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Opinion
June 17, 2009
Has the Clock Struck Midnight?
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech endorsing a Palestinian state is a rather clear though not particularly far-reaching attempt to placate President Obama and his new get-tough attitude toward Israel’s settlement policy. Much more will be required from Netanyahu — and to be sure, from the Palestinian side as well — to revive the moribund peace process. Perhaps the president’s willingness to draw a line in the sand with regard to West Bank settlements can deliver the requisite political jolt to break the current impasse.
Sadly — indeed, it is painful even to suggest it — the clock may already have struck midnight on the two-state solution. Prescient Israeli observers such as Amos Elon, the recently departed and unyieldingly trenchant journalist, and Meron Benvenisti, the scholar and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, have been warning for decades that the settlement project has reached a point of no return. And they may well be right.
Supported by every Israeli government for the past 42 years, the policy of settling in territories occupied after the Six Day War of 1967 has been driven by a mix of Zionist ideology and land-grabbing opportunism. Each government has also been motivated by the impulse to allow for the “natural growth” of settlements, which is to say the expansion of existing dwellings or the construction of new ones to accommodate growing families. To date, this patchwork policy has led to the creation of over 120 settlements beyond the 1967 Green Line (based on the 1949 Armistice between Israel and her neighbors), in which some 280,000 Jews live amid 2.5 million Palestinians. Another nearly 200,000 Jews reside in large suburban settlements that ring the city of Jerusalem.
What is astonishing, as well as shortsighted and self-destructive, is that even those politicians who spoke of the need to withdraw from settlements — Rabin, Peres, Barak during the Oslo/Camp David years and Olmert more recently — continued to build. Not only did this building sap the confidence of Palestinians in Israel’s willingness to withdraw, it made the ultimate day of reckoning ever more difficult to conceive. The effect may be to hammer the final nail into the coffin of the very outcome they claim to desire: a two-state solution.
Most analysts concur that in an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, the majority of the settlements in the immediate environs of Jerusalem (e.g., Ma`ale Adumim) and in the dense Gush Etzion bloc would be incorporated into Israel proper in exchange for land swapped to the Palestinians either in the Negev or the Galilee. But what would happen to those tens of thousands of settlers who dwell beyond the incorporated settlement blocs? Or in an alternative scenario, were Israel to declare that the separation wall/fence that it has been building would be the new border between itself and a nascent Palestinian state, what would happen to the 25 percent of the West Bank settlers who currently live to the east of it?
Former Israel Prime Minister Olmert declared his willingness to evacuate these settlers, but his actions belie his words. No doubt, his reticence to act, rooted in 40 years of Israeli settlement policy, was also colored by the trauma of the Gaza disengagement of 2005, when 8,000 Jewish settlers were forcibly removed from their homes. An evacuation of West Bank settlers would be 10 times larger and would require a degree of political acumen and courage that no Israeli leader has yet demonstrated. Nor has any American president yet produced the mix of incentives and demands to induce Israel to take this painful step.
Given the significant risks (and decreasing likelihood) of a forced evacuation, it has been suggested that those settlers who live outside of the large blocs should be offered the choice of a generous compensation package to resettle in Israel proper or of staying in their homes under Palestinian sovereignty. While it is not clear how many settlers would accept the former, it is hard to imagine how the latter option could work. It is naïve to believe that a fledgling, fragile and demilitarized Palestinian state would happily welcome the presence of tens of thousands of armed, ideologically committed, and often-violent Jewish settlers. In an ideal world, Jews would have the right to settle wherever they want, just as Arabs would have the right to settle wherever they want. But the world, at least at present, is a far more complicated and compromised place.
Where then does the current situation leave us? The difficulty in uprooting settlements throughout the West Bank calls into question a key fundament of the two-state solution: territorial viability for a new state of Palestine. Palestinians will be loath to accept a pockmarked piece of land with deep pockets of settlers unwilling to recognize their sovereignty. Mindful of this predicament, a growing chorus of Palestinian intellectuals speaks in favor of a single state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. But this idea is utterly impractical, given the steadfast opposition of an overwhelming majority of Israelis — not to mention undesirable, given the current state of enmity between Jews and Arabs.
Perhaps President Obama’s willingness to challenge the Israeli government on settlements can serve as the necessary wake-up call to all involved that far-reaching action is required now if the two-state ideal is to be salvaged. In a universe of unappealing prospects, two states remain the best and most equitable solution.
But it is also possible the clock has already struck midnight, requiring a new math that moves beyond the diametrically opposed visions of one and two states. Devising credible alternatives that acknowledge the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians — for example, cantons, regional autonomy, a federation — may well be the essential task that diplomats, politicians and academics must face in the next phase of this long-simmering conflict.
David N. Myers teaches Jewish history at UCLA.
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