months, and probably longer than that, from its presence in Gaza. Lebanon is very different, but there’s a big question mark. Going back to capacity, Israel’s goal is to make sure not only that Hezbollah won’t threaten it, but also that Hezbollah is unable to threaten it. Given Hezbollah’s vast rocket and missile arsenal, its skilled fighters, and its Iranian backing, that’s exceptionally difficult.
Dr. Alterman: And the porosity of the borders.
Dr. Byman: And the porosity of its borders. The assumption is that whatever Hezbollah loses, Iran will eventually rebuild. In the last month, Israel has done a sustained series of operations against Hezbollah’s leadership. Its military rank and file, its rocket launchers, and, more broadly, its arsenal have been far more effective than I would’ve said was likely. If you had asked me six months ago, I would’ve said that Israel would not be able to succeed to the degree it is. The question to me is, can Israel force Hezbollah to make significant concessions through force rather than through a broader deterrent threat? This is going to be difficult because Hezbollah can simply return. We saw this after 2006 where Hezbollah was supposed to leave the Israel-Gaza border and effectively didn’t. As always, Hezbollah is a much harder problem than Hamas. There’s a genuine question mark about what Israel’s going to do in the long term there.
Dr. Alterman: Especially with the vacuum in Lebanese politics, which Hezbollah has been filling, and the vacuum in Palestinian politics, where the Palestinian Authority (PA) has been unable to move in.
Dr. Byman: That’s the huge question: who takes over? Dana, can I ask you to guide us on that one? Talk us through some of the Palestinian politics on all this.
Dr. El Kurd: To understand the current situation in Palestinian politics, I want to preface by noting polling that just came out a few days ago from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research about, similar to what Natan was describing, the really vivid fear that Palestinians are living in during the aftermath of the last year of the war on Gaza. To Palestinians, this has been described as a genocide, and there are vivid fears this conflict will continue in the West Bank. There are fears of ethnic cleansing also happening in the West Bank. In the latest polling, 77 percent feared that the West Bank would be next in this level of violence.
This past year has been an unfathomable level of violence to Palestinians. The way this is described, perhaps a little bit in the media, is as if Gaza is some sort of periphery, given the fragmentation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. However, it’s a sizable portion of the Palestinian body politics. For Palestinians, it’s not seen as something happening on the periphery. Current Palestinian politics are based on this very real and growing fear that levels of violence will continue to escalate, and in the aftermath of October 7th, Palestinians are struggling with this kind of policy of fragmentation. There are many Palestinian stakeholders, such as Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and elsewhere with different positionalities, but there isn’t really a framework to incorporate all those different Palestinian stakeholders.
In the aftermath of October 7th and the level of destruction we saw in Gaza, there’s an urgency to resolve this fragmentation issue that limits the ability and capacity of Palestinians to negotiate and put up a united front. There are many discussions happening in Palestinian civil society and attempts to organize to push beyond the Palestinian Authority/Hamas binary, and to largely push beyond the Oslo framework.
I could talk more about what those initiatives look like, but I think it’s also important to note that we find ourselves in this kind of situation within Palestinian politics because even prior to October 7th and this last year, Hamas, Fatah, and the Palestinian Authority have had very little legitimacy in the Palestinian political space. This was some of the polling from before. Whether it’s from the Palestinian Center or the Arab Barometer, a lot of the polling shows that neither Hamas nor Fatah achieved more than a 30 percent approval rating. In the latest polling, people were asked if parliamentary elections were held, which group would win? Fatah received 36 percent and Hamas only received 34 percent.
There is this palpable lack of legitimacy for all ongoing actors. That is the problem when we talk about what happens now, in the aftermath, and on whatever day after is supposed to come. Who will govern? That is the biggest problem. If we don’t move beyond this legitimacy issue for all the ongoing structures and the political parties involved in those structures, then we’ll continue to have similar issues, like spoilers and other actors taking advantage of this vacuum. I could speak more about some of the civil society initiatives if we go in that direction.
Dr. Sachs: I’d love to hear about those initiatives. The Palestinian Authority, led by Abbas, has been very lacking in legitimacy for a long time, and probably deservedly so, but it also seems almost impossible to see a clear alternative. Again and again in the polls I see Fatah and Hamas rated very, very low, but no one else is able to rival them. What are the chances of a third actor coming about? Or the chances of Fatah rejuvenating with different actors coming in or back in, and giving it a new energy that it used to have?
Dr. El Kurd: The problem, as you mentioned, is that these political parties have been stagnant. Part of the push from Palestinian civil society is to start the discussion about moving beyond the Palestinian Authority/Hamas framework, moving beyond the Oslo framework, and trying to possibly revitalize the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as an umbrella organization. These are the kinds of discussions and attempted initiatives that are ongoing. They also have to do with reviving party politics within these parties. Fatah has not organically fallen apart on its own in this stagnating way. Instead, it has to do with the fact that Fatah hasn’t allowed young cadres to rise up in the party or to impact the party for quite some time. That’s just one example.
Some of the initiatives that I was alluding to have taken off after October 7th. There’s the Palestinian National Conference, which is this attempt to revive the PLO and bring together actors from all the different political parties, as well as those outside those political parties. Polling shows that there’s a lot of support for national unity governments in Palestinian society. In fact, in the latest polling, it was the biggest priority for what should happen and what the Palestinian Authority should take part in after the war in Gaza, whenever it ends. But as you mentioned, the seriousness of these political parties to actually reinvigorate politics within their parties and allow for new faces to emerge is a problem that still remains.
The second thing is international buy-in for some of these initiatives. If there isn’t support for an umbrella organization—whether it’s the PLO or we call it something else—that might incorporate Hamas as a junior partner, as has been discussed by some of the people involved in this initiative, or if there isn’t support for Palestinian input on whatever the “day after” is going to be, and there’s just continued discussions of different configurations of the status quo, then I worry that some of these initiatives don’t necessarily go very far.
If Palestinian politics remains as it is, where there isn’t a lot of serious international support and engagement with some of the Palestinian civil society initiatives, we’re going to see more armed tactics. We’re going to see more armed conflict and the devolvement into violence. But if it is taken seriously in an ideal scenario, then we might see a revival of some sort of national unity government or umbrella organization that has the legitimacy to negotiate and return to nonviolent methods of conflict resolution.
Dr. Alterman: Dana, could I ask you and Natan a question? As I look at Palestinian-Israeli politics, each one seems to have a blocking third, whether it’s Otzma Yehudit and other nationalist parties in Israel or Hamas with strong 30 percent support. You have religiously inflected groups that believe that this is not just between people, but that it’s between people and God, and that it’s about reclaiming holy land. It’s one thing when you have small minorities that you have to manage. It feels to me, and correct me if I’m wrong, that you have these mirror images of about a third of the people on each side who are deeply nationalistic and religious and feel that it’s national suicide to negotiate along the lines that Dana talked about. First, am I right in thinking that there is this religious nationalist blocking third on each side? Second how might the two-thirds, who are not in the blocking third, deal with the 30 percent who are? I’m not completely confident that it’s a mirror image, but it feels very similar.
Dr. Sachs: On the Israeli side, I agree and disagree. The good news is that if you look at the religious national element, the ones who would put religion deeply intertwined with and inherent to the national cause, it’s significantly less than 30 percent. If you look at Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, the two figureheads of the far right today, they have much less than 30 percent.
Dr. Alterman: They’re at 15 percent, right?
Dr. Sachs: At best, and now their polling is actually down. Many of the voters, especially of Ben-Gvir, are not necessarily of the religious national ilk. Technically, religious nationalists, or modern Orthodox, are slightly more than 10 percent of the population. Not all of them are necessarily hardcore nationalists, although most are. That’s the good news. Of course, there are the ultra-Orthodox who are a very different group. They are not necessarily as nationalist, although in recent years, they are much more so than in the past. But their leadership is more complex than that. That’s the good news. The good news is the blocking third is significantly less than a third of that kind. That’s on the religious side.
There are two main impetuses for hawkishness among Israelis towards the Palestinian issue. One is the religious aspect. For someone like Smotrich, it’s not a question of expediency or security. It’s a question, as you said, of divine purpose—the whole purpose of this whole thing. It is about the land of Israel and the State of Israel within it. It has very little to do with other considerations.
There’s a second consideration, security, and that often coincides with the national one. Even people who are attached to the national or religious idea, but less so, can be very attached to the security question. It is significantly more than 30 percent. It’s easily more than half of the population who are now extremely risk averse and have lost patience with the suggestion that they should be taking profound risks with their family because people will be angry at them abroad.
Dr. Alterman: Last spring, a Pew poll last spring asked Israelis, “Would a two-state solution deliver security?” Among Jewish Israelis, the number was 19 percent.
Dr. Sachs: Exactly. Let me stress this point. If you somehow convince Israelis magically that there would be a Palestinian state, but there would be zero added risk security-wise, which is impossible, although there are very big differences to what kind of risk you add, I think you could muster a majority with the right leadership, not today, and not in the next year or two or five, but eventually you could do it. That proposition is extremely hard to sell to Israelis, especially today. A two-state solution, or a Palestinian state, at this moment in time among Israelis is a non-starter. A non-starter. Once you introduce demilitarization, which was always part of the negotiations, and spell out what demilitarization might mean, it looks slightly different. With time, the right leadership, and a lot of luck, it may be easier to do.
To summarize, there’s a big difference between religious or nationalist claims, which are strong. By the way, they’re prevalent among many people who are not national religious. Many people on the left, even, feel a deep attachment to the land, et cetera. They just believe they should compromise on it, but it is a compromise for them. That is on one side. The second side is a security question. Especially after October 7th a year ago, that is an overwhelming argument, but it’s one that our world of structured diplomacy and geopolitics can deal with at least. That is something one can discuss in some context. Not in the midst of a trauma, but if, hopefully, one can move past it and start recovering from it, it’s not impossible to imagine.
Dr. Alterman: Dana, how do you feel about the blocking third?
Dr. El Kurd: We need to understand the polling around Hamas in a similar way as Natan described. This is not necessarily support for a religious view of the conflict. Support for Hamas does not necessarily equal a religious view of the conflict or a lack of space to compromise. I’m sure there are some elements of that among people who support Hamas. But whenever we see Hamas gaining in polls, it’s usually support that’s gained because of the failure of its opposite. There is a large element of that in the polling that we have to take into consideration. Another thing that we have to take into consideration is that the Palestinian stakeholders I was describing at the beginning are not just people in Gaza and the West Bank. Even the polls that we do have are more limited, and they don’t get the full scope of where Palestinian politics stands today.
That being said, Hamas, especially in the aftermath of 2017, has tried to emphasize its role as a national movement and its willingness to compromise around national issues. They know that’s where Palestinian society is at. They can’t gain as much traction with religiously inflicted narratives as much as they can with nationally motivated narratives. You’re right that there is some element in Palestinian society that is zero-sum, and the ongoing violence really increases this. The violence creates the conditions for zero-sum understandings of the conflict. It’s less so because of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, and more because of how people are understanding, absorbing, and processing the last year.
That means that the space for negotiations is much smaller. Since before October 7th, a lot of us have been saying that if things went on that path and mass violence becomes the norm, the space for any kind of nonviolent resolution to the conflict becomes very narrow. So, I don’t think it’s necessarily just Hamas as a block. I think it’s people who view this conflict as zero-sum as a result of the last year. That portion of the population has definitely increased.
Dr. Alterman: Thank you.
Dr. Byman: Jon, can I interrupt to ask you a question on the region? A very impressive Israeli diplomatic success is that the Arab partners that Israel has worked with, in some cases for years like Egypt, and in some cases more recently, have somewhat publicly stuck by Israel, at least in their actions. We are a year into this. No one here is saying the end is in sight. Is the support, or at least the quiet cooperation of Arab states, towards Israel something that’s going to continue in the future? Is there a breaking point for them?
Dr. Alterman: There’s cooperation on Iran issues, because under the current government of Iran and its behaviors, they feel they have a common cause with Israel. There’s growing frustration on the Palestinian issue, not because they support Hamas, but to a country. All the governments in the region are hostile to Hamas as a popularly elected, Islamically inflected political movement that, as far as they’re concerned, wants to push them from power in their own countries. But there is a sense in the region that Israelis believe that Arab lives are particularly cheap, and that’s offensive. There is concern with public opinion that I see manifested. There’s a certain sense in the public of a profound lack of Israeli respect, which I think frankly some Arab governments also practice with their own people, but this doesn’t help legitimate what governments want to do with Israel.
The other piece of this that’s really important—I would be interested in hearing Dana’s perspective on this as well—is that, as a democracy, Israel has a pretty relentless timeline. It has an independent press and people are saying, “Okay, so where’s this going? That was last week. What about this week? Where’s this going? When is this going to end?” There’s an insistence on accountability and on the refinement of policy. When it comes to the issue of cooperation or normalization with Israel, a lot of the leaders in the region think they have 40 years to play this out. For them, it doesn’t matter what happens this week. They can park the issue for one year, five years. As far as they’re concerned, their people aren’t fighting and dying. They have other things going on. There’s some frustration in the Gulf. They feel their main issue is diversifying their economies and attracting foreign investment, and this war is taking all the attention away from the good things they’re doing and getting people agitated, on top of raising risks in the region.
But rather than breaking anything irretrievably, they’re likely to park things for quite some time. Don’t forget, this is a region where the Saudis and the Iranians, after long being deeply hostile for years and years and years, threatening each other, shutting down embassies, and everything else, the Iranian president met with the Saudi foreign minister last week. People said, “Yeah, that’s the right thing to have happen.” You can accelerate or you can deepen cooperation, but everyone has a much longer timeframe, and the people at the wheel now are likely to be the same people there in the future. Sultan bin Abdulaziz was the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia for 48 years. I’m not saying the current foreign minister is going to be there for 40 years, but it’s certainly possible. The crown prince expects to be guiding Saudi foreign policy for decades to come. The ruler of the UAE, Mohamed bin Zayed, expects to be there for a long time. Everybody is playing a longer strategic game.
You can talk about Netanyahu’s politics and Netanyahu’s survival. The only survival most leaders in the Arab world are worried about is biological, not political. That gives you a different amount of freedom and a different perspective on a lot of these issues. I want to ask Dana a question about regional politics, but before I do that, I just want to tell the viewers that you can send questions into the panel through the CSIS web page or the YouTube page. Dana, how do you see the regional picture? How do you see the rebirth of Arab interests in Palestine? Is any of this consequential for Palestinians or for regional politics? How does it look from the regional perspective?
Dr. El Kurd: When we discuss Palestine and the region, there’s been a lot of focus on the Axis, Iranian-backed militias, and that kind of framing for how Palestine might impact the region and vice versa. But understanding how Palestine intersects with regional politics must take a wider approach to understand how Arab societies, not just related to these particular militia groups, view Palestine. It is really important for understanding regional opposition and dissent. Palestine as an issue area is a gateway to dissent because it represents this lack of accountability that you mentioned.
I agree with you. Arab governments have this long view of their role in the conflict, but given ramifications of events like the Arab Spring, it may be too comfortable for them to assume that Palestine won’t play a larger role in regional dynamics, especially in terms of oppositional politics and the way Arab societies, publics, civil societies, and protest movements are absorbing the information of the last year of war and using it to channel their own grievances. That’s one component. Protests might move in a direction people don’t suspect. Another thing is the expansion of the war with no end in sight lends credence to the ideas and narratives of the Axis with the different actors, whether it’s Hezbollah or Hamas. It increases the degree to which Arab societies view this as a zero-sum conflict, and that can only escalate the likelihood of regional destabilization. Even if particular Arab governments have a long view of the ongoing crisis and possibly think they can return to normalization at some point, it’s not as simple as that. There are a lot of risks in this kind of strategy.
Dr. Alterman: Am I correct in feeling that Arab governments have been restrictive in an unprecedented way about protests over Palestine? Under what circumstances would they be less restrictive in your judgment?
Dr. El Kurd: As I said, especially in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the issue area of Palestine has become more of a hot topic to Arab governments. They’re much more wary of allowing those kinds of protests and that kind of dissent. In the past, it used to be kind of a safety valve. It was one of the only issue areas in some cases in which people could express some political dissent, but that quickly led and metastasized to other issue areas. Arab governments have been very restrictive as a result of that decade of learning about the role of Palestine in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.
They have allowed it at this moment in a very limited sense, and it really depends on a country-by-country basis. It’s only been allowed if you are expressing humanitarian concern and fear for people in Gaza. If that transforms into some kind of critique of government policy or the government’s approach to any of these issues, including normalization, that has been very swiftly shut down across the region. This is not a very good long-term or winning strategy for them.
Dr. Alterman: Let me ask another regional question. You talked about the way this war is spreading. One way it hasn’t yet spread profoundly, but may spread, is in the Israel-Iran direct confrontation. Iran has lobbed missiles at Israel, and Israel has fired back, but we haven’t seen anything that I would call normal war between the two. Natan, how do you see the Israel-Iran axis unfolding? Do you see it playing out into a direct war? Do you see it playing out in an indirect war in which Iran works through Palestinian groups? What should we be looking for? What should we be worried about?
Dr. Sachs: That’s a good question. This is almost the flip side of what Dana was saying, but I don’t think this contradicts it at all. A very prevalent Israeli perspective pits the two views of the Middle East against each other. One, a Palestinian-centric view that when you speak about Middle East peace, that’s almost synonymous with Israeli-Palestinian peace as if there’s no other problem in the region, which is obviously incorrect—although the conflict is very emotive in the Arab world. That would be a worldview. Netanyahu wrote a chapter in a book back in the early nineties called the “Myth of Palestinian Centrality”. The flip side of this view revolves around the theme of Iran versus Israel and Iran versus some of the Sunni Arab States. The Palestinian issue is useful for Iran as a ticket into the Sunni-dominated world, because they can raise the mantle that the main Sunni states are not.
Dr. Alterman: So it’s a Sunni Arab issue for a Shiʿite power?
Dr. Sachs: Exactly, for a Shiʿite power.
Dr. Alterman: Non-Arab, non-Sunni.
Dr. Sachs: They are the only ones raising the banner truly. Pitting the two views against each other is wrong because both can be true. Both the centrality of the Palestinian issue, certainly in Arab, but also in Muslim politics writ large in the Islamic world. I used to live in Indonesia and most people couldn’t point to Palestine if you asked them to, but it was an emotive issue even all the way there, and it certainly is now. On the hand, if you look at this war, it is not coincidental that all the cases of actual fighting have been surrounding the Axis of Resistance and nowhere else. It has been seven fronts, as the Israelis like to say. It has been focused on Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, militias in Iraq and in Syria, and Iran itself. All of these are precisely the Axis of Resistance that Iran leads. Hamas is certainly not a Shiʿite organization, but nonetheless align more loosely with the Iranian Axis.
Therefore, there were also those in Israel who very early on, as early as October 11th, 2023, proposed not invading or pushing into Gaza in retaliation first, but going north first. A lot of what we see now, perhaps what Dana was referencing or perhaps the assassination of Nasrallah, was considered seriously on October 11th and was pushed back by someone in the Israeli leadership or by President Biden. Eventually Netanyahu decided against it. That worldview says that at the end of the day, this is fundamentally an Iran-Israel fight. Of course, Hamas has its own calculations. It’s not a tool of Iran, but it is backed by it. The stronger enemy was Hezbollah, the main tool of Iran, and therefore the war should go there.
This was a long way of prefacing. This lends itself to the current Israeli campaign, which given the successes Dan described, and despite the cost of life in Lebanon, has very widespread support in Israel. Especially because, second only to the hostages, there is a feeling that the residents of northern Israel, the tens of thousands of Israelis who evacuated after October 8th when Hezbollah joined the fight, have to return home. To do that, they have to feel a sense of safety, not only in agreement with Hezbollah or Lebanon more broadly, but a sense that Hezbollah is not able to carry out an October 7th of their own on the border, which Hezbollah said it would, at least in terms of invading Israel. A retaliation by Israel for the last ballistic missile fired from Iran is likely. I can’t tell you what it is.
There is a lot of effort by the United States to limit it and to try to move towards de-escalation. There is a real chance that Israel, including Netanyahu, see their gains in Lebanon and a true degrading of Hezbollah and its capacity. Therefore, they might see an opening to de-escalation since at the end of the day, they will need to deal with Lebanon to bring back their civilians in the north, which is the political imperative domestically.
Dr. Alterman: Though arguably, all the big bets and risks that Netanyahu has taken for the last six months, in Netanyahu’s eyes, have worked out better than everybody told him they would. Whether it’s going to Rafah, going to Lebanon, or assassinating Nasrallah, all that could really go badly hasn’t gone badly.
Dr. Sachs: That’s true. It’s a very strong sense in Israel, and that’s Netanyahu’s political line as well. It’s a line that says, “Look, I withstood all this pressure. You can’t imagine what pressure. Look at the opposition leaders or anyone else in Israel. Who else could have withstood this pressure? Therefore, I am the only one able to conduct this long term.” He’s gained some popularity, and he’s risen in the polls somewhat, but he is not leading in the polls. He would still likely draw at best, and a draw is a victory of sorts for him, as we’ve seen in recent years, but he would draw at best. He could easily lose elections. More importantly from his perspective, he may be thwarting elections. They’re only scheduled for two years from now. Given that he also managed to bring someone else into the coalition, he could easily try to maneuver politics that way, or he could go a completely different route, which is to say, “My big successes mean I can chance elections.”
I don’t know what the next move is with Iran. We are in a very different territory than we were after April 13th when Iran fired directly at Israel for the first time in history. Actually fighting from Iran and sustaining direct, overt Israeli responses on Iran. We’re in a very different territory. Part of what we’re seeing today, the Israeli calculation and response is based on whether that equation can stand. It is based on whether Iran can now calculate that regardless of Iran and Israel exchanging some fire, the rules of the game are that the great powers, especially the United States, come in and quiet things down. While the Israelis say, “No, the rules have to be before that. You dare not shoot at Israel. That must be the rules of the game.” This is very dangerous, but all the dire warnings of many of these things have come, at most, to partial fruition. In Lebanon, we have not yet seen the all-out war that we fear.
Dr. Alterman: Dan, let me ask you. You’ve thought about Hezbollah, Hamas, and irregular warfare more generally. Are you surprised that Iran hasn’t more aggressively advanced the Axis of Resistance against an Israeli onslaught, or is this what you would’ve thought would happen?
Dr. Byman: I’ve certainly been surprised by how much Israel has been able to degrade Hezbollah. Iran was always a relatively weak actor in terms of its own capabilities. Its conventional military forces are quite limited, it’s limited economically, and most of its systems are not advanced. Yes, it has these rocket missile forces, but this has been an education for many people in the importance of air defense. For many years, Israel has been working on developing a truly comprehensive air defense system against small, short-range stuff from Gaza, but also, the big, ballistic missiles that are hard to shoot down from Iran. We knew before this that they had made a lot of progress.
I’m a little less surprised that Iran has been cautious, but there are some question marks. This has not just been provocative for Iran; it’s been embarrassing for Iran. Israel has not only degraded its major proxy, Hezbollah, but it’s done significant operations at the heart of the regime in Iran itself. Iran’s responses have been lackluster, and one possibility is Iran backs away, right? It doesn’t have to necessarily fight. If Israel has a mid-level response, Iran may say, “We’ll strike another day,” but do nothing in reality.
Dr. Alterman: As they did after the April 13 strikes.
Dr. Byman: Exactly. But Iran might also move towards international terrorism here. We’ve seen that in the past with attacks in Bulgaria and Argentina. This is a way of responding when you can’t respond through traditional military means. But I will say, there’s still a big question about what Hezbollah is going to be able to do with the remainder of its arsenal. Is it unable to fight? Has it simply taken so many losses that it can’t use this effectively? Or is it actually trying to avoid further escalation? I’m not quite sure what Hezbollah would be fearing, so I do think the degradation is quite real.
I did want to throw in one point that is a little different, and I’d like to get Dana’s or anyone else’s views on this. It is about the Palestinian Authority as a partner for Israel. From a counter-terrorism point of view, the PA in the West Bank has been incredibly important on a day-to-day basis in helping Israel ensure its security in the West Bank, going after Hamas remnants, and—in the eyes of critical Palestinians—being a handmaiden of the Israeli occupation. There seems to be a fairly dramatic shift in Israeli policy in terms of disregarding the PA leadership and doing major operations in the West Bank with no concern for their political standing.
That’s a very significant shift. Thank goodness that hasn’t been as bloody as Gaza or Lebanon, but it’s certainly causing a lot of casualties, and it also raises the long-term question of what the West Bank is going to look like.
Dr. El Kurd: This is reflected in some of the polling I mentioned earlier. This is why the Palestinian public fears that the levels of violence we’re seeing in Gaza might be replicated in some way. In fact, we are seeing some tactics replicated in the West Bank, where we have the razing of infrastructure and attacks on hospitals. The Palestinian Authority is absolutely not seen as a deterrent in its relationship with Israel. As you mentioned, for most Palestinians, it’s seen as a subcontractor of occupation. There was this element that they might be able to negotiate with Israel or, as the Israeli partner, might be able to engage the Israeli state in some way. As you mentioned, that’s not happening.
To be honest, this is merely a continuing trend from what we were already seeing. Especially after the Unity Intifada time frame, between May and August of 2021, this has been the case. There have been extensive operations in the West Bank against different militant groups that have popped up unrelated to Hamas, and there have been extensive operations in urban centers like Nablus. The Palestinian Authority has not been able to act as some sort of partner with Israel, and that already damaged its role and legitimacy with the Palestinian public long before last year.
This only puts the last nail in the coffin for the Palestinian Authority as some sort of legitimate actor that represents Palestinians in the West Bank. I am concerned that if the international community or the United States doesn’t lend credence to some of the other attempts to create legitimacy in Palestinian politics, then that vacuum is going to be filled by other types of political action.
Dr. Alterman: There are too many PhDs sitting in this room for me not to ask a question about grading. We have a question here: how would you grade the Biden administration’s performance toward this conflict? The Biden administration had a theory of the case. It’s been very active diplomatically with Israel and Arab states. It has chosen what to engage on, how to engage, and what to say. Understanding that GPAs are now rising, and average grades are somewhere above A-minus at many leading schools, how would you grade the administration’s strategic performance? Not that it can control the situation, but it can control what it does.
Dr. Sachs: I’m going to let the active professors take that first.
Dr. Byman: Dana, I’ll start but ask you to correct me. Leverage on the primary actor, which is Israel, is exceptionally weak. That’s because, as Natan said at the beginning, the stakes for most Israelis. There is widespread support across party lines that this is an existential moment and that the country is facing a wide range of threats and that a very strong response is required.
With that in mind, I think the administration has set a number of red lines, the vast majority of which have been violated. Then, it sets them again, and they get violated or ignored. That looks foolish. It’s hard. I don’t have great answers for how you do this. It would require a reconsideration of how the United States has approached Israel and changing it dramatically from the U.S. response for the last 50 years, where the United States really effectively doesn’t support Israel as much.
If you look at the latest confrontation with Iran, the United States is trying to have it both ways. It’s saying, “Don’t escalate, but we’re going to provide you intelligence, we’re giving you military support. We’re going to stand by you 100 percent.” That’s not the biggest threat against escalation. In fact, one could argue it’s exactly the opposite. It’s basically giving a green light. In that sense, I would say the United States has certainly not done well. It looks foolish to many Arab audiences, and it looks weak.
At the same time, the Biden administration scored a lot of points with Israelis, which was their primary audience. Especially early in the conflict, there was a genuine sense of empathy by the President that went a long way and gained some goodwill where there was a lot of concerned suspicion. I’m sympathetic because I don’t have great ideas myself for how the United States should change its approach to the conflict, but I can’t look around and say the United States has been incredibly successful.
Dr. Alterman: Professor Byman, is that a B?
Dr. Byman: It depends on what standard you want to use, but yeah, I’ll put it in the B range. I think that’s fair.
Dr. Alterman: Dana?
Dr. El Kurd: Wow. It’s so generous. I guess I’m a hard grader. I recently wrote something that the editors then titled “Washington Isn’t Learning Any Lessons.”
Dr. Alterman: It’s an interesting piece in Foreign Policy.
Dr. El Kurd: It came out today. The empathy that you mentioned that was shown to an Israeli audience and won the Biden administration points on that front was matched by a complete lack of empathy towards Palestinians and towards Arabs, generally. That has harmed the Biden administration here in this country as well.
I am particularly concerned and frustrated with the fact that, whatever the diplomatic behind-the-scenes is happening, as you said, there were all these red lines that were crossed. Any ideas that we have about what the “day after” might look like in the Palestinian Territories, or how we might get back to a framework to resolve this conflict in some way, have not deviated very much from reconfigurations of the original status quo that led us here. It seems like the Biden administration hasn’t been able to absorb the lessons of its first three years in office, which led to the point where October 7th happened and where this war unfolds. There have been no new ideas about where we go from here. That’s really the biggest concern.
Obviously, all the red lines that were crossed during the last year, the lack of response, and the lack of capacity to try to condition aid in some way are very harmful with Arab, Palestinian, and global audiences. The biggest concern is: where do we go from here? Have the United States’ decision-makers thought to themselves, “We have to try something other than what we’ve been trying?” I don’t see a lot of evidence of that and that’s why I would grade them much more poorly.
Dr. Sachs: I wanted to make two points. First, when you’re thinking about the success of U.S. strategy, the question is about goals. The U.S. administration and Biden himself early on were not just trying to gain Israeli solidarity. He genuinely identified with the two main Israeli goals, which were that Hamas should not be allowed to govern and poses a threat from the Gaza Strip and the return of the hostages, including American hostages. Those were the main goals.
A lot of difficult that people have is with the duality of the United States’ position. On one hand, it’s the guarantor of the world order and seen as the one that should restore equilibrium. When something goes wrong almost anywhere, but certainly in the Middle East, people say, “Who in Washington is in charge of this? Who in Washington is fixing this problem?”
On the other hand, the United States, and certainly President Biden, see themselves as an ally of Israel. Therefore, the administration has, at times, felt that if it aired grievances with Netanyahu, regarding a hostage deal or ceasefire deal, it would be understood as if Hamas is not an obstacle for it. This would cause Hamas, and Sinwar in particular, to harden their positions. They’re playing this dual game.
The second point I wanted to make is that, very early on, even during the very first speech that Biden gave, the administration correctly identified their main geopolitical, strategic goal and unique position in minimizing the risk for all-out war. They were correct in understanding that it is a role that only the United States can play.
Now, we’re much closer to an all-out war right now than we were just a few months ago, but nonetheless, on this, I think their grade is pretty high. Recall that, not only did President Biden, very early on, issue a stern warning to any state and any organization, which everyone understood as Iran and Hezbollah, from joining the fight, but he also moved a carrier group and then a second carrier group.
Then, on April 13th and14th, the United States Central Command coordinated a historic event. It was not just a historic Iranian attack; it was a joint coalition led by CENTCOM in which Arab states defended Israel actively. That happened again now. Whether good or bad, that is very much in service of the goal that Biden identified. That could come to naught, but it offsets a lot of the frustration that they and others have felt on the Gaza front.
Dr. Alterman: You’ve been an adjunct instructor at Georgetown. What would you give the administration?
Dr. Sachs: I would go to the dean at the time, Dan Byman, and ask him. It depends on which realm. On the regional realm, it might be an A-minus. On the Gaza front, it’s much harder to decide because of exactly what Dan said. They have a very difficult partner on the Israeli side. They also have an impossible player here, which is Sinwar. Sinwar has veto on this all the time.
Israelis complain vociferously against Netanyahu and his prioritization of things and the lack of prioritization of a hostage deal. Criticism that I share. But what Israelis say that they are assuming, of course, is that Sinwar is worse by far. 100 times over, and I’m not trying to make some equivalence or something. That’s not my point. My point is that the administration is trying to play a game where both of these very difficult actors have veto. The result has been lacking. Unlike everyone else on Twitter and everywhere else, I am not as smart to know what all of the answers would’ve been.
Dr. Alterman: We are going to have to leave it there. I want to thank my colleagues, Dana El Kurd, Dan Byman, and Natan Sachs. Thank you all for joining us. There is a theme page on the CSIS homepage that has a lot of our work on the conflict and current assessments, including a new report that Dan published, some things that I have published. I’ve really learned a lot from this conversation. I hope you have too. We will put a transcript up quickly and we look forward to seeing you all again very soon. Thank you much for joining us.
