The Triumph and Tragedy of Greater Israel
September 6, 2012
The
Middle East peace process is dead. More precisely, the two-state solution is
dead; the peace process may well go on indefinitely if this Israeli government
has its way.
The
two-state solution did not die a natural death. It was strangulated as Jewish
settlements in the West Bank were expanded and deepened by successive Israeli
governments in order to prevent the emergence of a viable Palestinian state.
The settlement project has achieved its intended irreversibility, not only
because of its breadth and depth but also because of the political clout of the
settlers and their supporters within Israel who have both ideological and
economic stakes in the settlements’ permanence.
The
question can no longer be whether the current impasse may lead to a one-state
outcome; it has already done so. There is also no longer any question whether
this government's policies will lead to what can legitimately be called
apartheid, as former prime minister Ehud Olmert and other Israeli leaders
predicted they would. Palestinians live in a one-state reality, deprived of all
rights, and enclosed in enclaves surrounded by military checkpoints, separation
walls, roadblocks, barbed-wire barriers and a network of “for-Jews-only”
highways.
Until
now, Israel’s colonial project has been successfully disguised by Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pretense that he is pursuing a resumption of
talks for a two-state solution with President Mahmoud Abbas. It has also been
strengthened by the pretense of President Obama and EU leaders that they
believe a resumed peace process can still produce a Palestinian state. But
these pretenses cannot be sustained for long, if only because of the inability
of settlers to restrain triumphalist pronouncements of their achievement of
Greater Israel and their defeat of the Palestinians’ hopes for statehood—as
Dani Dayan did recently in the op-ed pages of the New York Times and Haaretz, in which he proclaimed that because of the
settlements’ irreversibility there will be only one sovereignty west of the
Jordan River.
But
paradoxically, the triumph of the settlement project contains the seeds of its
own reversal—or of the demise of the Zionist project.
First,
some history. Israeli decision-making elites long ago made a cold cost-benefit
calculation that the benefits of establishing permanent Israeli control over
the entire West Bank exceed the cost. Immediately following the 1967 Six Day
War, Israel’s government announced it would withdraw from occupied territories
in Egypt and Syria in return for those countries' recognition of Israel but
made no such offer to the Palestinians. When asked in 1968 what would be the
future of the Occupied Territories, Moshe Dayan—the legendary IDF chief of staff and, at the time,
Israel's minister of defense—replied with characteristic bluntness: their
future, he said, “is being implemented in actual fact. What exists today must
remain.” In 1977, replying to that same question, he said, “The question is not
what is the solution, but how to live without a solution.”
As
for what to do with the millions of Palestinians who live within Israel’s
enlarged borders, many Israelis believe that the long-unacknowledged silent ethnic cleansing that has been going on for years in what was designated by the
Oslo agreement as area C, comprising over 60 percent of the West Bank, can
continue for the time being. And when it no longer can, then Israel would
unilaterally draw borders around areas A and B and call the imprisoned enclaves
within that area a Palestinian state.
Advocates
of Greater Israel also believe that by granting (or pretending to grant)
citizenship to the small number of Palestinians who have managed to resist
expulsion from area C, which would be formally annexed, the apartheid issue
will have been neutralized—at least sufficiently so to placate American Jews
and the U.S. administration. That was stated explicitly by Naftali Bennett, a confidant of Netanyahu and a settler leader who reported that his
proposal for Israel’s annexation of area C was well received by Israel's
political, military and security establishments.
There
is one price, however, that the vast majority of Israelis, including many if
not most settlers, will not pay for a Greater Israel: the loss of the state’s
Jewish identity. Israeli polls have confirmed this repeatedly. It is an issue
that Israelis believe can be finessed, either by continuing to hold out the
promise of a two-state solution in an undefined future or by carving up the
West Bank in a manner that excludes the heavy concentrations of Palestinian
population from Greater Israel, as advocated by Bennett and others. But if
those two options were precluded and the choice were to either grant
citizenship to the Palestinian residents of a Greater Israel or a two-state
arrangement with limited and equal territorial exchanges, Israel’s cost-benefit
calculations would have to change.
And
it would come down to that choice if the disguise of the existing Greater
Israel were stripped away. The issue for the United States would then no longer
be where the borders of a Palestinian state are to be drawn—a matter Washington
has for all practical purposes left to the Israelis to decide—but whether it is
prepared to defend what increasingly would be seen by everyone as an apartheid
regime.
It
is unlikely that even those Western democracies accustomed to pandering to
their Israeli lobbies would be prepared to shield Israel from condemnations and
sanctions when its apartheid can no longer be disguised. One must assume that
no American president would again declare at a UN General Assembly that Palestinian
victims of such a system should seek relief not from the UN or international
courts but from their occupiers.
The
key to changing the deadlocked status quo is therefore exposing the Greater
Israel that has been created by the settlement project in the West Bank and the
de facto apartheid regime under which Palestinians now live. But the United
States and the European Union will not be the whistle-blowers, most certainly
not as long as Palestinians themselves continue to collaborate with Israel’s
pretense that a one-state reality does not yet exist, a collaboration implicit
in their adherence to the Oslo framework and to the myth that the Palestinian
Authority and the strengthening of its institutions can still pave the way for
Palestinian statehood.
Nothing
would expose more convincingly the Israeli disguise of the one-state reality
now in place than a Palestinian decision to shut down the Palestinian Authority
and transform their national struggle for independence and statehood into a
struggle for citizenship and equal rights within the Greater Israel to which
they have been consigned. Only by declaring that Palestinians will no longer be
complicit with their occupiers in their own disenfranchisement will Israelis be
confronted with the need to choose between a two-state arrangement and a single
state that sooner or later will lose its Jewish identity.
In
recent talks with Palestinian leaders, some of them told me they fear that
Israel would take advantage of such a move to annex area C and consign
Palestinians to enclaves in areas A and B, as proposed by Bennett. But Israel's
government has already done so. Only those blind to the facts on the ground
created by the settlements can believe there still exists a possibility for a
two-state outcome that might be put at risk. And the sooner Palestinians expose
their new reality the better. For an Israeli land grab in area C that would
follow the launching of a Palestinian anti-apartheid struggle is far more
likely to be seen by the international community as confirming Israel’s
apartheid than a land grab that precedes it—i.e. when the issue is still
presented by Israel as the setting of the border between two states.
Friends
of Israel should fervently hope that such a Palestinian strategy will succeed
in changing the cost-benefit calculations of Israel’s government, for the
success of the settlements holds the seeds of Israel's demise. Palestinians
have lived under Israeli occupation for nearly half a century and will endure,
if they must, another half century. They have few alternatives.
However, it is highly doubtful that Israel can survive another half
century of its subjugation of the Palestinians. The region has been radically
transformed by the emergence of Islamic regimes that, unlike their
predecessors, will not suppress Arab furies provoked by Israel's permanent
disenfranchisement of the Palestinians. America's ability to impose its own
political order on the region is in decline. Even Arab royals in Saudi Arabia,
Jordan and the Emirates will be pressed to prove their legitimacy by joining
efforts to deepen the ring of Arab hostility that surrounds and threatens the
Jewish state. America's fading influence and Israel's growing vulnerability in
this emerging regional order have already been exposed by Egyptian president
Mohamed Morsi's decision, in defiance of American objections, to attend a
conference of nonaligned nations hosted by Iran. The heightened sense of
isolation and insecurity that Israelis will experience as Arab countries join
the nuclear club, which in time they surely will, is bound to lead to an exodus
of Israel's best and brightest, and in time it could spell the end of the
Zionist dream. As reported in Israel’s press, the search in certain sectors of
Israeli society for foreign passports and second homes abroad has already
begun.
An
honest Israeli offer of Palestinian statehood based on the Clinton parameters
would avert such a calamity, remove the most incendiary issue from the region's
agenda, and leave Iran and Hezbollah without a cause in the Arab world.
Paradoxically,
only Palestinians can make that happen. By abandoning the Palestinian
Authority, ending the ugly Fatah-Hamas rivalry and mounting a struggle for full
citizenship rights in the Greater Israel they now live in, Palestinians will
challenge not only Israel's public but also the United States and the
international community to finally stand up to the most reactionary government
in Israel's history. If that struggle does not bring back the two-state option,
nothing will. In that case, the struggle that Palestinians will have initiated
for citizenship and equal rights in Greater Israel could not have been more
timely.
Henry Siegman is the president of the U.S./Middle East Project. He also
serves as a nonresident research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East
Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
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