Starvation and the Palestinian State
Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer.
Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
Q. A number of European states, led by France, plan to recognize a Palestinian state in September. Why now, and what is the significance?
A. Recognizing the existence of a (still nonexistent) Palestinian state may be a new response on the part of Europeans to Israel’s failures. But not so the rest of the world, where for years now over 140 countries have ‘recognized’ a Palestinian state. The virtual state of Palestine already has more ambassadors serving abroad than does Israel. Thus far this has had little substantive effect on Israeli security, the Israeli economy or the much-needed two-state solution.
In May 2024, five European states joined the ‘recognition bloc’ without incident. Some of those scheduled to do so in September 2025 have laid down conditions for possibly cancelling their plans--conditions, such as Israel launching a two-state solution process--that the Netanyahu government is unlikely to meet.
The state recognition wave anticipated in September at the United Nations General Assembly appears to be very different both in motivation and in anticipated effect from previous recognition campaigns. Major world powers considered close to Israel--France, the UK, Germany, Australia, Canada--are among the recognizers. The catalyst is no longer merely Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and its failure to engage in a peace process.
Now, Israel, long accused (accurately) of having no strategy at all for Gaza, is being blamed for having a genocidal strategy: starving the Gazan population. And recognition of a Palestinian state is the world’s response.
The erosion of public support for Israel discernable in recent years in Europe is now increasingly evident in the United States, too, where support is dwindling among the younger generation and in President Trump’s Republican electoral base. If Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a MAGA stalwart, accuses Israel of “genocide,” Trump himself (“real starvation”) could be next.
Q. Isn’t European opinion being influenced by the growing Muslim population there?
A. And if it is? Europe is still Israel’s biggest trading partner, biggest vacation destination, biggest source of global orientation (“the West”) that Israelis identify with. Besides, Europeans of all religions, not just Muslims, are legitimately appalled by the images of starvation in Gaza that they see on their TV screens.
Q. But why respond by recognizing a nonexistent Palestinian state? How does this punish Israel? Does this make a two-state solution more likely?
A. Certainly not in the short term. Not only does the Netanyahu coalition reject a Palestinian state, but a majority of the Israeli public, while taking its distance from Netanyahu himself at present for a host of reasons, strongly opposes a two-state solution.
Further, according to Palestinian polls, Palestinians themselves have lost faith in a two-state solution. Palestinian governance and Palestinian leadership in the West Bank are in crisis. Hamas, still firmly in control in Gaza, rejects the existence of Israel and, by extension, a two-state solution, continuing to preach death and destruction.
Any international actor trying at this point in time to initiate a two-state solution has almost no one to work with in either Israel or Palestine.
Q. If this does not make a two-state solution more likely at present, what could this move by the international community catalyze?
A. Unless the Netanyahu government responds by ending the war, immersing Gaza in food and medical aid and initiating a serious political process with the Palestinians, state-recognition in September is likely to generate serious economic, political and security boycotts of Israel. This could isolate Israel internationally as a pariah state.
In this regard, we are witnessing Israel’s worst international crisis in memory. And there is every indication that major concessions by the Netanyahu government, while pleasing the world, would bring down that government, thereby ushering in a national political crisis that Netanyahu fears but most Israelis would welcome.
What is most devastating about this emerging crisis is that the Israeli body politic, while celebrating the IDF’s victories of late over militant Islam--Iran, Hezbollah--and the disappearance of the threat from Syria, is unable to come to terms with the heart and soul of Israel’s dilemma: the Palestinian issue.
Q. Indeed, doesn’t the two-state solution remain the only viable way out of decades of conflict?
A. It does. No other ‘solution’ could conceivably work or be agreed over the long term. Yet it is not about to happen. It was fascinating to watch coverage last Saturday of a video released by Hamas of a young Israeli man held hostage for over 660 days, in a Hamas tunnel, thoroughly emaciated and obviously starving. The context, for Israeli viewers, was the Holocaust, not starving Gazan children. The latter were either not mentioned by the mainstream media or their plight was denied by way of contrast.
If Israel is now allowing heavy food supplies into Gaza, by air and by land, this is primarily because of fear of the international reaction, not a guilty national conscience. A recent opinion poll by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University indicates that over 61 percent of the Israeli public are not troubled by the humanitarian situation inside the Gaza Strip.
Q. Why? Why aren’t they troubled?
A. Israelis’ lack of empathy for starving Palestinians and opposition to Palestinian statehood are at least in part extended reactions to the Hamas attack and massacre of October 7, 2023. Israelis’ support for right-wing racist politicians reflects the country’s growing religiosity, including an expanding messianic movement that is no longer a fringe.
The public is also reacting with frustration to the absence of a decisive victory in Gaza despite nearly two years of fighting by the mighty IDF against Hamas terrorist guerrillas. This reflects the failure of both the government and the IDF to recognize that standard offensive military tactics do not work against guerrilla warfare executed from tunnels. Meanwhile IDF casualties pile up. Israelis want revenge not only for October 7 but for their losses since then as well. Hamas, with its bloodlust, is a legitimate and singular focus of popular hatred.
Q. But did Netanyahu deliberately cause the Gaza hunger crisis?
A. No. He let it happen through negligence. He delayed vital decisions, ignored IDF warnings, acquiesced to the racist pressures of his most extreme Kahanist ministers out of political expediency, and celebrated military achievements over Iran and Hezbollah in order to distract public opinion from Gaza.
Then too, Netanyahu adopted dumb strategies. In March he bought into the theory that a few months of food deprivation in Gaza would force Hamas to capitulate. We see where that got us. Currently he is toying with the theory that if Israel begins annexing parts of the Strip, piecemeal, Hamas will out of panic offer concessions. This last knuckleheaded idea reminded Haaretz columnist Amos Harel of General Evelyn Barker, commander of British forces in Mandatory Palestine in 1946-47, who explained that you could punish the Jews there through their pocketbooks.
Q. Well, Israel still has the Trump administration behind it . . .
A. As noted, even here the erosion of public support has begun. Besides, Trump is the most unpredictable political leader in the world.
Q. Bottom line?
A. Leave aside the learned discourse as to whether or not Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. I personally think that neither the prime minister nor the IDF or Shin Bet ever intended that. But this is what the world increasingly thinks. And mass hunger is the obvious reality. No amount of clever hasbara will change that impression: we can blame Hamas as much as we want, but it is we who in the eyes of the world are in charge.
Given the abysmal state of both Palestinian and Israeli governance, is recognizing a Palestinian state the appropriate international response? It is unlikely to advance a two-state solution. But by isolating Israel, it could help end this totally counterproductive war.
