Shlomo Avineri, an Israeli political scientist, historian and former government official whose pessimism about resolving the conflict with Palestinians did not stop him from advocating measures to ease it, died on Nov. 30 in Jerusalem. He was 90.

In his writings, Mr. Avineri was consistently skeptical about Israel’s prospects for achieving peace with its enemies. He was convinced of Palestinian and Arab hatred for Israel and Zionism, whose 19th-century roots he chronicled in 1981 in his book, The Making of Modern Zionism. The Hamas attack in Israel on Oct. 7 buttressed this view. Immediately afterward, speaking to The New York Times, he noted what he said was Hamas’s view that in Israel “every civilian is a soldier.”

Mr. Avineri had a distinguished academic career behind him when he entered Israel’s foreign ministry in 1975 as director general in the government of Yitzhak Rabin. “What I have in mind specifically,” he wrote at that time, “is a discussion with the Palestinians now under Israeli rule concerning the possibility of establishing a Palestinian Arab state on the West Bank and in Gaza.”