For Israel and the Palestinians, It’s Now or Never

Kerry Apologizes for Telling the Truth: April 29: Met with wrath, he apologized for saying that if a two-state solution is not reached, Israel runs the risk of becoming a bi-national apartheid state. Kerry is hardly the first to view that as an eventuality. The Palestinian population in Israel and the West Bank is forecast to exceed the Jewish population, which would force Israel either to erect a two-tiered society or risk losing control of Israel as a Jewish nation if all have equal voting rights.
    
Like so many before him, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry must have often dreamed of traveling someday to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize for being the one finally to resolve the decades-long impasse between Israel and the Palestinians. But as the arbitrary nine month negotiation timetable that he set last summer draws to its end-April close, what he has chiefly accomplished is to make more apparent than ever just how intractable are the differences separating the two sides.

With five days to go the Palestinians blew up any possibility for the talks continuing — at least according to Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu — by announcing an alliance between Fatah, the leading political party of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank that has been negotiating with Israel these many months, and Hamas, its counterpart that controls Gaza and is viewed as a terrorist group by both Israel and the United States. In reaction, Netanyahu said, “As long as I am prime minister of Israel I will never negotiate with a Palestinian government backed by terrorist organizations committed to our destruction".

When Israel failed to deliver the last of four groups of Palestinians held as prisoners by the Israelis and at the same time announced another 700 housing units for Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas retaliated by quickly signing on to 15 international conventions and treaties that would treat Palestine as a state, breaking what he had pledged not to do as his part in the prisoner release bargain. And now, his reconciliation with Hamas is viewed by Israel as making further talks beyond consideration, a blunder by Abbas that allows Netanyahu to place the blame with the Palestinians, letting him off the hook held by those in his coalition government who are opposed to a two-state solution of any sort.

As opposed to blunder, we see something different possibly afoot. Is not Hamas' sudden alliance with Fatah attributable to Abbas joining the 15 conventions? Would Hamas have done so if this were merely a bluff by Abbas? Isn't it more likely that Abbas and his party have decided to abandon the talks altogether (he has reportedly made increased demands of a sort unacceptable to Israel on their face such as a prior agreement for Israel to retract to the pre-1967 War borders) and pursue this new international path entirely? Did Hamas come aboard effectively saying "now you're talking". This could explain their abrupt about-face only weeks after militant groups in the Gaza Strip launched about 100 rockets into southern Israel, prompting Israeli airstrikes, and after commandos intercepted a ship from Iran to Gaza carrying advanced missiles.

At those international bodies, the nascent Palestine will probably lobby for sanctions and boycotts against Israel, following the model that was successful in ending apartheid in South Africa. But Israel fears it will also become a party to the International Criminal Court, a move greatly feared by Israel because of its power to punish war crimes. As if to underscore that alarm, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power attested before Congress at the beginning of April to “our firm opposition to any and all unilateral [Palestinian] actions in the international arena” because they pose a profound threat to Israel. Netanyahu declared that “The Palestinians will achieve a state only by direct negotiations...not by unilateral moves“ (a statement that reveals the extent to which Israel has mentally colonized its Arab neighbors).

If we are surmising correctly, what may have convinced Abbas that he could never forge a deal with Israel is Netanyahu's insistence as a pre-condition to any agreement that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a “Jewish state”. He has called that “the minimal requirement”, “an essential condition” and “the real key to peace”. Sounds reasonable. After all, Israel was founded as a homeland for the Jewish people.

Except that for the Palestinians that designation is fraught with suspicion. They question why it is their responsibility to define Israel’s character. In a meeting with President Obama, Abbas said, “Since 1988, we have recognized international legitimacy resolutions, and in 1993, we recognized the State of Israel”, referring to when Yasir Arafat wrote to Yitzhak Rabin that the Palestinians recognize the right of Israel “to exist in peace and security”. So why the insistence on “Jewish” and does it have some hidden meaning? Will the 1.6 million Arabs living in Israel be reduced to second-class citizenship? Would they be disenfranchised from voting for not being Jewish? Might agreeing to “Jewish state” even be treated as grounds for their deportation?

And agreeing to “Jewish” state would certainly nullify the demand that the Palestinian refugees who fled before the onslaught of the 1948 war have the right to return to what became Israel. Unsaid is that any move by Abbas toward giving up the “right of return”, and with nothing in exchange, no doubt has him contemplating the likelihood of his own assassination.

Of course, the Palestinian hope to win the return of some 800,000 refugees, is a fantasy, and not only because 66 years on, there’s barely an original refugee left in the camps. With their descendants grown to millions, their influx into Israel would be a Palestinian Trojan horse, a probably fractious horde that would have to be denied rights for Israel to remain in control as a Jewish state, and that would replace democracy with apartheid, destroying Israel’s legitimacy in the world arena. Unmentioned is the probability that the Fatah doesn’t want them either, an angry element that might side with and tip the scales toward Hamas.

“Bibi” Netanyahu knows why Abbas cannot say the magic words “Jewish state”, of course, and is accused by countrymen of using this demand as a poison pill to make certain that a two-state solution never happens. Finance Minister Yair Lapid says, “I just think this is rubbish…we don’t need anyone else to recognize us”.

"I think it is a mistake for some people to be raising it again and again as the critical decider of their attitude toward the possibility of a [Palestinian] state and peace," Mr. Kerry told Congress in mid-April.

Netanyahu walks a tightrope on the issue. He leads a coalition government that includes political parties openly against the two-state solution. If Netanyahu truly wants to pursue that objective, he may have to form a new coalition of those who see side-by-side nations as the only way to preserve Israel as a Jewish state. In the present alignment, he must fend off the likes Naftali Bennett, head of the pro-settler Jewish Home party that holds about 25% of the seats in the Knesset (parliament), who favors a plan to annex over 60% of the West Bank and “build, build, build”, leaving the Palestinians only their cities, with Israeli military still in control. He has said he will quit the coalition if Israel agrees to a Palestinian state with the 1967 lines and East Jerusalem as its capital. “America has been around...for 220 years or so years...Jerusalem has been our capital for 3,000 years”, says Bennett. To Muslims Israel’s claims to the land from millennia ago are nonsensical.

These right-wing elements are openly hostile to the talks and to the unflagging efforts of John Kerry, who has made more than a dozen trips to the region so far. Bennett called him a “mouthpiece” for anti-Semitic factions out to boycott Israeli goods. An article quoted Israel’s defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, as saying Kerry “operates from an incomprehensible obsession and sense of messianism...The only thing that might save us is if John Kerry wins the Nobel Prize and leaves us be”. The State Department shot back with, “The remarks of the defense minister, if accurate, are offensive and inappropriate, especially given all that the United States is doing to support Israel’s security needs”, implying the $3 billion a year the U.S. gives Israel each year to fund Mr. Yaalon’s weaponry.

Before this newest bombshell, the talks had already gone “Poof!” (Kerry’s description to the U.S. Senate) when in late March Israel put out for bids for those 700 housing units (in addition to 1,400 announced in January in East Jerusalem and the West Bank) and reneging on the final prisoner transfer. In retaliation, Israel fired back by announcing its intention to withhold the monthly transfer of about $100 million in tax revenues that it collects in behalf of the Palestinian Authority, and it “legalized” 250-acres that had been taken from Palestinians in the Gush Etzion settlement, the largest appropriation in years according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. In other words, the talks were already at a standstill.

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Kerry said both sides were responsible for their “unhelpful” actions. Israel was “deeply disappointed” to be included in Kerry's blame. Cessation of settlement expansion was not agreed to as a condition for talks, said an Israeli official, so the Palestinians should have no objection to further building in “Israel’s capital” city. The U.S. views the settlements’ taking of land in the West Bank and in the Jerusalem site, which is outside Israel’s borders before the 1967 war, as a violation of international law. Beyond the fine print of what was or wasn’t agreed to originally, the Palestinians hardly view further settlement building as conducive to continued peace negotiations.

As Jeffrey Goldberg of Bloomberg View puts it, after nine months ”they’re not talking about settlements or refugees or the future of Jerusalem. They’re just talking about how to talk”.

At Kerry’s Senate appearance, Arizona Republican John McCain predicted that Kerry is “about to hit the trifecta” — failure to produce a political settlement in Syria, a nuclear deal with Iran, and no results with Israelis and the Palestinians. “It’s a tough issue,” Mr. Kerry said, looking daggers at the former fellow senator. “But your friend Teddy Roosevelt also said the credit belongs to the people in the arena who are trying to get things done.”

The U.S. and Kerry are expected to lay down a body of core principles that they view both sides must agree to in order for the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict to end — retention of certain of the settlements, compensated by land transfers to the Palestinians, withdrawal of the rest to the 1967 lines, and security arrangements for the Jordan Valley. Presumably they would not be so foolish as to include the “right of return”.

Beyond that, too much of greater consequence for the U.S. is happening around the world now. And, as we say, after watching the U.S. exert this much effort only to be met with a total lack of progress, with both sides locked in their positions, no one will bother with this again. Left on their own, the likely scenarios for Israel and the Palestinians are not encouraging.