Entangled Alliances

photo credit: josef.stuefer

In my last post “Netanyahu will be Prime Minister: What now for Israel?” I discussed the decision by Israel President Shimon Peres to let right-winger Binyamin Netanyahu form Israel’s new government, but left open the crucial question of whether, following Netanyahu’s likely formation of an exclusively right-wing coalition, the two-state solution is off the table – and what happens if it is. (for a primer on what the two-state solution actually is, check out the Wikipedia entry)

Questions on the future of Israel and Palestine don’t come much bigger than this. Ever since Camp David in 2000, the two state solution has been appreciated by all sides as the eventual desired outcome. Back in 2002 The Arab League endorsed Saudi Arabia’s Arab Peace Initiative which was, essentially, a two-state solution. Successive Israel Prime Ministers Barak, Sharon and Olmert have all accepted that it must be the goal to work towards. But with Netanyahu’s victory, it might be time to start wondering whether it’s simply no longer an option. Whether you’re an optimist, a pessimist or a realist, it’s not the kind of question that the main players in the peace process can ignore for long, unless they want to find themselves up the proverbial creek without a paddle, while facing a raging whirlpool and a bunch of hungry alligators. You get my point.

Crucial to this question, then, is the need to be realistic – perhaps brutally so. Let’s start with the man who will soon be Israel’s PM. Netanyahu does not favour the two state solution; indeed as far as anyone can tell he does not favour giving Palestinians any rights at all. Not only is he against the withdrawal of Israeli settlements but he also favours increasing their number. It is true that some hope may lie with his alleged desire for the international community – especially the U.S. – to view him as more than an extremist, as well as the promise of the Obama administration to re-engage with the peace process, but it is hard to imagine anything more than a handful of weak concessions coming from a Netanyahu administration never mind an entire peace process. Put it this way: Vin Diesel will win an oscar before Palestinians have a state under Netanyahu. (And yes, you can file that statement under “hoping to be proved wrong”, as well as “hoping Vin Diesel doesn’t read politics blogs”.)

The hopes for the two-state solution diminish even further when you combine Netanyahu’s intransigence on the issue with the practical realities involved in the scale of Israeli settlements. Stephen Walt, Professor of International Relations at Harvard and self-described realist, makes this point in a must-read article on the fate of the two-state solution:

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 7 percent of its population) from their homes.

In reply to Walt, Jonathan Chait of the New Republic had this to say:

… settlements are reversible. To make peace with Egypt, Israel abandoned settlements in the Sinai peninsula, forcibly uprooting residents there. It did the same when withdrawing from Gaza recently. It was prepared to do the same in the West Bank in 2000 and 2001, though it never had to follow through because negotiations collapsed… the settlements are an obstacle, but not the primary obstacle.

But as The American Prospect’s Ezra Klein has made clear, the West Bank is not Gaza:

I’m more skeptical than he (Chait) is: The fight to uproot the settles in Gaza was tremendous. But the numbers were vanishingly small: 8,500 Jewish settlers made their home in Gaza. And most of them got compensation packages in the hundreds of thousands. The political power and physical presence of 290,000 settlers in the West Bank are of another order of magnitude. I’m not sure the settlements can be uprooted and, more problematically, the Palestinians are quite sure they won’t be uprooted, and that Israel’s promises of a contiguous state are hollow. The rapid growth of the settlements on a parallel track to the peace process was an important part of Arafat’s mistrust of Barak.

The crucial point in all of this is that the Israeli settlements are a huge issue. The kind of idea that Jonathan Chait suggested in his quote above – that settlements are not the primary obstacle – is debatable to say the least.  Their constant expansion in the past decade – whether under a moderate, right-wing or left-wing Israeli government – is arguably, in fact, the main obstacle to the peace process. Palestinians become less inclined to negotiate with the Israelis every time settlements expand, as with settlements  comes not just a general feeling of intrusion on what they consider to be their land, but also very real socio-economic problems. It’s hard, therefore, to understate the damage caused in the past to any hopes of a peaceful solution by Israel’s habit of negotiating a deal with one hand while continuing to expand settlements with the other.

What’s even more significant is that the US, despite their official stance of opposition to settlement expansion, has stood idly by while successive Israeli governments step it up. Indeed, it is the US funding of Israel that helps make these settlements possible (not directly, but money is fungible… so aid to Israel frees up money for settlement expansion) The importance of this point cannot be overstated, because it means that if Obama is going to somehow keep a peace process going despite the twin obstacles of Netanyahu and the huge numbers of West Bank settlements, then he’s going to have to have to do what America has been too scared to do so far : start getting serious about the chronic settlement growth of Israel.

But whether America steps up to the plate or not, odds are at this point that real progress towards two states is looking a lot less likely than it did a year ago. Therefore, in part two I’ll turn to the possible alternatives to the two-state solution… be warned, they’re not pretty.