War or Peace: What to do about Israel
The case for war and the case for peace, explained
600,000 Israelis live in the West Bank. They occupy hilltops and other fortified areas, and are armed to the teeth with small arms and similar munitions. Any attempt to expel them, e.g. to return the Camp David status quo ante, will result in an immediate, bloody, and brutal war. It is a thing that the Israeli state will never do of its own accord, for that would lead to immediate civil war.
From this simple fact alone, the two state solution is dead, and has been for a long time. Now only a singular state remains, and when all is said and done, the question remains: what is to be done with such a genocidal, expansionist state?
America, as imperial hegemon and overlord of Israel, has two choices with what to do regarding the Israeli state. The first is to opt for war, to break the state entity down and rebuild it into a more pliant, less powerful entity. The second is to opt for peace, to accept Israeli power and genocidal suzerainty over Palestine.
A decision-point is inevitable in the making, and soon, America will have to make its choice.
The Case for War
A nuclear-armed power is on the march in the Middle East. They’ve invaded or attacked over a half-dozen sovereign countries this past half-decade, and are currently annexing new territory in areas they have illegally occupied in contravention of all international laws for decades. Were this country anyone else but Israel, the mainstream position in both parties would be, we need to stop this country immediately. Many understand, after the horrors of the 20th Century, that there is “no peace in our time” possible without both a strong military and diplomatic counterforce in the world that can stand up against tyrannical, conquest-thirsty regimes.
To be clear, no other ally in America’s otherwise beefy roster is pursuing a policy of violent military aggression and conquest. No mainstream French leaders are calling for Greater France, an expansion of French territory into the NATO-aligned German Rhineland, for instance. No German leaders are likewise calling for ‘living space’, at the expense of other NATO allies like Poland. Yet, Israeli politicians including government ministers have made the desire of a ‘Greater Israel’, at the territorial expense of US allies in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Syria, and Egypt (to name a few), explicit government policy. And crucially, no other state is as accused as Israel is of active, mass ongoing genocide, excepting the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces’ (RSF) or Putin’s Russian Armed Forces’ genocides in Sudan and Ukraine, respectively.
When it came to Putin and Russia, the West immediately rallied behind Ukraine when that country faced its own invasion challenge in 2014. US support for Ukraine became unwavering in the years since, and dried up only when Donald Trump became President again in 2025. The West understood then and especially in 2022, that if Putin’s military march of conquest was not stopped in Ukraine, that it likely would or could not be stopped beyond that save a massive world war.
The preeminent lesson of World War 2 is that Hitler’s defeat was inevitable, and it should have happened sooner. It should have happened in 1938, when Germany threatened Czech sovereignty and annexed Austria, or in 1936, when Germany remilitarized the Rhineland, or in 1935, when Germany began secret rearmament. It would have been better and more moral for the world to have confronted Germany in 1933, as soon as Hitler came into power, for 1933’s Germany was eminently more beatable than 1939 Germany.
The sinews of war are infinite money, and infinite money can only be attained through permanent war, via conquest and pillage. In Spring 1939, when Germany finished gobbling up Czechoslovakia, before the invasion of Poland and the official beginning of World War 2, German annexation of Czechoslovakia gave them the material means to wage war not just against Poland, but against France and Britain and the rest of the Western allies. By being allowed to take Czechoslovakia without a fight, Germany immediately got access to:
2,175 cannons and field guns.
Nearly 500 then-modern light tanks.
43,000 machine guns, 1.09 million military rifles, and 114,000 pistols.
About one billion rounds of small-arms ammunition and 3 million rounds of anti-aircraft ammunition.
500 anti-aircraft guns.
Bullets and guns are one thing, but they also took all of Czechoslovakia’s peoples (14.8 million before the surrender at Munich), who were immediately put to work in Germany’s war industries as second-class or even slave labor. They also of course took over Czechoslovakia’s raw resources and copious mines, as well as one of the most advanced arms factories at the time in the world, the Škoda Works.
The logic of war imperialism is therefore quite simple, and self-perpetuating: the conquests of today will feed and make possible the conquests of tomorrow. Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, after all, to steal their natural resources to resume his war against Britain on more equal footing. Germany only failed in this not because of any moral superiority on the part of the Allies but because of the fact that the Allies could outproduce Germany and her allies 10:1 when it came to planes, trains, and automobiles, and that the Soviet Union could raise 1200 divisions instead of the presupposed 200.
It is inevitable that Israel intends to finish consuming Palestine, like Germany did with Czechia or how Russia intends now to do with Ukraine. Once they have done so, they may very well turn their ire and rapacious hunger for territory on their neighbors, and use the same policies they used in the soon to be former West Bank and Gaza in countries like Jordan and Egypt. It’s a very simple playbook:
Impose military control over the targeted area.
Restrict the import of basic goods such as food and water, to say nothing of medicine or consumer goods.
Paint every act of resistance against military rule as anti-Jewish hatred, allowing policies of extermination to be pursued.
Place populations into tiny segregated ghettos in urban communities, allowing disease and famine to do the bulk of the work that bombs cannot.
Once the population has been diminished enough, send in settlers with full military backing to isolate the few remaining ghettos.
Then, either absorb the ghettos as second class laborers (or even slave labor), or expel/exterminate the populace, as needed.
If this were merely a moral or material question, then like with Germany, Americans ought to be pining for war and regime change in Israel. Defeating Hitler would have been easier in 1933, and defeating Israel will be easier today than it will be every single day after this one.
Yet war, especially one with the prospect of turning nuclear, is not something that should be argued for lightly. Thousands of Americans may die in such a conflict, and for what benefit? A more peaceful Middle East, carved in our image? Were it so easy!
The goal of war is not the war in of itself, of course. A military confrontation with Israel must lead to something other than the confrontation; it must have clearly defined goals and policies. The necessity of war has already been made plain; Greater Israel is inevitable unless if it is militarily confronted by a power strong enough to confront it. Otherwise, are we really willing to sacrifice our allied partners from Egypt to Turkey, just so Israeli settlers have more real estate to settle in?
But if there is war, what is it intended to lead to? Here, military stratagems and maxims tie in quite nicely with policy aims. The playbook, as it were, with recalcitrant allies is well known. The United States has deployed similar strategies the world over, from Iran in 1953, or more recently in 2019 Bolivia. Julius Caesar himself succinctly summed it up as divide et impera; divide and rule.
In other words, the state unity of Israel must be broken, and it must be broken by US agents and assets. Existing fissures and divisions in Israeli society must be exploited and made worse; festering sores of division between the religious and nonreligious must turn into open gunfights on the streets. Settlers in the West Bank must be turned into extremist secessionists, army officers should be turned against their seniors, and everywhere: violent gangs and drugs must rule the streets.
Meanwhile, diplomatic and economic pressure will isolate Israel; by placing the state of Israel under economic siege, that will in turn feed the beast of disunity. The once vaunted IDF will hopefully be splintered across the territory, with differing factions warring for supremacy. Ideally, this would even be an outright civil war, with each faction fighting a war to death against the other.
And then, the actual war would come. This, like Iraq in 2003, would be a simple mop-up job. There would be no unified IDF command still existing in this case; we would pick our favored faction of would-be collaborators, and use our military strength to put them in charge of the territory.
The new regime in charge of the territory will be demilitarized (to not repeat our fate in Iraq post-2003), save for domestic security, with one state existing from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The ethnoreligious makeup of this territory, would be, in this case, ideally, a mixture of Palestinians and Israelis, with equal rights granted to both.
But wars, especially civil ones, like this are bloody affairs. Mass refugee outflows should be expected, anticipated. The ethnoreligious makeup of the territory may be entirely different after the war, or it may result in one party assuming total majoritarian control over the other. It would not be, in other words, surprising if a majority of the ten million or so Jews in Israel fled to greener pastures elsewhere—indeed that is the definitional aim of some of the policies; the fewer Jewish Israelis in the country, the fewer people America would then need to fight during the clean-up operation.
What would this ultimate goal be, in the long-term? It is to render the state of Israel (or the Palestine to-be) into a diplomatic and economic roadbump, an otherwise ineffectual, irrelevant part of our imperial hegemonic tapestry. It’ll continue to be important for religious tourism but otherwise, it will be no powerhouse capable of independent action.
In a century, in other words, the whole of the Levant should be pacified, peaceful, with everyone enjoying equal rights and economic growth. That is the end goal. It’s also been the end goal of many US administrations. Many administrations have pursued war in the Middle East to enact this exact goal, and there is no guarantee that this time will be any different.
Thus, what is the alternative?
The Case for Peace
Wars are costly, oft-pointless affairs. Even wars where the opposing side has been weakened by covert and economic operations are no cakewalk—there is no such thing as a cakewalk in war. Even against ill-defended Grenada, at the height of our military power, we still lost 24 soldiers killed, 116 wounded, and 9 helicopters lost. It is likely that if we step up covert operations against Israel to soften them up for an invasion, that Israel will do the same to our allies and our own selves, to say nothing of when things finally turn kinetic.
And, they have nuclear warheads. What if, seeing this plan, this desire for war, Israel opts to respond with a nuclear threat? They have around 300 operational warheads, and while we can outshoot them on the nuclear front 10:1, we could still suffer at least 50 million casualties in the event of a nuclear war. No one would say that that cost is worth the trouble, for anything.
Further, the process of weakening Israel may take decades, during which time, they may very well finish the extermination of the Palestinian peoples, which is ostensibly the main reason cited why America must oppose Israel. And, there is no guarantee that they will indeed continue their conquest after they finish with Palestine. While many politicians desire Greater Israel, the bounds of territorial expansion are state capacity; the ingurgitation of all-Palestine will take Israel at least a few more generations to do, to say nothing of their neighbors. In that time, old prejudices, old politicians, will die, and a future where Palestine is not totally exterminated will remain possible. It will be a Palestine of bantustans, of tribal reservations, and land acknowledgments, with the vast majority (90%+) of ethnic Palestinians living in the external diaspora, but Palestine and the Palestinians will not be fully wiped out.
It must also be admitted that Israel remains an incredibly rich state with incredibly rich western backers. Any demand for confrontation will run into a brick wall of strong foreign-backed domestic opposition. The domestic political parties of America have their own agendas, their own programs to pursue, and a costly, time-consuming ‘to-the-death’ conflict with Israel would be considered a distraction to many US administrations.
Who would, in other words, surrender the issue of Palestine in return for Medicare for All? The response today will be, “no, not me, not ever”, but that may very well change, especially as AIPAC continues to get more and more involved in primaries. There is no way a pro-Palestinian leftist candidate will ever be able to out-fundraise the Israeli-backed candidates. If AIPAC backed economic populists who were pro Medicare for All, in other words, it is likely they could have saved some seats they lost this cycle. For instance: had Haley Stevens had the exact same policies as Abdul El-Sayed, save Israel, would El-Sayed still have won? It’s doubtful.
If there is to be long-term peace with Israel, it will likely be via a negotiated settlement, wherein Israel is allowed to continue its extermination of Palestine to a certain point, at which point, it will have to stop and establish the new permanent reality of Palestinian bantustans under US direction; the so-called ‘23 state solution’. On international maps, in international fora, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, all we will see will be Israel and Israel alone, for it will be Israel alone that will have military, political, economic, and cultural sovereignty over their territory.
And, to be sure, there will be benefits for America in this scenario. Israeli technology and capital assets will continue to be exchanged with US entities and capital owners. Israeli intelligence will continue feeding into American intelligence links. Israeli ports and airports will continue to be refueling silos for our planes and ships, with no lengthy period of reconstruction needed (in a war scenario, all structures will likely have to be rebuilt from scratch).
A Third Way?
No. There is none.
If we do nothing, absolutely nothing, the default will be the case for peace. Palestinian extermination will continue until it is complete or until diplomatic pressure forces Israel to accept a bantustanification of the Palestinian question, or some other final solution.
If we choose confrontation, then we must accept the risk that that confrontation will lead to military conflict, and if we are to fight any war, it must be a war we can win, which entails breaking down Israeli unity. If we do make this choice, in other words, it is a choice made once and early in a Presidential administration, with final fruition coming into effect sooner rather than later. We cannot very well start sending suitcases of cash to Israeli army officers to overthrow their civilian government and then continue whistling along the path of peace as if we hadn’t tried to subvert the Israeli state!
Either option leads to likely horrific war crimes and violations of human rights. There is a hope, perhaps, that economic pressure alone can lead to a better solution. This is the hope of the present majority of the pro-Palestine left, that sanctions and boycotts alone will lead to regime change. Look at Iran, look at Venezuela, look at Cuba, to see how well sanctions and boycotts do. In those three examples, only Venezuela actually worked out in the interim (wherein we did a successful military coup).
Therefore, the first thing we must do is accept this fait accompli, of these two sole paths, with all the attendant risks.
If we are to argue for and accept war, then let the costs and risks be plain, as well as the benefits and idealistic end goal. Yes, a third of Americans may die in nuclear hellfire, but if we avoid that future, then the alternative will be one where the former Israel is no longer capable of annexing or threatening anyone, where the population has been completely denuded and disarmed by US military power, where peace and economic growth reign in perpetuity. Israel in this case will be as much of a threat to Jordan and Egypt as New Jersey is to New York; not at all.
Conversely, if we are to argue for peace, then let us be plain about what that entails, about the possible total or near-total extermination of the Palestinian population (minus the diaspora, which Israel cannot get to), and of Israel’s likely continued march on its neighbors, all of whom are US allies. Convincing Israel to accept Palestinian Bantustans is not a given (total extermination or expulsion being preferable to many in Israel), and containing Israeli territorial expansion in allied territories will be an uphill battle that may still result in a military conflict against Israel, albeit a much stronger, much larger Israel. For example, if Israel finishes annexing Palestine, and takes Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan next, the US defense of Egypt will be far, far harder than if we had attacked them prior.
An Honest Debate
So, the two options have been laid forth, with all the attendant risks and benefits flagged for each. Now all that is needed is the choice, and the choice will arise from the internal political debates both parties will have.
If a person says they are for the case of peace, then they should be asked:
What if Israel does not accept economic or military pressure to establish bantustans? To what extent do you personally agree with the genocide of Palestinians?
What if Israel, after finishing its annexation of Palestine, turns on other US allies in the region, such as Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria?
If a person says they are for the case of war, then they should be asked:
If a conflict with Israel leads to nuclear war, is it still worth it?
What guarantees can you offer that such a conflict will be as easy and beneficial as you say?
Let the chips fall where they may; let a democratic majority form for one of these two options in the United States, and let the People, the sole sovereign arbiters of justice and truth, make their decision and live with it, come what may.
But let us not live in delusions anymore of fake solutions such as whimpers of ‘two states’ or the meek ‘BDS’.
War or peace: when it comes to the fate of Israel, there is no other option.