Hope Is Not a Strategy. Neither Is Despair: Thoughts and reflections at 30,000 feet, between Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi
Updated: 3 days ago
Simmy Ziv-el
In the space of a few weeks this fall, national elections will be held in Israel, the United States and the Palestinian Authority. Their timing is coincidental; their interdependence is not. America's midterms on November 3 will decide whether Democrats can win back the House and put some restraints on Donald Trump for the remainder of his term. Israel's elections, expected October 27 or a week earlier, will decide whether Prime Minister Netanyahu and his ultra-right coalition survive, or are replaced by a coalition of centrists and moderates from left and right. And in the Palestinian Authority, elections announced for November, the first in 20 years, assuming they actually take place, will decide whether Mahmoud Abbas, now 91, finally accedes to a generation with more legitimacy among younger Palestinians.
Criticism of Israel and embrace of the Palestinian cause are central to the platform of a leading Democratic candidate for governor in my home state of Wisconsin, and to the platforms of several House candidates who won their primaries. Ironically, it means the outcome of several key House races could hinge not on what one would traditionally expect, namely local issues, but on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself. Meanwhile, any Palestinian Authority election will inevitably be shaped by whether Israeli voters choose a centrist block over the messianic and anti-democratic wing of the current coalition.
I saw this up close during my visit to Israel in July. I was granted "honorary Canadian status" for a week and folded into a group branded Kaleidoscope, a small delegation organized by Toronto lawyer Stephen Pincus. Over three intense days we met with political leaders, grassroots organizers and policy advisers, roughly 100 days out from this season of elections.
We sat across from General (Res.) Yair Golan, who leads The Democratim, a new left of center party formed by the merger of Labor and Meretz and the only leader of a major party saying unequivocally that the Arab Parties must be part of the next governing coalition. His willingness to speak the truth looking you in the eye and not over your shoulder at the latest polls on this issue, is inspiring and especially coming from a person with such impeccable military credentials. We also sat across from Orit Farkash HaCohen, a Knesset member and former cabinet minister under Yair Lapid who has joined a party led by General (Res.) Gadi Eisenkot who buried a son and two nephews in the Gaza war and now holds a slim lead over Netanyahu in the polls. We had the opportunity to dialogue with Aluf Benn, editor of Haaretz, and Lior Schleien, an icon of Israeli television for the past seventeen years and often called “the Jon Stewart of Israel.” We dialogued candidly with Palestinian leaders, some of whom are citizens of Israel and others of the West Bank and policy hands and field organizers whose names don’t make it into the media, but who nevertheless will impact the outcomes. I also met separately with families who lost people on October 7 and with reservists who served more than 100 days in Gaza.
It is not an exaggeration to say that no one in the region is the same person they were on October 6, 2023. What struck me was not any single position the Israelis held. Many in general and young people in particular, have moved rightward in their language since the war began. What struck me was how many, in the same conversation, were describing the unglamorous work of trying to unseat the government whose rhetoric they seemed ostensibly to have absorbed. A Palestinian offered a version of the same paradox from the other side: Jews in North America, he said, are more moderate than Jews in Israel, while Palestinians in North America are more insistent on confrontation than most Palestinians who actually live in the West Bank. Stereotypes do not survive contact with the people they claim to describe.
None of this fits the story that reaches most of us. Scroll through cable news or social media and the region cleaves into two simplified blocs: Israelis are Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and Smotrich; Palestinians are Hamas and Hezbollah. It is a tidy framework, and it is wrong. It forecloses the real possibility on the ballot in Israel this fall, that a coalition of Israeli centrists and moderates could replace the current government, and that a Palestinian Authority election could produce leadership young Palestinians actually see as their legitimate representatives.
There is a version of this essay that ends in despair, and for a while I thought I was writing it. “Hope is not a strategy” is a line I've heard credited to half a dozen people, and after December 29, 2022, when Netanyahu's ultra-right-wing government was sworn in, and what happened on October 7, 2023, it has felt less like a warning than a diagnosis, especially to young Israelis and Palestinians with no memory of anything saner.
But I met people in Jerusalem who have actualized beyond either premise. Young Jewish and Palestinian Israelis who have birthed a new political party. NGO staff untangling the bureaucratic knots that make daily life unlivable for ordinary Palestinians. Activists are fighting, meeting by meeting, and demonstration by demonstration, to stop the West Bank from being permanently split into a northern and southern half by a planned settlement project known as E1. Since these are the people actually doing the work, I don't have standing to indulge despair on their behalf.
I was reminded of a podcast about the recent World Cup and what happened in American towns that adopted visiting national teams like Lawrence, Kansas and the Algerian team. Fans who arrived in the USA presuming that “every American would be like Donald Trump” left saying they'd found warmth, generosity and acceptance far beyond anything they expected. While the stakes are exponentially higher and the wounds still raw, it is the same error that reduces Israelis and Palestinians into caricatures of their most extreme members.
In an era of what is often called “the attention economy” cable news and social media benefit those driving fear and hopelessness. But this fall, hundreds of millions of people will vote in three elections that will decide whether the extremists who dominate our feeds keep dominating our lives. Hope may not be a strategy. But despair is not one either. It is our responsibility to amplify the voices and actions of those who believe that democracy, decency, national pride and even religious beliefs can coexist in a tiny geographic area so rich in human potential, waiting to be harnessed for a better future for all.
