Out of the Gaza war, there is an opportunity

The situation in Israel looks grim. The war in Gaza drags on with more Palestinian casualties. Opposition to Israel builds internationally. If and when Israel decides it has degraded Hamas enough to stop, no Palestinian or Arab force is likely to be willing to take over Gaza under those circumstances. So, Israel will stay on as the occupying force, new insurgencies will probably pop up, and Gaza will remain a wasteland populated by some 2 million Palestinians living lives of desperation. Meanwhile, conditions in the West Bank are deteriorating rapidly. If the Palestinian Authority were to collapse, Israel would have two volatile arenas and about 5 million Palestinians to police night and day, indefinitely.

There is a way out. In fact, the Biden administration has been working to find a way to turn the crisis into an opportunity. National security adviser Jake Sullivan has been doggedly pursuing an effort to get Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel, in return for what Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister has described as a “credible and irreversible path to a Palestinian state.”

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