It Could Be Said #49 Dreams Of More Haunt Israel and Palestine
Will responds to Noah Smith's claim that nobody is working towards a Greater Israel
The scenes we witnessed over the weekend in both Israel and Palestine were horrifying and suggest that many more people will needlessly lose their life before the latest surge in violence subsides, and the conflict once again falls off the international front pages.
It’s hard not to feel a sense of helplessness at the scenes of such carnage, seeing two peoples doomed to lash out at each other despite their being no scope for a military victory. The Israelis understandably want to rescue the scores of people who have been abducted by Hamas and avenge the hundreds murdered over the weekend. Palestinians understandably see Israel’s renewed bombing of Gaza as equally murderous given the Israel Defence Forces know that their bombs will be landing in areas filled with civilians. Likewise, whilst the weekend’s event superficially justifies Israel’s determination to heavily police what goes in and out of Gaza, the humanitarian disaster in Gaza feels to Palestinians like a collective punishment for what their unaccountable rulers do.
I thought
wrote a good article about a possible way out of this. Smith advocated for Israel to withdraw to what it wants its final borders with Gaza and the West Bank to be, and then fully recognise both areas ruling regimes as the governments of separate states.The attraction of this is that Israel could do this without needing to wait for the end of Palestine’s cold civil war between Hamas and the PLO. But Smith makes a fundamental error in his article that leads him to not explore arguments both for and against his solution. When contrasting his three-state solution against a one-state solution, he says that the only versions of a one-state solution being seriously discussed are either a bi-national state where Jews and Arabs live as equals or the restoration of a unitary Palestinian state, following the expulsion of the area’s Jewish inhabitants; he explains that many Western liberals advocate for the former, whilst Palestinians and their anti-colonialist allies across the world advocate for the latter. He however dismisses the idea that there is any constituency pushing for the inverse of Hamas’s irredentism; a unified Holy Land under Israeli control following the ethnic cleansing of the area’s Palestinian population.
This is deeply mistaken, given the long lineage the idea of annexing “Judea and Samaria” has within Israeli rightist politics. Indeed, hours after Smith had wrote his article, Haaretz took Bibi Netanyahu to task for empowering such forces as he sought to prolong his premiership:
“In the past, Netanyahu marketed himself as a cautious leader who eschewed wars and multiple casualties on Israel’s side. After his victory in the last election, he replaced this caution with the policy of a “fully-right government,” with overt steps taken to annex the West Bank, to carry out ethnic cleansing in parts of the Oslo-defined Area C, including the Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley.
This also included a massive expansion of settlements and bolstering of the Jewish presence on Temple Mount, near the Al-Aqsa Mosque, as well as boasts of an impending peace deal with the Saudis in which the Palestinians would get nothing, with open talk of a “second Nakba” in his governing coalition”
Sadly, despite myself and others in his comments highlighting this mistake, Smith has refused to tweak the article to acknowledge that he was wrong to say that the Israeli right is just as capable of murderous wishful thinking as Palestinian militants. But highlighting this is not a case of whataboutery but is at the heart of the terrible bind everyone finds themselves in; not being sure what each side’s maximalist objectives really are.
Take for instance Israel policy of pursuing peace deals with its Arab neighbours, the latest of which (with Saudi Arabia) the attacks over the weekend were almost certainly designed to prevent. None of them have ever included what is an obvious precursor to durable peace in Israel-Palestine; a roadmap to dismantling the various camps that many generations of Palestinians have lived in since 1947. Whilst one can well understand why bitterness still reigns amongst those who live in such camps, the regrettable fact is that population expulsions were far from uncommon in the aftermath of World War Two and the implosion of the British Empire; Africa, South Asia and Central Europe all saw similar mass migrations. Palestinians are unique in being a longstanding refugee community for which there has been no genuine attempt to resettle and normalise their status.
So why does neither the Israelis or Arabs insist on resolving the issue as a precusor for peace? Is it because:
Arab nations still yearn for the Palestinians to return to their former or ancestral homes, even though those houses have been in Israeli hands for three quarters of a century.
Israel doesn’t want to see such extensive developments in the West Bank that would make further expansion of Jewish settlements impossible.
Leadership on all sides genuinely want a just peace but doubt their ability to openly impose one on the maximalists on their own side.
The answer is realistically probably a bit of all three, given how many different people and factions were involved in the negotiations. But given that the first would make it impossible for Israel to be a Jewish homeland, the second would make it impossible for the West Bank to be a Palestinian state, and the third makes any deal vulnerable to an upsurge in popular anger on either side, that makes it impossible for any side to trust themselves to negotiate in a full and open way, let alone the other side.
Worse, that each side has its own genocidal faction both legitimises murder and expulsions as a “defensive” tactic but also delegitimises meaningful compromises. This is sadly not a hypothetical. Palesinian Militants can justifiably highlight that decades of growing normalisation between Israel and Arab nations has only encouraged greater expansion of Jewish settlements, so further reducing the size of a future Palestinian state on the West Bank. Likewise, those who believe in Greater Israel can rightly say that the withdrawal from Gaza made it the launching pad for the deadliest attack in the nation’s history. Meanwhile the pragmatists that once spoke about making peace rush to issue blood curdling threats out of fear that they be swept out of power as anger rises.
The only way to break this cycle is for one or both sides to chart a course that will make a cold, distrustful, uncooperative peace work. Given the current occupation gives Palestinians next to no room for positive action, that burden falls onto the Israelis. And that means building upon what they started in 2005, by retreating to what they see as the new border on the West Bank. To not just say they recognise the new states that would emerge but to demonstrate genuine respect for their sovereignty, including adopting a position of proportionate and targeted responses to attacks like it would to nearby hostile states rather than the collective and indiscriminate reprisals it currently feels free to reign down on territory it has suzerainty over.
But Israel would not have to just say it believes in the Palestinian states it creates, but clearly communicate a confidence that it can continue to survive and thrive even if in the short-to-medium term it is bordered by a dysfunctional or hostile neighbours. The model is not Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement but inter-war Britain’s standoffish stance towards the Irish Free State where it looked the other way as its former colony descended into a bloody civil war, imposed tariffs on its largest trading partner, and stayed neutral whilst its neighbour fought for the survival of European democracy against Nazi Germany.
That would be a very bitter and dangerous pill for Israel to swallow. Anything close to what a fairminded observer would consider a genuine attempt to unilaterally create space for a Palestinian-controlled state on the West Bank would involve surrending control of the Jordan Valley, and the water that flows from it. It is a testament to Israeli foresightedness that they have been actively pursuing desalination projects to make possible. Likewise Israel relies on busing tens of thousands of workers in from Gaza and the West Bank, something that will likely not be possible in the aftermath of a unilateral withdrawal designed to seal the borders shut. Israel will have to consider how it can increase productivity to ensure it can sustain a vibrant economy with access to cheap Palestinian labour. This will be particularly difficult given that it will be facing this resource and labour crunch as it frantically tries to build substantial borders to prevent attacks from areas no longer police by Israeli security forces.
The militarisation of the border and stricter controls on immigration will only be the most visible signs of the steel behind such a cold peace. Further afield, Israel would have to make clear that positive relations with Arab nations must be built on working together to dismantle the Palestinian refugee camps. It should offer money for building new Palestinian settlements on the West Bank and work with overseas allies to rehome people further afield not to soften the message but to harden it; Israel will not treat any nation who helps keeps nearly two million people homeless and stateless on its border as a friend, given the clear irredentist implication of such a refusal to resettle or normalise.
And the reason there must be such steel is that Israel will need to both reassure its own population and convince the international community that unilateral concessions are not the prelude to further ones down the line. Here again the comparison with Britain and Ireland is illustrative. Britain’s actual redline with Ireland was that it never be used as a base for attack on Great Britain by a hostile power hence why it encouraged Ireland to rely on Britain for naval and air defence, and why Ireland only joined the European Economic Community when Britain did. This obviously screwed Northern Irish Unionists who were more focused on retaining hegemony over their own statelet, only to find themselves repeatedly denied the tools to do so by a Britain that was uncomfortable with their secretarianism.
Israel is of course the master of its own house. But the uncomfortable question is how did it establish such mastery, given military aid from its allies has diminished over time. Did its sensational victory in 1967 pave the way for its emergence as economic and military powerhouse by giving it defensible borders and sufficient natural resources? If so then partition was fundamentally misguided as the peoples within the Holy Land must live and work together to survive, or one of them must secure the most terrible and total victory.
This is why charting a course to unilateral witdrawal is so difficult. It risks being both too peaceful an act for hawks, and too hostile an act for doves. It requires a man forged in fire, who everyone in Israeli society knows has the brains, brawn and balls to facedown his domestic and international adversaries to achieve his vision.
Too bad that man left the stage nearly two decades ago and no one has siezed his mantle since. It of course underlines the depth of the challenge facing Israel and Palestine, that nobody is entirely sure whether he wanted to withdraw from the West Bank or not. But I thought then, and think now, that Ariel Sharon probably did plan a substantial withrawal, certainly by the standards of today (one estimate is that he envisaged Israel keeping 15% of the West Bank outside of East Jerusalem).
And to once again return back to
’s article that inspired this one. The reason that there’s no groundswell to follow Sharon is that many in Israeli society still feel the pull of the dream of Greater Israeli, just as many Palestinians refuse to accept the Lesser Palestine that is their fate. More than that, those who recognise such desiring more is forlorn or dangerous, have seen what happened to those who point out these facts.Hopefully some day another man of destiny can seize the moment to break the deadlock in way that minimises bloodshed and injustice. And let’s also hope that this time he hadn’t spent his life eating too many shish kebabs….