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As the dust settles from Afghanistan's dramatic fall to the Taliban last week, the ramifications of this sudden and shocking development across the region are emerging. In the week since Kabul's surrender to the extremist group, the discourse on Israel-Palestine has already been profoundly influenced, despite the major differences between the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Some Palestinians are pointing to the U.S. withdrawal as a sign that the Israeli occupation will similarly fail, while Israel's Defense Minister, Benny Gantz, brought up Afghanistan last Saturday to legitimize Israel's blockade on Gaza. But it is the possibility for a two-state solution that will be most impacted by the events of last week, thanks to how the Israeli Right, the Palestinian Left, and Hamas will interpret the events of last week.
Afghanistan's collapse will fuel the Israeli hard Right's position of indefinitely maintaining the occupation; the argument will be that no matter how compliant, well-trained, well-equipped, and well-funded the Palestinian state might be, nothing could guarantee that it wouldn't inevitably collapse if Israel were to withdraw from the territories. Looking to Afghanistan, they will now argue that extremists will certainly take over. This perspective, wrong though it is, has been central to the Israeli Right's pushback against calls for ending Israel's occupation, and Afghanistan's case, no matter how different from Palestine, will be exploited to boost this spin.
On the Left, many Palestinians are now eyeing the failed Ghani government as proof of what would happen under a two-state solution: Israel would only allow the Palestinians to run a demilitarized Palestinian state, in other words, it would be subordinate, collaborationist, toothless against Israel and brutally repressive to its own people. This compliant government would have to maintain a degree of corruption and patronage to buy loyalties and command the obedience of its beneficiaries, because a collaborationist PA dependent on Israel will be inherently unpopular, and corruption is the only way it could make up for that.
In other words, looking to Afghanistan, the Left will now have proof for their argument that the Palestinian state would have to be run by a corrupt, unpopular government continuously concerned with maintaining Israel's approval and protection. And yet, it would be prone to collapsing, because it would never manage to fully satisfy both Israel and its own people, and consequently, its legitimacy would always be questioned. The ghost of the occupation would always lurk.
Traditionally, the U.S. has made up for these perceived shortfalls with promises to the Palestinians of economic empowerment, generous funding, development and state-building aid. You saw this most recently in Trump's "deal of the century," with its pledge of $50 billion in aid to the Palestinians. But Afghanistan's fate shows how a country lavished in hundreds of billions of dollars was left worse off than before.
Meanwhile, on the Right, the U.S. has traditionally offered guarantees to Israel vis-a-vis security if it ends the occupation. For example, retired General John Allen— ironically a former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan—designed a plan in 2013 by which Israel would withdraw from the Jordan Valley within 10 or 15 years and be replaced by joint patrols of American soldiers, U.S.-trained Palestinians and IDF troops, all coordinated with Jordan's military.
But who could trust the Americans to maintain a permanent presence and not pull out after last week's debacle in Afghanistan? In fact, Brig.-Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser has already made the argument that giving the Allen plan any serious thought would be "appalling" after what unfolded in Afghanistan.
If the two-state solution has been a victim of Afghanistan, it is surpassed by America's reputation. One can't overstate how deeply impacted the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be by the hit to the U.S.'s credibility in the region—and to any U.S.-sponsored peace process between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. And no matter how many assurances the U.S. gives to assuage either side's concerns, both sides will now agree that the Americans can no longer be trusted.
In other words, what seems likely is that the collapse of Afghanistan will be a cautionary tale for both camps, fueling both sides to fight for one state between the river and sea, either with equal rights for all or as an apartheid regime.
Perhaps most devastating is the lesson Hamas will draw from the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. For years, moderates in the movement argued that openness, reform, and softening the movement's positions would garner it international recognition and legitimacy. But already when President Trump negotiated a withdrawal agreement in 2020 with the Taliban that excluded the Afghan government, hardline Hamas leaders began to push back against arguments for political moderation, citing the fact that the U.S. eventually had no choice but to recognize the strong and uncompromising Taliban and abandon the moderate and compliant Afghan government.
Hamas' conclusion? Forget moderation. Only the strong survives—even thrives.
This argument received a formidable boost from President Biden's botched withdrawal and the subsequent humiliation of the Afghan government. Now, even a relatively moderate Hamas leader, Musa Abu Marzouq, attributed the Taliban's victory to standing up to occupation, "refusing compromise" and not being "fooled by slogans like democracy and elections."
The heartbreaking scenes of Afghan collaborators scrambling to make an escape for their lives while U.S. troops make their exit, juxtaposed with scenes of a victorious, triumphant, and jubilant Taliban, will be Hamas' go-to imagery for years to come. This is what happens to those who help their foreign occupier, and that's what happens to those who defy it, Hamas will say.
Nothing could be worse for the prospect of peace in the region.
Muhammad Shehada is a writer and civil society activist from the Gaza Strip and a student of development studies at Lund University, Sweden. He was the PR officer for the Gaza office of the Euro-Med Monitor for Human Rights.
The views in this article are the writer's own.
