With Israel unleashed, there can be no peace in the Middle East

In the 20th century, the United States sponsored two peace agreements between Israel and Arab states, and it was close to securing a third, decisive one with Syria. These agreements came after decades of successive wars: The 1956 Tripartite Aggression, the 1967 Naksa, the October 1973 war, Israel’s

Yet in recent years, the US has abandoned pushing Israel down that path of genuine peace. Instead, it has helped Israel fight its way into hegemony over the entire region. The result is that now that Washington needs to strike a peace deal in the region and maintain it, it cannot – because it cannot rein in the Israeli aggression it has long fanned.

Israel’s forefathers were haunted by the anxiety of pursuing a settler-colonial project within a geographic space largely populated by Arabs and dominated by Islam. As a result, they developed two paths to deal with this existential anxiety. The first was the doctrine of force and military brutality, which was best formulated by Zeev Jabotinsky, the founder of the Irgun terrorist organisation in Palestine, in a 1923 essay titled The Iron Wall. “Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach,” he wrote in Russian.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was also a proponent of the idea that Israel must change the Middle East by force, to secure itself.Several decades later, Benjamin Netanyahu, then leader of the Likud party, wrote in his 1993 book,, A Place Among the Nations, that Israel needs to change the Middle East in ways that suit its security. He argued that if Israel could not preserve overwhelming military superiority, it would not survive. As prime minister, he has stuck to this doctrine, which has sown death, destruction and instability across the region.

The second path emerged after the October 1973 war when Israel came close to an existential catastrophe. It gave rise to the “existence through peace” approach under which Israel aimed to integrate into the region politically and economically. The advocates of this path supported the “land for peace” solution in which Israel would return territories it occupied in 1967 in exchange for recognition and peace. This approach gave immediate results. In 1978, Israel concluded a peace deal with Egypt, which saw the return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egyptian borders. In 1994, Israel signed a peace agreement with Jordan, again returning some occupied land. The Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization were also part of this process.

The Israeli government under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was reportedly prepared to return the entire occupied Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for a peace agreement as well. But Rabin was assassinated at the end of 1995 by Zionist extremists. Since then, Israel has gradually returned to the “iron wall” approach, reaching its most terrorist form at present. This Israeli regression has not been met by a similar aggressive posture from the Arab states. On the contrary, the Arab world presented the Beirut Arab Peace Initiative in 2002, which again took Israel’s existential anxieties into account by offering peace in exchange for land, namely, the Golan Heights and the Palestinian territory occupied in 1967, to establish a Palestinian State. Yet this initiative found no serious consideration in Israel.