As millions around the globe
contemplated New Year resolutions on 31 December 2017, Israel’s ruling Likud
party came up with one of its own. Its Central Committee overwhelmingly endorsed
a resolution seeking to extend Israel’s legal jurisdiction to its settlements
in the West Bank, home to some 400,000 Israelis. Noting the 50th
anniversary of the “liberation” of the West
Bank, the resolution called on Likud’s elected officials “to allow free
construction and to apply the laws of Israel and its sovereignty to all
liberated areas of Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria”.
Like New Year resolutions elsewhere,
Likud’s was non-binding. This, and its timing, possibly explains why it
attracted little media attention. But it may prove an important marker in the
burial of the two-state solution. Steven
Cook, a senior fellow at the US Council on Foreign Relations commented
that the resolution had “significant consequences” as “a prelude to annexation”.
In
the government halls that matter most in Israeli and Palestinian affairs—Jerusalem
and Washington—the resolution captured the spirit of the time. Prime Minister
Netanyahu is at his most credible when he
denies any possibility of a Palestinian state. His Education
Minister Naftali Bennett, one of two Jewish
Home party representatives in the current Knesset, lauded Trump’s 2016 electoral
victory as a tremendous opportunity for Israel, signalling “the era of
the Palestinian state is over”. The two-state solution, he told a gathering of Jewish
students in New York in March 2018, was a terrible idea which “we’re done with.” Citing
the example of Israel’s annexation in 1981 of the Golan Heights, Bennett spoke of
the benefits of international amnesia. “It’s never pleasant two weeks after,
but after two months it fades away, and 20 years later and 40 years later it’s
still ours.”
Early
in his presidency, President Trump gestured towards an open mind, commenting, “I’m looking at two-state and one-state and I like the one
that both parties like”. The idea that “both” parties could possibly agree on
what they like was fanciful. In any event, Trump’s subsequent actions made
clear that the US was not interested in using its clout to help the parties find
a way through the maze of claim, counter claim and mutual acrimony. Trump and
those around him have made the US a partisan player as never before. His former
adviser on Israeli affairs, now ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is an unabashed
supporter of “Israeli annexation”
of the West Bank, has been President of a fund-raising organisation for the
West Bank settlement of Beit El, and reportedly backed Netanyahu’s ludicrous claim that opposition to settlements amounts to “ethnic cleansing”.
Writing in The Atlantic in May 2018, the Israeli
author, Yossi Klein Halevi, described Israelis and
Palestinians as caught in a cycle of denial. “The
Palestinian national movement denies Israel’s legitimacy, and Israel in turn
denies the Palestinians’ national sovereignty.” The latter “sovereignty” is
greatly weakened by the schism between the
feeble Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and the Islamist Hamas in
Gaza. For Israel, it is the gift that keeps on giving.
Of the parties most
closely entwined in the conflict, the PA has the strongest interest in a
two-state solution and the least capacity to do anything about it. It governs fully
in less than a quarter of the West Bank which, under the Oslo Agreements of the
early 1990s, remains divided into Areas A, B and C. The PA has full control of
Area A, about 18 per cent of the whole territory. Israel has full control of C,
about 60 per cent. B, the remainder, is divided between Palestinian civil
control and shared security control.
The terminal problem for
two-staters is what to build the state with. Israeli settlement has so sliced
and diced the West Bank it’s hard to imagine how the geographic shards might meaningfully
be gathered together. US Ambassador Friedman has argued that settlements occupy only two per cent of the
West Bank. If true, that would make settlements easier to remove but it
completely overlooks their administrative reach. A report by the
Israeli Human Rights Organisation B’Tselem in late 2017 calculated that the settlements
and their governing “regional councils” directly controlled 63 per cent of Area C and 40 per cent of the West Bank
overall.
Besides the West Bank’s geographic fragmentation, there’s
the open sore of the Gaza Strip, ruled by Hamas. In its revised charter Hamas hinted for
the first time in 2017 that it might accept “a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian
state, with Jerusalem as its capital, along the lines of the 4th of June 1967”.
This amounts to a two-state solution, if not one Israel would accept. The charter
also described armed resistance as
the “strategic choice for protecting the principles and the rights of the
Palestinian people”. This points backwards. Israel has long declared it will not negotiate if
under fire; Palestinians retort that Israel will not negotiate unless it’s under fire.
A week after the Likud Central Committee’s New Year
resolution, Daniel Kurtzer, former US ambassador to Israel and Egypt, now at Princeton
University, wrote that Israelis
and Palestinians were careening towards a one state reality, which “carries extremely dangerous risks”.
These
risks hark back to Israel’s decades-old “trilemma“ of deciding what it wants to be: Jewish; an
occupier; a democracy. It can’t be all three. The two-state solution was
premised on the idea of ending the occupation, thereby preserving both Israel’s
Jewish identity and its democratic ways. Former Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, warned in mid-2017
that if Israel kept control of the area from the Mediterranean to the
river Jordan "it would become inevitably – that's the key word, inevitably
– either non-Jewish or non-democratic". If Palestinians in an annexed
West Bank were given full rights Israel would quickly become “a binational
state with an Arab majority and civil war”. Israel's current path he described
as a “slippery slope toward apartheid”.
Demography
has long been a pressure point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The late
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat once claimed
the “the womb of the Arab woman” as his “strongest weapon”. But population figures—totals and growth
rates—are sharply contested (see, for example, Israel’s
Impending Demographic Reality and Demographics
and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict ). According
to the CIA’s World Fact Book, in 2017 there were 8.3 million people in Israel,
the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem, of which 74.7 per cent were Jewish. The
West Bank’s population was 2.75 million, which included 391,000 Israeli
settlers. Gaza’s population was 1.8 million. Rounded, this produces a total
Jewish population of 6.59 million and a non-Jewish, primarily Muslim Palestinian,
population of 6.25 million, a 51:49 per cent split. Take Gaza out and the split
firms in Israel’s favour 60:40. While Israel has always had a significant
non-Jewish minority, the larger this minority the weaker the country’s sense of
identity and the more complicated its internal politics.
One “solution” to the
demographic dilemma involves the claim that “Jordan is Palestine”, given its
high proportion of citizens of Palestinian descent. “Relocate” Palestinians
from the West Bank to Jordan, so the argument runs, and they’ll have their
state and Israel will have demographic and identity comfort. Israeli Justice
Minister Ayelet Shaked, also from the Jewish Home party, last February outlined
her plan for Israeli law to apply in Area C of
the West Bank while Areas A and B would “be part of a confederation, with
Jordan and Gaza”. She rightly acknowledged this might seem “a bizarre option to
the international community, but … in three years from now the international
community will understand this is the right solution”.
To many of us, the “right” solution has
long been two states for two peoples, reached through their own negotiations,
supported and encouraged by others. That has not happened, and there’s no
reason to believe it will. Sputtering efforts at negotiations over the past 20
years or so kept the “peace process” on life support. They also made it
increasingly clear that the two-state solution is dead, overwhelmed by the
weight of the past, myopia, ignorance, inhumanity, indifference, deceit, fanaticism,
miscalculation; it’s a long charge sheet. The solution will not be rescued by a
change of political leadership in Jerusalem or Washington, though we might see
more subtle funeral directors.
Despite the recent flareups on the
Israeli-Gaza border a new Palestinian
uprising does not seem imminent. A new round of stalemate does. This
may well blur the issues that governments around the globe, including the 140
or so who officially recognise a non-existent “State of Palestine”, will eventually
be forced to consider. These comprise (at least): the prospect of Israeli
annexations and forced relocations; a Palestinian statelet in the West Bank; an
Islamist de facto state in Gaza which offers its citizens little more than
rhetoric. That may sound not much different to present-day reality. But governments
to date have been able to chant the two-state mantra to avoid having to think
anew. To continue in that vein will peddle false hope at best and, at worst, amount
to calculated deceit.
*
First
published by The Strategist (Australian Strategic Policy Institute), 16 June
2018
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