In Search of a Game Changer

Moshe Behar in Contending Modernities:

“Game changer” is a concept that involves individuals, tactics, strategies, and more. As such, it saturates the mind of every losing player, team, and/or party; a player who is winning a game, let alone decisively, is rarely interested in a game changer. In the hazardous Israel/Palestine playing-field, the issue may well be more complex or counterintuitive. That is so not because the losing collectivity is somehow uninterested in a game changer (Palestinians are interested); it is because the leadership of the winning Israeli collectivity has convinced itself, perhaps paranoidly, that the “game” is not yet over and that it still needs to settle on what the endgame is. I wish to suggest here that annexation-cum-apartheid may not be this endgame.

A significant development—possibly even a game changer—has been three years in the making, and is led by a group of American-Israeli policy makers linked to Israel’s “Block of the Faithful” settler movement. The development reached an important point in Washington, D.C. in January 2020 when Donald Trump’s administration introduced a 181 page plan entitled “Peace to Prosperity”—colloquially referred to as “the Trump Peace Deal” or “the deal of the century.”

More here.