What Future for Israel? By Nathan Thrall.

What Future for Israel? By Nathan Thrall. The New York Review of Books, August 15, 2013. Also here.

Thrall:

Israel’s new government represents well the rightward shift in mainstream Israeli thought. Like Netanyahu and Lapid, most Israeli Jews say they would accept a two-state solution, but the terms on which they are willing to do so are hardly realistic. Many of those further to their right, by contrast, are rather more clear-eyed—or perhaps simply honest—about what peace would entail. In a veiled attack against Netanyahu and Lapid, Naftali Bennett recently said, “Some say they are against the division of Jerusalem but they are in favor of a Palestinian state. And I ask, where exactly would the Palestinian capital be? In Jericho? In Bethlehem? In Berlin?”

 

The right has strengthened as the arguments of the left and center have been discredited. Promoters of negotiations have failed to convey how high a price a peace agreement would exact. They have told themselves and the public that the outlines of a peace deal are well known and they have asserted that agreement exists where it does not. Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat, a veteran of the Carter and Clinton administrations and co-chairman of the board of the Jewish People Policy Institute, writes in The Future of the Jews that it is “commonly understood that the largest settlement blocks would remain under Israeli control in any final peace agreement.” Israelis similarly speak of “consensus” settlements, but the common understanding of which Eizenstat writes is shared only by Israelis and their supporters. Leaked Palestinian transcripts from the Annapolis talks of 2007–2008 record the two sides fighting fiercely over the future status of what Israelis consider one of the most “consensus” settlements of all, Ma’ale Adumim, east of Jerusalem, with some 40,000 residents.

 

Claims of a peace within grasp have been as overstated as warnings that the perpetually closing window for a two-state-solution has nearly shut or that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank will make it an international pariah. In the countries in which the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (“BDS”) has made the largest gains—South Africa and the United Kingdom—Israeli exports have in fact sharply risen. Israelis are not overly worried that the European Union will go significantly beyond wringing its hands over the way its financial support of the Palestinian Authority effectively underwrites Israel’s occupation.

 

Even if proposals to boycott Israeli companies based in the West Bank were to gain steam, they would not stop Israel’s banks, cable television companies, or supermarkets from operating beyond the 1967 borders; nor would they reduce the number of settlers, most of whom work not at factories adjacent to Ariel but west of the Green Line—at places like Google, Intel, and the prime minister’s office. And while elite attitudes toward Israel in the US are changing, recent polls have cast doubt on widely publicized claims that young, non-Orthodox Jews in the US are growing more distant from Israel.

 

Years of relative quiet in the West Bank—2012 was the first year since 1973 that not a single Israeli was killed in an attack there—have undermined the charge that the now-forty-six-year-old military occupation is unsustainable. Secretary Kerry has warned that Israel “will be left to choose between being a Jewish state or a democratic state.” But limited Palestinian self-governance, including close security cooperation with Israel, continues to protect Israel from having to make any such choice.

 

An inescapable and likely unintended conclusion one draws from Abrams’s behind-the-scenes account of policymaking during the second intifada between 2000 and 2005 is how effective violence was in eliminating Israeli complacency and advancing Palestinian goals. Less than a year into the uprising, pressures from Saudi Crown Prince Abdallah—in the form of tearful pleas for America to restrain Israel and a secret letter that, Abrams writes, “put US-Saudi relations in the balance”—led the US to endorse Palestinian statehood. Ariel Sharon soon followed with his own statement of support for a Palestinian state, becoming Israel’s first prime minister to do so.

 

As the Palestinian ambushes, sniper fire, and suicide bombings continued, Sharon abandoned his decades-long dream of retaining Gaza and all of the West Bank. “The bloodshed was so great,” Abrams writes, “that Sharon lifted his year-old” policy of demanding seven days of quiet before he would negotiate a cease-fire with the Palestinians. Later he used the word “occupation” before a Likud Knesset faction meeting, saying it “cannot go on forever.” As pressure mounted to end the violence, Sharon announced that Israel would withdraw from Gaza.

 

The subsequent rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza did not end the desire for more talks. They did, however, greatly strengthen the right’s argument that the conflict is neither primarily territorial nor based on grievances stemming from Israel’s 1967 conquest. Both Palestinian and Israeli hard-liners have gained supporters by casting doubt on the notion that the conflict could be resolved in an exchange of land for peace. This central axiom of the two-decades-old peace process made sense for Israel’s negotiations with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, but never with the Palestinians, who believe that the core of the conflict is Zionist settlement in Palestine and the expulsion of Palestinians during the 1948 war that established the Israeli state.

 

The belief of American and Israeli negotiators that solving the problems of 1967 will close the door on those of 1948 comes under powerful rebuke in two original books from distant points on the Israeli political spectrum: the historian Asher Susser’s Israel, Jordan,and Palestine: The Two-State Imperative and the sociologist Yehouda Shenhav’s Beyond the Two-State Solution. Susser documents how the gaps between the two sides, or at least some leading spokesmen from the two sides, have narrowed on issues deriving from the 1967 war—borders, settlements, and security arrangements—while “little if any real progress was made in resolving the 1948 question of refugee return.” That issue prominently resurfaced in January, when Abbas said that Israel had refused to allow Palestinian refugees fleeing the Syrian conflict to enter the West Bank and Gaza unless they renounced their right of return to Israel. With the political dominance of the Israeli right, which places greater emphasis on Israel’s own 1948 issue—Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state—the gaps between the two sides are indeed only widening.

 

The intangible elements of the conflict have grown in importance while the Green Line defined by the 1949 armistice has been all but erased. Jewish nationalist attacks against Palestinian communities in the West Bank have crossed into Israel, taking the form of arson, vandalism, and violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel. Jewish activists in the West Bank have expanded their demographic battle to cities in Israel proper, west of the Green Line, buying homes in the Palestinian neighborhoods of Ramla, Akko, and Lod. Dozens of Israel’s municipal chief rabbis signed a ruling forbidding the rental of homes to non-Jews. Many Israelis no longer know where the Green Line lies, mistakenly identifying it with the current West Bank separation barrier and quite unaware that they have crossed it on major roads and highways.

 

Israel’s turn away from the Palestinians has brought an overdue shift in focus from the borders of the state to what lies within them. Jewish identity was a central issue of the 2013 election; indirectly, so too was the place of minorities in the Jewish state. Among Israeli citizens, Jews but not Palestinians have collective rights to land, immigration, symbols such as their own flag, and commemorations, particularly of the Nakba, the catastrophe of Palestinian defeat and expulsion in 1948. Jews and non-Jews cannot legally marry. Current residents of Jerusalem homes that were abandoned during the 1948 war have been evicted to make room for former owners and their descendants—but only when the deed holders are Jews.

 

The inequality of Jews and non-Jews within Israel’s pre-1967 borders—in which Palestinian citizens and residents lived under military rule from 1948 until the end of 1966—prepared the ground for still more unequal arrangements in the West Bank after the 1967 war. Both were created by the Ashkenazi Labor Zionist elite that now criticizes the settlers for dynamics it set in place. On what grounds, Shenhav asks, is the idea of Jewish settlement in ruined Palestinian villages within the pre-1967 borders—formerly inhabited, in many cases, by Palestinian citizens internally displaced by war—considered more moral than Jewish settlement on Palestinian agricultural lands of the West Bank? The former, he argues, involved far more human suffering. Susser, indeed any Zionist, would surely object to comparisons that would cast doubt on Israeli claims to its pre-1967 territory. But he offers strong support for the underlying premise that the root of the conflict is not east of the Green Line but in the more than century-old project of Zionist settlement itself.

 

The fading importance of the pre-1967 borders means a breaking with illusions and a return to the true nature of the conflict: a struggle between two ethnic groups between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The peaceful arrangements they have so far discussed have all fallen short of both the full sovereignty Palestinians desire and the hard ethnic separation the Israeli center and left seek. As Susser writes:

The Palestinian state that the Israelis were willing to endorse was never a fully sovereign and independent member of the family of nations, but an emasculated, demilitarized, and supervised entity, with Israeli control of its airspace and possibly of its borders too, and some element of Israeli and/or foreign military presence.

This was as true for Netanyahu as for Olmert, Barak, Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin, who a month before his assassination told the Knesset that the Palestinians would have “less than a state.”

 

Israel, Susser argues, almost certainly will not achieve an end of conflict, much less recognition of a Jewish state, without meeting Palestinian demands to admit responsibility for the flight and expulsion of refugees of the 1948 war. Israel can point to its acceptance of the UN partition plan that was rejected by Palestinians and Arab nations, which then attacked the new Jewish state. But the forced displacement of a very large number of Palestinians during the war that followed is now a documented reality, one that for most Palestinians supports their claims to return, or to ample compensation for their losses, or to both.

 

Many Israeli leaders believe that any such acknowledgment of responsibility or acceptance of Palestinian claims to return would shake the very foundations of the state, undermining its international legitimacy and upending decades of Zionist teaching by conceding that Israel was responsible for forcibly dispossessing large numbers of Palestinian civilians from their land and homes at its birth. Netanyahu understands the size of this obstacle, or once did, yet is moving with Kerry to renew talks based on the foundering 1967 model.

 

Kerry, like his predecessors, has concentrated on 1967 issues such as borders and security, showing few signs that he has learned from past failures. One hopes that he is not under the mistaken impression that Olmert and Abbas were inches away from a real agreement. Those talks did not come close to resolving even the 1967 issues. What’s more, compared to Olmert, Netanyahu is less desperate, less willing to compromise on 1948 issues, and is making calculations in a region that has become less stable and forgiving of risk.

 

If renewed talks break down, Israelis may begin asking themselves whether the time has come to abandon hopes of a full peace in order to achieve—perhaps through cease-fires or further unilateral withdrawals—a partial separation. They would thereby create something more than one state but less than two, which is, in fact, all that was ever on offer.