Just over 20 years ago, the declaration of principles that emerged from the Oslo peace talks opened up an alluring vista of two states — Israeli and Palestinian, living peacefully side by side. They would share the Holy Land and work as partners in a Middle East revitalised by what looked like a passport out of a crippling pathology of conflict.
A multibillion-dollar scheme was even proposed to turn the Jordan rift valley into a collaborative hub of regional prosperity, to be developed jointly by Israel, Jordan and a future, independent Palestine.
Umpteen fruitless parleys, serial broken agreements and several small wars later, another, maybe halfway viable plan to end this conflict hovers, a framework agreement drawn up by John Kerry, US Secretary of State, after painstaking negotiation. Kerry has yet to publish his blueprint. But, as details start dribbling out, there has already been much scurrying to apportion blame for what leaders from both sides clearly foresee as its failure. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, is in a bitter spat with Naftali Bennett, the Economy Minister and leader of the intransigent Jewish Home faction in his radical rightwing coalition.
In essence, Netanyahu seems incensed that his colleague denounced a defensive parry by the premier about Jewish colonists on the occupied West Bank. Not wanting to broach prematurely the explosive issue of uprooting them as part of a withdrawal of Israeli forces, Netanyahu vaguely suggested some colonists may stay under Palestinian rule in a future Palestinian state. Israeli commentators say he was hoping this idea would be jumped on by Mahmoud Abbas, President of the interim Palestinian National Authority, revealing Israel’s interlocutors as rejectionists — but Bennett jumped the gun, placing the ruling coalition at risk. Yet, amid the sparring, the real question is whether the Kerry plan — even in its sketched outlines — is politically realistic or territorially feasible. For the fact is that there is no indication that Netanyahu’s government, or any other conceivable Israeli coalition, is willing or able to roll back the occupation of the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem to boundaries that would make a Palestinian state viable.
Netanyahu, who has, rhetorically, inched away from his Likud party’s opposition to a Palestinian state, has plenty to say on how Palestinians must recognise Israel as a Jewish state or why Israeli troops must remain in the Jordan valley. On the heart of the matter — how far Israel would withdraw from occupied land — he says nothing. The Kerry plan takes as its reference the 1967 borders, before Israel seized the West Bank and East Jerusalem in that year’s Arab-Israeli war. The idea is that Israel should withdraw towards that line, exchanging some big West Bank colony blocs for Israeli territory and that occupied Jerusalem will be a shared capital.
Other inflammatory issues — such as the demand that Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state and renounce the right of return of nearly five million refugees — will never catch fire so long as Netanyahu dodges the issue of land — and of confronting more than 500,000 colonists to give enough of it up. Israel has turned the West Bank into a scattering of cantons, walled in by a separation barrier built on yet more annexed Arab land and criss-crossed by segregated Israeli roads linking the colonies. Occupied East Jerusalem has been cut off from the West Bank and is now colonised by more than 200,000 Jewish colonists, while Palestinians whose families have lived there for centuries are being driven out by apartheid-style zoning, building and residence laws and municipal stratagems that deny Palestinians their basic amenities and services.
The government, meanwhile, intends to expand Jewish colonies by linking occupied Jerusalem to the largest colony of Maale Adumim through the so-called E1 project. That would put in place the last ramparts to enclose occupied East Jerusalem and encircle Bethlehem — and kill any idea of a viable Palestinian state stone dead.
There is no discussion, furthermore, of whether the colonies Israel would get to annex in any deal would encompass their current built-up area or their much more extensive boundaries. The total municipal area of Maale Adumim, for example, is bigger than that of Tel Aviv.
Kerry better have a lot more than a sketch.
— Financial Times
