“Many years ago, my friends and I were lonely voices. It was a time of hubris, of outright Israeli denial that peace was our best strategic alternative. Since 1967 Israel had occupied Palestinian territory, telling ourselves that this was the only way to keep our nation secure. But before the first Intifada began in 1987, waking many Israelis up to the injustices of occupation, we were among the very few people in Israeli politics to insist that no enduring resolution to the conflict in our region could be imposed by force alone, and to call instead for a negotiated two-state solution. It wasn’t easy: we were called traitors, well poisoners, Trojan horses and more.
But within a few short years, what we had called for—what we had been told was impossible—became Israeli policy. What’s more, it had been agreed to by the Palestinians themselves.
On a sunny September day in Washington, Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, and Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, shook hands in the White House Rose Garden. The two men agreed to a process of mutual recognition, which the world understood would one day lead to two separate states, Israel and Palestine, living in peace side-by-side.
So what an irony that today I find myself charged with the difficult task of telling Israel and the world something else that it doesn’t want to hear: that the two-state solution is dead. A quarter of a century on from the Oslo Accords, the two-state solution lies in tatters. There is no peace process. There is very little hope left. And yet somehow, we must still find a way for Israelis and Palestinians to live side-by-side, with equal rights within a single international border. It is time for a progressive one-state solution. I accept that this view is as unpopular among Israelis today as the two-state solution was long ago. But, as I shall explain, it is our only hope.
How the two-state solution died
Two states may once have been wildly controversial, but it has long since become a platitude. We mouth the mantra without stopping to ask whether it had already passed its expiration date. Where once the formula was a practical possibility, and the best prospect for peace that we had, today it is a hollow phrase. It provides a refuge for dishonest people, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who refuse to countenance making the real sacrifices it would inevitably require.
It is often said it takes two to tango, but two states just won’t happen unless one tangos first: Israel. For this is not a conflict between equals. In the dishonest blame game we eternally play, all pious Israeli patriots like to think in terms of a 50-50 share of responsibility with the Palestinians. But if—a big if—this were ever true, it is certainly not true today.
Try to forget the past. Whatever the historic mistakes of the Palestinian side, they cannot justify Israel’s wrongdoing in the here and now. For the conflict is today—fundamentally—one between the privileged and the deprived. Israel now enjoys 100 per cent of the privileges between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Freedoms, resources, power, political rights and industrial clout: all of these things are monopolised by us.
The pre-condition to moving things forward is not negotiation, in the old sense of one side swapping some cards for the other’s, but rather one side—the Israelis—becoming ready to relinquish some of the deck of cards on which it has an exclusive grip. Only then can we start thinking about moving from a monopolised space to a shared one, as we know in our hearts we must one day do if we are to enjoy the real security that can only come through a just and durable peace.
But we seem to have less readiness the for requisite compromises than ever before, as has been made abjectly clear by Netanyahu’s new quasi-constitutional Nation State of the Jewish People law, which was passed in July. It elevates long-standing day-to-day discrimination into a formal ethnic hierarchy, by asserting that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” This shows contempt not only for the people of the occupied territories, but also for the Israeli Arabs who we used to like to claim as co-equal citizens.
Netanyahu still pays lip service to the two-state solution—mouthing the phrase doesn’t cost him a thing. But he wilfully refuses to develop any strategy that could make it happen, so when he says the words it is nothing but a cynical evasion. Netanyahu is, in practice, an arch conservative who simply wants to defend Israel’s position of dominance for now, and put off the whole question of the conflict so that it becomes someone else’s problem to deal with down the road. In the meantime, he deepens our country’s racialised character.
And yet, with all of this going on, because we hear that “two state” phrase all the time, too many of us Israelis kid ourselves that a two-state solution still is—and always will be—an option. That matters for our standing in the eyes of the world, and it matters, too, because it makes us feel that at some point, somehow, in some entirely unspecified manner, a way will be found to draw a line under the conflict. We can entertain that soothing thought without doing anything about it. What we can’t do, however, is hope to make it a reality.
For the two-state solution is, quite simply, no longer viable. Why not? Because the long-dominant Israeli right, with the active if tacit support of successive Labor leaders, has changed the facts on the ground.
For one thing, numbers matter. Israel was able to push through a withdrawal—of sorts—from Gaza in 2005 and deal with the practical consequences of bringing the settlers there back into Israel proper because they numbered in the thousands. Back in the 1990s, when West Bank settlers were still counted in tens, rather than hundreds of thousands, it might still, had it mustered the political will, have been able to withdraw from there too, and so cleared the way for a viable a Palestinian state. But no longer. Those settlers, who now number around 400,000, can vote for the Knesset—entirely unlike the two million or so Palestinian adults living under occupation in the West Bank, the overwhelming majority of Arabs in East Jerusalem or anyone living in Gaza. And the settlers form an increasingly powerful bloc, even before you consider their family and friends within Israel proper who may also vote in their interest.
Furthermore, of course, Gaza has taken its own ugly turn during the last decade of separate Hamas rule, sundering the putative Palestinian state. Even more fundamentally, the mood for compromise within Israel, as across so much of the planet, has passed. Back in the 1990s, walls seemed to be coming down worldwide: the Soviet Empire spluttered out, and the old iron curtain countries were being integrated into the west; apartheid was negotiated away; peace was being brokered between deadly enemies in segregated Northern Ireland. Amid the bloodshed of the first Intifada, Israelis were forced every day to confront the reality that they, too, were living amid another conflict; and the way the world was going suggested that the way out of that was compromise. But now—post-9/11, post-Iraq, post-7/7, with Europe struggling to keep its borders down, and nationalism everywhere on the rise—we live in a different age; the walls are back.
Nowhere is that more true than Israel, which started building its great wall before Donald Trump ever had the idea, and which has developed considerable skill in using aggressive security to keep the deep conflict over its land from intruding on the day-to-day life of its citizens. It is less “two states,” more two parallel universes.
Meaningful words have long been palpably absent from the peace enterprise, but—more than that—the whole melody is adversarial in tone. If talks ever were to result in a peace agreement, it would be a peace tinged with suspicion and hostility. Many Palestinians are convinced that every Israeli is either a West Bank settler or a soldier, because the shared spaces between the two peoples have now shrivelled to the point where these are the only Israelis they will ever encounter. And many Israelis are certain that “they,” all Palestinians, hate Israel. The sourness of Netanyahu and his cabinet ministers, as well as the suspiciousness of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah colleagues, a tired bunch often more interested in entrenching their own position internally than in really moving things on, are an obstacle to concrete change.
In sum, everything—the political geography of the settlements, the deepening split between Gaza and the West Bank, the nationalist turn of politics—is now pushing against a two-state solution, and the compromises from Israel that would require. It is no longer on the table. We won’t move forward until we face the truth about that.
Moving beyond borders
Israel can try to forget the occupation, and in day-to-day life it sometimes succeeds. But running away from this argument is morally irresponsible. It debases a real democracy into the sham of an “ethnic democracy.” In an uncertain world, where the politics of a declining America are increasingly mercurial, continuing with an occupation that most of the world condemns leaves you lonely, and so carries strategic risk. Looking forward 100 years in this part of the world is not easy: try to do so, and some things are frightening, and many things are always unclear, but they become much more so without a plan for a just peace.
So if two states are no longer an option, we need to start talking about how we can allow Israelis and Palestinians to co-exist in a single state. Today we already have one version of the one-state solution, the Greater Israel dream of the right, which involves a single state which is—as now—beset by discrimination. But my own proposal comes from a very different place—the idea that we can create a single state that treats all its citizens equally.
Think of our political structure as a building with three levels. The first storey—the foundation—of the new building contains the principles upon which the entire future state will be built. Every person between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is entitled to the same equal rights—personal, political, economic and social. They include the right to protection and security, equal treatment, freedom of movement, property, judicial recourse and the right to vote for, and be elected to, public office. Regardless of your citizenship, Israeli or Palestinian, you will be bound by the same constitutional framework and principles and entitled to the same fundamental liberties, without discrimination based on ethnicity, faith or national affiliation.
The middle level of our building will be divided between the tenants: an agreed-upon, logical division and separation between the two self-identifying collective groups in the form of two self-governing polities. There will be different ways of splitting things up—with, say, more or less devolution to individual regions or cities, and more or less regard paid to where Arabs and Jews actually live, as opposed to the historic green line. But all of this is second order, and should be soluble, once the principle of self-government built atop of shared and universal rights of citizenship is agreed.
Each self-governing community (or “nation”) will express the respective aspirations and values of the Israelis and the Palestinians, in its own allotted space and as it sees fit in accordance with its own traditions. Like individual American states or the Scottish nation within the UK, each community will be free to pursue its own domestic social policy within this middle level. But more than that, again mindful of its own traditions, each of our “nations” will have some room to conduct its own relations with the rest of the world.
But we cannot stop building there. Because the hostilities and violent frictions of the past could return at any time, constant co-ordination between the tenants is essential. And so a third storey will have to be constructed for that purpose—a superstructure, joining both our polities in a federation. The federation of Israel and Palestine will direct its attention both inward and outward. Using the powers accorded to it by the twin communities of Israel and Palestine, the government of the central federation will also have the muscle to be the back-stop enforcer of the constitutional system in the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
After all, there will never be quiet and reconciliation here unless a language of common values can be created. A murderer in one community must be considered a murderer in the other. We have had enough of the intolerable situation in which the same act is considered a heinous crime on one side and a supreme expression of patriotism on the other.
While each state will collect taxes from its own citizens and maintain its own institutions, their infrastructure will be co-ordinated. The federal administration will ensure that water sources from the mountains are shared with the lowlands, that rivers are kept clean for their entire length. If water and other resources are controlled from the top for the good of all, then many of the questions about which community gets to control every last slope and scrap of land will become less fraught. The federation will see to it, too, that road signs should use the languages of all the region’s drivers; the same in both Netanya and Nablus, with the aim being—as with an interstate American highway—to connect people, rather than keeping them apart.
It is also on the federal level that the co-ordination of asylum and immigration policy will have to be settled, including the rights of return for both Jews and Palestinians. Vis-à-vis the outside world, beyond the historical region between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, a successful Israeli-Palestinian federation could in time evolve into a framework that other political entities could join in a sort of regional union, although only for those polities that could accept the obligations deriving from the democratic and constitutional principles of the building’s foundation floor.
The proposed building attempts to solve most of the issues on the agenda, but not all. Those who hanker after an integrated single state will find only partial satisfaction in the federal structure. Advocates of a two-state solution will find some of their wishes addressed in the middle level, while those dedicated to individual rights will get partial satisfaction as reflected in the binding constitutional infrastructure.
That’s all fine, the cynics will say, but what about security? I would respond to the cynics with cynicism: “Do you agree with everything else? When we accomplish everything else, it will be a lot easier to deal with security issues.” And to those delving more deeply, I would pose a question of my own. Did anyone ever think open borders between Germany and France were possible? Peace between Spain and the Netherlands, or reconciliation between Russia and Germany? When the environment changes, so do the threats, and so does one’s perspective on security.
To everyone else I will say this. Have faith that we are strong; that we can afford to abandon a strategy of fear, and move to a perspective of trust. If I’m wrong, we won’t be any worse off than before. And if I’m right, then the current obsession with security will change so much as to be unrecognisable. As indeed it recently changed in response to Iraq’s disintegration, Syria’s fragmentation and Egypt’s decline, so it will change dramatically again in the face of a Palestinian-Israeli partnership that will be completely different from anything we have ever known.
The road to one state
How will we get there? In theory, the argument should not be such a hard sell. It would start from the assumption that our fates, Israeli and Palestinian, are intertwined and that it is ultimately useless to ignore reality. Cancers left untreated on one side send secondary growths to the other, and there isn’t a wall in the world that can stop them.
But given current Israeli politics, this is a formidably challenging sell. It is easier to foresee that the argument for a just single state will ultimately have to prevail, than to envisage how it will do so. The process of getting there could turn out to be painful. One possibility is that we shall slide slowly into a new conversation, as the situation gradually deteriorates towards a point where it is so stark that one state is the only viable way forward, that can no longer duck debate about what sort of state that will be.
Another disturbing possibility is that we will be jolted out of our current complacency by a shock or a trauma. All the big moments in Israeli history have responded to trauma—the 1973 war led to a strategic peace with Egypt, while the first Intifada gave birth to the Oslo Accords. Or maybe, instead, someone—perhaps from the right—will pass a Knesset resolution that clarifies realities, by calling for the official annexation of the West Bank, just as we did with Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
But how much better it would be if we could get there without trauma, by fixing our politics instead. In particular, we need to overcome the partition wall between Jews and Arabs—not only physically, but also figuratively in terms of politics. We cannot and should not leave the Arab society in Israel as an alien and perpetual opposition bloc in the Knesset, but must work together across ethnic lines. We need to stand shoulder to shoulder, within Israel proper, and then in the Palestinian territories too. The outmoded and ossified parties, in Palestine as well as Israel, need to be opened up to challenge, by those who are unafraid to see the country they are living in as it really is. Those of us with eyes to see it—Jews and Palestinians, working together—must be ready to confront those, also both Jews and Palestinians, who cannot. None of us can any longer afford shelter behind polite fictions about a peace process that processes nothing, indeed a process that doesn’t exist.
An Israel for all
The 1948 Declaration of Independence established Israel as a “Jewish state.” This has always been the biggest obstacle to the idea of a single state—how can it be both Jewish and, if non-Jewish votes are to enjoy their full weight, also democratic? In the early years of the State, the concept of “Jewish” was more civil and cultural. Today it has a different interpretation that is more religious and nationalistic. As a result, Israel has de facto two sources of authority: the democratic and the theocratic, colliding and contradicting each other constantly. Furthermore, one resident does not equate to one vote, since it has been decided in advance that the votes of one ethnicity are bound to prevail. The federative formula I am proposing, of two self-governing communities working within one federation, can solve that seemingly intractable problem.
Politically, it will undoubtedly require some of the Israeli political continents to move. The left, or parts of it, has to depart from the Zionist paradigm, and move into a more inclusive paradigm. Israel must belong to all of its residents, including Arabs, not to the Jews alone. Then we can forge the new and creative alliances that will be required to really move things. On the Israeli Arab side, those who believe in integration within general Israeli society must prevail over the separatists, in order to create a real bridge between the two communities.
Some on the right, like President Reuven Rivlin are dedicated territorialists, but also sincere democrats. They are dedicated to comprehensive human rights, which means they are potential partners in building a single state. Wiser Palestinians—intellectuals and activists alike—are also increasingly pressing more for the right to vote, rather than for an independent state purely for the sake of having one.
A combination of these three—a new Israeli left, the democratic Israeli right, plus new and courageous Palestinian thinkers and leaders—might sound unlikely. But in time it could be formed into a coalition which just might begin to crack the ice.
It will certainly not happen overnight. We might have to cross troubled waters. And we might well have to park for a while longer in that dead-end street called “Two States.” But the ideal of inclusive and equal citizenship for everybody who lives across this small and war-weary corner of the Earth is a noble and inspiring vision. It also offers a way ahead, as it becomes more and more obvious that the old routes into the future are running out of road. If we can find the guile and the courage to take it, we can transform our iconic conflict into an iconic symbol of reconciliation that will inspire other warring nations and states to find their own way out of the quagmire of hatred and animosity.
Rajah Shehada
Rajah Shehada, a “Palestimian” voice on the one-state solution
“There is little doubt that ultimately Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews will have to find a way to live together in the same land, undivided by borders. Whether this would be an undivided single state, or a federation of some sort, will have to be worked out through an arrangement that is viable and agreeable to both sides. Until then the ‘one- state solution’ remains more of a slogan than a programme, something to be further developed before this future attractive prospect can ever become a reality.”
“Even though there is rough parity between the numbers of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs living in historic Palestine, as matters now stand it is the Israeli state that dominates the entire land—exploiting it as its own, and privileging the Israeli Jewish citizens. When one farmer in the South Hebron hills, where the settlers are doing all they can to drive out local Palestinians [such as him], was asked whether the settlers can stay, he responded that as far as he was concerned they could, but he added a rider. ‘There is plenty of room, but only on condition that they act like human beings.’
As long as Israel reigns supreme, and can violate Palestinians’ rights to the land and discriminate against them with impunity—whether they be disenfranchised people living under occupation, or Palestinians living as citizens within Israel itself—there is little likelihood that the present reality will change. Without outside pressure allied with fresh thinking, we are unlikely to get any closer towards finding an equitable way to share the land.”
Donald Macintyre
Donald Macintyre, Bulldozing a Vision
“Sitting with Nasser Nawaja and his father Mohammed on the floor of his flimsy wood-framed shack at Susiya, in the rocky, windswept South Hebron hills, you sense how the history of the last 70 years is bound up in their journey here—short though it was by the standards of many Palestinian families. In 1948, Mohammed, then aged two, was carried on his father’s shoulders as they walked four miles north to flee advancing Israeli forces, like over 700,000 other refugees who lost their homes in what is now Israel. Susiya was just across what would become the 1949 armistice line, in the West Bank, which after the first great round of fighting stopped was controlled by Jordan.
But after the 1967 Six Day War, the West Bank—along with Gaza and East Jersualem—was occupied by Israel, paving the way for the settlers. And so, in 1986, it was the toddler Nasser’s turn to be carried on Mohammed’s shoulders from his birthplace. Three years after the establishment of a nearby Jewish settlement, the Palestinian residents were ordered by the Israeli military to leave to make way for an Israeli archaeological park around the ancient ruins of a synagogue; no matter that a mosque had also existed there since the 10th century. The families constructed a new, makeshift Susiya, where today its 240 residents remain squeezed precariously, between two Israeli-imposed “security zones,” which exclude them from much of their previous land. To Susiya’s north is that archaeological park; to its south are the red-roofed settlement houses, homes to 950 Jewish residents, with their own synagogue, community centre and swimming pool. It could expand again without fuss, if the only Palestinian residents were once again uprooted.
Which is just what the Israeli authorities intend. Israel’s military has court authority to demolish seven of the ramshackle dwellings, the first step in a process to move the Palestinians from their land to the impoverished West Bank city of Yatta. But the Nawajas have been fellahin, peasant farmers, in the area for generations—the very way of life, along with their land, that they are now under military orders to abandon. Nasser is an activist; but also a farmer to his fingertips. When we last met back in the late spring, he broke off to worry aloud about the heavy rain beating unseasonably on the nylon roof above us—it might be “good for the vegetables,” but “disastrous” for his wheat and olives. And he is determined to resist being forced, as if it were a once in a generation event, to carry his own youngest son on his shoulders from his birthplace. “I won’t do it,” he says.
Whether he will succeed in resisting is another matter. Susiya is in “Area C”—the mainly rural 60 per cent of Occupied Palestinian Territory under direct Israeli military control. A significant minority of the Palestinians, estimated at 300,000, live here together with the vast majority—around 400,000—of all the Israeli settlers. Area C is easily the biggest territorial chunk of an independent future Palestine, so without it there is not going to be the two-state peace deal that the international community has long espoused.
But ultra-nationalist members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition want to see much or all of it unilaterally annexed by Israel. If Susiya is demolished, it will be yet another case of the creeping de facto annexation which hard-right ministers want to formalise. Since a plausible Palestinian state would require settlements to be dislodged, their expansion makes a peace deal correspondingly more difficult.
Since its last move, Susiya’s story has been one of demolitions, settler violence, damage to Palestinian property, expulsion orders, and ultimately vain appeals to the Israeli courts. In international law, the settlement—like all those in the West Bank—is illegal. But in Israeli law, Susiya’s Palestinian residents are caught in a classic Area C trap. The ostensible reason for the Susiya demolition orders is that the residents, forcibly transferred over 30 years ago, built their present dwellings without permits, which is true. But it is virtually impossible for Palestinian residents—unlike Israeli settlers—to secure such permits. Between 2000 and 2014, 2,020 Palestinians embarked on the heavily bureaucratised process of applying to the Israeli authorities for building permits. Just 33 were granted. Dismantling Palestinian Susiya would be a symbolic but logical extension of the discriminatory process which many are saying has already killed the two-state solution.
Stuck at a staging post
Israeli-controlled Area C was never supposed to last. It’s a hangover from the Oslo accords, the first of which prompted the famous handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn 25 years ago this September. It’s easy to forget the excitement and hope the accord generated among millions of Israelis and Palestinians. It was designed to lead to a lasting peace between the two peoples by 1999. But supposed to be an interim staging post, Oslo became the endpoint.
Establishing a Palestinian Authority with heavily circumscribed autonomy in the cities, Israel rid itself of any obligation regarding the welfare, education and other essential services for the Palestinians, without sacrificing its overall control of the occupied territories. As Yossi Beilin, the Labour politician who was the accord’s key Israeli architect told me, “the problem with Oslo is not that it’s dead but that’s it alive.”
The agreement was always flawed. For one thing, it gave Israel carte blanche to continue building settlements in occupied territory in (what has proved to be an indefinite) interim period. Opposition mounted. Hamas rejected the agreement and unleashed a spate of suicide bombings, after a Hebron settler, Baruch Goldstein, murdered 29 Palestinian worshippers in the Ibrahim mosque, the site, holy to both Jews and Arabs, of Abraham’s tomb. There was virulent incitement against the accords by the Israeli right, including the present Prime Minister Netanyahu. And in November 1995, Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing fanatic as he left a Tel Aviv peace rally.
Whether or not Oslo would have led to a two-state solution had Rabin lived, without his lustre and personal authority as a general and war hero, the chances were greatly reduced. Immediately after the White House signing, Beilin—acting alone—had opened secret talks overseen by himself and Arafat’s deputy Mahmoud Abbas, to produce the blueprint for a full two-state agreement. That was achieved, with tragic timing, in October 1995; Beilin, temporarily abroad, intended to put it to Rabin early the following month as the basis for completing negotiations. Ahmad Khalidi and Hussein Agha, the two Palestinians who had done the detailed negotiation of the outline agreement, travelled to Gaza on 1st November and secured Arafat’s parallel assent. But on 4th November, Rabin was killed.
Beilin thinks that Shimon Peres, who immediately succeeded Rabin, made a serious error by refusing to make the two-state blueprint the centrepiece of his 1996 election campaign. “He said I can only do this once I have a personal mandate, and not before,” recalled Beilin. Instead Peres lost the election to Netanyahu—who brought the post-Oslo process to a halt.
Two state diplomacy did not permanently stop—it resumed, after Ehud Barak’s 1999 defeat of Netanyahu. Yet the paradox of the next quarter century was that, as the basic contours of a two-state solution became progressively clearer, the prospect of it became more elusive. Partition would return to what it had been between 1949 and 1967: 78 per cent of historic Palestine would be Israel’s, and 22 per cent the Palestinians’.
A land swap would probably allow a couple of the biggest Jewish settlement blocs to be sited within Israel while the other settlers would be evacuated. There would be a capital for both states in Jerusalem, respectively west and east, and at least a recognition by Israel of the wholesale dispossession of 1948—what the Arabs call the nakba, or catastrophe—underpinned by a symbolic return for a minority of Palestinian refugee descendants, with compensation for the large majority.
It was hardly an impossible dream, so how has it come to be regarded as unattainable? One factor is the shrinking of Beilin’s centre-left peace camp in Israel’s domestic politics. Most Israelis said they favoured—and still do—a two-state deal. But they blame the Palestinians for the failure of the Barak-Arafat Camp David talks in 2000, then the subsequent, second intifada, as well as the doomed Ehud Olmert-Abbas talks of 2008. But some American—and in the case of Camp David—also Israeli officials disputed this apportionment of responsibility. Israel always took more account of its own strident anti-deal minority, than of the Palestinian belief that Arafat’s “historic compromise” of 1988, ratified at Oslo, settling for 22 per cent of historic Palestine, left scant room for further concessions. Nonetheless, the Israelis spun—and came to believe—that there was “no partner for peace.”
A similar narrative embedded itself in the Israeli psyche after Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal of 8,500 settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Disengagement from Gaza potentially set a momentous precedent. But Sharon was determined to act unilaterally, denying Abbas a political dividend—which might have helped him win the fateful 2006 elections against Hamas—and refusing to link the move to any wider peace plan. And disengagement—by design, and in contradiction to earlier deals—started to separate Gaza from its markets in Israel and the West Bank. After Hamas seized full control of Gaza in 2007, that separation rapidly accelerated, halting all exports and destroying Gaza’s economy. But the Israeli right—again including Netanyahu—was deaf to the idea that this impoverishing separation was something Israel had imposed. Instead, it popularised the argument, “We left Gaza to the Palestinians so they could prosper in peace, and all they did was fire rockets at us. That’s what happens when we give up territory.”
The new normal
Back in the 1990s a gruesomely funny sketch in the Israeli television satire show, Hahamishia Hakamerit, depicted three long-skirted female Jewish settlers cheerfully swapping cooking tips in a Hebron street. The scene is wholly normal except that two of the women, without halting their homely discussion of whether olive oil can be re-used, fire their M16s at a (presumably Palestinian) target off camera, while another hurls a hand grenade.
Underlying this caricature was an assumption that most of the show’s mainstream audience would see its characters as, well, crazy. Ideological settlers were still seen as an outlandish fringe minority. True, the numbers had grown rapidly; but there were around 100,000 Jewish settlers across the whole West Bank, a small constituency in a population of 5.5m. Today there are at least 380,000 settlers in the West Bank, as well as the 200,000 in East Jerusalem—an increase that has convinced some analysts that it is now “too late” for two states.
And it’s not just about the numbers. Hebron, is in many ways a microcosm of the wider occupation and the only Palestinian West Bank city with settlers in its heart. After the Goldstein massacre, Rabin considered removing the Hebron settlers but eventually decided this would have to await a final peace agreement. Instead the greatest impact of the atrocity was on the Palestinians themselves; to prevent revenge attacks the military imposed a six-month curfew and then closed part of Shuhada Street, the city centre’s main artery, to Palestinian vehicles. The neighbourhood began to empty of its Palestinian residents, and the bustling shops and markets, which had once made this commercial hub of the southern West Bank, began to wither into the desolate ghost town of today.
Things got much worse during the second intifada. With settlers so close to the Palestinians, Hebron was an incendiary flashpoint. Between 2000 and 2007, Palestinian militants killed five Israeli civilians, and 17 Israeli security force personnel. The Israeli military killed 88 Palestinians—over half of whom were “not taking part in hostilities,” according to the Israeli human rights agency B’Tselem.
I visited Hebron this year, as I had a decade earlier, with Yehuda Shaul, who had served in a combat unit there at the peak of the second intifada, and has since founded Breaking the Silence, a veterans’ group which, in Shaul’s words, thinks “the military should be for Israel’s defence and not for the oppression and occupation of Palestinians.”
Steel shutters and cages on every window protect the few remaining Palestinian residents from stones thrown by their Israeli neighbours. International volunteers were still preparing to escort the 100 remaining Palestinian pupils from the neighbourhood’s girls’ school to guard them from the hostile children in the adjoining four settlements. More than 600 Israeli soldiers protect around 850 residents of four distinct settlements. Only settlers can drive their cars on Shuhada Street, and on most of it Palestinians are barred even from walking.
Today, the Hebron settlers are no longer deemed an embarrassment; they enjoy the Israeli establishment’s moral and political esteem. In 2012 Gideon Saar, an annexationist tipped as Netanyahu’s successor who was then education minister, expanded a programme of school visits to Hebron, saying that “the Arabs mustn’t get the mistaken notion that Jews can be uprooted from Hebron.” In 2015, State President Reuven Rivlin, one of Likud’s relative moderates, officially opened a visitors’ centre at the Beit Hadassah settlement. And last November, the government approved a new, fifth settlement in Shuhada Street which would bring another 31 Israeli families to Hebron.
All of which reflects a wider political shift. Israelis often point out that Hamas has never rescinded its notorious charter, pronouncing the whole of historic Palestine as Arab land. But while Hamas did, in May 2017, signal it could entertain a state on pre-June 1967 borders, Likud has never scrapped its own founding document claiming a “Greater Israel,” from the Jordan to Mediterranean. Where even the hardline Ariel Sharon would talk in office about the “occupation,” none of the Netanyahu cabinet would use that term, and some senior ministers simply proclaim the whole land as rightfully Israel’s. “How can you be an occupier in your own country?” is the rhetorical question posed by ultranationalist education minister Naftali Bennett.
Annexation may not happen. Netanyahu seems comfortable with the status quo, continued occupation and expanding settlements, without any change to the legal status. But with senior Israeli politicians freely discussing formalising their conquest, it is becoming easier to imagine this than partition into two states. And right now, the international dynamics only reinforce this sense. In his book last year, The Only Language They Understand, the International Crisis Group’s Nathan Thrall argued it would be “irrational” for Israel to end the occupation, unless the US and the rest of the world imposed costs on it for not making concessions which exceed the relatively modest price—for Israel—of maintaining and entrenching the status quo.
Sometime in the future, that could happen. Among US Democrats the traditionally bipartisan assumption of “Israel right or wrong” is fraying. The EU, in many respects the sleeping giant among Israel’s allies as its biggest trading partner, could at some stage impose a robust ban on trading with companies in occupied territory. However, there is little sign of serious movement in Europe for now, and Donald Trump’s Washington has been doubling down on uncritical loyalty to Israel. Of course Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt are supposedly working on his “deal of the century.” But Trump’s moving of the US embassy to Jerusalem, and remarkable boast to have taken the defining city of the entire conflict “off the table” makes a mockery of that. He has also cut funding to the UN Palestinian refugee agency, and remains electorally dependent on a fanatically pro-Israel Christian right.
The last time the US actually used its huge potential leverage on Israel—which includes the $3bn a year it spends on Israeli defence—was at the outset of the process which led to Oslo. George HW Bush suspended $10bn of loan guarantees to bring a resistant Yitzhak Shamir, Israel’s prime minister, to the table. But the early 1990s proved the high watermark of the conviction that America’s interests were served by using an Israeli-Palestinian solution as a way to stabilise the wider Middle East. Few can believe that today. With Syria, Yemen and Libya ravaged by war and with Islamic State a major security threat to the west, the Palestinians look increasingly marginalised on the world stage. Meanwhile, a Saudi-led coalition of Gulf States now regard the Palestinian cause as less important than a strategic alliance with Israel—and the US—against Iran.
Power without a price
All this helps to explain the loss of faith in the two-state solution since Oslo. Even Yossi Beilin, still working away on the conflict at 71, is updating the old blueprint in the light of subsequent events, and thinking anew. Under his new two-state plan, the smallprint of which is being developed in conjunction with London’s Chatham House, Palestinians would get a state on 22 per cent of the total land: the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. So far, so conventional. But there is a twist; any of the settlers beyond the major blocs—nearly 200,000 in all—who wanted to could stay put. They’d retain their Israeli citizenship, but would live under Palestinian sovereignty, without the Israeli military to protect them. Those remaining would then be matched by a similar number of Palestinian refugees who would be returned to Israel proper. The continuation of the idea of “Israel proper,” alongside a new Palestine, means this remains a variant of the two-state model, differentiating it from the Avraham Burg plan (p20). But, with the same emphasis on seeking justice without displacing all the settlers, the line between the two visions becomes a little hazy. Like Burg, Beilin talks about “confederation,” and a series of joint Israeli-Palestinian institutions, covering security, water, and communications, as well as freer movement than today.
But does he seriously think the most ideologically driven settlers would suddenly co-exist peacefully with their Arab neighbours—and vice versa? It would, Beilin admits, be a “real challenge” but in his view “not impossible.” Many settlers, he thinks, would leave for Israel with financial compensation. His plan focuses on them because, he is quite clear, the “biggest fear of any prime minister, left or right, is the evacuation of settlers. This “huge stumbling block,” he believes, “is more of an obstacle than Jerusalem or the refugees.”
But Beilin’s ideas have many critics, on both the left and right. The Hebron settlers’ spokesman Yishai Fleisher sees no need for a negotiated agreement “permitting” the settlers to stay. “Why should we waste our time talking about this? I have to tell some of my leftist friends that there are 600,000 settlers, we have a right-wing government and a right-wing Knesset. We have waged a long struggle, and we’re winning.” On the other flank, the soldier-turned-anti-occupation campaigner Shaul, who describes himself as a “two-state extremist,” is convinced that the settlers have created a myth about the power—and supposed immovability—conferred on them by the recent expansion. The biggest growth in settler numbers, he points out, is in Beitar Illit and Modiin Illit—around 100,000 residents in all—which are both communities bordering the green line, so it would be easy enough to resettle them in Israel itself or—by trading land—to draw a future border incorporating them in Israel.
Living without protection?
Those numerous settlers in Beitar Illit and Modi’in Illit are principally there not for ideological reasons, but for cheap and effectively subsidised housing. Indeed all the settlements depend on Israeli government subsidised utilities, education and other services provided—at formidable taxpayer cost—by Israel under laws and military orders which could, if the politics changed, easily be reversed. Convinced the settlers can indeed be evacuated if the will exists, Shaul rejects Beilin’s plan for a settler right to remain “because it legitimises the settlements,” and potentially does so ahead of negotiations with the Palestinians. Most fundamentally, he is convinced it is a “fantasy.” “Do you really see a scenario when Israel leaves its citizens living there without its protection?”
Shaul, like many frontline Israeli anti-occupation activists, is no fan of the alternative of a binational state, in which an Arab majority would be wholly possible, effectively spelling the end of Israel’s existence as we know it, a prospect he thinks his compatriots would never accept. “For 50 years you couldn’t remove Israel from the occupied territories,” says Shaul. “Now you think you can dissolve the state. Are you nuts?” Unlike Beilin, the crucial obstacle for Shaul is not the evacuation of the settlers, but rather Israel’s continuing stubborn reluctance to offer the Palestinians a fully-fledged state. Even Rabin never made an offer like that, but—Shaul thinks—under him the dynamics were pushing that way. Today’s central problem, he insists, “is a lack of political will by Israel to end its control over Palestinians. If Israel doesn’t have an incentive to end the occupation, or a disincentive to continue, why would Israel give it up?”
Back in Susiya, Nasser Nawaja, as a refugee, no doubt dreams of a single, if binational, Palestine, stretching from “the river to the sea.” But he says bluntly: “It won’t happen; Israel doesn’t want it. And it doesn’t matter what I want but what the Palestinian people will accept.” He does believe that they would buy “a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel.” And so they might, but only if the world gives Israel a formidable “incentive” to agree to it too. Western politicians repeatedly assert that “time is running out” for the two-state solution. Without action as well as words, they are willing that warning to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
— source jfjfp.com by Avraham Burg. Sep 1, 2018