Three-State Solution - Are we witnessing a historic shift toward Palestinian unity? Don't bet on it
Levan Ramishvili
Three-State Solution
Are we witnessing a historic shift toward Palestinian unity? Don't bet on it.
BY AARON DAVID MILLER | JANUARY 9, 2013
Tens of thousands of Palestinians rally in Hamas-controlled Gaza to celebrate the anniversary of Fatah's founding. Thousands more in the Fatah-controlled West Bank cheer on Hamas. The Palestinian public yearns for unity -- and once again Egyptiansare talking about a reconciliation conclave in Cairo within two weeks.
What's going on? Could we be witnessing a historic shift toward Palestinian unity? Is there finally a basis for a meaningful Hamas-Fatah deal that might bind up the self-inflicted wounds of the Palestinian people and strengthen their leverage -- if not in negotiations with Israel, then at least in the PR battle against it?
Not likely.
Yes, Israel throws up plenty of obstacles to peace -- its settlements expansion in the West Bank is a big one. But on the Palestinian side, the greatest challenge remains the pesky problem of Noah's Ark. Simply put, the Palestinian national movement has been too successful: It has two of everything -- constitutions, mini-states, security services, funding streams, and patrons.
The absence of a monopoly, or anything close to it, over guns, people, and negotiating positions is the single greatest threat the Palestinians face to the fulfillment of their own aspirations.
And here's the kicker. Even if real unity were achieved, it would likely leave the peace process worse off -- in large part because neither Israel nor the United States would likely accept the new parameters of a Palestinian entity that included Hamas for negotiating a two-state solution.
The idea of unity resonates powerfully within Palestinian society. It's a major psychological blow to see your national movement at war with itself while the real adversary -- Israel -- exploits your weaknesses and divisions.
And yet, the Palestinian national movement has always been divided. Yasir Arafat used to tell us that it was really Palestinian democracy in action. And to a degree, given the challenges Arafat faced -- managing a fractious movement that lacked a secure territorial base and was vulnerable to manipulation by Arab states and Israel -- a decentralized structure was inevitable. Unlike other national movements, such as Algeria's FLN or even the pre-state Zionist underground, there was never a watershed moment when one faction imposed its will on the others.
There was a price to be paid for this lack of control. In June 1990, the United States suspended its dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization when a small Iraqi-backed group launched an attack against Israel that Arafat refused to condemn.
But Arafat was able to manage this gaggle through his iconic stature in the Palestinian national movement. Beginning with the 2000 intifada, however, as Fatah began to split and smaller offshoots like the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades and Islamists began to run their own operations, his authority began to wane. His death in 2004, the corruption in Fatah, the inability to end the occupation, and the rising power of Hamas made a mockery of the idea of a unified Palestinian national movement.
The Palestinian Humpty Dumpty had finally fallen off the wall. And since Hamas's 2007 takeover of Gaza, there have been at least four unsuccessful efforts to put it back together again. Here's why unity efforts keep falling short -- even while all Palestinians say they desperately want them to succeed.
Neither Hamas nor Fatah is really serious: Unity is again being driven by tactical considerations, not by a sincere desire to unify ranks. Hamas's successful rocket attacks against Israel and Abbas's success in winning observer-state status at the United Nations allows each to come to the table with some leverage.
But the impulse to do so is driven far more by public opinion and Egyptian pressure than by any real desire to pay the price for what a real merger would entail. Hamas isn't going to give up the gun and recognize Israel -- and Abbas knows that his whole reason for being, not to mention his international support, will evaporate if he signs on to a hard-line program.
The differences are enormous: The Fatah-Hamas reconciliation accord signed in May 2011was never implemented -- nor is it, or anything like it, going to be.
Hamas is the religious manifestation of Palestinian nationalism; Fatah represents a more centrist, secular version. But the issues that divide them aren't just about seats in a parliament or who is the titular prime minister. At its core, the divide is over what Palestine is, where it is, and how its establishment is to be achieved: A secular or religious state? A state on the June 1967 borders, or over all of historic Palestine? Do Palestinians negotiate with guns or without them? Hamas may have pragmatists and hardliners on these issues. But that's the point: There is no real consensus, and given Hamas's own timeline, no urgency to produce one. And now with friendly Islamists rising in the Arab world, there's less of a rush.
The peace process in a box: Any kind of unity between Hamas and Fatah -- except one that compels Hamas to give up the gun, accept Israeli's right to exist, and defers to Abbas's authority -- will bury an already comatose peace process. Bringing Hamas into the PLO or a unity government with its current positions intact will compel the United States to cut aid to the PA, make it impossible to get negotiations with Israel launched. and give those in Israel who aren't terribly interested in the peace process an unassailable reason to just say no. Unity will make Abbas radioactive, too.
Three states: Like the two-state solution itself, real Palestinian unity is too important for Palestinians to abandon but too complex to realize. And these days, without the prospect of serious Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, it's one of those pastimes -- like the battle to win hearts and minds in the international arena -- that Palestinians will devote more time to.
Another powerful patron, President Mohamed Morsy's Egypt, also has an incentive to keep unity talks alive. After all, Hamas was derived from the Muslim Brotherhood, and looks increasingly to Egypt for support. But Morsy wants above all else to control this often unruly member of the family.
Morsy is no peacenik. He barely can bring himself to utter the words Israel or the two -state solution. But making a run a Palestinian unity, like his work at orchestrating a Gaza ceasefire, is good for his prestige and will keep a volatile issue on the back burner as he deals with pressing issues closer to home.
And if almighty Egypt wants to try, Palestinian leaders can't afford not to play along. Hamas needs Cairo to open up Gaza economically and to exert pressure on Israel. Abbas knows there's no going back to the good old days with Mubarak, but he too wants to stay on Egypt's good side. And so unity talks will start, stop, start again, and perhaps even result in a formal accord.
But beneath this faux process, the players will continue to dig in their heels. And that means further consolidation of Hamas's authority in Gaza, further settlement activity by Israel in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and Abbas hanging on to his fiefdom over Ramallah and a few other towns. He may be facing a terrible economic and fiscal situation, but neither the Americans, the Israelis, or the international community will let him go under.
John Kerry -- a man who really does believe in diplomacy -- will want to do something serious on the Israeli-Palestinian issue because he believes it's important, because others will urge him to, and because that's what secretaries of state are supposed to do. But he'll have to deal with the Noah's Ark problem. Since he's not suicidal, he won't open up a dialogue with Hamas -- but dollars to donuts says he'll start talking to the Turks, the Egyptians, the Qataris (all led by Islamists with influence in Gaza) about ways to influence the organization.
Good luck to him. To paraphrase JRR Tolkien: It will not be one or two states to rule them all, but for now three -- Israel, Gaza, and a part of the West Bank, all trying to manage in the most imperfect of neighborhoods.
To be sure, this fellowship won't last. But from the perspective of three very important powers -- Egypt, Israel, and Hamas's leaders in Gaza -- it sure beats another war or a two-state solution. The first may yet come. And the second? Well, the second is the stuff of which dreams are made.
Levan Ramishvili
Syria, Libya, Iraq, Egypt…why have Arab states had such a hard time of it lately? And would Palestine, if it were to become the newest Arab state, fare any better?
Now that a ceasefire appears to have taken hold in and over Gaza—a result, most likely, of the fact that Israel is done destroying Hamas’s tunnels and Hamas is starting to run out of missiles—it is only a matter of time before the so-called international community once against turns its attention to the great white whale of global diplomatic yearning: a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. As it happens, two ironies attach to this well-intentioned quest. Pointing them out is a little like an indiscreet remark at a dinner party about the mad uncle in the attic, but someone has to do it, and it might as well be me.
Marginal reservations about the two-state solution aside, it remains the goal of the (so-called) international community and the formal objective of U.S. diplomacy. The Oslo Accords are based on it as well, which means at least some Palestinians, as well as the Israeli government, are bound to it. And to hear most Palestinians talk most of the time, a separate state of their own in the West Bank and Gaza, with its capital in East Jerusalem, is what they want.
One irony lies in the shifting positions of the two sides, very broadly construed. Back in 1984, when my friend Mark Heller wrote A Palestinian State: The Implications for Israel, he usefully scandalized the Zionist world. His argument, that a Palestinian state would be in Israel’s long-term interests under certain circumstances that Israel had significant control over, ran painfully against the grain of common wisdom at the time. Most Israelis and diaspora supporters of Israel still found the idea of an independent Palestinian state anathema; most sympathetic analysts remained enchanted, to one degree or another, with some variation of a Jordan Option (myself included). But now, after Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, after Oslo, and after the Likud Party under Benyamin Netanyahu threw in the Revisionist towel and accepted the proposition in 2009, mainstream Zionists overwhelmingly accept a two-state solution.
Back then, too, the vast majority of Palestinians articulated support only for a one-state solution: Palestine, built on the smoldering corpse of the State of Israel—in other words, the Hamas position. But now, according toKhalil Shikaki’s polls and plenty of other anecdotal evidence, most Palestinians are at least resigned to the two-state endgame, even if they don’t especially like it. Thus those who have argued that it’s now too late for a two-state solution because of Israel’s establishment of demographic facts in the West Bank miss the most important counter-development of all: More people than ever on both sides support it.
Despite this, the Palestinian political class, divided and weak as it is, remains either unwilling or unable to partner with Israel to bring a two-state solution about. And the compound condition matters. When the Palestinian side was able, under Yasir Arafat, it was not willing. Arafat’s PLO could have negotiated a state when Ehud Barak led Israel’s government in 1999–2000, but Arafat walked away at Camp David without even posing a counterproposal. He preferred being a live revolutionary to a possibly assassinated head of state. When the Palestinian side subsequently was willing, under Abu Mazen, it was not able to make a deal with either Prime Minister Olmert or Sharon, owing to its political weakness and societal divisions. From the Israeli point of view, it’s like trekking many miles in the scorching heat to a portentous meeting with one’s promised bride at the formidable castle of her uncle, only to find the uncle unwilling or unable to drop moat bridge and raise the portcullis.
The second irony is more complex but no less bracing. Let’s start simply by observing that 2014 so far has not been very kind to the Arab state, generically speaking. Neither was 2013, 2012, or 2011. Syria, Iraq, and Libya have pretty much fallen to pieces, and Lebanon breathes whatever vapors Syria wafts its way. Egypt is an economic corpse that doesn’t know it’s dead and so won’t fall down. (For my ducats there is no better symbol of the Egyptian circumstance than Cairo’s City of the Dead—a vast cemetery full of countless squatters.) Jordan is suffering a multi-sourced nervous breakdown, complete with anti-Hashemite mobs. Algeria and Bahrain are armed camps, albeit for different reasons. Tunisia is a political weathervane that cannot control its borders. Morocco is fragile and faces a rising Berber challenge. Yemen is an armed mess. Sudan is a truncated basket case. Only great gobs of resource rents keep Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar afloat and seemingly quiescent. Oman may be the only Arab country that has managed to keep its balance, and it’s not a real state anyway—just a family with a flag.
This sad state of affairs is not the wayward result of the so-called Arab Spring. Not only does it long predate the Arab Spring, but all that misnamed and wildly misunderstood phenomenon wrought was to accelerate the ongoing decay of the highly unappealing authority relationships in these societies. It has disrupted the ugly and the unacceptable in different ways in different countries, since they’re all different. But with the possible exception of Tunisia (and the jury is still out), the results have not been any improvement on the status quo ante. Some state authorities have their backs up and are trying to be more oppressive than ever, while others are simply flailing.
The ruling classes are right to be worried. Trust in the state has suffered, and rightly so, because the management efficiency of these states, never very good in most places, has eroded further in the face of deteriorating economies and social infrastructure (education, housing, and health care) and the rise of expectations among more mobilized, youthful, cyber-wired, literate, and urbanized populations. All these creaking, slow-moving and mostly corrupt states are in deepening trouble, if they haven’t yet collapsed entirely.
So here we have a bundle of collapsing or very weak states, states that never achieved Weberian status as modern states in the first place, and what is the favorite obsession of the (so-called) international community?To create yet another Arab state, called Palestine.
At least some who have thought about the dissonance between these observations have worried that, unless extraordinary care is taken with the birth of Palestine as a state—assuming the process ever gets that far—it will be born a surefire failure. But most people never allow these two observations to ease into the same mental zone. The generic and worsening weakness of the Arab state per se and the simultaneous desire to create yet another one do not strike most people as interesting juxtaposition because they hermetically compartmentalize the two pieces. The look first at one, then at the other, but do not allow themselves to see the two together. Amusing, no? Or perhaps it’s a bit troubling if this happens to describe your own mental habit, dear reader, to which you, having now read this far, may not ever return.
Why have the Arab states had such a hard time of it, and why might Palestine, were it to be born, be just another example of the trouble? This, to put it mildly, is a big subject, one we cannot do justice to in a venue like this. So I will be telegraphically brief, and those who get the message based on their own intellectual resources will be grateful for its brevity, while those who don’t probably won’t.
If you take an introductory Middle Eastern politics course at any respectable American university, or just read the material assigned on the syllabus on your own (something I have to assume virtually no members of the American political class have ever done), you will soon find that the modern state (in idealized form the nation-state, where nation, strictly defined, and polity are well matched) is an organic development of Western history, whose peoples have developed to one degree or another the attitudes and civic habits that parallel the institutional forms of the state. The modern territorial state, as a post-imperial era expression of nationalist ideology in the West, does not so well fit the Arabs (and many other non-Western ethno-linguistic groups) whose history supplied none of the predicates.
Arab societies are patrimonial in character (the term preferred by Francis Fukuyama and others), as all Western societies were before the modern era, and they are premodern in a specific Weberian political sense. That sense has three key elements.
First, in Arab societies communal ties trump individual agency, so that the social authority of family, and of clan and tribe, remain strong; gemeinschaft has never been fully displaced by gesellschaft. Second, religion has never been privatized away from the public sphere; there is no wide and broadly accepted secular zone in which politics (or the arts) as they exist in the West can take place. And third, it follows that, especially in heterogeneous societies (whether heterogeneous in sectarian or ethnic terms), the state cannot command much symbolic affinity relative to its natural competitors. The result has been what some analysts, like Joel Migdal for example, have referred to as “strong societies, weak states.”
If you make it to the second week on the syllabus, you might be introduced to three or four Arabic words, here in transliteration, to help you fill out this picture: watan, qawm, and hamula.
Watan means “homeland”, which is the closest word Arabic has to capture the concept of the territorial state, and that’s the word that’s most often used to express what in English we call a country. Wataniya means nationalist feeling directed toward this country, the territorial unit with people and its borders. (Put an iya or sometimes iyya on the end of an Arabic noun and you usually get an ism.)
Qawm is a more expansive form of kindred feeling, encompassing all Arabic speakers. So qawmiyya is usually translated as pan-Arabism or pan-Arab nationalism, which is a secularized version of pan-Islamism of which the human community is the umma. Qawmiyya is “above” the territorial state, so to speak, and its symbolic power is, again, derivative of the aspiration of Islam to be a unifying social force.
The word hamula means tribe, or an extended unit of family clans. It comes from the Semitic root hams, which means five in reference to the five-generational patriarchal structure that defines a tribe. It is also the root of the word for “armed”, since a hand symbolizes a fist or the appendage of a body that holds a weapon. This is not entirely coincidental; family units had and in some places still have military tasks to perform, to protect the tribal group or, in some cases, to predate on others. The hamula is where politics in its elemental form happens in traditional societies. It is where affinity (assabiyah) in primordial form is often strongest.
Obviously, no society is static, and no culture is frozen. Arab countries today are in the midst of bewildering change, vaulted beyond the firm grasp of tradition but falling well short of functional modernity. Some are more “tribal” (measurable in part by the percentage of endogamous marriages) and more characteristic of patrimonial polities than others (Yemen, for example, compared to Tunisia), just as some are more heterogeneous than others (Syria, for example, compared to Jordan). But none of the Arab “states” ever made it to the Weberian heights of substituting formal and impersonal authority for traditional consensual or charismatic authority, and nearly all are deteriorating today from whatever elevation they did reach in the good old days of the Arab Cold War.
To put it a bit glibly, then, the Arab state has a Goldilocks problem: To be stable and effective, it needswataniya, but its reservoirs of wataniya are ever depleted by the power of qawmiyya above it and the assabiya of the hamula below it. To restate the impact of the Arab Spring in a nutshell, it has functioned to accelerate the depletion process, the power of qawmiyya taking the form of sectarian extremism, the power of hamula taking the form of ever more intense subnational identity politics.
The only known effective ways of keeping the Arab watan in working order is to militarize it (army rule) or to monarchize it (rule by a king). The former works via a repressive secret police apparatus (muhabarat) and the latter via a patriarchal structure that reaches all the way to the top, so that the king is the tribal sheikh of all the sheikhs. Actually, both forms of autocracy need both devices: the monarchies also have secret police functions and the military regimes implicitly run via the symbolism of patriarchal authority, hence the cults of personality that have tended to form around Arab dictators cum national “fathers.” But the result, especially in the militarized form of the watan, has always been a weak, jerry-rigged expedient—sometimes unstable (think Syria before Hafiz al-Assad) and sometimes hyperstable in an enforced form of suspended social and economic animation (think Mubarak’s Egypt, Qaddafi’s Libya, or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq).
While there has never been a true modern state anywhere in the Arab region, at least as Weber or anyone else who thought about the matter in terms of political sociology understood it, the outer forms and international rituals of the state have been present. But with the inner reality gone missing, the poor fit between new clothes and an old body has not been a pretty sight. There is nothing new here. Listen to how the late Hisham Sharabi, the Palestinian intellectual who lived much of his life in American exile, described the Arab situation in 1987 as one of “neopatriarchy”, the new grafted superficially and awkwardly upon the old social norms: Neopatriarchy reflected “processes of social, political, and moral decay: political despotism, corruption. . . ” that have led to “the frustrations and humiliations, the rage and despair . . . to the paralyzing traumas engulfing the Arab world. . . . The depths of self-hatred and cynicism equal only the ethnocentric fantasies and wild dreams of past glory.” Fouad Ajami’s assessment was not very different, nor is that of Bassam Tibi and many other astute, mostly self-exiled, Arab thinkers.
This traditional mélange of authority relationships masquerading as a modern state, as it were, were bound to confound Westerners, Americans in particular. Most Americans think their forms of government and the civic habits that go with them are universal in character. As far as the average person is concerned, they somehow just fell out of the sky one day in the 17th or 18th century, and we are so lucky to have been chosen to receive the tablets first. (We broke them in civil war and so had to have a second set carved out.) That average person also believes that people are essentially the same in all places and ages and that they’ll come around to our liberal democratic “best practice”—for we and the world all together of course are progressing, that being the faith of the thinly veiled “secular” eschatology of the Enlightenment.
This attitude has been mightily reinforced lately by political correctness, which assumes that any differences among ethno-linguisticaly defined groups of people presume better and worse, more advanced and less—and wecan’t have that in a world in which absolute equality of all kinds is a postulate beyond question or even discussion. (To respect the dignity and beauty of difference never seems to occur to the PC crowd, unimaginative dunderheads that they are.) So if Arab “states” are called states and are members in good standing of the United Nations and they have Presidents or Prime Ministers and constitutions and a court system and so on, the typical American will assume that these states must have the overt character, its people the underlying attitudinal bases, and its result the standard socio-political functionality of any “normal” modern state like, say, Norway, or maybe Chile.
And of course the typical American would be wrong. Even most well-educated Americans are remarkably un-self-reflective about cultural differences. Nothing falls down out of the sky except rain and snow, and the occasional meteorite. Political institutions, rather, spring up from the ground of historical experience and human efforts to grasp its meaning.
Would a Palestinian state be any different from the other Arab states, should it come into being? The Palestinians have a couple of notable advantages here. First, they have been watching Israel intensely for the past sixty-odd years, and many have worked in Israel or for Israeli companies. They have been culturally pluralized. They know there is another way for a state to exist and operate. They know there can be such a thing as an independent judiciary, a free press, open debate, and so forth. They have a sense of what individual agency is, and of what equality before the law looks like. Second, they have no baggage, no legacy of failed administrations and regimes going back half a century, unless one counts the very recent experience since Oslo in the West Bank and Gaza. Third, Western patrons will have a special interest in a newly born Palestinian state not failing. They will lavish money and advice (for whatever the latter may be worth).
Will this be enough to compensate for the standard deviations, so to speak, that have made successful Arab territorial statehood so difficult to pull off? Will it compensate, too, for the rise of various new challenges to allstates, no matter their origins or provenance or past glories? The Westphalian state is under siege nearly everywhere, for reasons I noodle on a bit in the new issue of the magazine (“What’s Going On”, September/October 2014). Could Palestine escape the general wave of deterioration in the performance and popularity of states worldwide?
No one knows. But the chances are that, one day, in one form or another, Palestine will be not merely declared but actually become real as a state. Not long afterward the Palestinians (and not just the Palestinians) are likely to experience a Goethe moment—getting what they long wished for, only to wonder why on earth they ever wanted a state in the first place, for all the good it will do them and for all the troubles it will bring.
The peoples of the Middle East are expert at living without peace and without much water, too. But no one is allowed to live without irony.
Levan Ramishvili
Did Netanyahu just reject the two-state solution?
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a statement on Sunday in which he repudiated his much-discussed 2009 speech that supported ending the Israel-Palestine conflict with a "two-state solution." Many are reading this as Netanyahu dropping his support for an independent Palestinian state.
- Netanyahu faces difficult odds in the Israeli elections a little over a week away; he may be attempting to shore up his conservative base and fend off political challengers on his right.
- Observers have long wondered whether Netanyahu's 2009 speech in support of the two-state solution was sincere, or if he was just feigning support to mollify the United States, which has long favored it as the most likely path to peace.
It sure looks like Netanyahu has rejected it
Two events this week led up to Netanyahu's statement on Sunday.
First, on Friday, the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth published what it said was documentation of a secret back-channel during the now-defunct 2013 US-led peace talks, in which Netanyahu's government proposed significant concessions toward the existence of a Palestinian state. The report put political pressure on Netanyahu, who may have appeared "soft" to voters on the right.
Then, on Saturday, Netanyahu's Likud party published a pamphlet announcing that Netanyahu had rejected his 2009 speech at Bar-Ilan University, in which he had first endorsed the idea of establishing a Palestinian state as part of a peace deal:
The Prime Minister announced that the Bar-Ilan speech is null and void. Netanyahu's entire political biography is a fight against the creation of a Palestinian state.
At first, Likud walked this back, saying the pamphlet reflected the personal opinion of its author and not official policy. But, as questions mounted, on Sunday Likud published a new statement that seemed to affirm the notion that Netanyahu now rejects the idea of a two-state solution, and thus the creation of a Palestinian state:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that [in light of] the situation that has arisen in the Middle East, any evacuated territory would fall into the hands of Islamic extremism and terror organizations supported by Iran. Therefore, there will be no concessions or withdrawals; they are simply irrelevant.
The crucial bit of context here is that Israel is holding an election on March 17. While Netanyahu's coalition is still generally expected to do well enough for him to stay in his position as prime minister, that is not assured, and Netanyahu has been especially challenged by the right. Israel has substantial religious and secular right-wing movements, both of which tend to oppose the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Netanyahu's conservative political base is skeptical at best of striking a peace deal with Palestinians. This statement, in narrow political terms, may be Netanyahu's attempt to curb the challenge from his right and drive support among his base.
It's also worth noting that this coincides with a disintegration in relations between Netanyahu's government and the United States. Years of tension between Netanyahu and President Obama culminated in the Israeli leader's highly controversial speech to Congress just a few days earlier undermining Obama's efforts to reach a nuclear deal with Iran. The two-state deal is a major priority of the United States, and has been since before Obama, so Netanyahu may have felt more comfortable rejecting it now that relations are already so sour.
Skeptics have long doubted Netanyahu's true views on this
For as long as there has been an Israel-Palestine conflict, the most viable path to peace has typically been seen as the "two-state solution," in which both Israelis and Palestinians would have their own independent states. President George W. Bush made this a centerpiece of his 2002 peace plan.
The same year Benjamin Netanyahu become Israel's prime minister, in 2009 (he had previously held the office in the 1990s), he gave a speech at Bar-Ilan University endorsing the two-state deal, though tepidly and with significant caveats.
Netanyahu, a member of the conservative Likud Party, had never been a strong advocate for peace, so his speech was a seemingly historic moment. It also infuriated many to his political right.
Observers in both the US and Israel, though, soon began to wonder whether the speech was a sincere statement of Netanyahu's views and his government's policies. He did little to pursue this goal and has acted frequently contrary to it, for example by repeatedly expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, though it was clear to all observers — and repeatedly stressed by the United States — that this made peace far more difficult.
As the New Yorker's David Remnick wrote in 2013:
Netanyahu has done almost nothing to follow through on a two-state solution, and most Likud politicians today contend that he was deeply ambivalent about the speech, which caused a serious rift with his father and within the Party. They are convinced that he did it mainly to placate Barack Obama.
A lot has happened in the Israel-Palestine peace process between 2009 and today, and Netanyahu's critics as well as detractors have many datapoints they can point to in support of their various readings of his intentions and level of sincerity. But the issue looks increasingly moot now that Netanyahu seems to have dropped his support for a two-state solution.
Levan Ramishvili
A 'three-state solution' for Middle East peace
Reality calls for attaching Gaza to Egypt and the West Bank to Jordan
The collapse of President Obama’s efforts to force a “negotiated” settlement between Israel and the Palestinians should prompt a thorough rethinking of his administration’s entire Middle East strategy.
The chances of the initiative, which is predicated far more on ideology and illusion than on the region’s hard realities, were always essentially negligible. While Mr. Obama’s impending failure will cost us dearly because it fosters the perception of American impotence and incompetence, there are important lessons to be learned.
Although Mr. Obama will almost certainly not rethink his policies, it is entirely appropriate for others to recalibrate our objectives in the Israel-Palestinian dispute, so the next president will not make the same mistakes.
For more than two decades, U.S. policymakers have generally acceded to Palestinian insistence that a new state be created for them, stitching together the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. These territories have no particular history either of national identity or of economic interdependence. They are simply bits and pieces of the collapsed Ottoman Empire and the failed League of Nations’ post-World War I mandate system.
The only logic underlying the demand for a Palestinian state is the political imperative of Israel’s opponents to weaken and encircle the Jewish state, thereby minimizing its potential to establish secure and defensible borders. The cruelest irony is that by using the Palestinian people as the tip of the spear against Israel, their supposed advocates have caused the Palestinians extensive suffering. Their economic well-being, their potential for development and the prospect of living under a noncorrupt, representative government have been lost in the shuffle of challenging Israel’s very right to exist.
As long as Washington’s diplomatic objective is the “two-state solution” — Israel and “Palestine” — the fundamental contradiction between this aspiration and the reality on the ground will ensure it never comes into being. There simply cannot be “two states living side by side in peace and security” when one of the “states,” for the foreseeable future, cannot meet the basic, practical requirements for entering into and upholding international commitments, including, unfortunately, the glaring lack of its own legitimacy.
Instead of pursuing the misguided notion of “two states,” U.S. policymakers should instead ask what other solutions are possible that would provide Palestinians with personal dignity and security, economic growth and the prospect of living under a responsible, responsive government. Concededly, there is no perfect alternative, but the most attractive prospect is to attach the disparate Palestinian communities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to their neighboring contiguous Arab states, Jordan and Egypt, respectively. We might call this a “three-state solution.”
After the late 1940s collapse of the League of Nations’ Middle East mandates, Jordan successfully governed the West Bank until the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Today, Israel, Jordan and Palestinians should draw new West Bank boundaries embodying Security Council Resolution 242’s “land for peace” formula. Jordan could, with relative ease, resume sovereignty over those portions of the West Bank not incorporated into Israel.
The contentious issue of Jerusalem’s status as the purported capital of “Palestine” would disappear, since Amman would obviously be the seat of government for an enlarged Jordan. Palestinians could be rapidly integrated into the Jordanian economy, and participate in its ongoing political development. Such a solution would enormously benefit the Palestinian people by providing political stability and the prospect of enhanced economic security. The existing Israel-Jordanian peace agreement would help ensure that Israel and an expanded Jordan could continue to live together peacefully.
Gaza is a harder problem, but incorporating it into Egypt is clearly a better solution than allowing it to remain the headquarters for Hamas and other terrorist groups. Merging Gaza with Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood was not an acceptable option, since Hamas, a Brotherhood subsidiary, would simply have acquired even greater capabilities for terrorist attacks against Israel, Arab states friendly to America, and beyond.
Cairo’s current (and likely future) military government may not be made up of Jeffersonian democrats, but it is a sterling alternative to Hamas, and will presumably not tolerate terrorism emanating from behind new Egyptian borders. Gaza’s economic integration with Egypt will be more difficult than the West Bank into Jordan, but no other alternative is feasible.
For many, ending the quest for the “two-state solution” will be like renouncing the search for the Golden Fleece. Moreover, Egypt and Jordan will be understandably reluctant to take control of the troubled territories, which therefore warrants significant international assistance for their efforts. Nonetheless, our experience over the past several decades proves conclusively that neither Palestinians nor Israel, nor (most importantly for us) the United States, can benefit from continuing to pursue an illusion.
The “three-state solution” will not be achieved easily, but it at least has the virtue of being realistic and workable. Those who truly have the best interests of the Palestinians at heart should consider it.
John R. Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Levan Ramishvili
Is Oslo Dead?
The peace process's two top negotiators reflect on the 20 years since their fleeting triumph.
BY AARON DAVID MILLER | MARCH 7, 2013
This year, the Oslo Accords (or what's left of them) will mark their 20th anniversary.
Oslo -- shorthand for a series of Israeli-Palestinian interim agreements done and undone between 1993 and 1999 -- was a heroic but ultimately failed effort to deal with an interminable problem that still eludes a solution: how to reconcile the conflicting national and religious claims of Israelis and Palestinians to a relatively small piece of real estate situated between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
Much will be written about these accords in the coming year, particularly as the Sept. 13 anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Principles on the White House's South Lawn approaches -- an occasion that now seems to me a thousand years and a million dashed hopes, naive expectations, and broken promises away.
Most of the analysis of the Oslo enterprise is likely to be negative, perhaps with good reason. The Oslo framework accomplished many things: It led to mutual recognition between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the state of Israel, enabled Jordan's King Hussein to conclude a peace treaty with Israel, opened up regional cooperation between Israel and a dozen Arab countries, and created the beginnings of Palestinian institutions not in Tunis or Beirut but in Gaza and the West Bank.
But much of this now lies compromised, undermined, broken, and bloodied. The central logic of Oslo -- that through an interim process Israelis and Palestinians could gain the trust and confidence necessary to make the big decisions on the final-status issues (Jerusalem, borders, refugees) -- simply wasn't sustainable, if it was ever even realistic to begin with. On the eve of the July 2000 Camp David summit -- the last serious effort by empowered Israelis and Palestinians to reach any agreement -- there was little, if any, trust between PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
Still, whatever their failings, the Oslo Accords reflected something critically important and missing from Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking: a sense of partnership and trust. It is true that this personal element masked to a dangerous degree an underlying clash of national interests and opposing expectations that proved in the end to be quite destructive.
But Oslo was the last time that official Israeli and Palestinian negotiators actually worked together as intimates -- exulted in their successes and mourned their failures and lost opportunities -- or at least as together as they'd ever been. And make no mistake: Even with a robust U.S. role, they will need to engage directly again and return to a place where there's mutual respect and trust if their deal is to get done.
The two principal Israel and Palestinian negotiators in those heady days -- Uri Savir and Ahmed Qurei (Abu Alaa) -- remain close still. Wiser and older to be sure, both men retain the sense of humor, mutual respect and affection, and above all natural talents as negotiators that allowed them to get as far as they did in a process whose odds not even the most dedicated partners could surmount.
In Oslo's 20th year, both agreed to answer five questions about the Israeli-Palestinian issue and the problem of what I've called the much-too-promised land. Savir responded to my questions in English; Abu Alaa in Arabic. The translation was done by my friend, the inestimable Gamal Helal, interpreter, analyst, and confidant to American presidents and secretaries of state.
Foreign Policy: What are Oslo's greatest achievements?
Ahmed Qurei: Regardless of the different views that were expressed at the signing of this agreement, or the assessment of it today after two decades, the substantive fact remains: Oslo was the first formal interim document designed to manage a temporary phase between two sides who denied each other's existence, who were unwilling to recognize the hopes and the pain of the other. After decades of bitter struggle, waste of blood, treasure, and energy, where both saw each other only through a barrel of a gun, they realized that it is inevitable to overcome hatred, misgivings, denial, and their own red lines. They sat face to face to test intentions, clarify misunderstanding, and search for the little common ground that could lead to squaring the circle of this conflict.
It was the first time in Oslo where both sides looked at each other face to face, and not in an interrogation room or a checkpoint. It was around a negotiation table that started as an experiment exercise that soon turned to a political [one] to achieve a significant turning point in that bitter struggle. It turned that conflict from an endless war zone to an open dialogue discussing the horizon of coexistence, peace, and security, among many other hopes that soon evaporated.
There is almost a consensus that the Oslo agreement was the historic foundation that impacted the issues of war and peace in the region, and a lot of hope was pinned to it to change the face of the Middle East, open the closed pathways, and turn the pages of hatred in the entire region. There was hope that Oslo would change the rules of the deadly game and replace the stereotype and perceptions on both sides -- and above all, to realize a peace strong enough that can defend itself and survive.
Both sides attacked the agreement. Many attempts were carried out to undermine it, defuse it, and to end it. The enemies of Oslo rose to power on both sides and changed the political environment. They have vehemently denounced it and tried hard to bury it. They have publicly renounced its principles, but no one dared to kill the agreement, which kept surviving. That continuity of the agreement, with the acceptance of its minimal results and gains, became an inevitable reality.
Despite Oslo's pros and cons, and the various criticisms, the agreement became the cornerstone of the political structure that the region witnessed since its signing. It prepared the ground for the option of dialogue and negotiations as an alternative to the option of continuing the bloody conflict. Oslo created a reliable negotiating record and joint expertise, which will allow future negotiation to build on it. The two sides will not go back to square one, but they can start the dialogue from their long negotiating experience and mutual understanding of each other.
Uri Savir: In my opinion, the greatest achievement of the Oslo Accords is threefold:
One: With the creation of a Palestinian Authority led by the PLO in Gaza and the West Bank, it put to an end two radical scenarios that were prevalent on both sides: the notion of a Greater Israel from the [Mediterranean] Sea to the [Jordan] River based on religious beliefs, which would have meant the end of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state; and secondly the Palestinian notion of a Greater Palestine from the river to the sea, based also on historical and religious beliefs that would have resulted in perpetual war and not in Palestinian statehood.
Secondly, mutual recognition, which is part of the Oslo Accord, between the Israeli Jewish national movement and the Palestinian national movement. It was a fundamental and historical turning point in the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. Until mutual recognition, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was of existential nature. The Palestinian national movement, led by the PLO, did not recognize Israel's right to exist, and the Jewish Israeli national movement (the government of Israel) did not recognize the national rights and identity of the Palestinian people. The mutual recognition agreement turned an existential conflict into a political relationship.
Thirdly, the creation of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza under the PLO created mutual dependency between Israel and the Palestinian Authority on issues of economy and security, whatever the nature of relations between them are.
These three achievements and turning points constitute the legacy of the Oslo Accords and turned them into a platform for future political progress.
FP: What were Oslo's greatest weak points?
AQ: Oslo was an imposed option for both sides when they jointly discovered the limitation of force and the uselessness of continuing to walk through a long, dark tunnel with no light at its end. It is possible that one side or both became fatigued and tired of wars and had to go through a self-examination that led to new conclusions, as well as thinking outside the box. All of this probably pushed one side or both to look simultaneously for a new way to narrow the gaps and overcome fears, concerns, and perceptions. The two sides seemed to be forced to walk through these land mines in search of uncharted territories. They both started to argue and take risks, each licking its own wounds without giving up their mutual fear of the risk taken in this political adventure that is surrounded with challenges. Among these challenges were the fear of each other, from extremist groups, and from different forces on both sides. These groups did not give up yet their own illusion and the mentality of zero-sum game -- groups that are committed to their ideological and religious beliefs, which were deeply rooted in the hearts of their people.
The Oslo agreement was only a declaration of principles. It was more like a general guideline for two stubborn parties that were suspicious of each other and didn't trust each other. The old wound made them fight not only over each word and paragraph, but also fight over the other side's intentions and the deeply rooted beliefs that existed in the other's constituency and their perceptions, along with very painful historic memories. All of this produced an agreement that barely touched the headlines of the issues without in-depth discussions; it brought the two sides closer on complicated issues without solving them. It clarified the minimum misunderstandings without fully clarifying them.
Although I was the one who negotiated Oslo myself and initialed the agreement, I knew from the beginning it was controversial and could be interpreted differently. I knew it could lead to challenges ahead, and that is exactly what happened. The rules of the peace process as they were set by the U.S. with the support of the USSR and Europe were the ones that forced the Palestinian side to negotiate an interim agreement and not a permanent-status agreement, as the case with any other country that participated in such process.
US: The greatest weakness of the Oslo Accords was that they did not lead to an inclusive process bringing in the two societies. They were accords made by the leaderships and negotiated on the two sides, and their effects were translated to important changes on the ground, but they did not trickle down to their respective constituencies in terms of necessary attitudinal changes between Israelis and Palestinians. They therefore did not create a necessary reconciliation process. Furthermore, the accords brought about economic change only for the elite of the two societies: The high-tech boom in Israel benefited only the elite, and the fruits of the real estate boom in the West Bank and Gaza were also reaped by the elite only. Therefore, the peace process became the revolution of the wealthy, and the "have-nots" revolted either politically or violently.
FP: Is the two-state solution still possible?
AQ: The Oslo agreement did not mention clearly that it will lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state. However, the core substance of the agreement that led to a five-year interim period implied the establishment of a state. In addition, the starting of the Palestinian Authority representative institutions became the cornerstone of a strong state which gradually, and despite Israeli obstacles, started to gain international recognition and tangible implicit understanding among segments of the Israeli public, as well as center and left political parties.
The two-state solution became tangible 10 years after the signing of Oslo when U.S. President George W. Bush announced it as the U.S. policy. However, that policy failed to manifest itself into a clear plan with specific mechanisms and timetables known in advance, which not only allowed the successive Israeli governments to continue their usual maneuvering, but also work against this policy in every way possible, including weakening the PA [Palestinian Authority], denying it the existence as a peace partner, and working very vehemently on expanding settlement activities.
I'll not be adding much when I say that after a decade of declaring the two-state solution, Israel has killed it and blocked all roads to achieve it. Israel not only ran away from previous commitments and understandings, but also accelerated its Jewish activities in Jerusalem and settlement activities on the ground, making the viability of a sovereign Palestinian state on the lines of June 4, 1967, unachievable even with the existence of political will in the future.
Although the only alternative to the two-state solution is one state for two peoples, Israel continues to deny both options along with denying the Palestinians legitimate rights as if it can exist as an occupying power without negative consequences forever in a world post the era of colonialism. That could lead Israel to become an apartheid state similar to old South Africa, which will increase its isolation and hatred in both the Arab and Islamic worlds and the world at large.
With this background in mind, I have published last year in the Palestinian media a warning of the evaporation of the two-state solution, and called on Palestinian public opinion leaders to revisit this dead-end solution and consider the one-state solution, believing that what Israel is doing will not lead to anything, and the two-state solution is a disappearing dream, and the reality of occupation can't go on forever.
US: A two-state solution is not only possible but inevitable; the one-state solution would have catastrophic consequences for both peoples, ranging from apartheid to major violence.
FP: How can Israel and the Palestinians achieve a two-state solution, and what if they can't?
AQ: I think the time allowed before us for achieving the two-state solution is limited, and it is running out very quickly. That means the time factor that Israel is using to create new facts on the ground in reality is working in a strong fashion against the two peaceful independent states living side by side option. In addition, Israeli society is moving more and more to the right with a rise of racial trends fueled by a sense of a military strength. The absence of Israeli historic leaders capable of taking risks for peace also is an additional element that is preventing the achievement of a solution based on international legitimacy in the near future.
I will not hesitate to say that the historic opportunity for achieving the two-state solution was wasted more than once at Camp David, Taba, Stockholm, and Annapolis at times when the Palestinian people had a historic leader in the caliber of Arafat. He was capable of accepting the desired outcome, defending it, and bravely taking on all internal risks.
Therefore, and since Israel is the occupying party that possesses the power, it should return the ball that has stayed in its court for so long. That means Israel should stop denying the principle of the peace process, giving up its expansion policies, and stop its plans in Jerusalem and other Palestinian areas. It is unrealistic that the weak side in this power struggle must take the initiative. The Palestinians have presented their historic initiative in 1993 when they recognized Israel and accepted the lines of June 4, 1967, with a strong commitment to peace as a strategic option. The Palestinians are not asking for anything more than recognizing their national legitimate rights, including their right to establish a sovereign independent state with Holy [East] Jerusalem and the right of return to Palestinian refugees based on Resolution 194 and the Arab Peace Initiative.
US: Palestinians and Israelis can reach a two-state solution only through a lengthy negotiation and implementation process, which will not happen in the current constellation without active involvement of the American administration. For such a process to be realistic, several elements must be put in place: an American vision for the ultimate outcome of permanent status based on the Obama Washington speech of 2011 and along the lines of the Clinton initiative; a clear timeline for negotiations and implementation; special American assistance and guarantees for Israel's security, including a NATO force in the West Bank (possibly an Israeli-American defense pact); American and G-8 economic assistance package for the creation and development of the new Palestinian state with its democratic institutions; a regional anti-terrorism pact; a people-to-people agreement linking the civil societies of the two sides, mainly the young generation.
The alternative to a viable peace process is not mere continuation of the status quo, but rather deterioration to violence, if not a regional war.
FP: What positive and negative changes have occurred in the region regarding the Israeli-Palestinian peace process?
AQ: It is difficult to speak of positive elements in the political environment over the past two decades that gave momentum to the peace process. That process was mainly subject to Israeli changes, mostly negative, as a result of six different prime ministers. Since Oslo and Rabin, the most positive Israeli PM was Mr. Shimon Peres, who in a short period of time as PM was able to achieve an Israeli military redeployment in six West Bank cities.
In a region like the Middle East, where negative expectations are a self-fulfilling prophecy, the biggest fear was a dysfunctional peace process. That feeling was with us since the signing of the Declaration of Principles and before the process became strong enough to sail on its own. We have experienced that with the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin in 1995 and with the complete political Israeli coup with the right under Benjamin Netanyahu taking over in 1996.
Since our partners who signed the Oslo agreement with us were no longer in power, the peace process was subjected to unlimited vigorous attacks, and progress was almost at a standstill. That continued until the Labor Party under Ehud Barak's leadership came to power in 1999, and with him we had many fruitless negotiating rounds. In mid-2000 we went to Camp David, which was the last useless negotiating round with an Israeli PM, where he wanted to open up all issues, including those that were covered with agreements previously signed. This led the peace process to a dead end.
Therefore we see that the history of the peace process was a mirror image of the changing Israeli politics and the negative trends it brought with it which put the entire process in the emergency room, followed by Second Intifada at the end of 2000 and the events of September 11th that changed the face of the entire world. All of this opened the door wide to a series of downward trends on both sides. Important among them was Prime Minister Sharon's decision to close the door in front of negotiations, reoccupying the West Bank in 2002, imposing a siege around Arafat's headquarters, and unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza, leaving behind an unstable internal situation, especially after the legislative Palestinian elections where Hamas had won and later carried against the PA in 2007.
It is true that after seven years of no activity on the peace process, the first direct negotiations took place in Annapolis, but those negotiations met the same fate as previous ones with failure that led to the land invasion of Gaza and the end of the Olmert government. With the return of Netanyahu's right-wing government, the process stopped, and settlements and Jewish activities in Jerusalem flourished. All attempts by Obama to stop these activities even for a limited period of time to reignite serious and constructive negotiations failed.
Now we find ourselves with this history of very little positive elements facing the naked truth: Israel was not serious in achieving just and honorable peace. It resorted to creating excuses and facts on the grounds to prevent progress on the peace process. The latest among these is Netanyahu's demand for the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state before the start of a new negotiating round that will be a cover for the acceleration of the ongoing settlement activities, which will undermine the foundation of peace between the two neighbors and destroy the dream of two-state solution completely.
US: The most important positive change in the region relating to Israeli-Palestinian peace is the impact on Arab attitudes towards Israel and Western attitudes towards the Palestinian state. The Arab world, in which the young Arab constituency has a very influential voice following the Arab Spring, is to a large degree shaping its attitudes towards Israel according to fate of their Palestinian brethren living under Israeli occupation. As we have witnessed between 1993 and 1995, a change in this reality will affect positively Arab relations with Israel, regional cooperation, international support for Israel and Palestine, and strengthen American strategic interest in the region. The Western world, led by the United States, will engage and cooperate seriously with the Palestinians on the diplomatic, strategic, and economic levels only after the creation of an independent, democratic Palestinian state.
There are no negative changes relating to Israeli-Palestinian peace except that both societies, through the fruition of a real peace process, will have to confront civil strife. Yet the identities of Israel, as a modern Jewish democratic state, and Palestine, as a modern Arab democratic state, can only be guaranteed through a peaceful two-state solution based on the Oslo Accords and its premises.
Levan Ramishvili
Of course, Netanyahu already embraced the concept of two states as soon as he took office, as outlined in his 2009 Bar-Ilan speech. However, Israel’s prime minister has also made quite clear that any genuine peace will have to rest on full Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. This has been responded to with skepticism from much of the international community, particularly on the part of the Europeans. The Zionist left (or at least what remains of it) has also proven pretty cold to this demand, with even moderates from this camp such as Shlomo Avineri appearing unenthusiastic about the Jewish state demand.
However, in this month’s featured essay for Mosaic Yoav Sorek not only proposes an alternative strategy, and indeed attitude, for Israel, but a strategy that places at its core the assertion of the Jewish state and its most fundamental rights. In his essay Israel’s Big Mistake Sorek argues that the path of concession and accommodation pursued by Israel since the early 1990s has been a disastrous one, only weakening it and emboldening the demands of Israel’s enemies. Sorek makes a strong case for the acknowledgement of the fact that since the conflict has not ever been about territory, but rather about ending Israel’s existence, nothing short of a total acceptance of a Jewish state in the Middle East will be able to deliver real peace.
Israel’s mistake has been to buy into the notion that it can purchase from the Arab world its right to exist by trading territory. It has pursued the land for peace equation on the belief that if it shrinks itself territorial, weakens itself strategically, then it can placate it enemies’ hostility. But as Sorek points out, logically the opposite is true. It is only by maintaining its strength, asserting its presence, and demanding to be recognized that Israel can have any chance of eventually compelling its neighbors to accept the reality of its existence, and in doing so fulfill the foundational vision of Zionism.
As far as concluding the long running dispute with the Palestinians is concerned, Sorek proposes that Israel might start by not seeking to appease and legitimize the most hard-line elements among the Palestinians. It was the great mistake of the Rabin government, the author argues, to recognize and elevate the PLO instead of continuing the policy of working to defeat Arafat’s terror organization. Instead, Sorek suggests that Israel should essentially take the initiative and simply assert its rights and authority over the entire territory in its control. Whether or not Israel is to find a way to simply fully integrate the Arab communities living throughout its territories, or whether they will ultimately see their future in reclaiming their former Jordanian citizenship, Sorek makes the claim that none of this will prove as difficult as the 20-year long shambles of attempting to establish a Palestinian state.
Obama makes the dishonest claim that he would like to be presented with some alternative to the two-state proposal. But that request is doubly disingenuous, because not only does the president clearly have no desire for an alternative plan, but he also knows full well that Netanyahu is cooperating in efforts to establish a Palestinian state. Yet, Netanyahu is also pursuing somewhat of a synthesis approach by insisting that territorial compromise by Israel must be matched by real Palestinian acceptance of the Jewish state.
Israel’s prime minister may demand this acceptance, but it is a sign of how doubtful the Israeli’s are that it will come from the region as a whole that they continue to insist that they hold such strategically significant areas as the Jordan valley. As Sorek observes in his essay, Israelis have given up on the hope of ever being embraced by the wider Arab-Islamic world. TS Eliot once wrote of those dreaming up systems so utopian that no one in them would ever need be good. In this way talk of sophisticated early warning systems in the Jordan valley, symbolic deals on token numbers of refugees, land swaps and more, are all part of misguided efforts to negotiate a final status arrangement so watertight that it won’t matter if the Jewish state is still reviled by Palestinians and the wider region.
As Yoav Sorek argues, nothing short of full acceptance of the Jewish state will bring peace to Israel and end the conflict, pursuing that acceptance is the only viable way to bring about a real and lasting peace.
Levan Ramishvili
Israel’s Big Mistake
How my countrymen gave up the hope for real peace, and how they can get it back.
By Yoav Sorek
These words are printed in three languages, loud and clear, on big red signs beside Israeli roads leading to Palestinian-governed territories:
This road leads to Area “A” under the Palestinian Authority. Entry for Israeli citizens is forbidden, life-threatening, and against Israeli law.
The warning is unlikely to shock anyone familiar with Israel today. As those of us who live here know all too well, a trip inside one of these areas can indeed prove fatal.
Yet the term “Israeli citizens” belies a deeply unsettling truth: not all Israelis need avoid entering these areas. Israeli Arabs come and go freely, and are even encouraged to conduct business in the territories. Only Jewish Israelis are at risk of death. No less unsettling is that one encounters such signs not at distant outposts, far from densely populated Jewish towns, but on the fringes of Jerusalem and the outskirts of Tel Aviv, just a few miles from Ben-Gurion International Airport.
Israeli Jews have resigned themselves to this reality. Under the laws of our own government, areas within what we consider our ancient national homeland are simply off-limits to Jews. We are not taken aback by this circumstance, not even disturbed. When the Palestinian Authority names central streets after suicide bombers with Jewish blood on their hands, we don’t think twice about it. And when we talk about a Palestinian state, we take it for granted that Jews will not be allowed to live there—or that, if allowed, they would never feel safe enough to do so.
To be sure, in the latest round of negotiations headed by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, all sorts of suggestions have been floated for normalizing relations between Israelis and Palestinians. At the end of January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went so far as to raise the prospect of Jewish settlers having the right to remain in a future Palestinian state. But the outcry of protest from his own coalition partners, together with the longstanding stony refusal of Palestinian leaders even to consider the notion of a single Israeli Jew living in their prospective state, has only underlined the grotesque abnormality of our situation.
Correcting this fundamental abnormality is what lies behind Netanyahu’s repeated demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state. Maintaining it in place is what lies behind their repeated rejection of the same demand. This—not territory—is the essence of the conflict. Just as the very existence of a sovereign Jewish state in the Middle East has been the root cause of the long-running Arab war against that state, accepting its existence will be the root cause of any future peace.
Unfortunately, we Israelis have stopped hoping for such a peace. In the disastrous aftermath of the Oslo accords, having awakened from a false dream, we have become realistic. We don’t talk much about peace—tellingly, what in the 1990s was called the “peace process” is now routinely referred to as the “political process”—and even when we use the term, we mean something different by it. We speak not of Arab acceptance of our legitimacy and our national aspirations but of how to arrange affairs so that the Jewish state can be kept safe, and the conflict confined. The hope that our neighbors will put aside their animosity and accept our presence here as right and natural—the hope, that is, for true peace—is something we have abandoned.
In doing so, we have also lost something that is key to our sense of ourselves, and to our future.
1. THE PHONE CALL THAT NEVER CAME
The Hebrew word for peace, shalom, entails more than the absence of violence; the verb from which it is derived means to complete an action, and the term itself connotes wellbeing and tranquility. In the Bible, shalom is the stage that follows victory. Once the Israelites repulse their enemies and are able to “dwell in the land safely,” they will also be blessed with “peace in the land” (Leviticus 26:5-6). King David is forced to fight wars throughout his life, but receives God’s promise that his son will reap the benefits: “I will give him rest from all his enemies all around . . . and confer peace [shalom] and quiet on Israel” (1 Chronicles 22:9).
Thus, the original Hebrew definition of peace involves more than a cessation of hostilities. Peace is the state in which one’s neighbors and rivals recognize that one’s presence is a fact and start cooperating instead of fighting.
This was the original Zionist vision as well. Even those who acknowledged that the Jewish homeland could not be built without bloodshed looked forward to the day when Israel would become a steady reality, accepted by all of its neighbors. Indeed, when the state of Israel was established, “in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months” (in the words of the 1948 declaration of independence), the new government took pains to “extend our hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness.” The declaration proceeded to visualize the days after the war, when the young state would “do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.”
At the time, few if any Zionists foresaw the Jewish state as a permanently isolated enclave, under unremitting threat from hostile neighbors. The image of “a villa in the jungle,” in the vivid coinage of former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, was emphatically not the Zionist dream. Instead, surveying the Middle East, the early Zionists saw the potential of a regional transformation, effectuated through cooperative efforts by Jews and Arabs together. Theodor Herzl inscribed this vision in his fictionalizedAltneuland (1902), picturing the Arab residents of Palestine as proud future citizens of the Zionist state. A half-century later, David Ben-Gurion reiterated the same vision, extolling Israel’s promise of bringing comity and prosperity to all.
History, of course, proved otherwise. Arab opposition to a Jewish homeland, strong from the beginning, proved unrelenting. In response, the Zionist movement eventually adopted Vladimir (Zev) Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” strategy: forge ahead, abandon vain efforts at appeasement, and build up the strength of the state against the day when none could dispute its permanence and there would be no choice but to accept it.
The Jewish state’s resounding victory in the Six-Day War of June 1967 convinced many Israelis that that longed-for day had come. Seven years earlier, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had proclaimed to the UN General Assembly that the “only solution” to the Arab-Israeli conflict was “the annulment of Israel.” But now, so sweeping was the young state’s lightning triumph over the massed forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan that in the aftermath it didn’t even seem necessary to draw up peace proposals. A full and genuine peace seemed inevitable: “Tomorrow,” in the words of a wildly popular song by Naomi Shemer, “we will maybe sail/ from Eilat to the ivory coast; and on the old destroyers/ golden oranges will be loaded.” Moshe Dayan, then minister of defense, said he was waiting for a phone call.
But the phone call never came. Instead, that same summer, the Arab League convened in Khartoum and issued its famous three “no’s”: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel.
In practice, as time went on, the “no’s” took on a somewhat softer tone. Most Arab states did, at least formally, accept UN Resolution 242 with its acknowledgment of the “sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of every state in the area.” Domestically, victory in 1967 also convinced many of Israel’s own Arab citizens that the state was here to stay; a process of genuine integration between the Arab and Jewish communities began, however haltingly, to unfold. In later years, after two additional wars, Israel would sign peace treaties with Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994) and thus, in at least two cases, win formal, bilateral recognition of the Jewish state’s right to exist.
2. ACCEPTING ARAB REJECTIONISM
But not so fast. If the treaties with Egypt and Jordan were not enough to bring peace—and they manifestly were not—it was because even in those two cases the recognition was grudging; diplomatic relations were accompanied by official coldness and, especially in Egypt, the continued encouragement of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incitement. Elsewhere, the Arab and Muslim refusal to accept the legitimacy of a sovereign Jewish state in the region persevered and, if anything, intensified as the burden of battle shifted from states to their terrorist proxies and to the sphere of international politics. In the latter arena, an early and enduring Arab victory was the infamous 1975 United Nations resolution condemning Zionism as a “form of racism and racial discrimination”; ever since that time, and despite the resolution’s repeal in 1991, denigration of the Jewish state in the world body has been obsessive and unceasing.
What did change over the years was the rhetoric of the anti-Israel campaign. No longer portrayed as an alien speck in the Arab Middle East that had only to be pulverized and excised, Israel post-1967 came to be depicted as a monstrously aggressive, expansionist, imperialist power that had viciously seized and occupied Arab territories and had set about abusing and victimizing their inhabitants.
The main carrier of this narrative on the ground was Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, founded by the Arab League in 1964—the most ruthless and intransigent of Israel’s enemies and the chosen vehicle of the larger political, diplomatic, and terrorist war waged globally against the Jewish state. Financed lavishly by Arab and, later, European and other international donors, the PLO, headquartered first in Jordan, after 1970 in Lebanon, and after 1982 in Tunisia, also operated freely in the Israeli-administered territories of the West Bank and Gaza, where it controlled much of everyday life.
Meanwhile, an arguably larger change was occurring within the psyche of Israel’s political and intellectual elites. Weary of policing the West Bank and Gaza, eager to move into the tantalizing era of reconciliation fleetingly glimpsed in June 1967, embarrassed and discomfited by the serial indictments of Israel leveled by the international community, many began to internalize the critique of their state’s fundamental legitimacy and to accept Arab rejectionism as an unalterable condition of life. Despite the brief euphoria generated by Egyptian President Sadat’s visit in 1977 and the subsequent peace treaty negotiated at Camp David, Israelis began perceptibly to surrender any thought of transforming the basic terms of a clearly intractable conflict.
The most striking evidence of this fateful shift in mood and perception would present itself in the early 1990s, when, under the premiership of Yitzhak Rabin, Israel started negotiating with its arch-enemy. Whereas real peace would have to be based on acceptance of the legitimacy of a Jewish state in the Middle East, the Palestinian national movement, represented by the PLO, was based on the opposite doctrine. Had Israel retained its hope for real peace, it should have been steadfast in its refusal of any dialogue with this organization, and waited for it to dissolve (as almost happened). Instead, entering into the most ambitious and futile of peace processes, it picked the PLO as its partner, thereby compromising on the issue of its own legitimacy and helping to create a new political entity based explicitly on anti-Zionism. In exchange for tepid and partial recognition, a small Jewish state in the midst of a huge Arab region agreed to shrink itself still further.
This was the new meaning of “peace,” and, just as one might expect, it led to nothing but violence. The passing of Gaza and most of the West Bank’s populated areas into the hands of Arafat and his murderous kleptocracy did nothing to resolve the problem of the 1948 Arab refugees (on which more below), to prepare the local Arab population for genuine peace, or to mitigate the larger Arab/Muslim refusal to accept a Jewish state. If anything, it achieved the contrary aim; in advancing that aim, the PLO initiated a sustained campaign of terror whose toll in blood would number in the thousands of Israeli civilians.
Yet even this was not enough to dissuade successive Israeli leaders from trying to woo some form of acceptance from the steadfastly recalcitrant Palestinians. The Oslo accords signed on the White House lawn in 1993 ostensibly obliged the PLO to strike from its covenant the call for Israel’s eradication. In the late 1990s, during his brief term of office, Ehud Barak, having reached a reckless final-status agreement with the Palestinian Authority (PA), insisted that Arafat declare a final end to the conflict. Benjamin Netanyahu now demands that Mahmoud Abbas recognize Israel as a Jewish state. So far, all such efforts have failed.
None of this should come as a surprise. In embracing the Palestinian national movement as its partner, Israel pretended not to see that, absent its fundamental objection to the existence of the Jewish state, there was no Palestinian national movement.
3. PAYING THE PRICE
That is today’s reality. Before considering what if anything might be done to change it, let’s look at a few examples of the price paid by Israel for constricting its Zionist horizons and acquiescing in the conditions imposed on it from without.
Tel Asur, also known as Baal Hazor, is the highest mountain in the Judean hills north of Jerusalem. Of its twin peaks, one is home to a military base and the other is open to visitors—unless they are Jewish. (The area is surrounded by hostile villages.) From the top one can enjoy a fascinating view of the Holy Land: the Mediterranean and the coastal plain to the west; the Gilead mountains in Transjordan to the east; the high mountains of Jerusalem and Hebron to the south; and the great Mount Hermon, facing Damascus, to the north. Mentioned in the biblical story of Absalom and Amnon (2 Samuel 13:23-30), the site, according to an ancient tradition, is where the patriarch Abraham first stood after separating from his nephew Lot and where he was promised by God that all he saw spread out before him would forever be the land of his descendants (Genesis 13:14-15).
To anyone who cherishes the Bible, here is a place of compelling and indeed romantic interest. Under normal circumstances, the Jews in Ofra, the nearby Israeli village to the southwest, and the Christians of Tayibe, the Arab village to the southeast, would cooperate to realize their area’s religious, cultural, and economic potential. Yet the Arabs of Tayibe are resolutely opposed to the mere presence of Jews in the area, and this turns everything into a political pitched battle.
Thus, when the residents of Ofra began to construct a sewage-processing plant to protect the area’s environment and drinking water, some neighboring Arabs, pushed by Israeli “peace activists,” petitioned to block its completion. The fact that the plant would also serve some of their villages, while being fully financed by Israeli Jews, was no deterrent. Claiming that part of the structure was built on private land and lacked the necessary permissions, they filed a lawsuit that succeeded in halting the project in its final stage. Now the unfinished plant corrodes in the sun, and the sewage runs freely.
Such stories abound in the West Bank, an area of picturesque landscapes rich in biblical and historical associations, all within a few minutes’ drive from Israel’s bustling metropolitan centers. It could and should be turned into a biospheric sanctuary, devoted to preserving the many archaeological treasures and traditional forms of agriculture to be found in the area. If this were to happen, local residents would benefit from a dramatic rise in amenities and employment opportunities, and the world would enjoy access to an un-mined portion of the biblical heritage. Yet with the exception of a few hiking paths, some freshly excavated ruins, and a number of boutique wineries and olive-oil presses—all in the Jewish sector—very little of this potential is being realized. On the contrary: in most of the Arab-inhabited countryside, delicate ecosystems are maltreated, sewage is uncared for, waste is burned openly, and scarce aquifers are polluted.
Another case of underdevelopment is the Old City of Jerusalem, one of the world’s best-known ancient sites. Commonly, such prized urban spaces undergo renewal projects, carefully restoring old buildings and streetscapes, rebuilding infrastructure, modernizing electrical and other delivery systems. This was done in the Jewish Quarter, which had been destroyed and plundered in the 1948-49 war and deserted during the Jordanian occupation. After its liberation in 1967, renewal projects uncovered, among other sites, the Herodian Quarter, the Burnt House, and the Roman Cardo, essential attractions for visitors from around the world.
No similar program has ever been seriously considered for other parts of the Old City, mainly populated since the 1950s by low-income Arab families living in cramped and dilapidated quarters. One might think there would be broad support for an initiative to rejuvenate the Old City as a whole, uncovering the archaeological riches lying underneath and bringing the entire walled area up to 21st-century standards. Yet the Palestinian leadership unfailingly objects to any such proposals. Whatever the area’s Arab residents may wish for in terms of an improved quality of life, the ethic of “resistance”—fueled as ever by foreign money funneled through Palestinian Authority enforcers—assures that these families stay where they are.
As elsewhere, the real source of tension in Jerusalem’s Old City is not Israel’s presence there since the June 1967 war but, rather, the longer-standing rejection of Jewish national legitimacy. One sees this clearly in the most seemingly refractory conflict of all: the one over the Temple Mount.
Conventional wisdom has it that any attempt to change the status quo on the Mount—where, ever since 1967, Israel has allowed the Islamic Waqf to retain its authority over the Muslim buildings as well as access to the plaza itself—will enrage the entire Muslim world and ignite a conflagration. But why? The Holy of Holies in the ancient Temple—the spot on the Mount most sacred to Judaism—was located, according to most authorities, in the middle of today’s 37-acre plaza. That spot is now occupied by the Dome of the Rock, which dates from the 7th century and is one of the most ancient and beautiful of Muslim monuments.
Unlike Al-Aqsa, the famous mosque located on the southern edge of the terrace, which faces south to allow worshippers to pray toward Mecca, the Dome is not and never was a mosque. According to some sources, it was built to protect the rock known as the foundation stone, and thereby to mark the place of the ancient Jewish temple. Its creators had no intention of denying the site’s Jewish importance, or of Islamizing it; indeed, some claim that the site was used as a synagogue in the Middle Ages, and until this day the whole platform is also known as Bayt al-Muqaddas, an Arabic version of Beyt Hamikdash, the classical Hebrew term for the Temple and its immediate environs.
Sadly, despite this history of former coexistence, today’s political struggle over the fate of Jerusalem has corrupted religious understandings. Al-Aqsa, coopted by the Palestinian resistance movement, has stretched symbolically over the entire Temple Mount, so that Jewish attempts to pray anywhere in the vast open areas of the plaza are portrayed as a threat to the mosque. Yet the truth is that Israel for its part has never repudiated the significance of this holy place to Muslims, and no amount of Jewish prayer, not even the building of a synagogue on the Mount, would harm the mosque in any way.
Still another contentious issue plagued by resistance to Zionism is the status of Arab citizens of Israel. Constituting roughly 20 percent of the population, they are the beneficiaries of numerous government programs aimed at improving their education, their economic opportunities, and their welfare. Yet while investment in the Arab sector is high, and while the share of taxes paid by Arabs is kept low, progress has been lingering. The reason is that, no matter how much Israel tries to advance the integration of its Arab citizens, there is no ignoring the elephant in the room: the issue of Arab loyalty to and solidarity with the Jewish state.
That issue affects both the way Israeli Jews treat Israeli Arabs and the way Arabs relate to the rest of society. There is no blinking the fact of discrimination against Arabs in Israel. Sheer prejudice may play a part here, but probably only a minor part. In general, it is no simple matter to join hands with people who very likely oppose your nation and wish it to disappear, and who therefore cannot be assumed to share your conception of the common good.
But the greater obstacles to Israeli Arab advancement are internal. The many Arabs who do accept the Jewish state as their permanent home are not represented in positions of leadership, and those who actively promote cooperation and integration are regularly branded as traitors. Recently, for example, an Arab Christian priest began advocating that Christian Arabs enlist in the Israeli army (they are officially exempt from service, though some volunteer); for this brave act, he was promptly silenced and had to be given police protection. In such an atmosphere, genuine integration remains extremely difficult, if not impossible.
There is much more to be said about the price paid within Israel itself for the forced closing of Zionism’s horizons. The regional price is, if anything, even higher. Israel is a dense country, inhabiting a small plot of land with scarce resources, and making an extraordinary success of it. But without a way to spread its success outward, the future is problematic. Real estate in Israel is expensive, not only because of market malfunctions but also because there is nowhere beyond the immediate borders where Jews can even consider living.
When a Jew from abroad wants to buy a home close to Jerusalem but can’t find what he’s looking for at a price he can afford, he will not turn his gaze to Amman, just a 90-minute drive from the Old City, but will stay in New Jersey and, a few times a year, fly twelve hours each way. Similarly, when an Israeli entrepreneur exhausts the opportunities of the home market, he will expand his reach not to neighboring lands but to Europe and the United States. And then there is the charitable front: Israel spontaneously dispatches aid delegations as far as Haiti and the Philippines, but is largely unable (at least publicly) to bring any real benefit to its own bleeding and war-torn region.
4. THE PATH NOT TAKEN
Was a different outcome conceivable?
The answer is yes, but a highly qualified yes. In the 1970s and 80s, had Israel not abandoned its single-minded quest for real, final peace, and had it stuck to its refusal to enter into dialogue with the unreconstructed PLO, it is at least possible (as I mentioned earlier) that the latter might have withered away. For this to have happened, of course, it would also have been necessary for other Palestinian leaders to emerge, leaders who, seeking the benefit of all, were prepared for reconciliation with Israel.
Indeed, there were such leaders-in-the-making among West Bank Arabs, though the odds against them were formidable and in the end decisive. Menahem Milson, who served briefly as civil administrator of the West Bank in the early 1980s, recalls how a “group of young Palestinians who had become politically active during my period [in office] laid the groundwork for a new political organization, the Palestinian Democratic Movement for Peace, calling for negotiations with Israel.” A number of West Bank notables—mayors, village chiefs, religious figures, educators, intellectuals, and others—were similarly bent on escaping the predatory grip of the PLO. From such beginnings it might have been possible to grow, in time, a new, moderate political class, ready in the right circumstances to take and exercise power in the public interest.
It was not to be. On one side stood the PLO, which since 1974 had been appointed by the Arab countries as “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” Its coffers overflowing with Arab and, later, European money, it distributed patronage, Mafia-style, in return for submission and unquestioning loyalty; nor did it hesitate to counter dissent and deviation by means of threats, intimidation, and murder. On the other side stood the Israeli administration, fastidiously non-interventionist in the civil affairs of the territories when not positively preferring to deal with the PLO, which it regarded as the only source of authority capable of insuring domestic calm (a mistake soon to be repeated and amplified by the Rabin government in entering into the Oslo negotiations). Between these two forces, as Milson records, the nascent democratic movement of the 1980s was condemned to failure.
Since then, some others have taken up the banner of an anti-PLO strategy. In his The Case for Democracy (2004), for example, Natan Sharansky urges Israel and the West to support and work with those Palestinians who, inspired by the idea of a free society, familiar with the workings of Israel’s democratic political culture, and eager to build truly representative institutions of their own, are the only potential peace partners worthy of the name. Moshe Yaalon, now Israel’s defense minister, records in his 2008 memoir, The Longer Shorter Way (Hebrew), his own odyssey as a peacenik mugged by Oslo and thenceforth converted to a more sober but also more activist and more hopeful position; reaching conclusions similar to Sharansky’s, his book is a model of clarity and common sense on where Israel went wrong in its dealings with the Palestinians and on how, by ceasing to treat with dictators while patiently helping to plant and nourish the seeds of democracy, it might correct its error.
5. WHAT TO DO NOW
What, then, can be done? Of course, as long as we Israelis continue to deal with a Palestinian leadership that cannot and will not accept the legitimacy of the Jewish state, there is a harsh limit to what can be achieved. That being so, Israel must simply allow the current, American-led “peace process” to self-destruct, as it will naturally tend to do.
But with the Arab world as a whole in flux, there may be a unique opportunity for Israel on its own to take steps in an alternative direction: one that is not focused solely on survival or on playing for time, that is not resigned to the permanent Arab rejection of the Jewish state, and that can circumvent the inevitable deadlock whenever we seek to appease or compromise with the Palestinian national movement. In short, the most important task is to change the Israeli mindset by recovering a positive Zionist vision.
Let’s start with the issue of the West Bank. Proponents of the two-state solution tend to see the West Bank as a separate territory that was seized by Israel from Palestinian rule in 1967. This is totally inaccurate: the West Bank is not a real territorial unit, there was never any Palestinian state there prior to Israeli control, and to this day Israel’s claim to the territory under international law is as strong as or stronger than anyone else’s. After 1948 and until 1988, when Jordan renounced its own claim to the area (a claim recognized by only three nations, and never by the Arab League) in favor of the PLO, the residents enjoyed Jordanian citizenship.
Were Israelis to return to their original concept of a Jewish state accepted by the surrounding Arab environment, their futile negotiations with the Palestinian national movement could be replaced by a dialogue addressing the very real problems of the Arab population of the West Bank. The biggest such problem is their legal and political status. If, as is possible, the PA is not going to become a state, what will be the identity of those who today live under its jurisdiction? Will they be able to recover their Jordanian citizenship? Will they enjoy full integration into Israel? Will a form of autonomy arise that will replace the PA?
Obviously, none of these options is simple or uncontroversial; by its very nature, the challenge admits of no simple or uncontroversial answers. But difficult does not mean insoluble. At only a fraction of the effort invested in the two-state solution over the last two decades, it would be possible to craft a model of governance that would benefit all parties. Once the idea of implacable Palestinian rejectionism is removed from the equation, even the option of integration into Israel makes sense. And why not? In the huge Arab Middle East, the Jews are a minority; in the small Jewish state, Arabs can be a minority. Fair enough.
Then there is the issue of the Arab refugees, which would similarly benefit from a paradigm shift in Zionist thinking. Their story is well known: the war that attended the founding of Israel in 1948 created hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees who sought shelter amidst their brethren in the surrounding Arab states. At the exact same time, and in almost exactly equal numbers, Jews were forcibly expelled from the Arab states of the Middle East. Put simply, a harsh wartime population exchange occurred.
The natural and most humane solution was to absorb all of these refugees where they were, which is precisely what Israel did with the Jewish refugees.. Yet, by decision of the Arab powers and with the active connivance of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the Arab refugees, except for those in Jordan, were kept stateless and apart as an enduring monument to the “catastrophe” (naqba) of 1948 and an invaluable diplomatic and propaganda weapon against the Jewish state.
UNRWA, created as a temporary aid agency specifically and solely for the Palestinian refugees, renews its mandate every other year, and the refugees, their numbers swollen into the millions by successive generations who know no other existence, remain imprisoned in the camps. Meanwhile, the campaign against Israel’s legitimacy prominently features a demand for the “resettlement” of the refugees and their descendants in their ancestral homes—a demand that holds out the prospect of destroying the state’s Jewish character altogether.
An Israel seeking real peace, a peace based on acceptance of its existence as a Jewish state, could also push for the rehabilitation of the Palestinian refugees and an end to their ongoing tragedy. Back in the 1980s, Menachem Begin’s government made a small effort to start such a process, but it was never carried through in a serious way. Today, as criticism of UNRWA is gathering steam globally, a self-possessed Israel could both urge and take a leading role in a broader campaign to put an end to this lingering ramification of the 1948 war.
Another initiative worth pursuing much more vigorously than heretofore is the integration of Israel’s Arab citizens, including by requiring of them, as it does of Israeli Jews, some form of national service. A third would entail standing confidently behind what Israel regards as the best ideas for local and regional development, ignoring the automatic objections of those who see the Jewish state as an illegitimate power.
An example of the last is the biospheric sanctuary mentioned earlier. This could be brought into being without waiting for a political solution for the West Bank as a whole. The Arab inhabitants of the area will cooperate if they understand that Israel is not only serious but unwavering in its intentions. The same can be said of urban renewal in the Old City: a clear Israeli vision and a strong stand against pushbacks, both domestic and international, can turn such a plan into a reality for the benefit of all.
Impossible? The case of the light-rail system in Jerusalem, which opened in 2011, proves that it can be done. The system’s route crosses the pre-June 1967 border, stitching together Arab and Jewish neighborhoods as if Jerusalem were never a divided city and as if there were no tension or hostility between Jews and Arabs. The service works quite well, and has become an undisputed fact of city life.
In brief, Israel must adopt a more confident view of itself. Over the last decade, there has been a welcome renewal of interest among Israelis in classic Jewish and Zionist thought. But that is not enough. Traumatized by decades of bitter conflict, we Israelis find it hard to regard the Arabs as partners; demoralized by decades of anti-Zionist discourse, we find it even harder to regard ourselves as potential benefactors of the region.
But it would befit us to dream again. In 1993, Shimon Peres, in The New Middle East, composed a rhapsodic paean to the era of unity and prosperity about to be ushered in, as he saw it, by the Oslo Accords. It was a deluded vision, soon to be shattered. But if, at some imaginable point in the future, Israel were to achieve true acceptance from its neighbors, a real new Middle East could indeed emerge. Is it too much to envision the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem megalopolis as the center of the future Levant? Or the spectacle of Jews being welcomed as residents in Arab countries? Or a massive aliya from North America? Or the restoration of Jerusalem as the international hub it previously was, with the old routes connecting Jaffa to Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo, long shut down and neglected, once more facilitating the traffic of goods and ideas around the region?
In 1949, after the ceasefire in the war of independence, David Ben-Gurion was touring the newly conquered Eilat region on the southern tip of the newborn state. Pointing toward the mountains of Edom on the Jordanian side of the border, he asked the army officer leading the tour how one might go about capturing them. The officer, like the professional he was, replied by sketching a quick tactical plan, but then stopped and asked the prime minister, “Why, do you have any plans to conquer the area?” “No,” answered Ben-Gurion, “I won’t try to capture it. But maybe you will.”
Israel needs no more territory or conquests. But the mindset of our current leaders is much too far from Ben-Gurion’s. Speaking with a large group of journalists in 2012, Benjamin Netanyahu projected the persona of an uncompromising leader preoccupied with one mission: survival. That is an admirable thing; we need leaders ready to take upon themselves that most onerous of responsibilities. But if Ben-Gurion, leading a much more fragile country and facing perhaps even greater external challenges, could see beyond his own horizon, then we should be able to expect the same of our own leaders. When they don’t see as far as we think they safely could, ours is the duty to help them envisage, and debate, the better future that might lie ahead.
Levan Ramishvili
Two-State-Minus
The two-state solution won’t work, the one-state solution won’t work. Where does that leave us?
By Hillel Halkin
I agree with Yoav Sorek that we should look forward to the day when there are no signs in the Land of Israel forbidding Jews to travel in parts of their historic homeland. But we should also look forward to there being no walls, fences, and roadblocks preventing and encumbering Palestinians from traveling in far more extensive parts of their historic homeland. However justified these may be at the present moment by considerations of security, they are surely more of an inconvenience and humiliation to Palestinians Arabs than the ban on travel in Area A is to Israeli Jews.
I point this out not because I wish to engage in the who’s right/who’s wrong debate that has characterized most discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian issue and that characterizes much of Yoav Sorek’s essay. Although I’m an Israeli and happen to think, if not in terms as black-and-white as Sorek’s, that my side has been more right than wrong, that’s not something I expect to convince the other side of. I point it out because any discussion of the problem that does not take into account the legitimate needs of both sides will just keep going around in circles.
Sorek is one of a growing number of people in Israel and elsewhere to argue that the conventional two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be implemented because it does not satisfy these legitimate needs and it must therefore be abandoned in favor of its one-state alternative. With the first half of that proposition, I once again agree. Dividing the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan into an Israel and Palestine that will, like Israel and Egypt, live with little contact on either side of a sealed border requiring passports and visas to cross is not possible. Israelis and Palestinians are not separable like Israelis and Egyptians. They are irreversibly scrambled together, with over a million Palestinians Arabs now living in Israel and over a half-million Israeli Jews in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Moreover, a majority of each people thinks it has a right—if not necessarily an exclusive one—to the entirety of this territory. No approach to the problem that fails to take these facts and feelings into account can work.
But the one-state advocates do not form a single group. Rather, they come from two diametrically opposed camps. One, on the international and Israeli far Left, calls for a de-Zionized bi-national state in which Jews and Arabs will be fully equal. The other, on the Israeli Right (international support for its position is non-existent), advocates a single Jewish state with a large Arab minority whose civil and human rights will be respected.
As a political concept, the bi-national Arab-Jewish state goes back to the 1930s. It was absurd then and it is even more absurd now. The idea of taking two bitterly warring peoples with different cultures, languages. religions, histories, and national aspirations and getting them amicably to share all of their institutions on an equal basis is either pitifully naïve or nastily Machiavellian. It is naïve in those who believe it can succeed. It is Machiavellian in those who know it cannot but support it because it will spell Israel’s doom. The naïve and the Machiavellian alike point to South Africa as a model, but conditions in South Africa in the early 1990s did not remotely resemble those prevailing between Israel and the Palestinians today.
Yoav Sorek belongs to the second camp, the advocates of a single, Jewish state west of the Jordan with a fairly accommodated Arab minority. Unfortunately, this, too, is a fantasy.
To begin with, who can believe that the world’s nations, including the United States, would agree to Israel’s annexing the West Bank in defiance of a long-standing international consensus in favor of an independent Palestinian state? As it is, Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria have drawn repeated international condemnation that has been slowly but steadily inching toward the imposition of economic and diplomatic sanctions. The annexation Sorek calls for would immediately bring on sanctions far more severe than any threatened to date. There is no way that Israel, a country totally dependent on international trade, could withstand them for more than a short time—which is to say that there is no way it can seriously contemplate annexation in the first place. Inasmuch as Yoav Sorek must be aware of this objection, the only explanation I can think of for his ignoring it in his essay is his knowing that it can’t be answered.
For the sake of argument, however, let’s imagine the unimaginable: Israel annexes the West Bank, the international community looks the other way, and annexation becomes a fait accompli. Now, all Israel has to do is figure out how it can politically absorb some two million hostile West Bank Arabs, thereby increasing its Arab minority from the roughly 20 percent that exists within its 1967 borders to over 40 percent.
Does it grant them full citizenship and voting rights, so that its Arab population is now in a position to elect 50 members to a 120-member Knesset? Does it deny them such rights and officially become the apartheid society that its enemies already accuse it of being? Does it resort to tricks and evasions, such as granting full rights on paper while making them conditional on Hebrew literacy tests, loyalty oaths, and bureaucratic review boards that will find reasons to turn down nine applicants out of ten? Does it make Palestinians the citizens of a West Bank Bantustan, empowered to elect their own school boards and dog catchers? Does it, without bothering to consult the Jordanians (who would of course refuse to cooperate), declare them citizens of Jordan?
“Obviously,” writes Sorek, “none of these options is simple or uncontroversial.” But not to worry. “At only a fraction of the effort invested in the ‘two-state solution’ over the last two decades, it would be possible to craft a model of governance that would benefit all parties.”
Since so little effort is required, one would have appreciated Sorek’s investing some and giving us the benefit of his conclusions. And yet what could these have been? There is no conceivable “model of governance” for an annexed West Bank that could avoid either, on the one hand, the full enfranchisement of its inhabitants with all the consequences for Israel that this would entail, or else, on the other hand, their permanent disenfranchisement in one form or another, with all its consequences. Although it’s by now a tired cliché to say that an Israel that absorbs the West Bank cannot continue to be both Jewish and democratic, this doesn’t make that statement any less true. (I won’t comment on the almost comical paternalism, let alone the practical unfeasibility, of Jewish planners creating a “biospheric sanctuary” in the West Bank for its Arab natives, who would no doubt be eternally grateful to be spared all the ills of modern economic development.)
The two-state solution won’t work, the one-state solution won’t work. Where, then, if not paralyzed by despair, does this leave us?
It leaves us, I believe, with what a smaller number of people than the one-staters have been advocating for years, namely, two states in one country—or, to put it more concretely, a Palestinian-Israeli federation in which two sovereign governments, each with its own institutions, one in the West Bank and one in pre-1967 Israel, collaborate in administering a territory that is the homeland of both Arabs and Jews. Each people would, subject to restrictions designed to safeguard the majority status of the other in its sovereign area, have the right to live and work in every part of this territory and to travel freely in all of it. Jews living in the Palestinian state would be free to choose Israeli or Palestinian citizenship (or perhaps both); Arabs now living in the Jewish state would have the same right.
One might call this the “two-state-minus” solution—one in many ways similar, in a bilateral form, to the multilateral structure of the European Union. Although France and Germany are still sovereign nations, their sovereignty is now constrained in various ways by the mutual obligations and commitments conferred on them by their EU status. One can imagine a similar arrangement between Israel and a Palestinian state. Benjamin Netanyahu wasimagining it last month when he suggested, as Sorek mentions, the possibility of Israeli settlers living in such a Palestinian state—and then, with a characteristic lack of political courage, declined to stand behind what he had said. No matter. He said it, and in doing so he was the first Israeli leader to put on the table—on a little corner of the table, it must be said—an idea whose time, I believe, will come.
Wouldn’t such an arrangement involve enormous problems, too? Of course it would. Unlike Yoav Sorek, I do not think that only a little effort is called for in conceptually squaring the circle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I do think, though, that there are better ways of doing it than the one he sketches in his essay.
Levan Ramishvili
In the first draft of the 2016 Republican-party platform, references to the two-state solution do not appear. CNN reports the “delegates drafting the Republican National Convention platform approved removing language encouraging a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians.”
An earlier draft had included support for “two democratic states” — the policy of recent Republican and Democratic administrations — but had removed a reference to Palestine included in the GOP platform four years ago. On Monday, the national security subcommittee of the Platform Committee approved an amendment dropping support of a two-state solution, according to four people who were in the room for the discussion. . . . “The U.S. seeks to assist in the establishment of comprehensive and lasting peace in the Middle East, to be negotiated among those living in the region,” the approved amendment said. “We oppose any measures intended to impose an agreement or to dictate borders or other terms, and call for the immediate termination of all U.S. funding of any entity that attempts to do so.”
The Democratic party platform supports a two-state solution, as it has previously.
What are we to make of this?
Support for a two-state solution has not always been American policy since Israel won the West Bank and Gaza in 1967’s Six-Day War. The initial assumption was that the West Bank would go back to Jordan, and Gaza to Egypt, as part of a “land for peace” deal that would be negotiated between Israel and each of those countries. When I worked in the Reagan administration, Secretary of State George Shultz was explicit in saying we did not favor the creation of a Palestinian state.
And after all, why would we? The Palestine Liberation Organization was led by Yasser Arafat, a terrorist and a thief. Who would want to give him a state? Well, Bill Clinton did. At Camp David in 2000, Clinton tried to broker an agreement between Israel and the PLO chief that would have handed him the West Bank and Gaza. But Arafat said no to Clinton and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak.
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The George W. Bush administration tried to square the circle. Under Saudi pressure the administration made the two-state solution official American policy. But after 9/11, the notion of giving the terrorist Arafat a state was unacceptable, so Bush found a fix in 2002: He announced that the United States would support Palestinian statehood only after Arafat had been removed from power. And, in fact, serious negotiations commenced only after his death in 2004.
But they too went nowhere, even after the international conference at Annapolis in 2007. Like Arafat, his successor Mahmoud Abbas said no to the Israeli offer, made in that case by Prime Minister Olmert.
Does this new language — or the absence of the old “two-state solution” language — mean the GOP is no longer for “peace”? That the party is for a permanent “occupation”? No, it means that the party’s platform is realistic about where we all stand in 2016 writing a platform for 2017–20. The goal we all share is clear: As the draft platform puts it, “The U.S. seeks to assist in the establishment of comprehensive and lasting peace in the Middle East, to be negotiated among those living in the region.” How exactly can that goal be reached?
Here the platform draft is silent, except to oppose imposition of any foreign (including American) plan. The fact is that no peace agreement is in sight, and that fact is acknowledged even by the Israeli Left. In January, Labor-party leader Isaac Herzog candidly told Israeli Army Radio, “I don’t see a possibility at the moment of implementing the two-state solution. I want to yearn for it, I want to move toward it, I want negotiations, I sign on to it and I am obligated to it, but I don’t see the possibility of doing it right now.”
“Right now” can turn out to be a long time. It’s popular on the left and in the Obama administration (perhaps a distinction without a difference) to say that the current situation in the West Bank is “unsustainable.” John Kerry says it all the time; in October 2014, for example, he said, “The current situation, the status quo, is unsustainable.” That “unsustainable” situation has lasted since 1967 — which is to say, for 49 years. Pretty good for something that’s “unsustainable.”
Israelis want to separate from Palestinians but cannot do so as long as their security is at risk. The best path forward is quite unclear. To a two-state solution at some near point, even if not “right now”? To greater Palestinian autonomy but also greater separation, in the near future? Toward more and more Palestinian reliance on Jordan, eventually? Those who are sure they know the answer, and that that answer is absolutely, definitely, unarguably, inevitably, the old “two-state solution,” are less persuasive as time goes by and as the Palestinian leaders appear to value their grievances against Israel more than they do achieving statehood.
So a cautious U.S. position might well be to state our clear goal, a “comprehensive and lasting peace,” without dictating one sole path to getting there. The new GOP platform language expresses not only strong support for Israel and for peace, but a bit of humility about our ability to see the future. Given events in the Middle East, that’s progress.
— Elliott Abrams is senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict.
Levan Ramishvili
The Eight State Solution
By Mordechai Kedar
Palestinian territorial contiguity is dangerous for Israeli national security. For security and demographic reason, Israel must retain as much land as possible in the West Bank. Evacuation of these areas will create a dangerous situation for Israeli security and eventually will necessitate reconquering extensive parts of the West Bank. There is no reason to dismantle and destroy the existing settlements, rather we propose the creation of seven independent and separate city-states within the West Bank, in addition to Gaza.
Premise:
There is no reason to assume that a Palestinian state will not become another failing Arab state, due to the fragmented society in the West Bank and Gaza, tribalism and the lack of awareness of nationhood as demonstrated by the failing performance of the Palestinian Authority since its establishment in 1994.
Since nobody in the world can assure that a Palestinian state will never turn – like Gaza – into an Islamic terror state, any solution for the Palestinians must minimize its potential threats on Israel, on the region and on the world.
Social stability is the key for political stability. Many existing Arab states are models only of ineffectual governance; the only successful model for an Arab state is the one which is based on a single consolidated traditional group such as each of the individual Arab Gulf Emirates. The standard Arab states - Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, which are conglomerates of tribes, religions, sects and ethnic groups – present the opposite picture. It is our belief that the successful Emirate model can be implemented in the Palestinian case more easily and successfully than the failing Arab model.
Problems with Territorial Contiguity:
Over the years, many Israelis and others have adopted the Arab-Palestinian narrative that views territorial contiguity as a condition for the establishment of a viable Palestinian state. As a result of this narrative and its pervasiveness worldwide, efforts are made to insure that the West Bank Palestinians will have an integral territory from Mount Gilboa in the north to the outskirts of Beersheba in the south. Thus, the large Israeli settlement blocs in the West Bank become thin “fingers,” with no ability to expand, and their inhabitants, easy targets.
Meanwhile, the central strategic goal of the state of Israel should be to permanently remain in Judea and Samaria and to prevent Palestinian territorial contiguity. There are dangers of maintaining territorial contiguity in the West Bank. While it will facilitate the Palestinians’ movement and allow them a better life, the repercussions are impractical for Israel. Territorial contiguity will compromise Israel’s security for the following reasons:
Rockets. Territorial contiguity will enable weapons smuggled from Gaza to easily reach all parts of the West Bank and to be used against the surrounding major Israeli landmarks and cities. For example, Israel’s only international airport, nuclear reactor, and towns such as Petah Tikva, Kfar Saba, and Afula in addition to Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv will fall within rocket range.
Non-viability of Palestinian governments. Experience has shown that Palestinian governments do not resolutely and consistently act against terrorists. Political and media messages since 1994 have proven that neither the PLO nor Hamas have prevented terrorism and the proliferation of weapons. There also is no evidence that any Palestinian government will prevent terrorism, even if Israel withdraws all the way to the Green Line. A further danger is the possibility of a Hamas takeover in Judea and Samaria and the creation of a terror state like the one in the Gaza Strip.
Tunnels. After the completion of the security fence in the West Bank, the Palestinians are likely to dig tunnels along the perimeter, as they have done along the Gaza-Egyptian border. These tunnels can be used to smuggle explosives and terrorists in and out of Israel. Palestinian territorial contiguity will make it easier for terrorists to bring explosives into Israel via the tunnels.
Territory. Transferring land to the Palestinians will remove the IDF presence from Palestinian towns. Two problems arise with this scenario. First, every strategic location Israel evacuates is at risk of becoming an arms depot and a haven for launching missiles into Israel. Second, any IDF operation against terror in these towns will require movement through hostile territory. This eliminates the element of surprise, essential for an operation’s success and forces the IDF to cope with explosives, mines and ambushes on the way to the target. By remaining in the rural areas of the West Bank, the IDF will more easily have the capacity to collect intelligence and to perform military operations against terrorists, if needed.
Water. Most of Israel’s water comes from an aquifer located under the Judea and Samaria. Palestinian sovereignty over the aquifer will create a grave water problem, compounded by the presence of tens of thousands of Israelis who will need to be evacuated from the settlements of Judea and Samaria.
Arab neighbors to the East. Palestinian territorial contiguity will cut off the strategically vital Jordan Valley from Israel, exposing it to dangers from the east - Jordan, Iraq and Iran. The threat posed by Iraq and Iran is thus greatly magnified by the loss of this territory.
Settlements. Retaining the rural areas in Judea and Samaria will significantly reduce the number of settlements to be dismantled, increase the chances that evacuation of settlements will be accomplished by agreement, decrease the expenditures for compensation and rebuilding, and limit the destructive repercussions on Israeli society. At present, there are serious social disruptions resulting from the events of Gush Katif, northern Samaria, and Amona. There is also a growing distrust and the resultant alienation from the political establishment and the democratic system by religious Zionists and settlers. Efforts should be made so that further withdrawals will be conducted in cooperation with the settlers and not in opposition to them.
Solution: Palestinian City-States
For all the reasons mentioned above, Israel must strive to block the territorial contiguity of the West Bank while maintaining the Israeli presence in the area between Ramallah and Nablus, including the settlements of Ofra, Shilo, Eli, Yizhar, Itamar, and the region of Ma’ale Efraim.
Therefore, the proposed plan is the creation of eight independent and separate city-states within the West Bank, having a limited rural periphery, that will enable future expansion and the establishment of industrial zones. The towns that will receive independence are under this plan are Hebron (the Arab part), Jericho, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Tul-karem and Qalqilya. Bethlehem will require further consideration. At the same time, Israel must create a situation of de facto annexation of the majority of the rural areas, while granting Israeli citizenship to those Arab residents of the villages who want it.
Such a de facto division, sustained over time, will foster the development of local rule and facilitate the establishment of political entities based on each separate city-state.
In its public relations outreach, Israel will put forth and explicate the concept that size alone does not determine the success or failure of a state. For example, Monaco, Lichtenstein, San Marino and Luxembourg are small states with a high quality of life, while Algeria, Libya, and Sudan are large states with poor quality of life. Thus, it is demonstrable that size is less important than effective government. So far, the Palestinians have shown their inability to manage an orderly, peaceful political system that has renounced terror. Until this happens, Israel must retain as much territory as possible to defend its citizens.
Hurdles
There are three major hurdles for Israel regarding the question of territorial contiguity. The first deals with the differences in social characteristics between Gaza and the West Bank. In Gaza, there is a high percentage of refugees and Bedouins, while by contrast, their concentrations in the West Bank are smaller. The levels of education and income are also unequal, and even the spoken language differs. As a result, it appears that the political separation between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip will continue. Considering that the prevailing historical competition and tensions between Nablus and Hebron have created friction within the Palestinian Authority, it can be reasonably assumed that their separation into two states will be tacitly accepted.
A second hurdle that Israel must overcome is the Supreme Court. Currently, the Supreme Court has taken on the role of demarcating the country’s borders. To undo this role, the Knesset must pass a basic law, by which the government declares that the setting of borders is a political rather than a judicial act. Indeed, defining a state’s borders has political (not legal) significance, and it is inappropriate for the Supreme Court to continue managing Israel’s relations with its enemies.
The third and highest hurdle is Israeli public opinion, which has adopted the terms “Palestinian territories” and “occupied territories.” This terminology is taken from the Arab-Palestinian narrative that Europe has so enthusiastically adopted and espoused. These terms are problematic because there still is no Palestinian state and, therefore, no “Palestinian territory.” The region of Judea and Samaria is a territory without sovereignty, and the ability to claim sovereignty over it exists for any state that borders it, including Israel. The existence of Israeli settlements over dozens of years is sufficient for claiming sovereignty. Moreover, the residents of the territory are Israeli citizens. The settlements do not infringe on the sovereignty of any existing state. Since these territories are vital to Israel’s security, the government needs to construct and propagate a new and different narrative. They should use these arguments to inform and so, combat, negative public opinion.
From the standpoint of demography, the rural areas in the West Bank constitute a small burden relative to the size of the territory that will be added to the state through annexation. Hence, there is almost no need to relinquish these areas out of demographic considerations. Israel will provide these residents a choice between citizenship and residency, the same choice possessed by the Arab residents of East Jerusalem.
Taking into consideration Israel’s security requirements, it is imperative to block the territorial contiguity of any future Palestinian entity. Israel should encourage and assist the establishment of eight “city-states” in the towns of Judea and Samaria, which will be independent and separate. Technical problems arising from the separation between them can be solved if their residents maintain good neighborly relations with Israel.
Israel must retain as much rural land in the West Bank as possible, particularly the area between Ramallah and Nablus, for security and demographic reasons. Evacuation of these areas will create a dangerous situation for Israeli security and will necessitate reconquering extensive parts of the West Bank. According to this scenario, there is no reason to dismantle and destroy most of the existing settlements.
It would be a dangerous folly to relinquish these areas of the West Bank and would result in undermining Israel’s security and economy. Such ideas stem from the adoption of Arab-Palestinian, anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli rhetoric would must be strongly refuted. It is imperative that Israel do everything possible to thwart such an outcome.
Mordechai Kedar, PhD, the director of the Center for the Study of the Middle East and Islam (under formation); a researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies; a lecturer at the Department of Arabic, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel. Mordech...@biu.ac.il
Levan Ramishvili
The 8-State Solution
The Palestinian Authority’s grip on Judea and Samaria is weakening, with its disintegration a distinct possibility. A possible solution.
Ron Jager
Not long ago, the head of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Mahmoud Abbas, spoke at the UN General Assembly, basing his remarks on three basic Palestinian beliefs that reflect the PA's inability to be partners towards a peaceful solution with Israel. Abbas, spoke of the Palestinian Arab refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist as the Homeland of the Jewish People, he refused to end the PA’s incitement to commit terror against Jews, and reaffirmed the so-called “right of return” which means nothing less than the end of Israel as a Jewish State.
The PA chairman's remarks concerned only the Jewish State, but back home in the Middle East, Mahmoud Abbas’s greatest threat is not Israel, not Israel’s military presence in Judea and Samaria ('West Bank'), and not even the so called “settlements”. Abbas’s number one existential threat is that the Palestinian Authority’s grip on Judea and Samaria is weakening, with growing political instability across the region and the Hamas terror organization breathing down his political neck.
Pinhas Inbari, a researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs has painted a grim picture of the growing dislike and the loss of widespread support of the PA by the local Arab population. In Nablus, Fatah terrorist cells are in open rebellion against PA security forces. Since August 18, Fatah cells have repeatedly engaged PA forces in lethal exchanges, and according to Inbari, the town is now in a state of “total anarchy.” In Hevron, tribal leaders, more or less dormant for the past 20 years, are regenerating a tribal alliance as a means of bypassing the PA, which no longer represents them. Their first major action to date was to send a delegation of tribal leaders to meet with King Abdullah of Jordan. Even in Ramallah, the seat of Abbas’s power, the PA is losing ground to EU-funded NGOs that seek to limit the PA’s economic control over the groups and their operations.
While the Palestinian Authority verges on the brink of total chaos, President Obama used his meeting this week with Prime Minister Netanyahu to defiantly ignore the Palestinian Arab refusal to negotiate with Israel, and instead proposed the worn out and obsolete formula known as the two-state solution, for reviving negotiations. As usual Obama clearly avoids blaming the Arabs, while at the same time demands of Israel to agree to a high-risk territorial compromise without simultaneously making it crystal clear that there will be no "right of return" for Palestinian Arab third and fourth generation "refugees."
The idea of a "right of return" is as we all know unique to the Israel-Palestinian Arab conflict; no other people in the world other than the Palestinian Arabs have demanded the "right to return." Keep in mind that hundreds of thousands of Arabs who came to Israel from all over the Middle East prior to the 1948 war and had lived here for as little as a year before the War of Independence broke out (when Arabs attacked the fledgling Jewish state) are demanding the "right of return". These Arabs were foreign workers in Palestine before 1948 with no prior residential status. Many of them carry names like "El Iraqi" ("from Iraq") or El Masri ("from Egypt") or "El Hourani" ("from the Houran, Syria"), which testify that they are originally not from Palestine but that they came from: Iraq, Egypt, and Syria.
Today, they certainly don’t want to return to those places. They would rather live in Israel – a democratic state that honors human rights, religious freedom, and a robust and free economy. Why go back to Syria where they shoot you in the street for whistling, while in Israel, a Palestinian Arab’s complaint of being detained for 5 minutes at a security checkpoint is considered a major violation of international law.
If we imagine a future Palestinian Arab state, it will have to forcibly integrate competing clans and tribes, so what are we really talking about? Those of us who live in Israel know that Arabs who live in Hevron, Jericho and Shechem (Nablus), never ever marry one another, let alone see themelves as one united nation. If they will be forcibly incorporated into one Palestinian Arab state, the result will be just another Arab state in perpetual conflict with itself blaming Israel for all of their internal problems.
Dr. Mordechai Kedar, a senior researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University, the author of the Eight State Solution has based this concept on a sociological and historical analysis of Arab tribes and the consequent concept of Arab tribal city-states. Dr. Kedar proposes the creation of no less than eight independent and separate Arab city-states within the "West Bank," in addition to Gaza. Of course, Israel would comprise the ninth. He writes: “There is no reason to assume that a Palestinian state will not become another failing Arab state, due to the fragmented society in the "West Bank" and Gaza, tribalism and lack of awareness of nationhood as demonstrated by the failed performance of the Palestinian Authority since its establishment in 1994…Social stability is the key for political stability…the only successful model for an Arab state is the one which is based on a single consolidated traditional group such as each of the individual Arab Gulf Emirates.”
There is much logic in what Dr. Kedar describes about Arab societies. The Arab Middle East has always been composed of many tribes, religions, sects, and ethnic groups, all at war with each other and with their government. The colonial imposition of a central, western-style nation-state based on arbitrarily drawn border demarcations has not served the interests of the many indigenous people but rather the interests of dictators and corporate interests. Thus, according to Dr. Kedar, there is essentially one tribe that “governs” in Ramallah, another tribe entirely which does so in Nablus, yet another which presides over Jenin, etc. A small city-state might be able to become productive and join a confederation of similar city-states. After all, size alone does not determine the success or failure of a state. For example, Monaco, Lichtenstein, and Luxembourg are small states with a high quality of life, while Algeria, Libya, and Sudan are large states with poor quality of life. According to Dr. Kedar: “The towns that will receive independence (from both the Palestinian Authority and Israel) are Hevron (the Arab part), Jericho, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Tul-karem and Qalqilya…Bethlehem will require further consideration.”
Approaching fast is the day when the Palestinian Authority we have known for the past 22 years will cease to exist. The Oslo Agreement that begat the fiction of the two-state solution is about to be shattered once and for all. The only relevant question today, is what does Israel intend to do next?
The Eight State Solution can be a practical solution for the Palestinian Arab local leadership who are unable and unwilling to accept Israel’s right to exist. Israel has extended out her hand for peace many times yet a real peace process is far from sight. As long as the Palestinian Arabs desire to replace us, rather than to live alongside us, we should adopt the Eight State Solution as the only realistic and practical solution possible in the coming years.
Levan Ramishvili
Alternative Solutions To Israel-Palestinian Quagmire
Conventional wisdom suggests that we all know the essentials of what a final deal between Israelis and Palestinians will look like: two states, some land swaps, and a sensible compromise regarding Jerusalem, refugees, resources and security issues.
But as the Israeli government presses on in its settlement-building ventures, and President Trump casually states his indifference to promoting a two-state solution, the decades-long impasse has resulted in several alternative ideas over the years. Some are advocated by certain sects of Israeli and Palestinian societies, others by particular corners of the international community, and there are those ideas conceived in the ivory towers of academic circles that may never become policy, but are sure to make you think twice.
Zero-state Solution
Proposed by the right-wing Israeli think tank Ariel Center for Policy Research, this viewpoint condemns what it calls “the defeatist campaign” of previous Israeli governments under the Labour Party. The ACPR dismisses ideas of a Palestinian identity as “euphemistic,” believing instead that “Jordan is Palestine.” A “zero-state” solution would have Israel extending sovereignty over the West Bank, providing limited autonomy for Arabs in the West Bank who would become Jordanian citizens living as expats. Gaza would be handed over to Egypt to deal with. Already assuming these terms would never be accepted by their Arab counterparts, the zero-state solution would be a unilateral decision by Israel.
One-state Solution
Increasingly, a one-state solution is being looked at as viable, if not inevitable, by numerous groups. However, what a one state solution looks like depends on who you’re listening to.
Isratin
Isratin would bestow equal rights and citizenships to all inhabitants of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza under one political unit. Advocates believe that settlements have effectively erased the possibility of a viable Palestinian state, leaving this framework as de facto solution. Others view a prospective “Palisrael” as the only democratic, just solution.
Some Israeli citizens of Palestinian descent, who worry a two-state solution might force them to leave or join a Palestinian entity they’ve been separated from, favor such an arrangement.
But while the proposal has some support among left-wing circles, the majority of Israelis and Palestinians oppose the idea as anathema to self-determination. Zionists view Isratin — which Israelis fear would lead to a Palestinian majority — as the destruction of the Jewish state. Islamists and Pan-Arab nationalists similarly oppose it along ethnic and religious lines.
Other versions of the plan include a form of power-sharing between Jews and Arabs under a federalist structure, allowing for self-rule on issues insular to respective ethnic groups while residing under the same larger political entity.
A settler’s one-state solution: Greater Israel
Some right-wing Israelis advocate for Israel to annex the West Bank and provide Palestinians in the region with limited rights, denying them citizenship to avoid the perceived demographic threat. Voluntary emigration has also been offered as a possibility as well. Some Israeli figures, particularly Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post, actually believe that the population statistics are misleading and a Jewish majority will be maintained in the event of annexation and citizenship for all.
These proposals often exclude Gaza as a lost cause without a Jewish presence. To solve this problem, Israeli professor Mordechai Kedar proposed applying the Emirate system found in the Gulf states to the Palestinian enclaves within Greater Israel in a so-called “eight-state solution,” an arrangement where Gaza would simply be one of seven Palestinian emirates.
Naftali Bennett, leader of the settler Jewish Home party and Israel’s Minister of Education, has proposed creating a quasi-Palestinian state. Bennett would seek to annex Area C of the West Bank and give Palestinians living there citizenship. In the rest of the West Bank, there would be increased Palestinian autonomy and political independence, with military infrastructure and checkpoints removed. However, this quasi-state would not enjoy control over its borders or have a military.
Hamas’s one-state solution: Greater Palestine
Most recently, Hamas leaders have claimed to accept terms that would establish a Palestinian state within the pre-1967 borders. However, Hamas’ founding charter sought for a greater Palestine in the entire area that would be Islamist in nature, an aspiration which has remained constant among conservative Palestinian populations.
The ‘Greater Gaza’ Plan
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi floated offering the Sinai Peninsula to Palestinians to combine with Gaza and form an autonomous, demilitarized Palestinian state. This proposal would deliver Palestinian refugees and residents in the West Bank to an area rich in natural gas with their own coastline. In return, the Palestinians would end claims to East Jerusalem and the West Bank. However, both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority voiced opposition to the proposal.
Three-state Solution
Similar to the “zero state” proposal, a three-state solution generally involves Gaza becoming a part of Egypt and Areas A and B in the West Bank reverting to Jordanian control. Advocated by former U.S. Ambassador John Bolton as well as former Israeli national security advisor Giora Eiland, this idea finds support in right-wing circles, though it fails to address Palestinian sovereignty and the lack of willingness by Egypt and Jordan to absorb these populations.
Steven Davidson is an editorial fellow at The Forward.
Levan Ramishvili
Developed by Dr. Mordechai Kedar, this plan allows for 1.8 million Arab Palestinians in Judea & Samaria, the West Bank, to become citizens of the seven independent city-states.
The only viable solution for the future of Israel...
Israel faces three immediate threats today: the possibility of a nuclear Iran, well over 100,000 rockets and mortars poised from three directions (Iran, Lebanon, Gaza plus terrorists in Syria and Egypt) and the Two State Solution.
The first two threats seem obvious, but why do we think that the Two State Solution could lead to the demise of our beloved Israel? After all, it's been the mainstay policy thrust upon Israel with various international initiatives and roadmaps to peace. But in reality it would bring about the opposite result.
The creation of an artificial Palestinian state requiring the uprooting of Jewish families where no Arab population currently exists would lead to indefensible borders for the Jewish homeland. The more moderate PA and Fatah want a Palestinian state as a precursor for the ultimate demise of Israel. Hamas remains opposed to any agreement which establishes a border recognizing the Israeli state. Any proposed re-unification between Hamas and Fatah is an obvious ploy that further threatens the survival of Israel and the Jewish people. The recent attacks against Israel by Hamas are now coordinated with the militant pro-Syrian, Iran-backed Islamic Jihad. Plus the Popular Resistance Committee is yet another terrorist group operating from Gaza.
The Arab Spring has brought about a much less stable region. Israel can no longer allow the rest of the world to dictate policy that makes it more difficult for the Jewish nation to survive. Israel must declare it’s own independent solution with regards to the so-called Palestinian movement and militant jihadism that appears to be on the ascendancy. Doing nothing only invites intervention from abroad.
Prior to statehood in 1948 the larger territory was known as the British Mandate of Palestine. The Jewish people, who have been on this land continuously for 3,290 years, were often referred to as the Palestinians from the early 1920's until statehood in 1948. Here are just two examples that prove this important distinction. The Palestine Post was founded by an American Jew in December 1932 in the Mandate of Palestine and supported the struggle for a Jewish Homeland. In 1950, two years after the State of Israel was declared, the paper was renamed The Jerusalem Post. And what started as the Palestine Symphony Orchestra is known today as the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.
The Arabs who emigrated to the territory in the late 1800's and early 1900's to live and prosper among the Jews never wanted to be recognized as the Palestinians until it became a convenient tool in their opposition to the Jewish Homeland. In 1964 the PLO was formed which finally transformed the mantle of Palestinian from the pre-statehood Jews to the post-statehood Arabs.
Historically there never existed an Arab or Islamic state of Palestine with a capital in Jerusalem. The capital of "Jund Falastin" ("The District of Palestine") under the Islamic 7th century occupation was the city of Ramle, 30 kilometers to the west of Jerusalem. It is very important that this historical truth be recognized as a basis for peace.
There is no Occupied territory west of the Jordan River. There is Disputed territory as a result of wars thrust upon Israel by jealous Arab neighbors. Today Arabs live within the State of Israel and in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. These Arab population centers are not going away and neither is the State of Israel.
Gaza is already a state-like entity, since Hamas took it over by force from the PLO in June 2007, thus breaking the Palestinian Authority into two separate entities. If Israel is forced to leave Judea and Samaria as part of a peace agreement, it becomes very possible that the more militant Hamas would eventually take over from the current PA/Fatah regime just as they did in Gaza, either by elections or by force. No one can guarantee otherwise.
Due to tribal rifts and local patriotism there will never be a successful unity government among the Palestinian Arab population centers in Judea and Samaria or Gaza. Like the PLO in the past, the PA/Fatah and Hamas do not represent the true ambitions of the majority of peaceful Arabs who just want a better future for their children within a traditional framework and local governance. The failed Two State Solution is rapidly heading to the dustbin of history where it belongs.
Successful Arab leadership must be independent, local and firmly rooted with a traditional and homogenous sociological foundation. Israel and the world should recognize and support local leadership in the Arab Palestinian population centers that desire lasting peaceful relations as independent city-states. Because of ongoing corruption and an overt anti-Israel agenda, the leaders of the PLO, PA/Fatah and Hamas have devoted almost a half century in a futile attempt to eliminate Israel and destroy all that her citizens have accomplished.
The eight city-states would comprise the areas of Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Jericho, Tul-Karm, Kalkilya, the Arab part of Hebron and the Gaza strip. Local residents would become citizens of these eight independent countries. Any Arab leadership that attempts to circumvent or dominate the development of these Palestinian Emirates would inhibit a future of security and economic opportunity for the citizens of these eight independent countries.
The Arab refugee situation can only be solved if there is lasting stability in the region. In 1948 approximately 500,000 Arabs were uprooted in advance of an Arab attack on Israel. At the same time over 800,000 Jews were thrown out of neighboring Arab countries, and most of the Jewish refugees successfully resettled in Israel. The Arab refugees have since been discriminated against by the Arab countries in the region in conjunction with the biased policies of UNRWA, so not a single Arab refugee has ever been resettled. The former director of the refugee agency in Jordan, Sir Alexander Galloway, actually stated, “The Arab nations do not want to solve the Arab refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore… as a weapon against Israel.” The obvious failure of the peace initiatives, which have been based on false assumptions for so many decades, has only perpetuated the Arab refugee problem and human suffering.
Complex problems require simple, workable solutions. The Palestinian Emirates vision is a viable alternative based on the Arab sociology of tribalism in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. This initiative will bring about a stable peace to the region and added security for Israel.
Eighteen Point Executive Summary
1/ The only true loyalty of the Middle Eastern Arabs is to family, clan and tribe and the local sheikhs who are their only true leaders.
2/ There is little trust that currently exists between people of the different tribes in the Arab Palestinian cities of Judea, Samaria and Gaza.
3/ Any PLO/PA led government of a Palestinian state would most likely become another corrupt and failed Arab state just like Syria, Sudan and Libya.
4/ If a Palestinian state would be established then Hamas would soon seize control in Judea & Samaria (the "West Bank") from the weak and corrupt PLO/PA/Fatah leading to a battle between Hamas and the Islamic State for control of the Levant, the land bridge between Turkey and Egypt.
5/ Israel would be faced on two borders by Hamas whose Charter openly calls for the destruction of the Jewish Homeland and the killing of Jews worldwide.
6/ The PLO/PA/Fatah and Hamas are not reliable negotiating partners for peace.
7/ The Two State Solution was already achieved in 2007 when Hamas established its state in the Gaza strip.
8/ Israel should take the lead to find a workable solution in light of the biased November 2012 and December 2016 UN votes which did not confer actual statehood to the Palestinians.
9/ As tribal leaders, the individual sheikhs may want their independence from the PLO/PA or the openly hostile terror groups to chart their own destiny of peace and prosperity.
10/ Israel should recognize the development of independent city-states, a/k/a emirates, in seven cities of Judea & Samaria, which would likely occur over a period of a few months.
11/ Each of the seven city-states in Judea & Samaria will be based socially on the local group of clans. Altogether there would be emirates in the seven non-contiguous emirates in the cities of Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Jericho, Tul-Karm, Kalkilya, and the Arab part of Hebron. This is in addition to the emirate already established in the Hamas-led Gaza strip.
12/ The Arab Palestinians living in the seven largest cities in Judea & Samaria would become citizens of those city-states. The remaining Arab Palestinians living in the rural areas could remain in place with citizenship to be determined in the future, or migrate to one of the city-states or another country. Israel might offer its citizenship to villagers who agree to be peaceful Israeli citizens.
13/ The Palestinian refugee problem can only be only solved in the Muslim Arab states, not in the Jewish State of Israel.
14/ As these independent Arab Palestinian emirates develop, they may choose to form a beneficial alliance together to increase security, economic development and other aspects of common interest.
15/ The sheikhs would view the more powerful Israel as invincible and establish a renewable temporary peace in order to focus on eliminating the terrorist and jihadist elements within the secure borders of their city-states.
16/ Israel would absorb and control the rural areas of Judea & Samaria to enhance security and development for the region.
17/ The PLO/PA leadership will eventually disappear from Judea & Samaria once the emirate movement takes root.
18/ Since being liberated in 1967 after a 19-year Jordanian occupation, Jerusalem will remain as the undivided capital of the Jewish nation which welcomes peaceful visitors of all faiths from all over the world to come and pray at their holy sites.
Levan Ramishvili
Tribal City States
A New Approach to Middle East Stability
Mordechai Kedar & Irwin J. Mansdorf
Tribalism, which may be understood as “loyalty of individuals and groups to a traditional framework, such as a clan, sect, ethnic or religious subgroup,“ is often thought of as a primitive institution which is awkward with respect to the modern world. In reality, it forms the basis of much of the social structure of the Arab and Islamic world. It has been noted that tribal or family alliances endure intact even after tribal territory has been incorporated into a state system, or after the imposition of an alien political structure. Recognizing this fact, it is pragmatic to examine the possibility of using tribal structures to formulate a political solution to the dilemma of state building for the Palestinians.
Undoubtedly, there are major discrepancies between the mores and values of tribal societies and those of Western societies, particularly in the areas of democratic values and human rights. The question is how, within those preexisting tribal structures, there might be built a political system that allows peaceful coexistence and respect for human rights.
In the Middle East, borders were largely determined by European colonial powers, usually according to their own interests. This led to the establishment of states that were conglomerates of disparate tribes and groups that had no history of peaceful coexistence before they were granted independence. What resulted was the establishment of countries, such as Syria, Iraq and Yemen, in which tension and instability were the norm. This can be contrasted with the social and political stability that characterizes the United Arab Emirates (The UAE consists of seven emirates: Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al-Quwain, Ras-al- Khaimah and Fujairah), which consist of nation-states configured from single, traditional tribes that built their power base on the foundation of traditional tribal affiliations.
Since the imposition of Western ideas and forms of government upon tribal nations has failed miserably, perhaps the time has come to consider a different solution that can preserve some of the objectives of democratic systems while at the same time respecting local traditions and the cultural authority of local tribes. (As the United States military is now attempting in Afghanistan, where appealing to tribal councils instead of a central government has had some success.)
The question is, whether by utilizing the Arab Emirates model of states founded upon tribal bases, a viable Palestinian entity can be established that will be accepted by the peoples of the region. If successful, these “United States of Palestine,” divided according to unique tribal areas, could form a confederacy that could make cooperative alliances with each other, with Israel and with other countries. Such a system could actually allow for greater democratic development, as the various subgroups within the culture would find self expression within their own politically unique areas. There would be many obstacles to be overcome. The key to the success of this endeavor would be to find the relevant “super ordinate goals” – that is, mutually agreed upon goals that would require the cooperation of more than one group to attain – that would foster growth, minimize conflict and hopefully promote a healthy civil society that respects human rights.
The benefits would be many: The stability and ease of domestic tensions within Islamic societies, and the enhancement of the economy, employment opportunities, broadening of education, public health advancement and stable state infrastructure would all potentially arise from this arrangement, to the betterment of Islamic society, all while using traditional governmental and social structures. Obviously, utilizing the concept of tribalism is not the sole or complete solution to the problems of the region, but, at the same time, recognizing tribalism for the power it does have is essential.
Mordechai Kedar, PhD, the director of the Center for the Study of the Middle East and Islam (under formation); a researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies; a lecturer at the Department of Arabic, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel. Mordech...@biu.ac.il
Irwin J. (Yitzchak) Mansdorf, PhD, SWU Leadership Program in Israel-Arab Studies, Midreshet Liindenbaum College, Jerusalem, Israel. iman...@compuserve.com
Levan Ramishvili
Yes, There Is a Solution to the Palestinian Conflict With Israel
The plan for Greater Gaza is palatable for all parties except Hamas
At his press conference with President Donald Trump in February, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu recommended including Arab states in a regional approach to Mideast peace. Trump affirmed him, saying a peace deal “would take in many, many countries.” These comments came amid speculation that the Sunni-Arab Gulf states are prepared to work with Israel to promote the “Greater Gaza” solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
After 80 years of Palestinian rejection of states—both a Jewish state and proposed boundaries for their own—and of peace with Israel, it should be clear that the “two-state solution” has expired. The Greater Gaza plan, in one form or another, has been discussed for years as an alternative.
In 2014, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi offered the Palestinians an autonomous, demilitarized Palestinian state incorporating Gaza and an additional adjacent 618 square miles of the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. This would give the Palestinians a homeland—six times the size of Hamas-ruled Gaza—for both Palestinian Authority (PA) citizens and Palestinian refugees. The PA would retain autonomous over Arab-inhabited cities in the disputed territories, which would be linked to the new “Palestinian state” by a land corridor. Future land swaps could increase the state’s area. In return, PA President Mahmoud Abbas would relinquish his claim to the remainder of the territories and eastern Jerusalem. The PA, not Hamas, would rule this state. Abbas nixed the plan immediately.
For everyone but Hamas and Iran, this plan is a win-win.
Egypt
El-Sisi is offering land is to stabilize the northern Sinai, a terror-ridden area and a ticking time bomb whose violence threatens to spill over into the Egyptian mainland. He hopes a Palestinian state in Sinai and Gaza, supported by the West both politically and economically—with a coastal port and rich natural gas resources—will be a stabilizing force in this unstable area, helping guarantee the uninterrupted flow of Israeli natural gas to the fuel-deprived Egyptians.
Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states
These Sunni nations—Egypt’s allies against Iran—believe that the Palestinian jihad against Israel is dangerously counter-productive to their nascent alliance with the Jewish state against a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. The Saudis are already working with the Israelis on intelligence and security. By giving the Palestinians a state in expanded Gaza, and weakening or eliminating Hamas, the alliance could focus on the real regional problem: Iran.
Jordan
The Hashemite rulers perpetually fear a Palestinian takeover of their country, where Palestinians represent the majority of the population. Jordan would welcome the Greater Gaza solution, as their Palestinian refugees would be resettled in the new state. Conceivably, a tunnel through southern Israel’s Negev region could be built to connect Jordan to infrastructure along the eastern border of the Sinai, running north to the Palestinian state, essentially giving Jordan a connection to the Mediterranean.
Israel
The Greater Gaza plan recognizes Jews’ sovereignty in their historic homeland, helps them retain strategic assets in Judea and Samaria, and enhances their security. It enables Israel to divert defense dollars for the resettling of Palestinians in their new state.
Palestinians
For the Palestinians, this plan is a windfall. They would get a politically and economically viable state. Investment from the U.S., Europe and the Sunni states in developing infrastructure and natural resources would provide jobs for young, unemployed Palestinians. Palestinian refugees could live in their own state and take advantage of its unlimited potential—better quality of life would decrease public support for Hamas and encourage moderation.
As usual, the only flies in the ointment are Abbas and Hamas. Abbas wants to impose a “solution” on Israel by declaring a Palestinian state in the disputed territories and eastern Jerusalem. Hamas continues its quest to destroy Israel. Both know they have no legitimate historical claim to the territories or Israel—even Hamas leader Fathi Hammad in 2012 admitted, “Half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis.”
Implementation of a Greater Gaza Palestinian state will be difficult and lengthy, but such a solution is realistic, given Palestinian rejection of multiple offers of a state in the territories, Israel’s security needs and Jordan’s opposition to becoming “the Palestinian state.”
The U.S.—eager for Mideast stability—can lay the groundwork by insisting that the price of Greater Gaza is that Palestinians institute the rule of law, protect human rights and religious freedom, eliminate government corruption, stop rewarding terrorism, desist from teaching Jew-hatred, and recognize the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state.
A 2016 poll showed that 96 percent of Palestinians believe Abbas’s government is corrupt, and 82 percent of Gazans say the same about Hamas. El-Sisi supposedly told Abbas in 2014 that if he doesn’t take the Greater Gaza offer, those who succeed him will. Given the new dynamics and realities in the region, the Greater Gaza plan is the future.
Ziva Dahl is a senior fellow with the Haym Salomon Center. She has a Master of Arts degree in public law and government from Columbia University and an A.B. in political science from Vassar College.
Levan Ramishvili
Trump Mulling Tripling the Size of Gaza to Create Palestinian State in Sinai
President Donald Trump is mulling a proposal to create a Palestinian state in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula that would significantly expand the territory of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm reported Saturday.
The Egyptian report came a day before Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, was set to address the Brookings Institution’s Saban Forum regarding renewed US-led peace efforts in the region, and amid reports that Trump may recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital this week.
The report stated that Egypt would allocate around 450 miles of land near Rafah and El Arish in order to triple the size of Gaza along the Mediterranean coastline.
In return, the Palestinians would allow Israel to retain 12 percent of the land in Area C of the disputed West Bank territories, including Jewish communities such as Ofra, Kiryat Arba and the Ariel bloc.
Within the framework of the proposal, Israel would also give Egypt land in the Negev desert near Nahal Paran and Egypt would be permitted to dig an underground tunnel linking its territory with Jordan.
Reports of a Palestinian state being established in the Sinai have circulated since September 2014. At the time, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi reportedly offered Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas a state in the peninsula, but Abbas rejected the proposal.
“If you don’t accept this proposal, your successor will,” El-Sisi purportedly told Abbas in 2014.
Levan Ramishvili
‘Outside-in’ is inside out
We’re not hearing much anymore about President Donald Trump’s desire to broker the “ultimate deal” between Israel and the Palestinians. But though the peace process is currently in the deep freeze, the concept that animated Trump’s approach lives on. The idea was called “outside-in,” and the conceit of it was that moderate Arab nations like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia would persuade the Palestinians to make peace, and then supply the money and muscle to make it stick. It had the virtue of being rooted in the hard truths of realpolitik, rather than utopian peace fantasies, and seemed to promise the kind of paradigm change that might actually make a difference.
But the notion that Arab states can be relied upon to safeguard Israel’s security in a theoretical peace deal is as much a pipe dream as Shimon Peres’ “New Middle East” vision of Israel and the Palestinians acting like Belgium and the Netherlands in the aftermath of Oslo. Far from the Arabs protecting Israel, the reality is that Israel protects them.
That’s the upshot of a report from this past weekend’s New York Times about Israel conducting a bombing campaign in the Sinai. The Egyptians are apparently not only cooperating with Israel in a battle against al Qaeda terrorists there, but have given their assent to Israeli air strikes against them on Egyptian territory.
This would have been unimaginable a few years ago. The peninsula was the crucible of four Arab-Israeli wars as Israeli forces repeatedly bested the Egyptians. After the Israel-Egyptian peace treaty that followed Anwar Sadat’s dramatic visit to Jerusalem in 1977, the Sinai was a source of concern to those who thought the “cold peace” might disappear altogether.
But the aftermath of the Arab Spring protests that brought down Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, led to a change. The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood brought the most populous Arab nation to the brink; however, when a coup backed by a mass uprising brought the military back into power, they knew who they could count on. The current Egyptian government understood that the Obama administration, which had helped pushed Mubarak out, was not a reliable friend. Israel was its main ally in the struggle against Islamist terror and the Muslim Brotherhood.
That led to a joint effort to isolate Gaza, which is governed by Hamas, an offshoot of the Brotherhood. And when the Egyptians lost effective control of the Sinai where al Qaeda terrorists operate, cooperation with Israel became even more important.
Despite the size of Egypt’s military and the fact that it has, as part of the deal that led to the peace treaty with Israel, been given $1.5 billion in U.S. aid every year, it needs Israel if it’s to maintain control of the Sinai. As the Times reports, for more than two years, Israel has conducted weekly strikes on the area via drones, helicopters and jets. All of them were apparently carried out with the direct approval of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
The same is true of the much vaunted under-the-table alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis couldn’t persuade P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas to engage in peace talks with the Israel and the United States. But they look to the Israelis as a strategic ally in their struggle with Iran, which is just as, if not more of, a threat to the desert kingdom and other Gulf emirates than it is to the Jewish state.
Given its pose as the guardian of Islam, the Saudis are unlikely to convert their closeted relationship with Israel into an open one. Nor will Egypt or Jordan, whose government is even more dependent on Israel for its survival, stop supporting anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations as they try to appease the anti-Semitic sentiments of their populations. But that won’t stop them from looking to Israel to save them from their enemies.
With Iran now firmly established in Syria and Lebanon under the effective control of Tehran’s Hezbollah auxiliaries, the region is a tinderbox. Yet the ability of Israel and the Arab states to cooperate acts as a deterrent against a bad situation that’s growing worse, even though expectations that these alliances can positively impact the peace process with the Palestinians remain unfounded.
Former Secretary of State John Kerry proposed that Egypt and Jordan would guarantee Israel’s security as part of a peace deal in which it would be expected to give up the West Bank and part of Jerusalem. Others have mooted the same role for the Saudis. But if neither Egypt nor Jordan can guarantee their own security, how can they be expected to protect Israel against terrorism and the implicit threat that a terrorist state in the West Bank, like the one that currently exists in Gaza, would pose to its future?
Seen in that light, the “outside-in” strategy touted by the Trump foreign-policy team is, at least as far as the peace process is concerned, just as much of an intellectual snare as anything produced by the Obama administration. The cold hard reality is that as long as the Palestinians refuse to concede defeat in their century-old war against Zionism, all such clever strategies are a waste of time.
That makes Israel’s role as the defender of moderate Arabs—and America’s sole reliable and democratic ally in the region—even more important. What’s going on in the Sinai proves this surprising but irrefutable principle: While Israel can trust no one but itself to safeguard its security, its former Arab enemies can now trust no one but Israel to ensure their survival.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin
Levan Ramishvili
The Israeli-Palestinian peace movement got momentum at the end of history. Now that history is back, peace seems further and further away.
Jared Kushner is set to unveil his closely held Middle East peace initiative early next month in Bahrain, just after the end of Ramadan. Though some information leaked two weeks ago to an Israeli newspaper, people with connections to the Trump Administration have cautioned against reading too much into the reports. Shared sovereignty over Jerusalem? All existing settlements annexed by Israel? A Chinese-financed causeway linking Gaza and the West Bank? It might all be hearsay.
What is overwhelmingly likely is that the plan breaks with earlier American peace effort orthodoxies. As Politico recently noted, Kushner sees his lack of experience in the Middle East as an asset, “telling lawmakers he is free of preconceived notions that stymied previous attempts.” Whatever the specific proposals end up being, Kushner’s plan ends talk of a “two-state solution”—language that is virtually sacrosanct among those who have devoted their lives to cracking the Israeli-Palestinian standoff. “If you say ‘two-states’ it means one thing to the Israelis, it means one thing to the Palestinians, and we said, let’s just not say it,” Kushner told Robert Satloff on CSPAN recently.
Satloff subsequently made a strong case in our pages that offering up a comprehensive peace plan in an atmosphere where the two sides are so far apart means near-certain failure. Failure, Satloff argued, not only risks scuppering the longstanding Oslo process that still undergirds an unhappy-but-relatively-stable status quo, but also risks delegitimizing any of the plan’s good ideas going forward.
Like Kushner and unlike Satloff, I am no Middle East expert. And without the plan in hand, it’s pointless for me to speculate on specifics. But I imagine media coverage of the plan is likely to harp on Kushner’s break with precedent in not explicitly backing a two-state solution. Avoiding talk about a two-state solution may well be bad. But having just spent a week in Israel (on a trip sponsored by the excellent Philos Project), I can say one thing with some confidence: Kushner’s decision to sidestep this question accurately reflects a grim reality on the ground—that the two-state solution has a rapidly shrinking constituency, on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides.
That this is so should be obvious from just reading the news. After all, though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just barely won re-election last month, his squeaker of a win had little to do with public unhappiness on how he had been approaching the Palestinian question, and his failure to subsequently form a government even less so. On that matter, at least, there is broad consensus in Israeli society today: The stance of the opposition Blue and White coalition on any putative peace deal was not all that different from what Likud has long been pushing. As for the Palestinians, they haven’t held an election in over a decade. Polls, however, clearly show that a solid majority has lost faith in a two-state solution in the course of the last two years.
So yes, not surprising. Still, it’s one thing to know something and another to experience it firsthand.
Among the Palestinians, we heard that younger people were increasingly supportive of a one-state solution. One analyst suggested that the prospect of a “true” democracy in a single state between the Jordan and the sea—a democracy, notably, where Palestinians would constitute an absolute majority—appealed both to young people’s idealism, as well as to their sense of social justice. Time is on their side, they believe. Maybe it’s better to abandon the peace process and heighten the contradictions by forcing Israel to directly govern them against their will.
Young people’s disdain for the existing peace process is not merely philosophical and strategic, a Palestinian pollster explained to us. It is linked to a deeply-felt disillusionment with the pervasive corruption of the Palestinian Authority in general, and Fatah in particular. Their rejectionism is born more of resignation than anger and despair, and Hamas’ radicalism does not necessarily present an appealing alternative. Nevertheless, the pollster cautioned, these numbers are not dispositive. If an election were to be called and Hamas were campaigning, sentiments could change.
The PA officials we met in Ramallah were the only people clinging to the two-state solution as the way forward. They were angry at the United States for preparing to break with two-stateism, and repeatedly invoked the international community and the EU as if they were talismans for warding off what was clearly coming. When we asked about corruption and young people’s disillusionment with it, they mostly dodged the questions. Their frustration with the impending peace proposal was palpable. “You are witnessing the destruction of all the Arab moderates!” one Palestinian official exclaimed at one point.
Moderates? Israelis don’t see any. Among the Israeli analysts we met, we kept hearing reservations about Bibi and worries about where his policies in the West Bank are leading. Many claimed to have voted against him last month, and some were quite anguished about the moral consequences of continuing Israel’s de facto dominion over a large Arab population in the West Bank. Nevertheless, none can imagine granting full sovereignty to a Palestinian state located west of the Jordan River. The failure at Camp David in 2000, followed by the second intifada and the rise of Hamas in Gaza in 2005, we were repeatedly told, had convinced most voters that they have no credible Palestinian partner to negotiate with.
The more optimistic among them still hold out hope for a “Sadat moment”—something akin to the breakthrough in 1977 when the Egyptian leader addressed the Knesset and recognized Israel’s right to exist. If only a Palestinian leader could do the same, Israeli opinion would change over night, they said. Others, however, dismissed the very notion of a Sadat moment as the product of magical thinking: “As if an incantation could make all these problems go away, just like that.”
The paradox is that Israel enjoys an overwhelming conventional military advantage over the Palestinians, and has managed to craft a system of surveillance and control that has successfully stymied the kinds of terrorist attacks that wracked the country in the early 2000s. Despite all that, its military advantage does not translate to a sense of security through deterrence. Palestinians’ perceived intransigence on Israel’s right to exist, coupled with their proven record of waging asymmetric warfare, means that absent a binding promise from a Palestinian leader who can credibly speak for the entire community, there is no alternative to the status quo.
But who is more guilty of magical thinking in this situation—the hopeful Israelis waiting for Sadat, or the resigned realists? The closer you look, the more confusing it gets.
We spent an evening with Jewish settlers in the West Bank who were downright serene about a future where Israel eventually annexes all the territories. Over Shabbat dinner in the settlement of Ofra, a father of six children waved away our questions about demography. Arab Israelis’ birthrates, only recently thought to present a fundamental threat to Israel’s future as a Jewish-majority state, have plummeted to barely below replacement levels, while the ultra-orthodox Haredi are still producing very large families. As for the Arabs in the West Bank, our host told us, there is no reason to assume they represent an absolute majority—there hasn’t been a census since 2007. And if they are in the majority today, there is no reason to assume that they will be forever. It’s true, he said, that there was no question of granting full citizenship rights to West Bank Arabs in an expanded Israel right away. But over time, gradually, he envisioned them becoming a constituent, smallish minority in Israel—as content as, and proportionately not much larger than, the total population of Israeli Arabs today.
Many other Israelis view this possible future with much less equanimity. They recognize that the status quo—which Israel’s electorate repeatedly votes for—is not static. No movement towards some kind of resolution with the Palestinians means Israel will inevitably get more and more involved in running the West Bank, with its Arab population—whatever the size—disenfranchised and increasingly restive. This, in turn, would call for more restrictions on movement, more surveillance, and perhaps more violent repression. If the Palestinian Authority collapsed or disbanded itself, responsibility for governance would fall squarely on the Israeli state’s shoulders. This would represent not only a moral catastrophe, but perhaps an insurmountable challenge. Disengagement and separation, therefore, are imperative. But how to get there?
The majority of Israelis feel trapped, consumed by the problem but unable to imagine a way out. Secular techies living in Tel Aviv pride themselves on not doing politics. Others have come up with ways of easing the friction of Israeli dominion in the territories—building special secure roads connecting the larger Arab cities in the West Bank, for example, thereby limiting the need for intrusive checkpoints. Full sovereignty, however, is no longer discussed. And not only is there no partner for peace right now, Israelis look at the declining legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority and conclude it would be courting disaster to sign any kind of agreement that could easily be abrogated by a future Palestinian government. Israel’s geographic realities—pinched between the West Bank and the Mediterranean—are unforgiving.
The real magical thinking doesn’t have to do with the desperate Israeli hope for a Palestinian Sadat. It’s prevalent among solution-obsessed foreigners—at least those who optimistically believe that a two-state approach will necessarily lead to lasting peace. This belief is rooted in so-called democratic peace theory—the idea that democracies simply don’t go to war against each other. And this, in turn, is rooted in a questionable theory of political change. Call it the Middle Eastern version of Democratic Determinism: Yes, the Palestinian Authority is dysfunctional today, the thinking goes, but just add the responsibility inherent in full sovereignty and some democratic accountability, and you are well on your way to a kind of society that would never go to war with Israel.
Experience suggests the real world is a lot messier than theory, and the path to lasting peace is much bumpier and longer than the optimists care to admit. Let’s leave aside the contentious question as to why the Palestinian Authority is so debilitatingly corrupt today—whether its dysfunction can be explained away as the result of Israeli domination, or whether its causes arise from elsewhere. The sad truth is that whatever its cause, it’s clear that after several decades political dysfunction is a deeply ingrained fact of life in the PA-controlled territories. This matters not only because the PA’s legitimacy is being eroded today, but also because endemic corruption is likely to render future governments weak and unstable. A corrupt political culture has a nasty way of replicating itself, even in democratizing societies.
One need only look at all of the former Soviet republics to see how persistent these problems can be, even with the full weight of the Western international development apparatus brought to bear. Ukraine, one of the more successful of the lot, is still more accurately described as a competitive oligarchy than a true multi-party democracy. It has gone through two revolutions in the last fifteen years, and a third is still not out of the question. Even in former Warsaw Pact countries, where democratic norms have more fully established themselves, supposedly successful reforms turned out to be much more shallowly rooted in society than we are fond of admitting. Once entry into the European Union was achieved for most of these countries, barely submerged old habits bobbed to the surface once more.
None of this is to say that the Palestinians are somehow intrinsically not “ready” for democracy or full self-rule. Palestinian individuals are certainly capable of participating and flourishing in mature democracies when they emigrate to the West. Culture, however, is a sticky thing in aggregate, and is much more determinant than any individual’s beliefs and desires. And change takes time. Meaningful, lasting change requires much more than simple technocratic fixes, and sprinkling “democracy” into the mix doesn’t necessarily make things better. To thoroughly reform political culture, at least one generation needs to die off, and even then regressions and setbacks are common.
Israelis’ pessimism is thus not only rooted in a grim reading of the present, but also in a sober reading of the future. It’s important to remember, however, that this was not always the attitude. As one former leftwing Israeli told me, the 1990s were a decade that exuded a bewitching sense of limitless possibility. Europe was being transformed before the world’s eyes, and the Israeli peace movement drew its strength from these developments. It’s impossible to understand the Oslo breakthrough and the start of the modern peace process without considering the broader global context in which it occurred. But that moment has passed. History has returned with a vengeance. And a solid majority of Israelis are no longer willing to stake what they see as an existential question on unproven liberal theories of democratic political change.
The 1990s were a quintessentially American decade. America is an optimistic place, suffused with that same sense of limitless possibility that leaked out into the rest of the world after the collapse of communism. Americans don’t like to admire problems. They ignore the past and relentlessly focus on the future—on what can be done rather than on what is impossible. This attitude has led to some mis-assessments in foreign policy, but it is also undeniably the source of the country’s great dynamism and capacity for reinvention.
It’s not surprising, then, that the post-1990s sobering that has been spreading across the West has reached the United States last. Chastened by the twin state-building failures in Iraq and Afghanistan—two of those unhappy misjudgments of what was in fact possible—and faced with a cratering economy at home, President Obama began to introduce a dose of steely realism to America’s foreign policy during his two terms in office, albeit masked with hopeful language about the long-term progressive bent of history. He regretted getting involved in Libya, and saw Syria as an intractable disaster (arguably even before it became one). Secretary John Kerry tirelessly shuttled around the Middle East in search of a breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli peace process, but the White House invested precious little capital in it. For all his bombast, President Trump represents a deepening of this same trend, further shifting America’s approach to the world away from idealism while completely foregoing Obama’s flowery talk.
But the dream dies hard for many Americans, especially within the Washington DC foreign policy community. Obama’s crypto-realism caused bipartisan grousing in its time, and Trump’s unrepentant America Firsterism has amplified what was mere grumbling into a deafening roar. The coming fight over Kushner’s peace plan in the United States will mirror the other foreign policy fights that have emerged in the last two and a half years of the Trump presidency. Part of what deeply offends Trump’s opponents is his frontal assault on all the pieties of the 1990s—that he is an outspoken American chauvinist rather than an American exceptionalist. And while abandoning a two-state solution is not obviously an “America First” policy, it is definitely a repudiation of the kind of idealism that has characterized many Americans’ outlook—and their self-conception—for almost two decades after the Berlin Wall fell.
Should Trump lose the elections next year to someone like Joe Biden, we will likely see a return to exceptionalist rhetoric—and, probably, a revival of talk of the two-state solution. The question is whether the talk will be accompanied by any serious change in policy away from the relative circumspection that will have characterized the past 12 years. It’s hard to imagine that it will. Re-enchantment is not easy to achieve.
Levan Ramishvili
Dream Palace of the Americans
Why Ceding Land Will Not Bring Peace
The Trump administration’s Middle East policies have been roundly attacked by the U.S. foreign policy establishment. There are various lines of criticism, including ones concerning its approaches to Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, but the administration’s gravest sin is generally held to be its support for Israel. By moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, blessing Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, and other gestures, the Trump team is said to have overturned half a century of settled U.S. policy, abandoned the Palestinians, and killed the two-state solution.
These are serious charges. But on close inspection, they turn out to say more about the hysteria of the prosecutors than the guilt of the defendant. Some of President Donald Trump’s policies are new, some are not, and it is too early to see much impact. So why all the hue and cry? Because the administration openly insists on playing power politics rather than trying to move the world beyond them. Trump’s real crime is challenging people’s illusions—and that is an unforgivable offense.
THE ROAD TO 242
Israel’s conflict with the Arabs has long functioned as a screen onto which outsiders project their own psychodramas. Actual Middle East politics, meanwhile, churns on relentlessly, following the same laws of political physics as politics everywhere else: the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.
The United States entered the regional geopolitical game in earnest during World War II, drawn in by the strategic importance of the oil recently discovered under the Arabian Desert and elsewhere. With postwar power came regional responsibility, however, and Washington eventually had to decide how to deal with the messy residue of the British mandate for Palestine.
In 1948, U.S. President Harry Truman came under domestic political pressure to recognize a soon-to-be independent Israel. The foreign policy establishment opposed the move, arguing that U.S. support for Zionism would alienate the Arab states and drive them into the arms of the Soviet Union. Many of the voices making these arguments were diplomats and experts with deep ties to the Arab world and little sympathy for Jews, however, and Truman was not persuaded by their analysis, so he went ahead and recognized Israel anyway. The establishment considered it a major blot on his record—a gross mistake driven by the intrusion of amateur domestic politics into professional foreign policy.
With the British gone from Palestine, the Arabs attacked, and when the dust cleared, Israel had not just been granted independence by others but won it on the battlefield. This demonstration of strength did not change any official minds, however, and the Arabist camp continued to see the United States’ commitment to Israel as a strategic liability—a sentimental luxury that interfered with serious policy. In 1956, Egypt lost a second war to Israel, which was joined in the fighting by France and the United Kingdom, and the Israelis captured the Sinai Peninsula. Reluctant to be identified with either Zionism or imperialism, the administration of U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower hastily stepped in to force its European allies to back down and Israel to withdraw, quickly and nearly unconditionally. For Eisenhower, at least, the decision was business, not personal. He was trying to fight a regional and global Cold War, and the oil-rich Arabs had a lot to offer. Weak little Israel, in contrast, had to take one for the team. A decade later, things heated up again. Moscow encouraged the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser to start a crisis with Israel, as explained in a CIA summary of intelligence from a Soviet official, “to create another trouble spot for the United States in addition to that already existing in Vietnam.” Moscow even passed him fake intelligence claiming that Israel was massing troops on its northern border in preparation for an attack against Syria. Nasser quickly learned the intelligence was false but decided to act on it anyway, choosing to see Moscow’s move as an invitation to heat up Israel’s southern border in the name of Arab solidarity.
So in 1967, purporting to come to Syria’s aid, Nasser expelled the UN peacekeepers separating the former belligerents, placed the Egyptian military on high alert, moved troops into the Sinai, cut off Israel’s maritime access to Asia, and linked up with the militaries of Jordan and Syria. Israel responded with a preemptive strike against its enemies and gained another victory, a lightning triumph that left it in control of territories captured from all three: Egypt (the Sinai and Gaza), Jordan (Jerusalem and the West Bank), and Syria (the Golan Heights).
U.S. President Lyndon Johnson now faced the same dilemma as Eisenhower: Should he let Israel keep what it had won? Some officials might have pined for the traditional policy of appeasing the Arabs at Israel’s expense, but the case was increasingly hard to make. Israel had now won three straight wars against its supposedly stronger Arab opponents, the last one a blowout. The defeat of powerful Soviet proxies by an underdog American proxy had embarrassed the Soviet Union and boosted the United States’ regional standing along with Israel’s. Egypt and its Soviet patron had been recklessly provocative, and Israel had made them pay for it, dearly. Stepping in once again to punish the victor and reward the vanquished was unthinkable.
Yet if forcing Israel to disgorge the conquered territories was not an option, neither was allowing it to annex them outright, which appeared to risk provoking yet another war. So the Johnson administration chose a third course, turning the crisis into an opportunity by linking the settlement of this particular war with the broader regional conflict.
Its plan was sensible: the Arab combatants would get back much of the territory they had lost, but only in return for recognizing Israel within secure boundaries and ending the violence. After months of talks, U.S. negotiators convinced the Soviets to accept something close, and the result became the famous formula enshrined in UN Security Council Resolution 242, [1] a call for the “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.”
The wording was deliberately ambiguous. The Arab states later insisted that the sentence meant that Israel must immediately withdraw from “all of the” territories occupied, but the Americans had taken pains to ensure that the official text read only “from territories.” The United States had demanded language that clearly supported its policy: bilateral negotiations between Israel and each of the belligerent states would determine the extent of Israel’s withdrawal. In the meantime, Israel would retain and administer the territories.
ENTER KISSINGER
At this point, eager to turn its attention back to Vietnam and the home front, the Johnson administration delegated matters to the Swedish diplomat Gunnar Jarring, serving as the UN special representative for negotiating a deal. Unfortunately, the talks quickly broke down over the irreconcilable interpretations of Resolution 242. The United States and Israel called for direct negotiations between the belligerents over the terms of a settlement, while the Soviet Union and its Arab allies insisted on an Israeli commitment to full withdrawal as a precondition for any talks—even as Moscow scrambled to rebuild the Egyptian military. A newly emboldened Nasser soon challenged Israel along the Suez Canal, the Israelis retaliated with airstrikes, and skirmishing escalated into what is now referred to as the War of Attrition.
Watching Israel more than hold its own, U.S. President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, decided that the Jewish state had earned respect as an ally and eventually built Israel’s new strength into the administration’s strategizing. Kissinger saw Israeli power as a tool for changing the geopolitical map, a lever that could flip Egypt, then the most powerful Arab state, from the Soviet camp to the U.S. one. To regain its lost territory and reopen the Suez Canal, he reasoned, Egypt had to negotiate directly with Israel. The Soviets could help Cairo make war, but only the United States could help it make peace. Washington could deliver the Israelis and broker a lasting settlement—but only if Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat would abandon Moscow.
After yet another major war in 1973, the strategy worked. The Sinai Interim Agreement [2], signed by Egypt and Israel in 1975, included a withdrawal of Israeli forces from land bordering the Suez Canal—the recent grand reopening of which had included, at Sadat’s insistence, an American warship. The “interim” part of the deal was a pledge by both sides to negotiate a final peace deal without resort to war. It laid the groundwork for the historic peace between Egypt and Israel that would eventually be signed [3] at Camp David in 1978.
Had U.S. President Gerald Ford defeated his Democratic challenger, Jimmy Carter, in 1976, Kissinger would surely have been the one to seal the deal. He would have been regarded as a diplomatic wizard: ending the Egyptian-Israeli conflict while simultaneously bringing Egypt into the Western bloc. As it turned out, however, it was the Carter administration that brokered the Camp David accords [4], and that fact greatly influenced the lessons that subsequent generations learned from the triumph.
Getting the parties to commit to a final settlement was a huge diplomatic accomplishment that required single-minded presidential focus and enormous reserves of patience and tenacity, for all of which Carter deserves immense credit. In the process of finishing what Kissinger started, however, he embedded his own ideas about the region’s true problems and solutions into the U.S. position—ideas that were less accurate than Kissinger’s but would end up sanctified as gospel because they coincided with the success of the earlier, more hard-bitten strategy.
ENTER CARTER
Carter and his team were contemptuous of the diplomacy that had led to the Sinai Interim Agreement. They believed it was necessary to solve the entire Arab-Israeli conflict all at once, in a single, grand, multilateral forum. It was Kissinger who had first convened such a conference in Geneva back in 1973, but purely in order to raise an international umbrella over his personal diplomacy. Carter wanted to reconvene the Geneva conference, this time for real, with the Soviets playing the role of true partners.
The underlying problem in the Middle East, Carter passionately believed, was the Israeli suppression of Palestinian nationalism. He was certain that if Israel could be compelled to give back the occupied territories, the Arab states would make peace—even Syria. So his administration turned Kissinger’s Bismarckian balancing into a driven quest for a comprehensive peace, one in which the Arab states bordering Israel would negotiate a lasting settlement in return for Israel’s withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders and the creation of a Palestinian homeland.
This policy put all the local parties into an awkward situation. Whatever they loudly proclaimed, the Arab states had little interest in the Palestinians. Washington’s embrace of the Palestinian cause gave them some leverage against Israel, but it also threatened to derail progress on important bilateral concerns. Sadat’s two goals in coming to the negotiating table, for example, had been to reclaim the Sinai and join the American camp. Now Carter, hung up on the Palestinians, was bringing the Soviets [5] into the talks as equals and wanted to add Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization to boot—nothing that would advance Sadat’s agenda. So the Egyptian leader stole a march and reshaped the diplomatic landscape. On November 19, 1977, he became the first Arab leader to visit Israel, delivering his message of “no more war, no more bloodshed” directly to the Knesset.
Carter felt blindsided, and he was angry that his dream of a comprehensive peace was receding. He eventually turned his attention back to the bilateral Egyptian-Israeli negotiations. But he chafed at the effort. And although the administration scrapped plans for a new Geneva conference, it never changed its mindset. Even as they supported the Egyptian-Israeli track, U.S. negotiators pined for a comprehensive peace and a full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza. Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski [6], called it a “concentric circles approach.” The idea, he explained in his memoirs, was to begin working for “the Egyptian-Israeli accord, then expanding the circle by including the Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza as well as the Jordanians, and finally moving to a still wider circle by engaging the Syrians and perhaps even the Soviets in a comprehensive settlement.”
The Carter team built the concentric circles concept into the Camp David accords, which contained both a bilateral Egyptian-Israeli agreement and the “Framework for Peace in the Middle East.” This second document called for “the resolution of the Palestinian problem in all its aspects” and “full autonomy” for the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza, with the establishment of “a self-governing authority” that would then participate in final-status negotiations. Thus was born the peace process that would continue forward for decades, all the way to Oslo and beyond. Imprinted in its very DNA was a utopian impulse to settle all the conflict in the Middle East by starting with the Palestinian question.
The Carter administration believed that the “Framework for Peace” was a crucial part of the overall plan, providing political cover to the Egyptians for making peace with Israel. Sadat played along with the “comprehensive settlement” game so long as he needed the Americans to pressure Israel to return the Sinai to Egypt, but once he got that, he displayed little interest in the Palestinian issue. And a close reading of the Carter administration’s internal documents shows that it was the Americans, not the Egyptians, who were obsessed with the “Framework for Peace,” none more so than the president himself. When Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin [7] fought him on granting the Palestinians autonomy and refused to commit to a freeze on Israeli settlements in the territories, the president became livid. Because Carter had much grander ambitions than Kissinger, the successful completion of an Egyptian-Israeli settlement left him deeply frustrated—to him it was a glass half empty rather than half full. He blamed Begin for the failure on the Palestinian track and never forgave him. When Begin and Sadat received the Nobel Peace Prize, Carter wrote in his diary, “I sent Begin and Sadat a congratulatory message after they received the Nobel Peace Prize jointly. Sadat deserved it; Begin did not.”
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE PEACE PROCESS
The peace process languished during the 1980s, as U.S. President Ronald Reagan cared more about East-West issues than Arab-Israeli ones and his administration was divided between the Israel-as-liability and Israel-as-asset camps, frustrating bold initiatives. A year after Camp David, moreover, the Iranian Revolution upended regional politics, shifting the geostrategic center of gravity (along with attention and resources) eastward to the Persian Gulf. But the George H. W. Bush administration came into office favoring the Carter administration’s goal of a comprehensive peace, and in 1991, it found a uniquely promising opportunity to reach for it.
By this point, the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse, Iraq had been roundly defeated in the Gulf War, Iran was still recovering from its eight-year slugfest with Iraq, and Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization were weak and broke. With all the rejectionist spoilers of previous peace efforts hors de combat, the road was clear to pursue a regional settlement on U.S. terms. The effort began with the Bush administration’s 1991 Madrid conference, continued with the Clinton administration and the Oslo accords [8]of 1993 and 1995, and for a few years really seemed to be getting somewhere: a temporary deal between Israel and the Palestinians, an Israeli-Jordanian treaty, tantalizing prospects of success on the Syrian track. As so often in the 1990s, a beautiful future seemed just around the corner.
And then things ground to a halt. In 1995, trying to derail the process, an Israeli right-wing extremist assassinated [9] Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Negotiations bogged down as neither side made deep enough concessions to satisfy the other’s concerns. And then, in 2000, the Palestinians turned back to violence. The second intifada’s grisly campaign of terrorist attacks directed against cafés, pizza parlors, discotheques, and other civilian gathering places killed over 1,000 Israelis and injured many thousands more, leaving deep scars in Israel’s national psyche. The median Israeli voter became convinced that ceding land to the Palestinians brought conflict rather than peace, and unsatisfying withdrawals from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005 only reinforced the feeling.
In retrospect, the ultimate failure of the Oslo process should not have been surprising. The successes of the peace process have come not from Carteresque dreams but from Kissingerian realpolitik. Egypt made a private side deal with Israel in the 1970s, and Jordan did so in the 1990s, but both were hardheaded, materialistic transactions: Egypt made peace to get back the Sinai and a place within the American system, and Jordan did it to keep its place in that system and insulate itself from the vicissitudes of the peace process. Both sought to extricate themselves from the Palestinian problem, not solve it.
Since 1994, the main parties without a deal have been the Palestinians and the Syrians, and it is difficult to say whether they were ever serious about making peace. They certainly convinced their U.S. interlocutors that they were, and they parlayed that success into decades of continued power, status, and international largess. And yet somehow the final settlement was always six months away—and always would be. Thus did the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat start the 1990s exiled in Tunis yet end them as a king in Ramallah. And thus did the Assad dynasty in Syria survive down the decades.
When the peaceful democratic revolutions of the Arab Spring [10] broke out in late 2010, the Assad regime came under fire just as its counterparts elsewhere did. But instead of increasing pressure on the Syrian dictator, Washington cut Bashar al-Assad a lot of slack. Why? In part because he yet again dangled before them visions of the elusive Israeli-Syrian peace. As Frederic Hof, the official then handling Syria policy at the U.S. State Department, would later write, “Assad told me in late February 2011 that he would sever all anti-Israel relationships with Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas and abstain from all behavior posing threats to the State of Israel, provided all land lost by Syria to Israel in the 1967 war—all of it—was returned.”
FACING FACTS
For 70 years now, many American (and European) policymakers have seen it as their mission to stabilize the Middle East by constraining Israel’s power and getting the country to give back at the negotiating table what it has taken on the battlefield. Over the decades, however, Israel has grown ever stronger and more able to resist such impositions. It has become a modern industrial power center, with a thriving economy and a fearsome military backed by nuclear weapons—even as the Palestinians have remained impoverished wards of the international community, with threats of terror their chief negotiating tool. Most Arab states moved on long ago. They now treat Israel as a normal player in the eternal great game of regional power balancing. So now has the Trump administration. And for that, it has been excoriated.
The administration’s approach is a disaster, critics say, because it concedes so much to Israel upfront that the Palestinians will never agree to negotiate. The critics are correct about the unlikely prospects for a deal anytime soon. But that makes the Trump administration different from its predecessors how? U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry [11] squandered more than a year of the Obama administration trying in vain to jump-start peace talks, a quixotic effort that even his own negotiators knew would not succeed. Is that the benchmark against which Trump is to be judged? If so, he will end up failing a lot more cheaply.
The awkward truth that Washington is only gradually beginning to admit to itself is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not, in fact, be solved with a two-state solution. It might once have been, and phalanxes of negotiators over half a century tried everything they could to bring it off. But the local parties to the conflict were never quite ready. The moment never got seized, and somewhere along the way the opportunity passed.
During the Israeli election campaign [12] in September, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced his intention “to apply Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and the area of the northern Dead Sea upon the establishment of the next government.” To the ears of a U.S. diplomatic establishment raised on dreams of Oslo, this sounded like the ravings of a right-wing extremist. But even Netanyahu’s centrist rivals call for the retention of the Jordan Valley, a united Jerusalem, and Israeli control of major settlement blocs.
It is not obvious how the United States should deal with this new reality, and the Trump administration’s plans for solving the problem are no more likely to succeed than those of its predecessors. But give the president his due. He looks at the Middle East like any other region, and respects power. Without the ideological blinders of the professional peace processors, he has recognized that the Palestinian issue is not a major U.S. strategic concern and has essentially delegated its handling to the local parties directly involved. He can see that Israel, having conquered the staging areas its enemies regularly used to attack it, will never give all of them back. Observing an emerging regional tripolarity, he has pulled two of the poles, Israel and Saudi Arabia, into a de facto alliance to contain the menacing third pole, Iran. In short, he seems to be embracing an updated version of the “twin pillars” Middle East policy that Washington adopted in the 1970s, with Israel taking Iran’s place as the second pillar.
This may advance U.S. interests effectively in the long run, and it may not. But the idea that the administration’s approach is a travesty of professional diplomacy by a bunch of bumbling amateurs is just a story that veterans of lost wars tell to comfort themselves.
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Links
[1] https://unispal.un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/0/7D35E1F729DF491C85256EE700686136
[2] https://peacemaker.un.org/egyptisrael-interimagreement75
[3] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/israel/1978-12-01/camp-david-unfinished-business
[4] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/israel/1979-06-01/israel-and-arabs-race-against-time-egyptian-israeli-negotiations-over
[5] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/1980-02-01/us-soviet-relations-bad-worse
[6] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/anthologies/2017-05-27/essays-zbigniew-brzezinski
[7] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/israel/1978-09-01/peacemaking-arab-israeli-conflict
[8] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/2014-10-02/oslo-dead
[9] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2018-02-13/yitzhak-rabin-soldier-leader-statesman
[10] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/anthologies/2016-02-29/arab-spring-five
[11] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/2013-06-25/john-kerry-lone-ranger-middle-east
[12] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/israel/2019-07-05/what-expect-israels-election-re-run
Levan Ramishvili
For the better part of the past three decades, especially since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the consensus solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been, of course, the two-state solution: a Jewish State of Israel and a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli right resisted the idea for a while, preferring “autonomy” for the Palestinians of the disputed territories, without ever really explaining what it might look like. The Israeli left, by contrast, seized upon the idea as the means of redeeming Israel from an interminable occupation, and finally securing Israeli legitimacy and permanence in the Middle East.
The international community, led by the United States, has always loved the idea, enshrining it in the 1947 Partition Plan that led to the founding of the State of Israel itself and periodically reasserting it against the maximalists of both the Israeli right and the pre-Oslo Palestine Liberation Organization, as well as the genocidal terror group Hamas. All attempts to achieve it, however, have so far failed.
Perhaps because of this failure, the consensus around the two-state solution is currently fraying. Partisans on all sides have begun making quiet—and sometimes not so quiet—declarations that “the two-state solution is dead,” and usually propose a “one-state solution” in its place.
Israeli one-staters, who are mostly from the far right, demand more or less total annexation of the West Bank and its absorption into Israel proper, with the Palestinians designated as the biblical ger toshav or “resident alien”—more than stateless, but less than citizens.
Israel’s pragmatic or secular one-staters have a less grandiose argument: Israel cannot cede the West Bank without fatally compromising its security. The Palestinians, they say, have never and will never give up their irredentist claim to all of Palestine “from the river to the sea,” and any territorial concessions would simply provide them with the strategic high ground of the West Bank. This would allow them to threaten Israel’s central coastal plain—its economic heartland with the country’s only international airport and major ports, as well as most of its population.
The Palestinian and pro-Palestinian one-staters are somewhat more diverse. On the one hand, there are the genocidaires of all parties, whether from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or the ostensibly secular Fatah. They all want, essentially, an Arab state in place of what is now Israel, with the Jewish population either slaughtered or expelled.
One-staters from the pro-Palestinian left, however, have a more sophisticated approach. Usually, they claim that there is already a “one-state reality” on the ground, and the key question is whether the West Bank Palestinians will be granted equal rights, including the vote, or whether they will be subjected to an “apartheid” system instead. Thus, they advocate dissolving Israel as a Jewish state and replacing it with a binational “Israel-Palestine.”
While immediately appealing to Western leftists and some liberals, such an idea is plainly unjust and impossible to impose. It is a non-starter for Israelis, because it would uniquely violate the collective rights of the Jewish people, once again rendering them a de facto stateless community, trapped in the same discriminatory position suffered by the Tibetans, the Kurds, and numerous others. In fact, the one-state approach has little support among the Palestinians themselves.
There is, in addition, a truth that all parties and the international community seem determined to ignore: A Palestinian state already exists in Gaza. It is, of course, a toxic theocracy and a hotbed of social and economic dysfunction, but it is nonetheless a demarcated territory with clear borders populated by and entirely—in fact, absolutely—ruled by Palestinians. It remains partially blockaded by Israel to prevent Hamas from arming any further than it already has. But countries under blockades and embargoes—Cuba for example—are still considered sovereign; and in any case, should the West Bank Palestinians reach an agreement with Israel, one imagines their Gazan neighbors would likely do the same.
Despite the current horrendous situation in Gaza, however, its existence as a de facto Palestinian state is some reason for optimism; it means that both Jewish and Palestinian national claims have already been fulfilled. Self-determination for both communities has been realized, and this only leaves the last, if very difficult question: What should be done with the West Bank?
There is one possible solution to this question that for some reason is excluded from discussions of Israel’s future by parties domestic and foreign, whether in high or low places. It is supremely difficult to accomplish, though it is also an elegant solution, and it has the virtue—so far as I am aware—of originality. And if the one-staters are entitled to their unlikely thought experiments, then others are certainly entitled to the same. The solution is the partition of the territory into three states: a Jewish state in Israel, a Palestinian state in Gaza, and a binational state in the West Bank.
What would such a West Bank state actually look like? It would be a kind of “Judea-Palestine,” in which the Palestinian majority and the Jewish minority beyond the Green Line would be equal citizens in a state that recognizes the political, religious, national, and historical rights of both peoples. Ideally, it would be a sectarian democracy based on parity between the two communities—with a legislature in which representation for both is guaranteed by law. It would have integrated police and security forces, Hebrew and Arabic as official languages, and political offices shared on the Lebanon model, i.e., the president must be a Jew and the prime minister an Arab, or vice versa. There would be freedom of movement throughout the territory, equal rights and restrictions on land and property, recognized freedom of worship for all religions, and equal access to holy sites.
Borders would be based on the 1967 lines and controlled by a joint Israeli-Palestinian security force until a new, integrated border guard could be formed by the new state. The state would also be, to the greatest extent possible, demilitarized in order to prevent sectarian violence. This would involve the disarmament of both the Jewish and Arab communities, including Palestinian militias and the Jewish settlements, leaving the monopoly on the use of force to the authorities. The most difficult issue, of course, would be Jerusalem; while the devil would be in the details, the best-case scenario would be a division based on the 1967 borders with joint control of the Old City.
Such a solution would likely gain the support of Jordan, which would probably see a binational West Bank as very much in its interests. Building on its current involvement in the area, Jordan could play a major role in securing the new state, managing the region’s various holy sites—including in Jerusalem, where Jordan already acts as custodian of the mosques on the Temple Mount. Moreover, West Bank binationalism would preclude a situation in which Jordan is forced to either absorb or confederate the area—threatening the Hashemite monarchy—or else see a potential irredentist terror state take shape on its border. In addition, as Israel would probably become the guardian of and advocate for the Jewish community in the new state, Jordan would fulfill that role for the Palestinians. Most importantly, the simple fact of a moderating Jordanian presence on its eastern border would contribute a great deal to the stability and success of a binational West Bank.
Nonetheless, both sides might be brought to see the advantages. A binational state in the West Bank would not, for example, uproot either community from their homes; it would allow for both sides to retain their attachment and passion for the land itself and its historical and religious significance; and the sectarian democracy it adopts would allow for official acknowledgement of the sociocultural uniqueness of each community. Should these guarantees be insufficient for any individual citizen, they would be able to decamp to Israel or Gaza.
The binational nature of the state would also be a positive thing for the Palestinians themselves—especially for women, gays, and others who might benefit from protections for minority rights. One need only look at the current condition of Gaza, which is a completely homogeneous theocracy in which chauvinism, racism, and religious coercion have immiserated almost the entire population. A binational West Bank would liberate the Palestinians from both the occupation and the corruption and oppression of their own rulers.
In many ways, to avoid becoming another Gaza, a binational state in the West Bank would need its Jewish minority. The presence of a substantial minority group makes democracy and equal rights a moral imperative; fosters openness, liberalism, and diversity; and promotes cooperation and creativity. Indeed, throughout modern history the Jews have tended to be a “creative minority,” helping the process of liberalization and modernization, with their presence often inadvertently minimizing the possibility of a “tyranny of the majority” that threatens to become oppressive or murderous.
It is true that neither the Jews nor the Palestinians in the West Bank are ready to entertain the possibility of a binational Judea-Palestine at the moment, but there are perhaps certain preliminary steps that could be taken. Israel could, for example, unilaterally freeze settlement expansion, thus reassuring the Palestinians that their majority—which is growing thinner—is preserved. An initiative could then be undertaken to bring the Palestinian Authority and the settlers’ Yesha Council together to work on infrastructure and development, thus building trust and dialogue between the two sides. The Palestinians could stop policies that incentivize violence, such as payments to imprisoned terrorists and the families of dead terrorists. And Israel could make it clear that it has no intention of annexing the West Bank itself.
This idea must seem, at the moment, to be vaguely akin to madness. But with Israel smoothly forging official ties with much of the Arab world, it is clear that, even against the most fervent convictions of experts and statesmen, the unthinkable can become inevitable very quickly. At the moment, moreover, both the Israeli and Palestinian Authority governments are mired in denial and self-deception. Contrary to what appears to be the vision of Prime Minister Netanyahu and his party, normalization with the rest of the Arab world will not make the Palestinian issue go away. The almost 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank will still be there—annexing them would still be political and national suicide, and a perpetual occupation remains immoral and unmanageable.
At the same time, however, the Palestinian dream of destroying Israel will remain impossible, the encouragement and lionization of Palestinian war crimes and terrorism will still be self-destructive and morally horrific, and the settler population will continue to grow. Both sides, in other words, must admit to reality and attempt to deal with it in a constructive way.
A three-state solution, with a binational state in the West Bank, would no doubt be difficult to establish; but it has the virtue of never having been tried before, and thus never having failed. This means, at the very least, the possibility exists that it might actually work. And for this reason alone, perhaps, it is worth trying.
Levan Ramishvili
October 7 was not Palestine’s independence day, but the final nail in the two-state solution’s coffin. Is confederation with Jordan all that remains?
Late this month, and exquisitely timed to coincide with Rosh Hashanah, the United Nations General Assembly will meet and, addressing it, the president of France will recognize “Palestine” as a state. France will be the 148th country (by most counts) to recognize a state that does not exist and never will—a “state” with no borders, no government, no economy, and no control over its claimed territory. Norway, Spain, Ireland, and Slovenia recognized Palestine in May 2024 in a clear reward for the Hamas terrorist onslaught in October 2023. The United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia will join the French, as may a dozen or more other countries. These acts of “recognition” do nothing to help Palestinians. Their effect and their usual objective is to harm Israel, both by blaming it for the Gaza war and by making an end to that war more difficult to achieve. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in August, “Talks with Hamas fell apart on the day Macron made the unilateral decision that he’s going to recognize the Palestinian state.”
President Emmanuel Macron’s move, and those of Prime Ministers Keir Starmer of the UK and Anthony Albanese of Australia, are largely domestic policy matters—responses to low approval ratings and large Muslim populations. It seems to have escaped their attention that they are contributing to a Palestinian conclusion that only brutal violence will produce a path forward. In an effort to defend himself from such criticism, Macron stated “there is no alternative” to Palestinian statehood and announced in July that, “in light of the commitments made to me by the president of the Palestinian Authority, I have written to him to express my determination to move forward.”
What were the Palestinian Authority’s solemn commitments to the president of France? “To fulfilling all its governance responsibilities in all Palestinian territories, including Gaza, to reforming fundamentally, [and] to organizing presidential and general elections in 2026 in order to enhance its credibility and its authority over the future Palestinian state.” Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney told CNN that “Canada intends to recognize the state of Palestine . . . because the Palestinian Authority has committed to lead much-needed reform.” Albanese talked of “major new commitments from the Palestinian Authority” and proclaimed that the “president of the Palestinian Authority has reaffirmed these commitments directly to the Australian Government.” Similarly, while the so-called “New York Declaration,” adopted on July 30 by the entire Arab League, the European Union, and more than a dozen other countries usefully condemns the October 7 attacks and calls for Hamas’s removal from power, it calls for a Palestinian state under a reformed Palestinian Authority (PA) that will “continue implementing its credible reform agenda.”
It is difficult not to laugh at all those “commitments” to a “credible reform agenda” by the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, who has made them and others like them over and over again during his nearly twenty years as head of Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the Palestinian Authority. The PA is no closer to ruling Gaza than it has been since June 2007 when it was expelled from there by Hamas, nor any closer to fundamental reform. Macron also stated that “we must build the state of Palestine (and) guarantee its viability,” and it apparently never occurred to him to suggest that Palestinians must “build the state of Palestine and guarantee its viability.”
Why, after 80 years of efforts to partition the Holy Land, has a Palestinian state never been created? Why am I persuaded that this objective will never be achieved? Scores of new countries have been created since the Second World War. What is unique about the struggle for “Palestine” that has doomed it, and what are the alternatives? While my particular focus here is on the West Bank, most of the analysis that follows applies just as well to Gaza.
I.The “two-state solution” is an offshoot of the older idea of partition—the division of the Palestine Mandate held by the United Kingdom into Jewish and Arab lands. Transjordan, a separate British mandate and now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, came into being in 1946, and the UN General Assembly voted in November 1947 to create two more new states, one Arab and one Jewish. The Jews said yes and the Arabs said no.
There is a lot more to be said about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, but the essence of it remains in 2025 what it was in 1947: the Arabs said no.
Daniel Pipes has commented on this many times, writing of what he called the Palestinians’ “genocidal rejectionism.” Why haven’t peace and Palestinian statehood prevailed? In the early years, Pipes wrote, “The local population, which we now call Palestinians, didn’t want them there and told them to get out. And [the Zionists] responded by saying no, we are modern Westerners, we can bring you clean water and electricity. But Palestinians engaged in rejectionism, and said, ‘No, we want to kill you; we’re going to drive you away.’” Over a century ago, the Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky explained that this is the response the Jews should expect to such offers of economic advancement, although he believed the attitude would change in the fullness of time. But little has changed, as Pipes writes:
It hasn’t worked because it can’t work. If your enemy wants to eliminate you, telling him that you’ll get him clean water is not going to convince him otherwise. What’s so striking is that the Palestinians have retained this genocidal impulse for such a long period. I would argue, as an historian, that this is unique. No other people have ever retained that kind of hostility for such a length of time.
Such views can be, and have often been, attacked as those of a Zionist and conservative. But Pipes’s conclusion has now been given support by an unexpected source: Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, who have written a book called Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine about their decades of efforts, individually and together, to promote Palestinian statehood. Agha was a trusted confidant and key negotiator for Yasir Arafat. Raised in Beirut, now holding a British passport (after previously having Lebanese and Iraqi citizenship), a member of Fatah from 1968, educated at Oxford and associated for 25 years with St. Antony’s College there, the wily and charming Agha advised the Palestinian leadership and participated in talks from the Madrid Conference in 1991 through those with John Kerry in 2014. Malley, son of a far-left and anti-Zionist Egyptian Jew, was special assistant to the president for Arab-Israeli affairs during the Clinton administration and then a key Middle East adviser and negotiator for Barack Obama. Malley and Agha worked together, each for his respective team, to prepare for the Camp David Summit in 2000, and then collaborated on a famous New York Review of Books article in August 2001 that defended Arafat and rejected the view (advanced by President Clinton and most other U.S. participants) that Arafat was to blame for the failure of the peace effort.
Their very latest collaboration was an article in the New Yorker in August that was largely based on the book but added new and exceptionally vicious condemnations of Israel. It is as if they worry that the balanced judgments about the history of negotiations in their book, whose publication date is September 16, are now out of date—and that they must join the chorus lest they be accused of inadequate zeal against the Jewish state. The time for careful reflection seems to be over.
But in their book Agha and Malley write that “the idea of an Israeli-Palestinian partition into two states has an interesting, troubled, and foreign pedigree. What it has not been, save for a relatively short period, is an indigenous Palestinian or Jewish demand.” This is because “the two-state solution is not the natural resting place for either Israelis or Palestinians [and] runs counter to the essence of their national identities and aspirations.” True, but the Zionists, in 1948, compromised and took what the UN was offering. The Palestinians did not.
The Palestinians did not want to live at peace with the Jews, so the UN partition decision in 1947, much less efforts like the Oslo process (designed to cope with Israel’s conquests in 1967), failed to address the underlying problem. Agha and Malley quote Arafat: “We are not concerned with what took place in June 1967 or in eliminating the consequences of the June war.” That is, the Israeli “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza after the Six-Day War, held up time and again by Israel’s critics abroad (and even some of its supporters) as its great sin, was not the problem Arafat wished to solve; rather, his objection was to Israel’s existence. How do we know this is right? They comment: “Were it otherwise, Palestinians and Jews would not have fought in the 1920s and 30s, when no state of Israel existed; Arab nations would not have fought Israel in 1948, when the partition plan proposed a Palestinian state; and Palestinians should have made their peace between 1948 and 1967, when the West Bank and Gaza were not in Israeli hands.”
In other words, the problem is not the technical challenge of delineating borders or some diplomatic failing, that if solved will lead to Palestinian statehood. The problem is that Palestinian nationalism is fundamentally about destroying the Jewish state, not building a Palestinian one. In his famous Bar-Ilan speech of 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu put it this way: “this is the root of the conflict, this is what keeps it alive, and the root of the conflict was and remains that which has been repeated for over 90 years—the profound objection by the hard core of Palestinians to the right of the Jewish people to its own country in the Land of Israel.” State-building is not a Palestinian priority, and the absence of a state is not the cause of the conflict.
This is what Macron, Starmer, Carney, Albanese, and their many peace-processor predecessors, get wrong. To the extent that there is a logic to their arguments, it goes like this: there is an Israel-Palestinian conflict because Palestinians want an independent state where they can exercise their right to self-determination in their homeland, and to do so Israel will have to cede “land for peace.” If Palestinians have a state, their underlying grievance will be addressed and violence, like that of October 7 and of the ensuing war, will no longer be necessary. Hamas appeals to Palestinians at present because they believe its claim that only violence will achieve statehood. Granting a state to the PA will undercut Hamas, end the reason for conflict, and bring peace.
While this logic is internally consistent, all evidence contradicts it. If Pipes and Netanyahu are correct—and Malley and Agha seem to believe they are—then a Palestinian state will fail to meet Palestinian aspirations since it will still have to exist alongside Israel. The two-state solution solves the wrong problem.
To this analysis, it may be objected that in the Oslo Accords of 1993, Israelis and Palestinians did in fact reach an agreement, a meeting of the minds about peace and the two-state solution. Not really. What is called Oslo I established the Palestinian Authority and agreed to start negotiations on everything that mattered: “permanent-status negotiations will commence as soon as possible. . . . It is understood that these negotiations shall cover remaining issues, including: Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, security arrangements, borders, relations, and cooperation with other neighbors, and other issues of common interest.” In other words, there was agreement on none of the key issues that divided the parties.
Agha and Malley write that there was a signed document but those signatures “served to conceal their divide on issues as elemental as the rights of refugees, the attributes of a Palestinian state, and the legitimacy of the state of Israel. Surface consensus signaled continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle by other means.” As to being an agreement on Palestinian statehood, nowhere in the Oslo Accords is such an objective even mentioned.
The Oslo Accords happened over 30 years ago now, and have failed. They were the apparent high point of Israel-Palestinian accommodation and agreement, but what has transpired since shows that their promise was empty. As David Weinberg put it, “Thirty years and billions of dollars and euros later, the return on Western investment in Palestinian independence is abysmal. There is no democracy, no rule of law, no transparency, no sustainability, no investment in economic stability, and no peace education in the PA.” An Economist editorial in September 2023 said the “lasting achievements” of Oslo were “to create a limited Palestinian government loathed by most Palestinians.”
These are grim conclusions, but most Palestinians agree with them. The leading Palestinian pollster, Khalil Shikaki, found in a September 2023 survey that, “thirty years after the signing of the Oslo Accords, about two thirds describe conditions today as worse than they were before that agreement; two thirds think it has damaged Palestinian national interests; three quarters think Israel does not implement it; and a majority supports abandoning it.” Palestinians say the PA is a burden on them rather than an asset, by 60 to 35 percent. Fifty-seven percent oppose the two-state solution (though support rises if you promise the 1967 borders, including in Jerusalem).
A plurality of 41 percent, when asked how to bring the occupation to an end, favors “armed struggle,” and this brings us back to the question of violence and Pipes’s stark reference to “genocidal rejectionism.” As I’ve explained, proponents of the two-state solution claim that Palestinian statehood will bring an end to Palestinian violence. They argue that it will instead produce, as the formula goes, “two states living side by side in peace and security.” But if the object of that violence is the destruction of the state of Israel, not the establishment of an independent state, why would the violence not continue (or increase) across the border of an independent Palestine, as it did across the border from the West Bank and from Gaza? Why would it not encourage Palestinians to believe that the old “phased plan,” as the historian Efraim Karsh explained, of taking “whatever territory Israel is prepared or compelled to cede to them and us[ing] it as a springboard for further territorial gains until achieving the ‘complete liberation of Palestine’” is working?
In their book, Agha and Malley make no effort to downplay Palestinian violence. Of Arafat, whom Agha knew very well, they say that he “believed in a negotiated outcome [but] he also clung to the belief that violence was needed to reach that end.” As to the second intifada, which killed more than 1,000 Israelis and over 3,000 Palestinians, they write of Arafat that “an armed confrontation, he thought, could not hurt. Who knows, it might help.” Nor has much changed: as for Fatah, still the ruling party in the PA and PLO, they assess that “Hamas’s religious doctrine, not its resort to violence, is what sets it apart from Fatah. From the start, Fatah’s defining trait was armed struggle, often with scant heed to whether its victims were civilian or military.” And they conclude that “deep down, Oslo notwithstanding, Fatah never truly reconciled itself with laying down its arms.”
Even more striking is what they write about the Hamas massacres on October 7, 2023: “October 7 was neither uniquely Hamas nor distinctively Islamist. It was Palestinian through and through.” And again, “there is no denying that Palestinians largely embraced the events of October 7 because they spoke to their most profound feelings. October 7 was Palestinian to the core.”
That is where we are, 30 years after Oslo and 77 years after the UN resolution on partition. The attention of the “international community” and, too often, pressures from the United States remain focused on what Israel can or must be forced to do, while meaningless Palestinian pledges (such as the recent ones to Macron, Carney, and Albanese) are taken at face value. But the core of the problem remains the reality and the potential on the Palestinian side. Will Palestinian society ever abandon support for violence and terrorism? Will dreams of destroying Israel ever be replaced by efforts to build a real state? Will businessmen, honest officials, doctors, lawyers, architects, and engineers ever replace terrorist murderers as the most honored citizens? Einat Wilf noted recently that “there are perfectly capable people in Gaza, as we saw on October 7. That massacre required billions of dollars, years of investment in infrastructure, leadership, strategy, and vision, of the most perverse kind. What it shows is that the people of Gaza are not lacking capacity or resources. Their problem is ideological.” From the early Zionist days, to those of Haj Amin al-Husseini, to Arafat, to the present, Palestinian nationalism and even Palestinian identity have been irredentist and negative: about destroying, not building. That is why there is no Palestinian state.
II.
The Palestinian Authority was created under the Oslo Accords to change that. Palestinians would use creative energy in both the West Bank and Gaza to build institutions of self-government. The goal of statehood was officially adopted by the United States during the George W. Bush administration. The “Roadmap,” issued in 2003 and formally titled “A Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” set Palestinian statehood as its goal. But the achievement of that goal was conditional on Palestinian conduct:
A two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will only be achieved through an end to violence and terrorism, when the Palestinian people have a leadership acting decisively against terror and willing and able to build a practicing democracy based on tolerance and liberty.
A Palestinian state was to be earned, not awarded. To help achieve that goal, Bush forced the creation of the post of prime minister. The idea was to limit Arafat’s power to maintain the corrupt structures that characterized the PA, PLO, and Fatah, and begin building institutions. Mahmoud Abbas served as prime minister briefly, until he was pushed aside by Arafat. After Arafat’s death in November 2004, Abbas was quickly chosen to succeed him by the PA, PLO, and Fatah, and legitimized himself through winning a January 2005 presidential election.
Staying in power, not state-building, was and is Abbas’s objective, but state-building was the objective of the man who served as finance minister from 2002 to 2005 and prime minister from 2007 to 2013—Salam Fayyad. His goals were clear, and it is fair to call them Zionist in inspiration: “Israel as a state was not established in 1948,” Fayyad said in 2010. “Statehood was proclaimed in 1948. The key institutions of state and the services were there long before.” Similarly, he argued, “Palestine is not going to emerge in a vacuum but on the strength of the institutions of government” and people would “see statehood translated and transformed from the realm of concept to the realm of reality. This is enormously powerful.”
He explained this over and over. In 2009:
The Israelis have also expressed concerns that our program is not really about state-building but a plan for “declaring a state,” which is most emphatically not the case. We already declared our state in 1988 within its own set of objective conditions, and we have no need of another declaratory statement. What is certainly true is that if the Palestinians are seen by the international community as having built a de-facto state, even if the occupation is still in place, there will be great pressure on the Israelis to end the occupation.
In 2024:
the task was always about building the state and projecting its reality on the ground. And that’s why I invested a lot in the process of making it happen. Creating it—you just create it, make it happen, build it. Build its institutions; project its reality. Let it grow on people, as opposed to it happening top-down. And then, work politically, somehow, with the international community to impart sovereignty.
This is precisely what Bush and the Roadmap were all about, and it all failed. Palestinians have not built institutions of government, they have not built a de-facto state, and the reality on the ground is disastrous. Why did “Fayyadism” or genuine state-building yield so little? Some part of the blame goes to Israel, the United States, and the European and Arab countries, all of whom cheered Fayyad but did too little to help him. For Western countries there was always something more important: the “peace process” itself. Negotiations, visits, declarations, summits—these were the proximate goals; state-building was arduous, long, boring, and unrewarding. Western politicians needed something flashy to fill an immediate political need. This is precisely what we are seeing today in the ritual recognition of the non-existent state of Palestine by Western governments. The “peace process” has become not a process of construction but an alternative to it—substituting declarations and conferences for hard work that, the leaders knew, was unlikely to be undertaken, to succeed, or to make anyone very happy in the short time that politics demanded.
Certainly it was not rewarded by the Palestinians themselves. In 2005 Fayyad resigned as finance minister to run in the 2006 parliamentary elections. His party received 2.4 percent of the vote and two seats in the 132-seat parliament. In that election, Hamas defeated Fatah, winning 44 percent of the votes to Fatah’s 41 percent.
Why did Hamas win? President Bush took the view that Palestinians were rejecting Fatah’s corruption and voting for clean government. Others argued that it was religion: Fatah was a secular party while Hamas was Islamist, so people were voting for Islam. I had a different view. Perhaps Palestinians were voting for the party that was killing Jews over the party that was negotiating with them. Perhaps this vote showed, yet again, that Fayyad’s step-by-step state-building and Fatah’s negotiations for statehood both failed to satisfy what many Palestinians wanted more: armed struggle against Israel.
As prime minister, Fayyad continued to promote building the state and in 2009 he announced a 54-page, two-year plan that would lead to statehood by building more and stronger institutions. Fayyad got Western encouragement, but his plan abandoned Oslo and its requirement of a negotiated resolution of the conflict. It was to end in 2011 with a unilateral declaration of statehood on the 1967 borders. Fatah politicians didn’t like it because it sidelined them and their control of the negotiations with Israel. Fatah and Hamas leaders noticed that it was an abandonment of “armed struggle,” which was always Hamas’s main focus and which had been endorsed by Fatah again that very year.
Fayyad’s plan did not work and of course armed struggle was never abandoned. But in another way it may be seen as a critical turning point: the Oslo paradigm was that peace would be negotiated between Israelis and Palestinians. Fayyad was now jettisoning the centrality of getting Israeli agreement.
Fayyad wanted to build the institutions of statehood, but other Palestinians wondered why Palestinians should bother with all that travail if they could achieve statehood without it. What if a Palestinian state could arise not from the hard work of building institutions, not by abandoning violence, but as a gift from foreign governments? And what if it turned out that “armed struggle” against Israel inspired not revulsion in those foreign governments but further demands on Israel and further support for the Palestinian cause?
That is precisely where we are today. The conditions that Bush demanded twenty years ago seem almost quaint now. Everyone understands that the Palestinians will not meet any prerequisites that are set. So, leaders like Macron instead accept Abbas’s empty pledges that “reform” has taken place, is under way, or will soon happen. It doesn’t matter: he is lying, they understand fully that he is lying, and they have decided that the lies do not matter. The alternative approach is that of Starmer, who says Israel must achieve impossible goals by a certain date or he will recognize a Palestinian state. Then he can do so and blame Israel at the same time. In all these cases, the goal is to fill a political need (namely, to attack Israel) rather than to bring Palestinian statehood or any concrete improvement in Palestinian lives closer.
The position of the United States in the Biden years was a variant of this, and used a phrase that has become almost universal now. On February 7, 2024, exactly four months after the Hamas massacres, Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave prepared remarks in Israel and called for “a concrete, time-bound, and irreversible path” to a Palestinian state. With those words Blinken destroyed the Bush Roadmap’s demand for preconditions to the creation of a Palestinian state. “Time-bound” and “irreversible” are the exact opposite of the Roadmap’s “performance-based” idea.
The trajectory over the decades is clear. First, negotiations with Israel were said to be absolutely required. Israel offered peace and land (most clearly under Ehud Barak in 2000 and Ehud Olmert in 2008, as we will soon see) but that would have required difficult compromises as well on the Palestinian side, so Palestinian leaders said no. Then came the idea of building a state bottom-up and, once the institutions were ready, declaring a state unilaterally. But Palestinians did not build those institutions, blocked by a combination of the corruption and incompetence of the PA, PLO, and Fatah; terrorist movements that had very wide support in their dedication to violent attacks on Israel instead of positive actions to create new realities; and by their own deeper interest in destroying Israel than in creating a state that would surely be poor, face limitations on its sovereignty, and be politically and psychologically unsatisfying. So, now, the “international community” is throwing in the towel and simply recognizing a Palestinian state anyway—even though it does not exist.
The Soviet Union led the way, recognizing “Palestine” in 1988. Soviet satellites and sympathizers of course began to follow, as did Arab and Muslim states. But Western nations held out honorably, imposing demands and preconditions. We are now watching that principled resistance collapse. Neither Israel nor moderate Arab nations nor Western democracies could force or entice Palestinians to develop decent, moderate leadership and build modern state institutions. Under left-wing political pressure and the demands of growing Muslim populations, even the Anglosphere democracies—Canada, Australia, and the UK—that were once a staunch bulwark against radical demands and often voted against senseless and one-sided UN resolutions have given up. They know what a Palestinian state will require to be successful, but they no longer care, the political pressures are too great to resist, and they wish to punish Israel and its right-wing government for the sin of defending itself. Which Palestinian cannot be struck by the fact that so many world leaders do not even require the release of all hostages before they make their self-indulgent declarations?
Nothing has been more pernicious to building a decent, democratic, peaceful Palestinian state than such “support.” The message to Palestinians is clear: what you need to do to get your state recognized is nothing. No reform, no institution building, no democracy, no defeat of terrorist groups, no competent government. All of that will happen magically in the Palestinian state once it comes into existence. The use of brutal and inhuman violence will bring some nice rewards, while Israel’s reactions will bring it punishment—for it is crystal clear that without the October 7 attacks Macron, Starmer, Albanese, and Carney would not today be recognizing this imaginary state.
The last point is worthy of emphasis. As David Weinberg has said, writing not of Gaza but of the West Bank, “Nobody is under the illusion that any Palestinian ‘authority’ can or will counteract the buildup of Iranian-backed Islamist terrorist armies in these areas—which directly threaten Jerusalem and central Israel. Only the IDF can and will; thus, the full-scale military operations in places like Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nablus to rout such threats resolutely will continue.” Every Israeli knows that that is right. To recognize Palestinian statehood now is to insist that Israeli military action in those areas is illegitimate, which is a roundabout way of saying that Israeli self-defense is illegitimate.
And that Israeli self-defense will have to continue, not even if but especially if a Palestinian state were ever created. As Agha and Malley write, “Israelis might have been more open to persuasion, if offered reason to believe that territorial withdrawals would yield security. Their experience suggests otherwise.” Because as we have seen, the mere creation of a weak, landlocked, poor Palestine will not bring Palestinians the historic and emotional victory they seek. Only Israel’s destruction will, and efforts to bring that day closer will continue. The establishment of a Palestinian state will be viewed as a tremendous but partial victory—and one that provides many Palestinians an assurance that the ultimate victory is still possible.
It is worth recalling what Palestinians have in fact said “no” to—the Israeli offers of statehood they have turned down. Here is the account of the late Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator during the Oslo period, later minister of negotiation, and then secretary-general of the PLO from 2015 to 2020.
On July 23, 2000, in his meeting with President Arafat in Camp David, President Clinton said: “You will be the first president of a Palestinian state, within the 1967 borders—give or take, considering the land swap—and East Jerusalem will be the capital of the Palestinian state, but we want you, as a religious man, to acknowledge that the Temple of Solomon is located underneath the Haram al-Sharif.” Yasir Arafat said to Clinton defiantly: “I will not be a traitor. Someone will come to liberate it after ten, fifty, or one hundred years. Jerusalem will be nothing but the capital of the Palestinian state, and there is nothing underneath or above the Haram al-Sharif except for Allah.” That is why Yasir Arafat was besieged, and that is why he was killed unjustly. [Note that, in reality, Arafat died of natural causes.]
In November 2008, . . . Olmert . . . offered the 1967 borders, but said: “We will take 6.5 percent of the West Bank, and give in return 5.8 percent from the 1948 lands, and the 0.7 percent will constitute the safe passage, and East Jerusalem will be the capital, but there is a problem with the Haram and with what they called the Holy Basin.” Abu Mazen [i.e., Mahmoud Abbas] too answered with defiance, saying: “I am not in a marketplace or a bazaar. I came to demarcate the borders of Palestine—the June 4, 1967 borders—without detracting a single inch, and without detracting a single stone from Jerusalem, or from the holy Christian and Muslim places.” This is why the Palestinian negotiators did not sign.
If those Israeli offers were insufficient, none ever will be. And those offers are inconceivable right now to Israelis, because the risks they would impose are unacceptable to Israelis left, right, and center after October 7. Olmert was in fact willing to place the entire Old City of Jerusalem under international control, an astonishing concession that was unlikely to pass his Cabinet or the Knesset and will not be repeated. But even that elicited no response from Abbas, nor did he respond to the Kerry-Obama peace proposal in 2014.
Thus the “progress” of the “international community,” from insisting on negotiations, to insisting on state-building, to insisting on nothing; a Palestinian state must be recognized immediately without negotiations between it and Israel, and without its having achieved any of the normal prerequisites for statehood.
III.
There is a certain logic to that progression if you don’t really care about Israelis and Palestinians, and if you are acting for domestic political reasons. But it won’t work, for two reasons. First, at the moment there is one key holdout among powerful nations: the United States, which is still insisting that this wave of recognition of “Palestine” is a reward for terror. Indeed, on July 31, the State Department imposed new sanctions on PA and PLO officials for “not complying with their commitments and undermining the prospects for peace” and for “continuing to support terrorism including incitement and glorification of violence (especially in textbooks), and providing payments and benefits in support of terrorism to Palestinian terrorists and their families.”
Second, Israelis will not commit suicide. As Michael Oren put it, “since the massacres of October 7, 2023, the majority of Israelis view a Palestinian state as a dangerous reward for terror. Nobody knows what that state would look like, who would run it, or whether it would be democratic and peaceful or Islamic and jihadist. Nobody can adduce evidence that the Palestinians are capable of maintaining a nation-state.” The advice that only when there is a Palestinian state will Israelis have “genuine true security,” which Secretary Blinken and hundreds of other diplomats have repeated for years, gets only laughs in Jerusalem.
Cynics or Machiavellians might suggest that the Israelis accept some formula now for Palestinian statehood later (or, much later) when certain conditions are met—because everyone knows the conditions will never be met. So the state will never be created and Israel will get the credit now for saying the magic words. The problem with this formula is that as we have seen, there are no more conditions. Empty promises suffice. Even as war continues, even as hostages remain in captivity, even as the “reformed Palestinian Authority” remains entirely mythical, country after country insists on immediate Palestinian statehood. Israelis know that whatever conditions they set will eventually be abandoned.
This is an odd moment, then: as the insistence on immediate recognition of Palestinian statehood spreads, the possibility of that outcome narrows—not least because its supporters make it increasingly clear that they are indifferent (or hostile) to the security of Israelis. Agha and Malley say this about the leaders now demanding immediate Palestinian statehood:
[T]hey know this is implausible and cannot describe a practical plan to achieve it. Deep down, believers in two states, confronted with all reasons to surrender their faith, fall back on a single argument: there is no alternative. Partition is considered inevitable, even as it becomes harder to imagine, because they are not capable of imagining anything else. . . . The most likely outcome is perpetuation of the status quo. . . . It has lasted for over half a century, despite repeated objections and obituaries, far outstripping the nineteen years during which Israel did not control the West Bank or Gaza.
They’re right. Many supporters of the two-state solution acknowledge all the problems but say “there is no alternative,” as France’s foreign minister told the big July meeting at the United Nations and as Blinken often said.
But there are alternatives. The first and most obvious, as Agha and Malley acknowledge, is the situation that has obtained since 1967. Everyone in the diplomatic world insists that it is “unsustainable,” but, as I have argued previously, something that has been sustained for 58 years is not exactly ephemeral. The Palestinian leadership in the West Bank remains dedicated to staying in power, a delicate goal when Abbas will be ninety in November and what follows him is uncertain. Will a successor wear his and Arafat’s three hats, as head of PA, PLO, and Fatah? Will the struggle over succession be brief and polite, or long and murderous? Given the state of those three organizations, will it matter who follows or are they now incapable of winning back public loyalty and respect? One thing should be clear: while they are engaged in a brutal fight for power among themselves, those PA, PLO, and Fatah leaders will have limited or non-existent ability to build new Palestinian institutions or to negotiate peace with Israel. If I were betting on what the West Bank would look like a year from today, or five years, I would say that deep change is unlikely.
The main diplomatic issue now being debated about future governance in Gaza is what role the PA will play there, and whether it will be able to govern the place as it did before Hamas ejected it in five violent days in 2007. Most diplomatic proposals, such as the “New York Declaration,” are adamant that the PA will once again rule Gaza as part of a unitary state. Historically the West Bank and Gaza have often been separate, though at other times linked. After long periods of rule by the Ottomans and Egypt, Gaza—like the West Bank—became part of Britain’s Palestine Mandate right after the First World War. Egypt seized Gaza in 1948 when the British left, though it never annexed the area; Jordan seized the West Bank, so from 1948 to 1967, the West Bank and Gaza were ruled by two different countries. The period of greatest linkage was the Oslo years, when Arafat’s PA held sway in both Gaza and the West Bank. Once Hamas seized power in Gaza in 2007, links were largely broken again.
Every proponent of Palestinian statehood believes that Israel must return almost entirely to the “1967 borders,” which are actually the 1949 armistice lines, and believes that the imaginary Palestinian state must consist of both Gaza and the West Bank. None seems concerned that the PA has no ability today to govern or rebuild Gaza and has had no role there for a generation. Their idea is that the world will help Gaza recover under international and PA tutelage, and at a certain point Gaza will join the West Bank as a normal district under rule from Ramallah—or indeed from Jerusalem, if a negotiated agreement divides that city and makes part of it the Palestinian capital.
My focus here is not the future of Gaza. I believe that when the war ends, an international committee to rebuild Gaza will be created whose members will be key Arab states (Jordan, Egypt, the Gulf donors), the EU, and the United States. It will work to rebuild schools (hopefully along modern Emirati lines rather than those of Qatar or worse yet UNRWA, for whom education is primarily indoctrination in terrorism and anti-Semitism), hospitals, and all civil functions. The PA’s blessing will legitimize whatever governance or administrative structures are imposed in Gaza as well as the intrusive foreign role, and the PA will try hard to make believe it is central to all of this. That might strengthen its international position, but will do little to enhance its reputation and support in the West Bank or in Gaza because in all likelihood it will perform its functions with the customary incompetence and corruption.
The hard part is security in Gaza: who will provide it? The PA cannot, lacking the requisite number of trained troops. Most likely is a messy combination of vetted Palestinian police, private security contractors, and Arab/Muslim forces that some states may be willing to send at least to perform limited tasks like protecting a food warehouse or a government building. Meanwhile, as in the West Bank, the IDF will do what the PA and Arab forces likely will not: fight Hamas and prevent its reconstitution.
But the very most that can hoped for in Gaza, if Hamas is destroyed and the entire place is physically rebuilt by some grand international coalition, is that it will resemble the West Bank. There will still be a residue of twenty years of Hamas indoctrination of an entire generation, there will still be thousands of young men trained by Hamas to fight, and there will still be all those Gazans who voted for Hamas and tell pollsters they still support it. A May 2025 poll found that 64 percent of Gazans oppose disarming Hamas and a majority oppose exiling Hamas military leaders; if legislative elections were held with all the parties who ran in 2006, voters in Gaza would go 49 percent for Hamas versus 30 percent for Fatah. Forty-six percent of all Palestinians told pollsters they support “a return to confrontations and armed intifada” (a higher number than in the September 2023 poll mentioned earlier). When asked what the most vital Palestinian goal should be, 41 percent said statehood, including East Jerusalem as the capital—but 33 percent said it must be the “right of return” to their 1948 towns and villages, which would of course mean the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state.
Those clamoring now for immediate recognition of Palestinian statehood never seem to mention any of this, or to recognize the true condition of Palestinian society. Each half of its population has been almost entirely separated from the other half for a generation, with the half in Gaza ruled since 2007 by a death cult and the half in Judea and Samaria ruled for even longer by corrupt politicians whom Palestinians loathe. Recognizing a Palestinian state today not only fails to solve this crisis in Palestinian society—a crisis not only of governance but of ideology and national purpose—but fails even to acknowledge it. Instead, again, the reply is “there is no alternative” and the status quo since 1967 is “unsustainable.”
The idea that Palestinian institutions should be built up first, largely as Fayyad proposed but necessarily with a far more realistic timeline, is rejected out of hand. Improving Palestinian lives pragmatically—better jobs, better educations, better futures, better government—seems to satisfy no one in diplomatic circles because it quiets none of the political pressures governments are under. Demonstrators are surrounding parliaments and spray-painting government buildings with the slogan “from the river to the sea,” not “let’s build effective institutions.” So the pragmatic alternative of a much-improved version of the status quo is politically “unsustainable.”
But the alternative of creating a Palestinian state now will fail because it is far greater a threat to Israel than Israelis (or any nation) would be willing to accept. As we have seen, this widely acclaimed “alternative” is not even the real goal of Palestinian nationalism, and would create a launching pad for future attacks on Israel from what would become sovereign territory under international law.
IV.The nonsensical “one-state solution” of an Israeli/Palestinian combined state and society would, like the “right of return,” destroy Israel as a Jewish state. Nor is it believable today that such a state would ever attain internal peace, or would satisfy the desires of Israelis or Palestinians. As Agha and Malley put it, “A pure one-state solution is unappealing to many Palestinians. . . . Palestinians invoke it more as a threat to motivate Israelis to accept a two-state solution than as a genuine aspiration.”
But there is an alternative that has been around for a long time, and is roundly rejected as unrealistic and impossible, although it is far more realistic than the one-state or two-state solutions. Those who pay closest attention, and have for decades, know the two-state solution is not going to happen. Agha and Malley, veteran peace negotiators, admit it:
the idea of partition has been around for over 80 years. Attempts to reach a two-state solution have persisted for a quarter of a century under vastly different configurations of policy and power. In terms of longevity, creativity, and the cast of characters involved, it would be hard to fault the quest for a two-state solution. Yet regardless of setup, content, personality, and style, the result did not vary. . . . A time comes when even the most optimistic must retire their faith.
So what is the idea that they then raise? Jordan. As they write, “another potential outcome is a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation comprising the Hashemite Kingdom and the West Bank. . . . Israelis . . . might view a Jordanian security presence in the West Bank as reliable, more so, certainly, than a Palestinian one, more so, possibly, than a Western one.” King Hussein proposed such a confederation in 1972: a united kingdom consisting of two districts, with full West Bank autonomy except for Jordan’s control of military and security matters and foreign affairs. In 1977, President Carter raised it with Menachem Begin; at various times, President Sadat of Egypt and Henry Kissinger espoused the idea. Hussein and Arafat agreed to such a confederation in 1985. But Jordan renounced the idea in 1988 and today rejects it, demanding Palestinian statehood.
The idea still has some currency. Shlomo Ben-Ami, the Israeli Labor-party (and later Meretz) politician who served as foreign minister under Ehud Barak, wrote this in 2022:
Since all other attempts to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have failed, it may be time to revisit the Jordanian option. . . . King Hussein’s waiving of Jordan’s claim on the West Bank was never ratified by the country’s parliament and was seen by many, including the former crown prince Hassan bin Talal, as unconstitutional. In 2012, he said that since no two-state solution was still possible, the Palestinian Authority should let Jordan recover its control of the territory. . . . A Jordanian-Palestinian confederation has a more compelling logic in terms of economics, religion, history, and memory.
King Hussein, like Israel and most Arab leaders, never favored a fully independent Palestinian state. He feared it could be radicalized and fall into the hands of “a Gaddafi-like leader,” as Jimmy Carter had put it. To Hussein, a Palestinian state was bound to inherit the revolutionary traits of the Palestinian national movement. In 1985, Hussein reached an understanding with the PLO chairman Yasir Arafat in which Palestinians would exercise their “inalienable right of self-determination” within the context of a confederated Arab States of Jordan and Palestine. Hussein defended this as a question of “joint destiny,” “a matter of shared history, experience, culture, economy, and social structure.” He believed that the chaotic Palestinian national movement would be saved by linking its destiny with Jordan, “a sovereign state which enjoys credible international standing.”
It is striking that the concern expressed by those favoring a role for Jordan is precisely what we saw at its worst on October 7, 2023: the radicalization of any Palestinian state because it would “inherit the revolutionary traits of the Palestinian national movement” which was “chaotic.” The point about confederation should be clear: it would finally partition the old Palestine Mandate into a Jewish part and an Arab part, and do so in a way that guarantees—through the Jordanian army and mukhabarat (secret police)—that Hamas and other terrorist groups would not take over the Arab part or use it as a launching pad for attacks on Israel.
Agha and Malley acknowledge that such proposals will meet with “considerable hurdles” in Jordan. But they explain the advantages for both sides:
[F]or Jordan, a confederation would mean expanding its size and political weight. For the Palestinian elite, Amman already serves as a substitute political and social hub. . . . Palestinians would gain economic and strategic strength, reduce their vulnerability and dependence on Israel, obtain valuable political space, and form part of a more consequential state.
Palestinian support for the idea has risen and fallen, but the leading Palestinian pollster said in 2018 that previous polls had found support to be above 40 percent. Why raise the confederation idea here, and why now? In part to demonstrate that it is not an idiosyncratic notion but rather an option with historical roots and real advantages. In part as a reminder that it is simply false and facile to state that “there is no alternative” to full Palestinian statehood. And, in part, because Palestinian statehood is not going to happen, so contemplation of alternatives will at some future point be required. One of the worst effects of the “there is no alternative” position has been to stifle all discussion of what other options might exist.
It can be argued, of course, that such a confederation would not satisfy Palestinian nationalism. But in its current form Palestinian nationalism cannot fully be satisfied without Palestine extending “from the river to the sea”—that is, by replacing Israel rather than living “side by side in peace and security.” A more positive form of Palestinian nationalism would indeed be satisfied by complete local autonomy in a confederation with Jordan, which is an Arab, Muslim, and already half-Palestinian state. Those who wish to argue that this is insufficient—that Palestinian national identity or ethnicity require an independent state—must tell us why the same is not true for Kurdistan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Quebec, and Somaliland, among many other cases. The declarations that Palestinians have a “right” to an entirely separate and independent state are not convincing as a matter of history or international law, and are no more persuasive than it is to declare a million times that the PLO is the “sole, legitimate voice of the Palestinian people” when that is manifestly untrue.
What would convince Jordan to agree to this option? Today, nothing; the clamor for Palestinian statehood is too great. But after a while, when the Gaza war has ended and Palestinian statehood seems no closer, when serious Arab states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE that want an end to Israel-Palestinian conflict acknowledge that a Palestinian state will be unstable and radical, when billions in aid for Jordan are offered for a role in helping to solve the conflict by returning to the position King Hussein once took, and when Palestinians who seek to end Israeli rule in all of the West Bank turn to Jordan, things may change.
At some point Palestinians should be offered this additional option, when it becomes clear again that despite the clamor in Turtle Bay there will be no Palestinian state. Perhaps the way to get there is that offered by Salah Khalaf, a founder of Fatah who was the chief of intelligence for the PLO and the second most senior official in Fatah after Arafat. Agha and Malley cite him by his nom de guerre, Abu Iyad:
After the PLO’s acceptance of the two-state solution in the late 1980s, Abu Iyad, then one of its senior-most officials, spoke of Palestinians enjoying five minutes of independence before engaging in talks with Jordan on a form of confederation.
I’ve heard that line repeated over the years by a few thoughtful and often weary Palestinians looking for a way forward that separates them from Israel, guarantees a great deal of self-rule and real autonomy, and brings their children a better life, yet prevents Palestinian radicals, extremists, and terrorists from turning their imaginary peaceful “Palestine” into a simulacrum of yesterday’s Gaza—before October 7—or today’s. They understand something elemental that the Macrons and Carneys and Starmers do not: the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the wide support for violence in Palestinian society will not be solved by the magical incantation of recognition, and will in fact be worsened by it.
Until Palestinian nationalism is not fundamentally about destroying Israel, and until options like an organic link to Jordan are examined, neither that internal crisis nor the violent confrontation between Israel and Palestinians will be resolved. Israelis will not, to say it again, commit suicide, and that means they will not empower those who would murder them and their children and would destroy their state. That is the fact that needs to be faced, and is daily evaded, by facile diplomats who claim to be protecting Palestinians and by self-satisfied politicians motivated by their own need for more votes.
A Palestinian state living in peace and security side by side with Israel is a mirage: despite all the claims that we are getting closer to it, it always recedes. Perhaps someday the Islamic Republic of Iran will fall, and a new government there will stop supporting every terrorist group that wishes to destroy Israel. Perhaps someday leaders of the major democracies will treat Israel with fairness and justice, and will demand and enforce fundamental changes in Palestinian society that root out the disastrous effects of a century of murderous anti-Semitism and efforts to destroy Israel. Perhaps Palestinians will someday find and support a national leader who, unlike Husseini or Arafat, truly wishes to build a decent society rather than attacking the one next door. But until such things happen, Palestinian statehood must remain an impossibility.
The most apt metaphor for Palestinian life today is the Gaza cityscape as it existed on October 6: behind and beneath the facades of homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques lay a vast network of terror tunnels and weapons storehouses. And underlying that physical network lay, and lies still, an intellectual and ideological network of beliefs—beliefs that lead to such widespread support for Hamas even today, and that lead the Palestinian Authority to name schools and plazas after the terrorist murderers of children, and to pay salaries and bounties to terrorists in Israeli prisons.
Israel has done a great deal toward eliminating the physical infrastructure of terror, but there cannot be a Palestinian state unless and until the intellectual network that prizes “armed struggle” against the Jewish state above building a normal life for Palestinians ends as well. That is a task for Palestinians, not Israelis, and it is a task that Palestinians will not take up while international organizations and leaders of important nations assure them that statehood will come to them soon and without conditions.