What if this war should end, as it must, not by a cease-fire or a truce, like other wars with Hamas, but with a comprehensive resolution to the 100-year-old conflict between the Palestinian and Israeli people?

To imagine anything good coming out of such a destructive war is not easy, especially for those of us witnessing its cruel prosecution from Ramallah, on the Israeli-occupied West Bank. And yet, as bad as things are, I feel compelled to resist giving in to despair. I may be clutching at straws, but I feel a moral responsibility to seek any grounds for hope.

One hopeful sign I detect is the recurring mention of the Nakba, as Palestinians call their tragedy during the 1948 war, when more than 700,000 people were forced to leave their home and become refugees. Israel has never officially recognized this collective catastrophe—largely because the Zionist movement, from its early days, denied the existence of the Palestinian people and consequently refused to recognize the Nakba.

Admittedly, today’s recognition is at best backhanded and at worst threatening. It points not to restitution but to repetition. On October 8, the Israeli Knesset member Ariel Kallner posted on X (formerly Twitter): “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48.” Violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank distributed pamphlets on October 26, warning of a second Nakba for the Palestinians: “You have a last opportunity to escape to Jordan. Afterward, we’ll drive you away by force from our holy land that God dedicated to us.”

[Graeme Wood: ‘You started a war, you’ll get a Nakba’]

I take some cold comfort from the recognition of the Nakba that this ugly rhetoric contains, in spite of itself. For decades, Israeli propaganda justified the exodus of three-quarters of the Palestinian population in 1948 with various claims; one—the contention that Palestinians left primarily because Arab leaders called on them to do so, rather than because of Jewish terrorism and systematic ethnic cleansing—has been rebutted by several generations of scholars.

Another persistent Israeli line held that the Palestinian Arabs had 21 Arab states to go to, while Israeli Jews had only one state. David Ben-Gurion, a 1948 war leader and Israel’s first prime minister, believed that after a few generations Palestinians would have integrated into new host countries and forgotten about Palestine. But 75 years after the Palestinians were pushed out of their home in Palestine, they continue to believe in the possibility of return, and many remain in the refugee camps where they were settled after the Nakba in the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza.

Before 1948, many Palestinians saw the Jews as a tiny minority who would never be able to establish a state in Palestine. The famous Palestinian educator Khalil Sakakini, who worked as an educational inspector under the British Mandate, describes in a 1934 diary entry a trip he took throughout the country. He wrote: “If the Jews have a few impoverished colonies, the Arabs have thousands of villages … What is owned by the Jews compares as nothing to what is owned by the Arabs in Palestine.” The Palestinians also believed that they had the backing of the Arab states, which would help them quash the Jewish dream of establishing a state in Palestine.

Before the 1948 war, few Palestinians were aware of the extent of European Jews’ suffering in the Holocaust, or of how that experience affected the survivors who immigrated to Palestine—the insecurity and dread that blunted them to the feelings of Palestinians and engendered extreme determination to succeed in their nation-building project. Likewise, after 1948, the Israelis failed to understand the enduring meaning of the Nakba for the Palestinians.

Despite this history, and in addition to the almost inadvertent recent recognition of the Nakba, I see a second, slender ground for optimism arising out of the terrible violence.

“When this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next … There’s no going back to the status quo as it stood on October 6,” President Joe Biden told reporters. The White House said that Biden conveyed the same message directly to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a telephone call.

We Palestinians have heard such invocations before, and they have proved empty promises. Even now, the United States, Israel’s staunchest ally, continues to block the UN Security Council from calling for a humanitarian cease-fire. But maybe, just maybe, after this latest horrific cycle of violence, the United States and the rest of the international community will follow through.

The Oslo Accords of 1993 are often viewed as a development that could have brought real peace, if not for the assassination of then–Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Israeli fanatic. Yet Oslo was largely a false beginning. From the start, Israeli extremists denounced the agreement because it would force them to relinquish parts of “Greater Israel,” which they considered to be their God-given land. After the accords were signed, they built settlements on occupied Palestinian land at a faster pace than ever before. Some on the Israeli left opposed this policy, but to little avail.

In the aftermath of what was supposed to be a historic peace accord, therefore, Palestinians witnessed the loss of ever more land to Israeli settlements on the West Bank. They saw Israel withdraw from Gaza, only to impose a tight blockade restricting the movement of people and goods and affecting every aspect of life in the strip. These developments together gave credence to the argument, propounded by Hamas, that only through armed struggle would Palestinian rights be restored.

The mirror image of this view is the prevailing Israeli belief that only military action can defeat Hamas. To destroy Hamas will be impossible without ending the occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza. Israel should know this from long experience, but instead persists in the delusion that Hamas’s appeal can be reversed without offering an alternative vision for a path to Palestinian freedom.

[Hussein Ibish: Israel’s dangerous delusion]

The Oslo Agreement established the Palestinian Authority, whose moderate head, Mahmoud Abbas, espoused nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation and to denounce violence. He was willing to settle for a smaller state and to struggle through peaceful and legal means to achieve it. Yet Netanyahu cynically supported Hamas in Gaza to make sure that the PA would not succeed. The PA, for its part, became unpopular because of its corruption, its security cooperation with Israel, and its failure to protect the Palestinians in the West Bank.

Now Israel is waging a destructive war against Hamas in Gaza that will carry a high economic cost, as well as a high reputational cost around the globe. Although Western governments proclaimed their solidarity with Israel after the October 7 horror, many are urging Israel to exercise restraint, and to cooperate with the provision of humanitarian aid. If the United States continues opposing calls for a cease-fire as the war goes on, it may find itself isolated even among its Western allies.

Israel/Palestine is a small, precious land with lovely beaches in Gaza; soft, attractive hills in the West Bank; and sites of exquisite beauty in Israel. But its people, rather than enjoying their mutual land for its bounty, are tormented by exclusivist attitudes and policies that stretch the limit of their endurance. The vision that peace could follow the eviction or destruction of one people, whether through a second Nakba or through bombing, is cruel and false.

Unfortunately, the United States’ policy is one of blind support for Israel. Over the years, Washington has failed to convince its ally that choosing the path of peace with the Palestinians through recognition of their rights is best for the future of all—for ending the violence, and for the possibility that one day, the two nations of Israelis and Palestinians can live together in peace and security.

Israel has launched what appears to be the first phase of a massive ground incursion into Gaza, vowing that Hamas must be eliminated or somehow rendered irrelevant, even at the expense of smashing Gaza to pieces.

But what then? Israeli officials have reportedly told the Biden administration that they haven’t engaged in any serious postconflict planning. That’s probably because none of their options is good and, despite a plethora of fantastical proposals, nobody is going to step in to bear the burden of Israel’s impossible dilemma or, put more simply, clean up its mess.

Israelis may feel that it doesn’t have any responsibility for realities in Gaza, given that Hamas has controlled the territory since 2007. But the rest of the world understands that the occupation has continued, albeit from beyond the borders of the Strip. Israel has all the while kept tight control over Gaza’s coastal waters, its airspace, its airwaves, and all of the crossings into the Strip except for a small one maintained by Egypt. Israel has made almost all of the major decisions regarding Gaza since 1967—including the reckless and self-destructive decision to bolster Hamas in order to split the Palestinian national movement between Islamists based in Gaza and secular nationalists in the West Bank.

Now Israel, apparently regretting this policy after the horrendous Hamas-led killing spree on October 7, has embarked on an offensive that will almost inevitably leave much of Gaza a smoldering pit of devastation. Yet, apparently, it still hopes to then withdraw, passing local authority to … somebody else. But this scenario is a fantasy. No third party is plausibly willing or able to police and rebuild Gaza on behalf of, and in coordination with, Israel.

[Hussein Ibish: Israel is walking into a trap]

One common proposal suggests that an expeditionary or police force, drawn from stable Arab countries, should secure Gaza as Israel withdraws. Given its geography and history, Egypt would have to be a central player in any such effort. But the Egyptians have made a foreign-policy priority of not getting sucked back into Gaza since 1979. They are not about to change their mind.

Another frequently suggested candidate is the Palestinian Authority. But the regime that Mahmoud Abbas leads in Ramallah has nothing to gain from reentering Gaza in the aftermath of Israeli devastation. Even in the decade before this war, Abbas rejected numerous Egyptian proposals to have the PA take over government ministries in Gaza, or supply security on the Palestinian side of crossings into the Strip. Hamas was apparently willing to accept these initiatives but also insisted that it would not disarm. Abbas reasonably feared winding up responsible for the impoverished population of Gaza, but without sufficient resources, and in the shadow of a heavily armed militia that could turn to violence whenever it liked.

If the PA was afraid of returning to Gaza back then, it will hardly be enthusiastic about stepping in behind Israeli forces after a devastating ground war. Gaza’s needs would be immense, and riding into power on the backs of Israeli tanks would mark the PA with a political kiss of death among Palestinians. Maybe, if a third party were to secure Gaza for a time after Israel withdraws, the PA might be willing to come in to replace it. But then we are back at square one: Who’s going to be that third party?

Some Israelis are quietly talking about the return of Mohammed Dahlan, the former Fatah leader in Gaza who has been living in exile in the United Arab Emirates since Hamas’s violent takeover in 2007. Dahlan still has supporters in Gaza, but he’s broadly unpopular among Palestinians and remains on terrible terms with Abbas and his inner circle. Without the backing of Ramallah, Dahlan can’t effectively return the PA to power in Gaza.

What about United Nations peacekeepers? Imagine a UN peacekeeping mission in charge of an utterly ravaged society that was already nonfunctional and on the brink of humanitarian catastrophe. Now imagine it battling the insurgency that Hamas is plainly planning to unleash on the Israelis, and which is one reason the Israel Defense Forces wants to get out as quickly as possible once they have finished wreaking havoc. The UN and its member countries will almost certainly not be willing to accept responsibility for policing the rubble and caring for more than 2 million impoverished and largely displaced Palestinians in a tiny and overcrowded area that has been reduced to ruins.

Hamas’s main aim since its founding in 1987 has been to take over the Palestinian national movement, including the Palestine Liberation Organization, with its precious international diplomatic presence, UN observer-state status, and more than 80 embassies around the world. In service of this aim, Hamas hopes to lure Israel into Gaza, where it can mount a long insurgency against the Israeli occupiers. Hamas will then claim to be taking the fight to Israel, while the secular nationalists in the West Bank sit around waiting for negotiations that will never take place.

[Franklin Foer: Tell me how this ends]

Such is Hamas’s path to leadership among Palestinians. If the Israelis skedaddle, Hamas won’t simply abandon the planned insurgency. It will carry out the plan against whatever power appears to be representing Israel’s interests, whether Arab, UN, or even Palestinian.

No third party is going to step into Gaza to fight the insurgency planned for Israeli troops, rebuild the infrastructure and society shattered by war, and solve the long-standing problem of governance that Hamas’s armed presence has ensured will endure. Israel is on its own, and so it must find an alternative both to leaving Gaza quickly, thereby allowing Hamas to reemerge, at least as a political entity, and to staying and battling the inevitable insurgency.

Whatever Israel decides to do now that its ground attack in Gaza is under way, it needs to understand that no deus ex machina will swoop in and save it from the accumulated consequences of its actions since 1967. When the smoke clears, yet again, Israel and the Palestinians—and not anyone else—will be left to cope with their self-inflicted disasters.