A brace of pessimism from Stephen Walt:
There are two trends at play that threaten to undermine the two-state option. The first is the continued expansion of Israel settlements in the land that is supposed to be reserved for the Palestinians. There are now about 290,000 settlers living in the West Bank. There are another 185,000 settlers in East Jerusalem. Most of the settlers are subsidized directly or indirectly by the Israeli government. It is increasingly hard to imagine Israel evicting nearly half a million people (about seven percent of its population) from their homes. Although in theory one can imagine a peace deal that keeps most of the settlers within Israel’s final borders (with the new Palestinian state receiving land of equal value as compensation), at some point the settlers’ efforts to “create facts” will make it practically impossible to establish a viable Palestinian state.
The second trend is the growing extremism on both sides. Time is running out on a two-state solution, and its main opponents — the Likud Party and its allies in Israel and Hamas among the Palestinians — are becoming more popular. The rising popularity of Avigdor Lieberman’s overtly racist Yisrael Beiteinu party is ample evidence of this trend. And it’s not as though Kadima or Labor have been pushing hard to bring it about. According to Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times:
The result is that the next Israeli government, left to its own devices, is likely to opt for the status quo with the Palestinians – continued occupation of the West Bank, desultory peace talks, steadily expanding settlements and military force in response to Palestinian rockets or bombs. The long-term pursuit of a two-state solution will be brushed aside, with the argument that the Palestinians are too divided and dangerous to be negotiating partners.”
One does not need to look far down the road to see the point where a two-state solution will no longer be a practical possibility. What will the United States do then? What will American policy be when it makes no sense to talk about a two-state solution, because Israel effectively controls all of what we used to call Mandate Palestine? What vision will President Obama and Secretary Clinton have for the Palestinians and for Israel when they can no longer invoke the two-state mantra?
There are only three alternative options at that point.
As Walt lays it out, option one is ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the West Bank. That’s not a solution the US could support. Option two is an apartheid state: “allow the Palestinians limited autonomy in a set of disconnected enclaves, while it controlled access in-and-out, their water supplies, and the airspace above them.” Walt thinks that the US couldn’t support this option, although I’m not as sure as he is.
Which brings me to the third option. The Israeli government could maintain its physical control over “greater Israel” and grant the Palestinians full democratic rights within this territory. This option has been proposed by a handful of Israeli Jews and a growing number of Palestinians. But there are formidable objections to this outcome: it would mean abandoning the Zionist dream of an independent Jewish state and binational states of this sort do not have an encouraging track record, especially when the two parties have waged a bitter conflict across several generations. This is why I prefer the two-state alternative.
But the more times goes on, the less possible a two-state solution will be. For its part, the US needs to push Israel very hard to reverse course on the settlements. (That doesn’t mean that the Palestinians don’t need to be pushed, too; but the US isn’t the country best situated to push the Palestinians. We are the country best situated to push the Israeli government.)
Good post.
A reasonable proportion of the people in the settlements are crazy enough, I think, to resist with armed force if Israel were to try to evict them.
If so, that leaves Israel with the choices between 1) a military/police action against a non-minuscule portion of its own population, which has strong political support; 2) keeping the settlements, with all the fallout therefrom both w/r/t Palestinians and w/r/t the political empowerment of the far right; and 3) abandoning the settlers, i.e. pulling out from protecting them and letting Palestinians do the dirty work of kicking them out and/or fighting them militarily.
#3 is not really an option, for many obvious reasons. #1 does not seem like an especially likely option either. Which suggests #2 as the most likely outcome. Unfortunately, the settlers can think this way too, and if they agree that #2 is the most likely outcome, that gives even more incentive to resist the government, which makes #1 and #3 even less plausible and even more unpleasant.
the two-state solution is described as being in the process of becoming impossible, while at the same time violent extremism on both sides is said to be getting stronger and more popular.
question: what is happening over time to Israel’s military capacity to act independently of U.S. support?
nightmare scenario: assume that, at some point further down the line (pick a date), someone in Israel makes the decision to go for any one of the options the U.S. cannot politically support. will there come (within the foreseeable future) a date at which Israel could decide to jettison U.S. support in order to do something currently unthinkable?
Or, worse, becomes one of the US allies (like Croatia in ’95) to “tidy up” the loose ends of a settlement “everyone knows” is on the way, with USAF photo-recon and retired officers in full support, and a little rocketry on Tel Aviv (like the Orkans on Zagreb) playing the role of impotent provocation and alibi. If I were an exceptionally cynical IDF officer, I’d be looking at the end of the Balkan wars with an eye to getting the US on my side in dealing with the trouble-fête Hamas, since, after all “Jordan IS Palestine.”
What’s the deal with this? If we were to stop providing military aid tomorrow, what effect would that have on Israel’s military capacity a year from now, five years from now, etc.? I presume there’s a certain amount of stockpile and some ability to buy military hardware elsewhere but not indefinitely. How far out could they go without us?
Israel could reverse-engineer all the American systems it possesses and bring them into home-built production within about a year for anything besides major combat aircraft, and could probably buy up enough spare parts for F-16s from sympathetic NATO suppliers (BeNeLux) or unscrupulous Arab countries (Saudi, Gulf States) to bridge the transition to something like the Lavi.
France cut Israel off cold turkey in ’67 and found that the Mirage-5 engines could be rebuilt, paid-for Israeli boats embargoed in French ports vanished only to reappear in Haifa. I am sure Rafael (Israel Arms Development Authority) has detailed plans for a total cut-off as in ’48 and ’67, and some might actually welcome the opportunity to go back to sophisticated clandestine networks of arms acquisition. Do not underestimate the capacities of a society that has long believed “the whole world is against us.”
If something like option #1 did happen, where would Israel expel the Palestinians to? One of the adjacent Arab countries? Would Jordan, Syria or Egypt accept these hypothetical refugees or would there be another Black September deal?
I see a modified version of #1 as being far more likely to garner American “support” (in this case, defined as looking the other way while running interference in the international arena) than #2. #2 is just a souped-up version of what we have now, and the US is becoming cognizant that it really isn’t tenable from the perspective of our (or Israeli, or obviously Palestinian) interests. The apartheid model is unstable simply because it will always yield more violence, and eventually someone will propose an alternative.
But with the racist Yisrael Beiteinu now the third largest party in Israel, the Lieberman “peace plan”, which tip-toes right up to the line of ethnic cleansing, may creep its way back onto the political table.
Lieberman simply wants to redraw the borders so that heavily Arab areas of Israel are ceded to the future Palestine, and heavily Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank are annexed back to Israel. I’m not sure if this is ethnic cleansing (nobody moves, the only thing that changes is political sovereignty and citizenship), but even if it’s not ethnic cleansing, it’s still really bad simply because the Israeli Arab community does not want to be ceded to Palestine, and coercing people to give up their citizenship on ethnic grounds is really, really wrong.
Actually in Black September Palestinian fedayeen fled Jordan to the safety of capture in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The Israelis would take prisoners, the Jordanians not so much. Wholesale expulsion of Palestinians post-’48 (as opposed to armed factions, primarily, as in Jordan and Lebanon) have only happened in Kuwait (’91) and to a lesser extent in Iraq (’03-present, largely “favorites” of Saddam’s regime), since most of the West Bank refugees of ’67 (250,000 or so) returned. The attempted deportation of a few hundred Hamas men to Lebanon in the late 90s failed when the Lebanese left the deportees in no-man’s land, and Israel eventually accepted them back into the West Bank. It is a bit of an axiom in Israel that large-scale expulsions of Palestinians today are a prerogative of Arab regimes.
In a slightly less cynical vein, there are many who believe that large-scale expulsion would not be countenanced by the Israeli public in the absence of a scenario of total social collapse. Certainly Egypt, Jordan, and Syria would do nothing but leave the refugees in no man’s land and invite the TV news cameras in, leading to pressure on Israel to take them back as in ’67. The veterans of ’48 are dying out, and the unhappily occupied West Bankers and Syrian Golanis are more the status quo. Even after Intifada Two, an uprising on a greater scale than Black September, not only the Palestinian population but the PA police were left in place. There are legal protections against the deportation of individuals, even individuals involved in armed resistance, and the vicissitudes of the past 20-odd years suggest that there are brakes on Israeli behavior that will last as long as the sky is not falling.
Not necessarily.
This has many, many, problems of course–but in theory the level of coercion could be reduced by some sort of compensation and assistance. IOW, if the U.S. gave massachusetts to Canada, but also offered me transportation, employment, housing, and compensation for giving up my Massachusetts home, it would be less problematic than if they did not.
There is in fact a level at which displacement-for-compensation in service of the public good can be thought of as FULLY acceptable (see, e.g., the principle of eminent domain.) That requires real compensation, though, which will be difficult to achieve for benefit of israeli arabs as they are a disliked and disempowered group. And there is obviously an issue with asking that population to bear the brunt of the cost of solving the problem.
There are some big numbers floating around though. Cast Lead probably cost a billion. Everyone else is talking about rebuilding contributions in the multiple billions. Maybe it could be done. I don’t know how big the population is, but IIRC income isn’t super high and housing isn’t super expensive, right?* If there were a serious way in which money could solve a problem that would otherwise mean ongoing war, i think the money would be found.
*Seriously, I’ve heard totals of almost 20 billion. I think there are what, 200,000 people in gaza? That’s $100,000 for every single person. you can do a lot with that much money. how many Israelis would have to be displaced?
Wikipedia puts the population at 1.4 million people. So if I got my zeros right, that’s $14,000 a person.
Yep, you’re right.
I’m going to be exceptionally cynical and point out that the ONLY distinguishing feature separating the Israeli-Palestinians of Umm al-Fahm is their Israeli citizenship; they are culturally Palestinian Arab (as opposed to Druze, Circassian, or other minority Arabophone cultures) Arabophone Muslims (99%) ruled by an Islamist party (the Islamic Movement of Israel.) They are thus culturally and religiously identical to (the majority of) West Bank Palestinians, whose increasing radicalization they have shared. (Umm al-Fahm is a frequent site of unarmed uprisings against the State and, less frequently, of terror/resistance activity.) There is thus an explicit rejection of the State of Israel by the masses of youth, and an insistent clinging to the value of liberal citizenship in the State of Israel by the spokespeople, the municipal government, and the elites. And bear in mind that the municipal government of Umm al-Fahm is an Islamist political machine, even by the standards of Israeli machine politics.
Bear in mind, too, that the area was covered by the annexes to the Armistice Agreement of ’49 in ’50-’51 and was ceded to Israel by Jordan after the war to “straighten the line”, what began as a territorial cession can come back as such. An incredibly surreal (and possibly politically liberal) solution would be to cede Umm al-Fahm to Palestine (or not) by referendum and leave the residents the option of retaining Israeli citizenship by making Palestinian citizenship “opt in”, i.e. anyone making no change would become an Israeli resident of Palestine even in case of cession.
There have been some cultural divisions in Baka al-Gharbiya, Israel and Baka al-Sharkiya, West Bank, because of the blockade 1949-67, resulting in the greater prosperity of Baka al-Gharbiya and a certain resentment by Mashriqis of wealthy Israelis from B-al-G throwing their weight around.