The current violence in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza should surprise no one. A house divided against itself, as someone once said, cannot stand.
The pre-eminent Israeli character trait is willful blindness. A large number of Israeli Jews have come to believe that yearslong intervals of relative peace are normal, and that Palestinians won’t be as infuriated and eventually stirred to violence by
their lack of self-determination as Israeli Jews were under the British Mandate, or, as with the Jews of the 1940s, by their occupiers’ routine acts of abuse and violence against them.
In the current round of violence, neither Israel nor the Palestinians have what could be considered a legitimate government. Bibi Netanyahu serves as the Israeli prime minister in a caretaker capacity only, since after four national elections over the past two years, he has not been able to form a government; he’s only in power because no one else in Israel has been able to form a government either. As
for the Palestinian Authority, President Mahmoud Abbas is now in the 16th year of his four-year term, having canceled every national election since 2005. Neither the state nor the non-sovereign state has a government able to command the support of a majority of its people.
It’s possible that the current upheaval will enable Netanyahu to win back support to form a government from those right-wing parties
that have thus far opposed him, in which case a harsher and more violent occupation awaits the Palestinians, which will eventually lead to a more cataclysmic round of retaliatory violence, and surely to more violence within Israel itself. If the Israeli right doesn’t coalesce, then any new Israeli government would have to include one or more of the Israeli Arab parties, which seems unlikely in the current climate, which may well be the permanent climate unless a two-state solution blossoms forth (which is itself virtually unimaginable unless the rest of the world wants to impose it by force, establishing a Green Line border and evicting Israeli settlers from the West Bank—yet another unimaginable scenario, which, however, would probably be the least of all evils). And the idea of one unified, democratic state seems even more unimaginable today than the two-state solution.
In the meantime, to hark back to that "house divided" line, Israeli Jews who think the status quo is sustainable sound increasingly like the white Southerners of 1859. It’s only sustainable by blood, both the Palestinians’ and their own.
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