{"id":13443,"date":"2018-06-26T21:02:46","date_gmt":"2018-06-26T11:02:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.socialpolicyconnections.com.au\/?p=13443"},"modified":"2018-06-29T11:38:44","modified_gmt":"2018-06-29T01:38:44","slug":"israel-palestine-vale-the-two-state-solution-where-to-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.socialpolicyconnections.com.au\/?p=13443","title":{"rendered":"Israel-Palestine : vale the two-state solution. Where to now?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Rodgers.<\/span><\/h1>\n
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The Separation Wall, Palestine 2006. MissyKel. flickr, cc.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With the two-state solution in the morgue, governments around the globe will need to consider anew the unpalatable realities of this long-running conflict.<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

As millions around the globe contemplated New Year resolutions on 31 December 2017, Israel\u2019s ruling Likud party came up with one of its own. Its Central Committee overwhelmingly endorsed a resolution seeking to extend Israel\u2019s legal jurisdiction to its settlements in the West Bank, home to some 400,000 Israelis.<\/span><\/p>\n

Noting the 50th<\/sup> anniversary of the \u201cliberation\u201d of the West Bank, the resolution called on Likud\u2019s elected officials \u201cto allow free construction and to apply the laws of Israel and its sovereignty to all liberated areas of Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Like New Year resolutions elsewhere, Likud\u2019s 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 \u201csignificant consequences\u201d as \u201ca prelude to annexation\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Era of Palestinian state is over?<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

In the government halls that matter most in Israeli and Palestinian affairs\u2014Jerusalem and Washington\u2014the resolution captured the spirit of the time. Prime Minister Netanyahu is at his most credible when he denies any possibility of a Palestinian state.<\/span><\/p>\n

His Education Minister Naftali Bennett, one of two Jewish Home party representatives in the current Knesset, lauded Trump\u2019s 2016 electoral victory as a tremendous opportunity for Israel, signalling \u201cthe era of the Palestinian state is over\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

The two-state solution, he told a gathering of Jewish students in New York in March 2018, was a terrible idea which \u201cwe\u2019re done with\u201d.\u00a0 Citing the example of Israel\u2019s annexation in 1981 of the Golan Heights, Bennett spoke of the benefits of international amnesia. \u201cIt\u2019s never pleasant two weeks after, but after two months it fades away, and 20 years later and 40 years later it\u2019s still ours.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Early in his presidency, President Trump gestured towards an open mind, commenting, \u201cI\u2019m looking at two-state and one-state and I like the one that both parties like\u201d. The idea that \u201cboth\u201d parties could possibly agree on what they like was fanciful. In any event, Trump\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u201cIsraeli annexation\u201d of the West Bank, has been President of a fund-raising organisation for the West Bank settlement of Beit El, and reportedly backed Netanyahu\u2019s ludicrous claim that\u00a0opposition to settlements amounts to \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Writing in The Atlantic<\/em> in May 2018, the Israeli author, Yossi Klein Halevi, described Israelis and Palestinians as caught in a cycle of denial. \u201cThe Palestinian national movement denies Israel\u2019s legitimacy, and Israel in turn denies the Palestinians\u2019 national sovereignty.\u201d The latter \u201csovereignty\u201d is greatly weakened by the schism between the feeble Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and the Islamist Hamas in Gaza.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Area B, the remainder, is divided between Palestinian civil control and shared security control.<\/span><\/p>\n

The terminal problem for two-staters is what to build the state with. Israeli settlement has so sliced and diced the West Bank it\u2019s 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\u00a0 Human Rights Organisation\u00a0 B\u2019Tselem in late 2017 calculated that the settlements and their governing \u201cregional councils\u201d directly controlled 63 per cent of Area C and 40 per cent of the West Bank overall.<\/span><\/p>\n

Besides the West Bank\u2019s geographic fragmentation, there\u2019s 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 \u201ca fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital, along the lines of the 4th of June 1967\u201d. This amounts to a two-state solution, if not one Israel would accept. The charter also described armed resistance as the \u201cstrategic choice for protecting the principles and the rights of the Palestinian people\u201d. This points backwards. Israel has long declared it will not negotiate if under fire; Palestinians retort that Israel will not negotiate unless<\/em> it\u2019s under fire.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ehud Barak: Israel on “a slippery slope toward apartheid”<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

A week after the Likud Central Committee\u2019s New Year resolution, Daniel Kurtzer, former US ambassador to Israel and Egypt, now at Princeton University, wrote that Israelis and\u00a0Palestinians were careening towards a one state reality, \u00a0which \u201ccarries extremely dangerous risks\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Israeli Military Checkpoint. Parker Seybold 2011. flickr cc.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

These risks hark back to Israel\u2019s decades-old \u201ctrilemma\u201c of deciding what it wants to be: Jewish; an occupier; a democracy. It can\u2019t be all three. The two-state solution was premised on the idea of ending the occupation, thereby preserving both Israel\u2019s Jewish identity and its democratic ways.<\/span><\/p>\n

Former Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, warned in mid-2017 that if Israel kept control of the area from the Mediterranean to the river Jordan \u201cit would become inevitably \u2013 that\u2019s the key word, inevitably \u2013\u00a0either non-Jewish or non-democratic\u201d. If Palestinians in an annexed West Bank were given full rights Israel would quickly become \u201ca binational state with an Arab majority and civil war\u201d. Israel\u2019s current path he described as a \u201cslippery slope toward apartheid\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Demography has long been a pressure point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat once claimed the \u201cthe womb of the Arab woman\u201d as his \u201cstrongest weapon\u201d. But population figures\u2014totals and growth rates\u2014are sharply contested (see, for example, Israel\u2019s Impending Demographic Reality and Demographics and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict\u00a0).<\/span><\/p>\n

According to the CIA\u2019s 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\u2019s population was 2.75 million, which included 391,000 Israeli settlers. Gaza\u2019s 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\u2019s favour 60:40. While Israel has always had a significant non-Jewish minority, the larger this minority the weaker the country\u2019s sense of identity and the more complicated its internal politics.<\/span><\/p>\n

One \u201csolution\u201d to the demographic dilemma involves the claim that \u201cJordan is Palestine\u201d, given its high proportion of citizens of Palestinian descent. \u201cRelocate\u201d Palestinians from the West Bank to Jordan, so the argument runs, and they\u2019ll 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 \u201cbe part of a confederation, with Jordan and Gaza\u201d. She rightly acknowledged this might seem \u201ca bizarre option to the international community, but \u2026 in three years from now the international community will understand this is the right solution\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Two-state solution now dead<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

To many of us, the \u201cright\u201d 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\u2019s no reason to believe it will.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Palestinian boy was shot dead that day. Adnan Mofi 2007. flickr,<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Sputtering efforts at negotiations over the past 20 years or so kept the \u201cpeace process\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u201cState of Palestine\u201d, 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Peter Rodgers is a former Australian Ambassador to Israel. His book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Herzl\u2019s Nightmare \u2013 one land, two peoples<\/em>, was published in Australia, the UK, and the US in 2004-05.<\/strong><\/p>\n

First published 16 June 2018 by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute\u2019s The Strategist,<\/em> and republished in John Menadue’s\u00a0Pearls & Irritations.<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
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