A Different Path Israel Could Have Taken — and Maybe Still Can

Before Oct. 7, Israel appeared to many to be sliding into a “one-state reality,” where it had functional control over Gaza and the West Bank, but the Palestinians who lived there were denied full rights. In 2021, a group of hundreds of former senior defense and diplomatic officials in Israel published a report warning that this was a catastrophe — for Israel’s security, its democratic values, its international standing, and its very soul. And they argued that there was another way, that even without a Palestinian “partner for peace,” there was a huge amount Israel could do on its own to create the conditions for a two-state solution to emerge in the future. Nimrod Novik is a fellow at the Israel Policy Forum and a member of the executive committee of Commanders for Israel’s Security, the group behind the report. He was a senior policy adviser to Shimon Peres when he was prime minister, and was involved in all forms of negotiations with Palestinians and the Arab world. I wanted to talk to Novik about the plan proposed in the Commanders for Israel’s Security report, and how they might have changed in light of Oct. 7 and the war. We also talk through what the “day after” might look li…