There is yet no clear political endgame emerging from the Israeli government or its western allies, still seemingly ready to support Israel’s free hand to punish the people of Gaza under the ‘right to defend itself’. However, putting aside the more extreme voices seeking to permanently depopulate the Strip or nuke it to oblivion, two largely consensual goals can be adduced from the Israeli stance so far: the first is that Hamas must be unequivocally defeated and its military and political-civilian presence uprooted from Gaza once and for all; and the second, that there should be no return to the status quo ante – that is, that any post-Hamas regime must be consistent with Israel’s security needs and the trauma suffered by the Israeli people on 7 October. The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has confirmed as much by asserting that Israel will retain “indefinite” security control over the Strip, thereby reversing the withdrawal that ostensibly ended in 2005. Hamas’s armed force is no match for Israel’s military might, and the immediate result in the field is almost certain to reflect this. But Hamas is not only deeply embedded in the soil of Gaza as a social and political movement; its presence stretches across the region with an extensive network of cadres, sympathisers and sponsors, including the broader Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliated movements globally. Regardless of what happens in the military confrontation, Hamas’s residual presence and its claim to represent the spirit of Palestinian resistance is likely to enhance its reputation and ability to renew itself among the masses of Palestinians maddened, frustrated and traumatised by the images of death rained down on Gaza’s civilians. Even those who do not support Hamas may be drawn to the notion of resistance. It is worth recalling that the Strip has been the incubator of the Palestinian national movement and its armed factions – from Fatah in the 1950s to Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas in the 1980s. All have been born from Gaza’s searing 75-year-old experience with brute Israeli force, from mowing down refugees seeking to return to their homes and fields in the “Gaza envelope” after 1948 through the massacres of unarmed protesters during the first Israeli occupation of 1956, Ariel Sharon’s brutal “pacification” campaign in 1970-71, the era of settler occupation up to 2005, the dozen Israeli operations against Gaza before the 2005 withdrawal, to the siege and repeated bloody assaults since. Those who think that the ongoing bloodbath will reverse this history may well need to think again. But rather than learning from history, the trend seems to be heading in an entirely different direction. In struggling to define a clear political endgame, President Joe Biden, among others, has called for a “horizon” for a two-state solution as its centrepiece. Operationally, this could entail forming an Arab-Palestinian Authority-international peacekeeping force to take over from Israeli forces after Hamas’s defeat, unifying the West Bank and Gaza Strip under PA control, reviving Israeli-Palestinian negotiations over a final status settlement, and promoting regional security and stability by pursuing normalisation with Riyadh along with a massive injection of Saudi or Gulf moneys to rebuild the devastated Strip. It is hard to disentangle the strands of delusion in any such scenario. A future Gaza regime based on a permanent or semi-permanent policing effort against Hamas or other resistant elements will be perceived by the Palestinians as a new and hostile occupation, acting in the service of Israel. Very few Arab or international forces are likely to be tempted by this prospect. Whether Riyadh can pursue normalisation and commit to rebuilding Gaza without a clear sense of how stability and freedom from Israeli occupation will be secured is another issue. And it is very hard to see Israel relinquishing its security role in Gaza to any outside party, thus immediately putting itself in forceful contention with any local governmental alternative to Hamas, whether Palestinian or otherwise. For its part, the PA will need more than sweet words about a political horizon to justify any return to Gaza under direct Israeli military control, or with a peacekeeping force bent on de-Hamasification. But perhaps the greatest obstacle to any revived two-state solution comes from Israel itself. Any serious moves towards two-state solution will necessarily require a significant change in the prevailing one-state reality in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The 7 October earthquake is most likely to drive the Israeli public even further to the right. The 750,000 settlers spread across East Jerusalem and the West Bank – now seeking arms to create “sterile zones” around Palestinian towns and villages in pursuit of asserting Israeli sovereignty and denying any Palestinian national rights – will form an even more insurmountable political and psychological barrier to altering the status quo to the Palestinians’ advantage. The Palestinian position in the wake of the war may make it more difficult for any authority or leader to adopt a more compromising position towards a political settlement, or any Israeli presence in Gaza. With its unqualified embrace and persistent arming of Israel’s onslaught, the Biden administration may find it hard to preach peacemaking. But over and above all of this is the enormous heft required to draw sustainable separation lines that meet both Israeli security demands and Palestinian requirements for minimal “sovereignty”. And those – primarily the US – who will have to deploy unprecedented political and diplomatic efforts to undo the one-state reality in an unprecedentedly charged local and regional climate will have to face the consequences of either failure or, perhaps even worse, ultimately owning what they are seeking to fix. A US election year with a viscerally pro-Israel incumbent at a seemingly growing electoral disadvantage does not appear to offer the most auspicious conditions for such an effort to succeed. The Gaza war threatens more than regional stability, with the increasing manifestations of antisemitism and the horrific images of civilian deaths generating deep political and personal fractures across the globe. But all those who think this could be the moment to finally resolve the 100-year conflict over Palestine should remember that it is not enough to draw a line down the winding roads and wadis of the West Bank. Hope tells us that there is always a way forward, but history tells us that that can be a cruel delusion. Ahmad Samih Khalidi is a Palestinian writer and former negotiator