Isaac Chotiner
The New Yorker / October 16, 2025
Despite the ceasefire in Gaza, prospects for long-term peace seem worse than ever.
Earlier this week, Hamas and Israel agreed to a ceasefire that included the release of the twenty living hostages who remained in Gaza and some two thousand Palestinians who are held in Israeli jails. The success of the exchange has raised hopes that the devastating war may really be coming to an end. President Donald Trump, who took credit for the deal after pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept it, now wants both sides to implement his twenty-point peace plan, which would require Hamas to disarm and Israel to leave Gaza. (Israeli officials told The New York Times that they are now considering punitive measures after Hamas said late on Wednesday that the remains of more than a dozen Israeli hostages—who are also supposed to be returned to Israel—were unable to be located. Separately, Israeli forces that still operate in Gaza have continued to kill Palestinians since the ceasefire began.)
I recently spoke by phone with Nathan Thrall, a former director of the International Crisis Group’s Arab-Israeli Conflict project. Thrall, who lives in Jerusalem, is also the author of the book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. I wanted to talk to Thrall about what the Palestinian national struggle might look like going forward. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed his fears about what lessons Israel may have taken from the war, why America is so unwilling to use its leverage to help resolve a conflict it has exacerbated, and whether Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, was a strategic as well as moral catastrophe.
In terms of the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict, what has changed most in terms of the way you thought about it on October 6, 2023, versus today ?
The largest change that has happened in the past two years is that the possibility of large-scale ethnic cleansing has become very real. Of course, we’ve already seen large-scale ethnic cleansing within Gaza. But what I have seen over the past two years is an Israeli society that is powerful, that faces very few obstacles, and that has the ability, and, in the right circumstances, the willingness, to expel huge numbers of Palestinians and, in the view of many Israelis, resolve the Palestinian issue once and for all.
I’m talking about all of the territory under Israel’s control, so, historic Palestine. Seventy-eight per cent of historic Palestine is within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. This doesn’t include the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which make up the remaining twenty-two per cent. But the West Bank is occupied by Israel, and, prior to October 7th, if you totalled the entirety of the territory actually under the control of Palestinians—meaning where the Palestinian Authority has control in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza—that together made up about ten per cent of historic Palestine. And, of course, Israel still made raids into those areas at will. So we are talking about Israel administering directly around ninety per cent of historic Palestine.
There’s a distinction between ethnic cleansing within the occupied territories—what we’ve seen both in the West Bank and on a much larger scale in Gaza over the past two years—and what might come next, which is the possible expulsion of large numbers of Palestinians to areas outside of historic Palestine. The Arab states’ fear of precisely this outcome, and the destabilizing effects it might have on their own regimes, was one of the reasons that they unified around a deeply problematic Trump plan for Gaza, even though that plan offers no assurance that Israel will fully withdraw from the territory or cease attacks on Palestinians within it.
So, in your mind, October 7th and the ensuing war changed the idea of what’s possible for Israelis, because despite some pushback from the international community, and lots of stories that indicate that Israel’s reputation is the lowest it’s ever been, the actual lesson is that they can do what they want ?
Yes. And what has really changed is that ethnic cleansing has become a part of the mainstream public discourse. It is something that I had previously thought was not unimaginable but very unlikely outside of some major regional war. Now it is discussed. People are polled on it. One poll found that eighty-two per cent of Israeli Jews favoured expelling Gazans. You can quibble with one poll or another, but you have clear Israeli Jewish majorities in favour of pushing Palestinians outside of Gaza. At some level, many Israelis feel that their basic predicament, the predicament of Zionism, is unresolved so long as there are millions of Palestinians living in the territory under their control.
When you say this has become part of mainstream discourse, what are you referring to ?
I’m talking about leading figures in the media, ministers in the government, and members of the Knesset discussing expulsion. I’m talking about Israelis from the center left putting forward plans for what they call voluntary “transfer” from Gaza. Ram Ben-Barak, a Knesset member from a centrist party, was the co-author of one of these plans. This is not a fringe notion anymore. And this comes from the fact that Israelis are unwilling to give Palestinians a state, or equal rights. What is left is either the continuation of apartheid or ethnic cleansing—and ethnic cleansing is appealing because it feels like a solution. Whereas apartheid feels like it may be sustainable, but is a nonsolution. It feels like the issue is not resolved.
O.K., but why hasn’t the international condemnation and Israel’s falling popularity registered with Israelis and convinced them that they should change course? Why do you think they have drawn the opposite lesson ?
There is a huge difference between a change in public opinion and policy changes that actually affect Israelis. And we have really not seen the latter. During a genocide, the Israeli arms industry was booming. They were making record profits. And we have at a bare minimum almost seventy thousand dead in Gaza. It took that to even get the first bills for banning settlement products introduced in some countries in Europe. But you still cannot get an E.U.-wide ban on settlement products. It’s a non-starter. So Israelis don’t feel any real consequences.
I agree with everyone on the left who believes this shift in global public opinion is important, but what it means is so often overstated. The U.S. is arming Israel, and the Europeans are Israel’s No. 1 trading partner. It’s embarrassing to see how many people are calling this deal a peace deal—not just Trump but Chancellor Friedrich Merz, of Germany. The Europeans will likely reverse even their modest steps. The Eurovision Song Contest was going to hold a vote, in November, on not having Israel compete next year, and that vote has now been postponed. You see headline after headline about how Europe is preparing to re-embrace Israel.
So, I think that is the reality. There’s a different conversation that’s happening on the left, which is about how this war represents the end of Israel, and it represents the end of Zionism and so forth. This is totally at odds with the reality on the ground. The reality on the ground is that we’re at peak Israeli expansion. Israel now controls about fifty-three per cent of Gaza, and there is no indication that it is going to leave. It’s probably going to continue bombing the remaining forty-seven per cent. It’s a Lebanon or West Bank-like reality with Israeli occupation and periodic bombings and raids that everyone is so eager to call peace.
Hamas’s attack on October 7th certainly was horrific for the Israelis who were killed or were captured, and then for a much greater number of Palestinians who were killed in the ensuing war. It seems to follow from what you are saying that, aside from the morality, even from a strategic perspective their attack was a disaster ?
Obviously, the differential in power between Israelis and Palestinians is enormous, and Palestinians do not have the ability to force the kinds of concessions that are required to achieve their freedom and independence. They have never had that ability. They have successfully used force and other tools to get some concessions from Israel. But, again, the power differential is such that they’re limited concessions. They launched an uprising in December, 1987, known as the first intifada, and they forced Israel to reconsider how it was going to manage the occupied territories, and to do limited withdrawals from city centers in Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinians at the time considered that an achievement, and the Oslo Accords were established. Now, this was very far from ending occupation or achieving Palestinian liberty, but those were concessions that Israel made as a result of Palestinian resistance.
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but it made the decision to do so in 2003, at the height of the second intifada. Again, without resistance, that decision to withdraw from Gaza would not have occurred. You can also point to gains that Palestinians have made as a result of the past two years. The recognition of a Palestinian state by European countries and Canada—which I personally believe is totally empty and was done mainly to avoid taking measures that have teeth and that would actually affect Israel—has nevertheless been perceived by Palestinians as a gain that would not have happened in the absence of October 7th. You have a huge shift in global public opinion toward Israel. You have the first breaking of the taboo on sanctioning Israel. You have a majority of Americans now saying they oppose arming Israel.
I have already noted the difference between public opinion and actual policy, and it takes many years for public opinion to translate into policy. But those are all things that happened as a result of October 7th. The Palestinian issue was falling precipitously in the global order of priorities for many years prior to October 7th. And that was reversed. It’s undeniably the case that there have been gains for the Palestinian national movement, and also of course gains for Hamas, in terms of its ability to get some two thousand Palestinians released from Israeli jails.
Well, sure, but far more than two thousand members of Hamas, let alone Palestinian civilians, were killed in the war.
I’m absolutely not making the claim that any of those perceived gains are worth the price of turning Gaza into rubble, of a genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people: at least two million forcibly displaced, and likely many more tens of thousands dead than the nearly seventy thousand we know about now. What I’m saying, not as a moral matter at all, purely as a factual matter, is that there are changes to the benefit of Palestinians that have occurred since October 7th that would not have occurred in the absence of October 7th. That is not a claim that those changes were worth the price paid in lives by either Israelis or Palestinians.
Right, because when I go back to your first answer, it seems like you are saying that Hamas’s action may end up precipitating, in some sense, the end of the Palestinian national movement in the medium term, if Israel decides to expel or encourages the expulsion of Palestinians. Without taking away Israel’s autonomy or responsibility if it does that, it is a remarkable thing for a movement that calls itself anti-colonial to have potentially precipitated.
I think the desire to be rid of the Palestinians was latent in Israeli society prior to October 7th. It has been amplified since then. It has gone mainstream. But let’s not forget that after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in June, 1967, some three hundred thousand Palestinians were expelled, and not allowed to return. And subsequent to that, the Israeli government put in various plans to try to get rid of the Palestinians in Gaza, which Israel at that time hoped to annex. That was under a government led by the founders of the state, and much lionized by liberal Zionists. So those desires have been there for a very long time. And I’m just saying that these past two years awakened those desires not only on the right but among large swaths of the Israeli public.
Now I think that if you were a member of a Palestinian resistance group and you were presented with the question that you just asked me, you might say, “Well, Israel is going to try to expel us one way or another. And it’s just a matter of whether I want to do it on their timing, on their terms, or I want to try and fight against it on my terms and with my timing.”
In September, 2023—just before October 7th—the United Nations published a report about a spike in Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities in the West Bank. During the past two years, we’ve seen the situation in the West Bank get even worse. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been pushed out of refugee camps. And dozens of Palestinian pastoral communities have been wiped off the map. Their inhabitants have been forced off their land by a combination of settlers and the Army, which are often indistinguishable from each other. So when we’re talking about ethnic cleansing, or an Israeli desire for ethnic cleansing, we shouldn’t talk about it purely in this future hypothetical way. It’s happening on a smaller scale every day.
I understand that Palestinians might want to do things on their own terms rather than feel like history is making decisions for them, or the occupying power is making decisions for them. But sometimes when I hear analysis of Hamas from people sympathetic to Palestinians, that analysis feels pretty close to pure nihilism. Essentially, no decision can be too terrible because the status quo is already terrible.
Yes, the first thing I said to you was that the change for me in the past two years was the realization that mass, large-scale ethnic cleansing was a real possibility. That’s an indication of things getting much, much, much worse. I had discounted that possibility in the absence of a regional war or some kind of really unforeseen cataclysm. Before October 7th, when I heard talk of Israel potentially doing mass ethnic cleansing, I thought, they can’t get away with that in the twenty-first century. I no longer think that. I wholeheartedly agree with you that things can absolutely get worse, and that every political actor needs to be held to account for the decisions that they make, for war crimes that they commit, and for the suffering that they bring on their people.
In terms of politics, given the rapturous response to the end of the war in Israel and the release of the hostages, why didn’t Netanyahu make a deal earlier? It seems pretty clear that he continued the war because he felt that his political survival depended on it, which is obviously grotesque. But did he miscalculate ?
It is absolutely the case that Netanyahu could have ended this war a long time ago. Hamas had offered to end the war since its very first days as long as there was a prisoner exchange and a full Israeli withdrawal. At any point since October 7th, Israel could have ended the war. Netanyahu could have ended the war by agreeing to those conditions. In the end, what he got was, from his perspective, better than that, because he ended the war and got the hostages out without fully withdrawing from Gaza. He got a much better deal than what he was told he would have to agree to.
But in terms of Hamas wanting to end the war—there was a story in the Times this past weekend that included intercepts of communication between Hamas leaders prior to October 7th. It appears that they wanted to cause chaos and mass fear, to destabilize the country, and start a regional war with their allies joining in. How does that fit with what you just described as their willingness to call for a ceasefire early on ?
The jury is out on how grand Hamas’s ambitions were prior to October 7th, and what they thought they really would accomplish. I think that the core objective of October 7th was a major prisoner exchange. That was the biggest objective. Of course, they hoped that Iran and Hezbollah would more meaningfully intervene. That was a hope. But was it an expectation? Let’s look at the outcomes of the previous wars between Hamas fighters in Gaza and Israel. I mean, it’s so lopsided. We have some fourteen hundred Palestinians killed in 2008 and 2009, versus thirteen Israelis. Hamas had every reason to expect that there would be a devastating Israeli response. I really don’t think that they could have imagined that they would actually destroy the state of Israel or anything of the kind.
I think that they expected there would be a limited war and a prisoner exchange. And I think that there really was an expectation that it would be the greatest accomplishment of any resistance group in the history of the Palestinian national movement, which would be that they would clear the prisons.
Why did Hamas not release the remaining hostages, even with no conditions, a while ago, just because it would’ve put so much pressure on Netanyahu to end the war ? What did keeping the hostages buy them? Netanyahu still fought the war with criminal brutality.
The global perception of Israel was dramatically changing. International sanctions were starting to be talked about, and in limited cases implemented, and pressure was ratcheting up on Israel. Great powers were recognizing the state of Palestine. Israel was becoming a pariah state. People around the world were decrying the perpetration of a genocide. I think that Hamas was looking at all of that and looking at the situation on the ground in Gaza. It wasn’t only looking at how much Palestinians in Gaza were suffering.
Everybody who looked at the current deal would tell them, rationally, if you ignore the moral issues, if you ignore the suffering, and you just look strategically at whether you give up your only asset with a total lack of clarity about the fulfilment of Israel’s part of the deal, they would say, “No, that would be suicidal to accept such a deal.” The fact that they agreed to it is a result of the tremendous pressure that was applied to them. They were facing a unanimous Arab and international front telling them that this is a good deal, applauding this deal, claiming that this deal would be an end to the war and a full withdrawal despite a clear reading of the text indicating that it isn’t. And you saw that they were tremendously torn about accepting it. Their first response sounded more like “fuck you” than “yes.” Trump chose to read it as a yes and continue with this steamroller of pressure, in addition to the pressure that they faced from Palestinians in Gaza who have been suffering tremendously for more than two years.
Hamas accepted a deal they didn’t want to take, and in the absence of tremendous pressure wouldn’t have taken it. On the Israeli side, there has been really a kind of false narrative put forward that the hostage protests played a big role in bringing about this deal. If they did play a big role, we would be asking ourselves why Netanyahu didn’t do it a year ago. This wasn’t about the hostage protests. That’s not why Netanyahu took the deal, and that’s not why he accepted it now rather than a year ago or earlier.
What are you hoping to see in terms of the Palestinian national movement going forward ?
The discrepancy in power is so great that the ability of a Palestinian national movement to force anything from Israel is extremely limited. Now, there are things that it does that many argue are self-defeating or damaging. The Palestinian Authority’s whole strategy for the past two decades has been to give Israel full security cooperation to arrest its own brothers and cousins and people who are perceived throughout the society as fighting for their own liberty, and to torture those people—not just the ones who are fighting with guns, even those who are protesting peacefully—and basically to do every single thing that Israel demands of them. And to demonstrate to the World Bank and to the I.M.F. that they have met the requisites for statehood. All of it is premised on this notion that if they cross every “t” and they dot every “i”, and they behave like good boys, that at the end of the day the international community will come forward, led by the United States, and say, ‘Now you deserve a state, we’re going to force it on Israel.’ And that theory is false. It’s been false from the very beginning. And it’s so clear to almost all Palestinians that it’s not going to work. A part of the popularity of Hamas and the support for resistance comes from this sense that the strategy of the Palestinian Authority has shown itself to be a total dead end. So I think that we need to also ask ourselves about our own role as Americans, and the West more broadly, and our own complicity.
We have failed to put any pressure on Israel, and have failed to use the leverage that we have to bring an end to this gross injustice. And the fact that we have gone out of our way, not only not to bring about justice but to help the side perpetuating the injustice, is one of the reasons that we keep seeing terrible rounds of bloodshed and is one of the reasons that we saw October 7th and now this re-embrace of Israel under the guise of a “peace plan” that the Times editorial board calls “promising.” Embracing Israel and reducing the pressure on Israel is a guaranteed recipe for more violence.
Watching Trump bully Netanyahu into doing something he was sceptical of doing without even—as far as we know—threatening anything like a weapons cutoff really does throw into relief that the U.S. has an immense amount of power if it wants to use it.
Yes. I documented all of the times that American pressure has resulted in Israeli concessions. It was proved when Dwight Eisenhower threatened economic sanctions to get Israel to withdraw from Sinai and Gaza in 1956. It was proved when Gerald Ford reassessed U.S. relations with Israel, and he refused to provide it with new arms deals until it agreed to a second withdrawal from Sinai. It was proved when Carter raised the possibility of terminating military assistance if Israel didn’t immediately withdraw from Lebanon in 1977, and again at Camp David when Carter threatened both Egypt and Israel, over and over again, with a downgrading in relations, if they didn’t agree to a deal. When the U.S. actually uses its leverage, it gets results. It has tremendous leverage over Israel.
U.S. officials talk about it as though they’re innocent bystanders and they’re just a kind of neutral party who want to come together and convene the two sides to make peace rather than acknowledge the reality, which is that America is a backer of the perpetrator of these atrocities. It’s complicit in this genocide. ♦
Isaac Chotiner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the principal contributor to Q. & A., a series of interviews with public figures in politics, media, books, business, technology, and more
