In the final months of 2015, Israel confronted the greatest unrest it had faced since the Second Intifada had ended more than ten years earlier. Palestinian protests and clashes with Israeli forces spread from East Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank, as well as to Gaza and Palestinian towns inside Israel. During the first three weeks of October, ten Israelis were killed and more than one hundred injured in stabbings and shootings and by drivers ramming cars into pedestrians. Over the same period, Israeli forces killed fifty-three Palestinians and injured around two thousand.1 Compared with the Second Intifada, the demonstrations were smaller, the influence of Palestinian political factions weaker, and the violence far less lethal. But the attacks came more frequently, with several of them, uncoordinated, on most days.
In Jerusalem, police units, reinforced by the army, deployed on buses and trains and at major intersections. Private security guards stood at the entrances to restaurants and cafés. Bomb squads detonated half-empty shopping bags left in the streets. Darker-skinned Israelis boarding buses sometimes shouted out to the other passengers that they were Jewish; a man printed a T-shirt that read, “Calm down, I’m a Yemenite”—that is, a Jewish Israeli of Yemeni descent, who shouldn’t be confused with an Arab. One man was mistaken for a Palestinian and stabbed. Another was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers. An innocent Eritrean asylum seeker at the site of an attack was shot and then, as he lay bleeding to death, kicked repeatedly in the head.2
The government took harsher measures than the security establishment recommended. Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the source of much of the violence, suffered most from the crackdown. Nearly five hundred East Jerusalem Palestinians were arrested in five weeks beginning in mid-September, more than twice as many as had been arrested for security-related offenses between 2000 and 2008, a period that included the Second Intifada. One government minister proposed destroying all illegally built Palestinian houses in East Jerusalem, a measure that, because of restrictive zoning, would have threatened at least one-third of the city’s Palestinian homes.3
In the forty-eight years since Israel conquered the eastern half of what it calls its eternal, unified capital, Jerusalem had never been more divided. Checkpoints and police trucks with flashing lights marked the line between West and East. Large concrete blocks cut off the exits from Palestinian neighborhoods. New obstructions, long queues, and heavy traffic deterred residents from leaving. In one neighborhood, additional bus routes operated on either side of the divide, one for trips outside the area, the other for movement within it. Elsewhere, a barricade was erected to separate Palestinian homes from a nearby Jewish settlement. At some intersections, Palestinians were stopped at random, told to lift up their shirts, and then frisked against a wall. Police units with dogs made frequent raids into Palestinian neighborhoods. The houses of people alleged to have carried out attacks were demolished, and the interior minister called to deport Palestinian perpetrators from East Jerusalem and revoke some of the rights of their relatives. The government refused to return the bodies of about a dozen Palestinians killed in the violence, both as a punishment and for fear that funerals would lead to new clashes.4
As a result of years of efforts to quash Palestinian political organization in Jerusalem, there was no leadership Israel could engage with to help tackle the unrest. The Palestinian government in Ramallah was prevented from acting in Jerusalem, as was the PLO, whose institutions in the city Israel closed down years ago. Jerusalem’s representatives to the Palestinian parliament had been deported to the West Bank. Israel’s security agency monitored “political subversion,” including lawful opposition to Israel’s occupation, in effect criminalizing all Palestinian political activity.5
Young Palestinians in Jerusalem felt they had been abandoned. Many of them loathed the political leadership in Ramallah, which they believed stood by as Israel slowly transformed and took over the city’s east, cutting it off from the rest of the West Bank. The international community barely reacted as settlement growth in East Jerusalem soared. When Israel imposed new restrictions on the ability of Palestinians to access the al-Aqsa Mosque, its official custodian, the Jordanian government, failed to reverse them. The rest of the world called for calm and a return to the status quo, which in practice meant continued Israeli control of the site. As steadily increasing numbers of Jews visited the al-Aqsa compound, which they revere as the Temple Mount, Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem continued to be forbidden from entering the plaza of the Western Wall (regarded by Muslims as the Buraq Wall), which is located on the ruins of a Palestinian neighborhood forcibly evacuated and destroyed by Israel at the end of the 1967 war.
The leaders of other Arab states were largely silent, much as they were when over 2,250 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in the 2014 Gaza War. Israel’s tacit alliance with many of the Arab states was one of the reasons for the Palestinians’ sense of abandonment and despair. It was once thought that the need to achieve peace with the Arabs would be a strong incentive for Israel to grant the Palestinians statehood. Yet de facto peace had come to the Jewish state without its having to end the occupation, a significant victory for Israel in the history of its conflict with the Arabs. Even so, the 2015–2016 unrest—despite Arab indifference, Palestinian weakness, and overwhelming Israeli military and economic strength—reminded Israel that its greatest challenge, as well as its oldest, remained unmet.
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In 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky argued against those Zionists who wanted to avoid dealing with the Palestinians by first making peace with Arabs outside Palestine:
A plan that seems to attract many Zionists goes like this: if it is impossible to get an endorsement of Zionism by Palestine’s Arabs, then it must be obtained from the Arabs of Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and perhaps of Egypt. Even if this were possible, it … would not change the attitude of the Arabs in the Land of Israel towards us.… If it were possible (and I doubt this) to discuss Palestine with the Arabs of Baghdad and Mecca as if it were some kind of small, immaterial borderland, then Palestine would still remain for the Palestinians not a borderland, but their birthplace, the center and basis of their own national existence. Therefore it would be necessary to carry on colonization against the will of the Palestinian Arabs, which is the same condition that exists now.6
Jabotinsky’s bleak conclusion, which proved prescient during the next half century, was that acceptance of Zionism would not come from Palestinians or other Arabs voluntarily. It would come only after the Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims of the region had concluded through bitter experience that Zionism could not be overcome. Until then, Palestine’s Jewish community would remain isolated and insecure, rejected by its neighbors as a foreign entity imposed by colonial powers.
This was the condition that prevailed for the first three decades of Israel’s existence, though there were several notable exceptions to Arab rejection: in 1948, Egypt offered to grant Israel de facto recognition in exchange for Egypt’s annexation of territory in the Negev; in 1949, President Husni al-Za‘im of Syria proposed to take in three hundred thousand Palestinian refugees and sign a peace treaty with Israel if Syria was given control over half of the Sea of Galilee; shortly before his assassination in 1951, King Abdullah I of Jordan, too, sought a peace treaty with Israel; Syria advanced a formal agreement over the armistice line in 1953; in February 1973, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt volunteered to sign a peace treaty with Israel if it withdrew from the territory it conquered in the 1967 war; and, in 1974, Jordan suggested the same.7
But for the most part Israel learned to live alone, the only state between Morocco and Pakistan that is neither Arab nor Muslim. Initially outgunned, outnumbered, and convinced of the enduring animosity of its neighbors, Israel prepared itself for the battles that Jabotinsky predicted it would have to win, and win decisively, if it was eventually to gain Palestinian and Arab acceptance. Without that acceptance, fenced-off Israel would be less Promised Land than Middle Eastern ghetto, unable to provide its inhabitants the safe haven that is at the heart of the Zionist goal.
Though Israel never formulated an official national security doctrine, its strategy against its regional adversaries could be said to have rested on several pillars: bringing in diaspora Jews to consolidate a Jewish majority; securing the support of a great power (before Israel’s independence, the United Kingdom, followed by France and, after 1967, the United States); establishing a nuclear deterrent; building up conventional-weapons capabilities; forging regional alliances with non-Arab states; and undermining enemies through military aid to minority populations. Several of these strategic priorities were advanced in what came to be known as the periphery doctrine, put in place in the 1950s by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and the first heads of the Mossad, the foreign intelligence service.8 The strategy’s basic premise was that Israel faced a proximate “core” of implacable Arab hostility, which could be countered only through action at its edges.
According to Periphery: Israel’s Search for Middle East Allies, by the Mossad veteran Yossi Alpher, the strategy, though often ad hoc, consisted of three primary components: alliances with non-Arab states such as Iran, Turkey, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, and, briefly, Sudan; secret cooperation with Arab states at the outer edges of Arab-controlled territory, including Oman, Yemen, and Morocco; and support for religious and ethnic minorities who were opposed to their Muslim or Arab neighbors—Maronites in Lebanon, black Africans in south Sudan, and Kurds in Iraq (though not, of course, in the allied states of Iran and Turkey, where the Kurdish populations are much larger).9
The periphery doctrine had several aims, not all of them directed at Israel’s adversaries. Perhaps the most important was for Israel to market its usefulness to the great power it was courting even before 1967, the United States. Israel collected information on US adversaries, shared intelligence with US allies, and presented its alliances as a counter to Soviet influence in the region. Another aim was military. The very fact of Israel’s trilateral alliance in 1958 with Turkey and Iran, two of the region’s strongest powers, was meant to deter Arab attacks, in particular from Syria and Egypt after they briefly formed a union—the United Arab Republic—in the same year. Israel’s close ties with Ethiopia and with south Sudanese rebels provided another sort of deterrence, by playing on Egypt’s fears that those two countries could reduce the northward flow of Nile River water, on which the Egyptian people and economy depend. Military support of the Kurds meant that Iraq couldn’t safely devote all its armed forces to the wars with Israel in 1967 and 1973. During the 1962–1970 civil war in Yemen, in which Saudi Arabia and Egypt backed opposing sides, Israel undermined Egypt’s army by supplying the Zaidi royalists with airdrops of arms and materiel, indirectly financed by the Saudis. The effect was to sap Egypt’s army and, more important, to help keep a substantial part of it tied down in Yemen when Israel launched a surprise attack at the outset of the June 1967 war. In July 1976, Israel’s peripheral alliances facilitated the rescue of more than a hundred passengers on a hijacked plane held at Entebbe Airport in Uganda; the raid would have been impossible, Alpher writes, had the air force “not been able to overfly Ethiopia and Kenya and land for refueling in Nairobi, all fruits of Israel’s southern periphery effort.”10 Taken together, these policies and alliances forced Arab states to regard Israel as a regional power, not simply a colonial implant.
What Israel’s partners sought from these alliances included money (Morocco, for example, received financial compensation and investment in return for allowing the clandestine immigration of Jews to Israel); arms (weapons captured by Israel in its wars with the Arabs were later transferred to Maronites and Iran-supported Shiite clans in Lebanon, insurgents in southern Sudan, Kurds in northern Iraq, and Zaidi royalists in Yemen); training (the Ethiopian army, the Moroccan intelligence agency, and rebel groups in Iraqi Kurdistan and southern Sudan); and intelligence sharing, especially in the cases of Iran and Turkey. No less alluring to these allies was what they took to be Israel’s extraordinary power over Washington. Alpher says that Israeli operatives sometimes cultivated their allies’ exaggerated and anti-Semitic beliefs about Jewish influence: “We knew that the issue of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion plays a very important role for them. To a certain degree even, we played that card, so they’d think we … could manipulate US policy in their favor.”11
Not all Israelis were supportive of the periphery doctrine. Some security officials warned that these alliances, with the exceptions of those with Morocco and Oman, came at the expense of efforts to achieve a more strategically valuable Arab-Israeli peace: they had the effect of convincing Arab neighbors of Israel’s enduring antagonism, refusal to integrate in the region, and preference for achieving security without making the necessary concessions. It was argued that the doctrine even encouraged Israel to spurn outstretched Arab hands, such as those of Sadat in 1973.
Another criticism of the periphery strategy was that, on matters of greatest importance, it was simply ineffective. In the 1967 war, Israel’s allies didn’t lift a finger to help it. In the 1973 war, Morocco sent a division to bolster Syria and Iraq in the Golan, and assurances made by Iran gave Iraq the confidence to leave the homeland less defended and send forces to fight Israel. The Kurds failed to fulfill their promise to open a front against Iraq and were pressured by both Iran and the United States not to help Israel. After the war, Iran supported the Arab oil embargo. At this point it wasn’t even clear, Alpher writes, that Washington placed much value on these peripheral alliances.12
During the decade that followed the 1973 war, the periphery doctrine collapsed. In 1975, the shah of Iran signed the Algiers Agreement with Iraq, ending Iran’s support for the Iraqi Kurds and Israel’s access to them. By 1979, the shah had been deposed and replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini, turning what had been Israel’s most valuable regional ally into a principal adversary. Three years later, Israel invaded Lebanon and sought to bring to power a pro-Israel Maronite regime that would expel the Palestinians to Jordan, where they could establish a Palestinian state—thereby, it was hoped, allowing Israel to keep the West Bank. The endeavor was a total failure, serving as a warning to subsequent Israeli leaders of the dangers of meddling in Arab politics.13
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But what truly ended the periphery doctrine was the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, which invalidated the central premise of the strategy: that no peace could be reached with the Arab core. The agreement with Israel’s best-armed enemy marked the beginning of the end of the Israeli-Arab conflict, to be slowly replaced by the less menacing but more intractable Israeli-Palestinian one. It set the precedent—followed by the accord with Jordan—of an Arab-Israeli peace that ignored the demands of the Palestinians. As Yasir Arafat ruefully remarked, “Sadat has sold Jerusalem, Palestine, and the rights of the Palestinian people for a handful of Sinai sand.”14 Postponing the call for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza was the price Egypt and the United States chose to pay for restoring Egyptian sovereignty in Sinai.
In his useful book Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David, Lawrence Wright recounts a conversation between Sadat and his foreign minister, Mohamed Kamel, on the day before the signing ceremony, moments before Kamel resigned. Kamel warned Sadat against “a separate peace between Egypt and Israel which would be completely independent of what might happen in the West Bank and Gaza.” It would isolate Egypt from other Arab states, doom Palestinian national aspirations, and provide Israel with the cover to build settlements and continue its occupation. Every one of Kamel’s predictions was borne out in subsequent years. But Sadat did not believe that refusing to sign would protect the Palestinians or make likely a future Arab liberation of their land. Even if he turned down the chance for Egyptian-Israeli peace, he told Kamel, the other Arab states on their own would “never solve the problems [in Palestine].… Israel will end by engulfing the occupied Arab territories, with the Arabs not lifting a finger to stop them, contenting themselves with bluster and empty slogans, as they have done from the very beginning.”15
It wasn’t long before others started to follow Sadat’s lead. For a few years after the agreement, Egypt seemed to be diplomatically isolated in the region, but the Arab states soon reopened their embassies in Cairo. In 1982, they put forward a plan that offered implicit recognition to Israel, calling for peace among all states in the region in exchange for the dismantling of Israeli settlements and the establishment of a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 lines with East Jerusalem as its capital. The plan represented a dramatic advance in Arab willingness to live in peace with Israel, but was denounced by the Israeli government as something close to the opposite. Yitzhak Shamir, then foreign minister, called it “a renewed declaration of war”; the plan’s proposal for a Palestinian state, the Foreign Ministry’s official announcement concluded, “constitutes a danger to Israel’s existence.”16
During the following decade, Israel’s position in the region grew progressively stronger. The peace with Egypt had greatly reduced the threat of a simultaneous attack on two fronts. Arab attention had turned toward the Iran-Iraq War, further relieving pressure. After Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, the PLO was destroyed as a military force and relegated to distant Tunis. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed military backing from Israel’s fiercest adversaries and supplied the country with nearly a million Jewish immigrants over the next fifteen years—a significant aid in the demographic battle. The US invasion of Iraq in 1991 neutralized another primary threat. The First Intifada, which lasted from December 1987 until 1993, finally pushed Israel toward accommodation with the PLO.
The Madrid-Oslo peace process brought the country to heights of cooperation with the Arabs that were unimaginable in the days of the periphery doctrine. Jordan signed a peace agreement in 1994. Seven Arabic-speaking countries—Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Mauritania, Tunisia, Oman, and Qatar—had diplomatic representation in Israel. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said that Israel’s next goal should be to join the Arab League.17
Although the euphoria didn’t last, the collapse of Oslo, the outbreak of the Second Intifada, and the attendant cooling of relations with the Arabs didn’t have significant strategic implications for Israel or affect its military dominance. Comprehensive peace with the Arabs had become less important as their ability to wage a successful war had decreased and as Israel came to be able to depend on the even stronger backing of the United States after 9/11: the two countries now shared a sense of threat that brought them into tighter cooperation. The United States increased its already heavy presence in the Middle East, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq was enthusiastically supported by Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders. Iran and Syria worried that they could be next in line for US invasion. Libya volunteered to give up a clandestine nuclear weapons program. As the preeminent Middle East ally of a hegemon at the height of its power, Israel had little to fear from its adversaries.
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For the first five decades of its existence, Israel’s chief concern had been how to deter surrounding Arab states from attacking and how to prevail over them if deterrence failed. In 2016 Israel faced no threat of conventional warfare from any Arab state. Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen had all but disintegrated. Syria’s chemical weapons program, for many years among Israel’s top national security threats, had been neutralized. The leaders of Egypt and Jordan had intensified security cooperation with Israel. Against Salafist jihadis in Sinai, as well as Hamas in Gaza, Egypt and Israel were working together more concertedly than at any time since the peace treaty was signed. In many respects, they considered themselves to be closer allies to each other than each was to the United States. Jordan recognized that Israel was a guarantor of its security, the regional power most likely to intervene on its behalf if it faced a serious threat.
The Palestinian national movement was crushed. Since agreeing in 1993 to establish limited self-governance before achieving independence, the Palestinians had been stuck in an impossible situation: on the one hand, a quasi state, on the other, a quasi liberation movement, neither of which was a success on its own terms. The PLO had gradually been drained of all its power and turned into an empty body with no plan for achieving independence. Palestinian political division—with Hamas controlling Gaza and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority controlling the West Bank—greatly reduced the pressure on Israel to allow the establishment of a Palestinian state. The main pockets of opposition to the occupation—militants firing from Gaza, lone wolf attackers in Jerusalem, protesters against Israeli visits at the al-Aqsa compound, weekly demonstrations in villages in parts of the West Bank controlled by Israel, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in the diaspora, and hunger strikers in Israeli prisons—had one thing in common: all of them fell outside the Palestinian Authority’s control. Suppression of resistance—whether violent or peaceful—was one reason the PA was held in contempt by many Palestinians, though most were still too dependent on it to seek its collapse.
The Muslim Brotherhood had been subdued throughout the region: overthrown in a military coup in Egypt, besieged in Gaza, split into rival factions in Jordan, defeated in Tunisia’s 2014 elections, and outlawed in the Gulf. Sunni jihadists in Syria were not only refraining from attacking Israel but were receiving medical treatment in Israeli hospitals. They were a containable threat, not because they couldn’t one day turn their guns toward Israel, but because if they were in control of a state they could be deterred; and if they weren’t, they would remain, in the words of the former head of military intelligence Amos Yadlin, “third-order threats.” Hezbollah was preoccupied with a battle for its survival in Syria. Hamas was severely constrained by Israel and by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and in Gaza it was suffocated and seeking a long-term cease-fire.18 Israel had few good solutions to the 2015–2016 unrest, but it had also grown accustomed to putting up checkpoints and walls.
Saudi Arabia, Oman, the PA, and the UAE were allies in all but name. They sided with Israel against Hamas in the 2014 war in Gaza. Since then, Saudi Arabia publicly acknowledged some of its previously secret cooperation with Israel, even permitting a delegation to visit the country to meet officials and members of parliament. The UAE allowed Israel to open a diplomatic office in Abu Dhabi and was among several nations, including Pakistan, that joined the Israeli air force in a US-sponsored aerial combat training exercise. Even Qatar, which hosted several senior Hamas leaders, worked openly with Israel on the reconstruction of Gaza, and Sudan announced its willingness to consider normalizing relations. In December 2013, President Shimon Peres was invited to address twenty-nine Arab and Muslim foreign ministers. The Arab League unilaterally enhanced its standing 2002 offer of comprehensive peace, disproving Israeli claims that it was a take-it-or-leave-it proposal that couldn’t be adjusted or negotiated. In 2015 and 2016, diplomats searched for a way to help Israel and its Arab allies work together to reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace.19
In Syria, the bloodletting between Sunni jihadists and the Iran-Hezbollah-Assad alliance was hardly harmful to Israel. A victory for either was seen as worse for Israel than the prolongation of the war. As Menachem Begin is said to have remarked about the Iran-Iraq War, Israel wished great success to both sides. For the first time in Israel’s history, an old idea of a Druze buffer state in southern Syria had become imaginable, as had an Alawite state on Syria’s coast, and even, in the dreams of Israel’s right, the possibility of gaining international recognition of the country’s annexation of the Golan Heights.20 The Kurds were closer to independence than they had ever been. Israel’s hope was that the establishment of other minority states in the region would not only create new allies but also increase its own acceptance by Arabs and Muslims.
As the civil war spilled over Syria’s borders, Turkey’s problems steadily mounted, lessening its capacity to apply pressure on the Israeli government and pushing it toward reconciling with Israel in summer 2016. Even during the years of downgraded ties, trade between the two had increased. Goods that Turkey once transported on trucks through Syria to the rest of the Arab world arrived on ships in the port of Haifa, where they were loaded onto vehicles bound for Jordan and the Gulf. Despite a great deal of noise about Israel’s international isolation, its trade with Europe, too, was increasing. It remained one of the top sellers of arms in the world. And with the discovery of large natural gas reserves in the Mediterranean, Israel signed contracts to begin exports, including to Arab states. As the government would often mention when tensions with Europe increased over West Bank settlements, Israel had steadily strengthened ties with China and India (the latter even started giving its support at the UN); gained the backing of several states for joining the African Union as an observer; established a mission at NATO headquarters; and, in 2016, it was elected chair of a UN permanent committee for the first time.21
Israel’s principal adversary, Iran, agreed to significant restrictions on its nuclear program, and, for all the talk of it spreading its tentacles and attaining Middle Eastern dominance, was overstretched throughout the region. Unlike ISIS, Iran, as a Shiite power, had limited ability to penetrate other states in the region, most of them overwhelmingly Sunni. Israel continued to be the region’s sole nuclear power, retained second-strike capabilities, and was not a signatory to the July 2015 nuclear agreement, so had no commitment not to attack Iran. The former head of the Mossad, Tamir Pardo, stated that the Palestinian issue was a greater danger to Israel than Iran’s nuclear program, which, he said, didn’t pose an existential threat.22
The United States, meanwhile, was still devoted to maintaining Israel’s military superiority over all its neighbors. More than half of US spending on military aid went to Israel alone, with the amount set to increase in 2019.23 The United States protected Israel’s nuclear program from Arab countries calling for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East and stood behind Israel in the UN Security Council and other international bodies, blocking any move more threatening than a toothless condemnation of settlements. It was unwilling to contemplate sanctions against companies and institutions operating in the Occupied Territories. With a few exceptions, it even insisted on referring to Israeli “neighborhoods,” not “settlements,” in East Jerusalem. It refused to recognize a Palestinian state. Israel was unyielding toward the Obama administration because it knew it had so little to fear.
The greatest challenges Israel faced as it approached its seventieth anniversary weren’t regional but internal: the need to subsidize a large nonworking population, comprised largely of ultra-Orthodox men and Arab women; demographic growth among Palestinian citizens and ultra-Orthodox Jews; an excluded Palestinian minority; attacks against Israelis, particularly in Jerusalem; and indecision about where to draw the still nonexistent borders and what rights to grant Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
In its search for regional integration, Israel was remarkably successful, even without having paid the price of Israeli-Palestinian peace. This was not to say it wouldn’t fight future wars with Arab enemies such as Hamas and Hezbollah. But in those conflicts it now stood to have the backing of the preponderance of major Arab states.
Jabotinsky, it turns out, was wrong to doubt that the Palestinians could be ignored. But he was right that an accommodation with the Arabs outside Palestine would not end the resistance of Arabs within it, as the 2015–2016 unrest in the West Bank and Jerusalem showed. Absent peace with the Palestinians, relations with other Arabs could go only so far. It had always been the case that only the Palestinians themselves could confer the legitimacy and acceptance that Zionism craved. This was at the heart of Israel’s demand to be recognized as the national homeland of the Jewish people. That the demand was made of Palestinians, and not of Jordanians or Egyptians, reflects Israel’s recognition, at least implicit, that Palestinian claims are legitimate. Until they are relinquished, Zionism cannot achieve its purpose.
In the meantime, Israel continues to become more like its neighbors. It struggles with the separation of religion and state, excludes a substantial minority group from the country’s identity, has grown rich in natural resources, and is plagued by high-level corruption. It endures growing Western complaints over failure to uphold democratic practices. Its relationship with Washington is increasingly based on security. And, with its neighbors, it grumbles about American naiveté. Sixty-eight years after its founding, Israel has become much more a part of the region, for better and also for worse.
—October 2015