Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
We Are All One Staters Now
Noam
Sheizaf
December
27, 2019
+972
Magazine
In the
final days before the second Israeli elections of 2019, Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu announced a special press conference. Speculation ran high:
was the prime minister about to resign and fight the criminal charges against
him in court? Would he announce the much-hyped mutual defense pact with the
United States? Bibi’s aides signaled he had something even bigger in store.
The
reveal came on Sept. 10: that evening, Netanyahu vowed
to annex the Jordan Valley, deep inside the occupied
territories, to Israel. He delivered his speech alongside a large map of the
eastern West Bank, which he occasionally gestured at with a pointer.
“The
Valley,” as it’s referred to in Israel, is the least populated region in the
West Bank. It consists of one Palestinian city, Jericho, and numerous smaller
communities. It is also home to several small, non-ideological, settlements.
But according to most maps, the Jordan Valley makes up between a quarter and a
third of the West Bank. In the past, therefore, an announcement on future
annexation would have caused a political storm in Israel, since it would have
spelled the death of the two-state solution, the end of the “temporary”
occupation, and the beginning of a new era in the conflict. For many, it would
have meant the end of Israeli democracy.
Not
today, though. Netanyahu’s words were met with a collective yawn. The same
thing happened several months later, when the prime minister tried to challenge
his main adversaries, Benny Gantz’s Blue and White Party, to join him
in supporting annexation. Nobody cared.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands beside a map of the occupied Jordan
Valley during a press conference before the second elections of 2019, Ramat
Gan, September 10, 2019.
Hadas Parush/Flash90 // +972 Magazine
Part
of the reason for the muted response is that such declarations, made on the
evening of the final polls, are always taken with a grain of salt. But
something else is at play here: for some time now, Israel has been treating the
West Bank as its own (and especially the 60 percent of the occupied territory
over which the Palestinian Authority has no power). Annexing it would be just
adding legal formality to a situation that everyone has been used to for a long
time.
In
practice, Israel has already annexed the West Bank. It has a monopoly
over the use of violence in the territory, over its airspace, over who goes in
and comes out, over its currency and over the population registry. Israel
extracts natural resources and dumps its garbage there. It builds
settlements for Jews and rejects any legal authority but its own.
These
elements were cemented in the previous decade. Attempts to challenge them —
through the diplomatic process or popular protests — failed. Israel has been
successful in containing violence as well. The old axiom that “the status quo
is unsustainable” has been proven wrong.
Another
axiom said that Israel cannot be an occupier and a democratic state at the same
time; that it would need to give up one of the two: democracy or territory.
This was also proven wrong. The world recognizes Israel as a democracy and as a
legitimate member of the western world (where some criticism of Israel and
Zionism is even being outlawed). Israelis themselves believe they live in
a democracy, and when they don’t, the reason has to do with corruption, the
lack of good governance, the power of the judiciary, or Netanyahu’s legal
cases. Hardly anyone chalks it up to the fact that 40 percent of the population
under Israeli rule is deprived of basic civil rights or political
representation.
To the
outsider, it seems that the past decade has changed very little about the
conflict. But the truth is that something very substantial did, indeed, occur.
This was the decade of the one-state solution. The ideological argument between
one staters and two staters, which continues to this day, disguises the fact
that in practice we are all one staters. Other ideas are completely
hypothetical.
An Israeli soldier kneels over a Palestinian protester in the village of Kfar
Qaddum, near Nablus, West Bank August 23, 2019.
Nasser Ishtayeh/Flash90 // +972 Magazine
Israeli
democracy consists of a permanent structure made up of two governing
systems — one for the Israeli citizens (including Palestinian citizens of
Israel), and another, authoritarian system for Palestinian non-citizens. People
argue whether this is the result of advanced planning or the outcome
of a historical coincidence. Regardless of the answer, there is no doubting
both the existence and the surprising resilience of this model.
The
occupation has been going on for nearly 53 years. The Palestinian
Authority was born 25 years ago. The median age in Israel is a little
under 30; in Gaza it is under 20. In other words, this is the only reality most
Israelis and Palestinians know: The one-state reality.
***
I
believe that the secret to Netanyahu’s long term as prime minister —
the longest in Israeli history — has been his ability to promote the status quo
as the preferred solution to the conflict. As I’ve argued previously, the
status quo is the least worst option as far as Israelis are
concerned, since it doesn’t require them to go through the painful process of
making territorial concessions or incurring far more dramatic changes that a
single democratic state would bring. Israel could remain relatively secure and
prosperous while maintaining most of the Palestinian population under a
military dictatorship.(*)
Palestinian construction workers work on part of the separation wall between
the Gush Etzion settlement bloc and Jerusalem, July 7, 2011.
Nati Shohat/Flash90 // +972 Magazine
Netanyahu,
and later others on the Israeli right, understood that when the world condemned
the occupation, it was threatening them with an empty gun. Nobody in the U.S.
or the European Union, let alone in other countries, was interested in
investing the kind of resources necessary to push Israel out of the West Bank
and establish an independent Palestinian state.
Following
the Arab Spring, when regional stability and security became everybody’s
main concern, whatever motivation was left for dramatic changes evaporated, and
the world was more than happy to assist in maintaining the status quo. It did
so by financing the PA; training its security forces; allowing and even
maintaining the blockade on Gaza and the military operations that went
hand-in-hand with the siege;(**) and by moving diplomacy out of international
institutions such as the UN into the realm of U.S. administrations. Those who
are angry at the way President Trump has recognized Israeli
annexation can only blame themselves for letting America monopolize the
conflict in the first place.
***
Looking
back, I am amazed at how slow many progressives — myself included — were to
recognize these trends. Because the occupation was such an aberration in the
international system of sovereignty and citizenship (even authoritarian
governments don’t maintain close to half their native population as
“non-citizens” subject to martial law), I was certain that Israel would either
end the occupation on its own or be isolated and forced to end it. Even before
the Arab Spring, I underestimated the forces maintaining the status quo. I took
declarations by foreign officials at face value rather than for what they were:
lip service to dead ideas. I also believed that nonviolent protests in the West
Bank would be the seeds of a major political force for change, and failed to
grasp the effectiveness of the Israeli army and the PA
in suppressing them and in maintaining the status quo.
The
Palestinian Authority was always a a strange hybrid: a state in waiting with an
element of the current political order. In the last decade, we witnessed the
first part collapse; today only the second remains. The Palestinian national
movement split into several pieces, each with its own political agenda:
residents of Gaza, East Jerusalem Palestinians, prisoners, refugees, Arab
citizens of Israel. Each one of these groups carried out collective struggles,
but none carried the others with it. The only group to successfully advance its
cause was Palestinian citizens of Israel. It’s clear why: despite facing
discrimination, they are still included within the framework of
Israel’s democratic institutions, and have learned how to take advantage of the
limited tools afforded to them. Their success has demonstrated that there is no
substitute for civil rights; those who lack them simply stay behind.
PA security forces prevent supporters of Hizb ut-Tahrir party from praying in
Hebron, June 4, 2019.
Wisam Hashlamoun/Flash90 // +972 Magazine
To be
fair, we cannot separate the crisis of progressive politics in Israel-Palestine
from the global crisis of progressive and left-wing politics. Culturally,
progressive politics are doing well. But within formal political structures —
where elections are held and governments are formed — progressivism is on the
ropes. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, of course, was never a purely cultural
issue. Whether it is the one- or two-state solution, a confederation, or
anything else, they all require strong, unified political movements in which
people are ready to cooperate with those who hold different values. They must
be willing to compromise on core issues, be loyal to one another, follow the
political leadership, and remain rooted in the reality on the ground, rather than
in symbolism. In an age of self-centered, abstract liberal politics, we are as
far away from that as possible.
***
So
what comes next? After these failed predictions, it would be pointless to add
another one. In fact, I think that any feeling of “inevitability” in politics
has always been part of the problem. Progressives got increasingly better at
working on process, many times at the expense of investing in hard political
currencies. Everybody waited for “forces on the ground” (or for “outside forces”)
to bring about change — but no such forces appeared, and when things did
change, those who benefited from the status quo were quicker to adapt and
capitalize on them.
Nonetheless,
the vanishing of the two-state solution over the past decade may not be a net
negative. I am not certain that the two-state model proposed in recent years —
especially during the negotiations led by Secretary of State John Kerry — would
have led to more freedom, happiness, security (for both people) and prosperity.
A tiny Palestinian state with a large internal security apparatus, supported by
U.S. and European money, would have looked much like a version of the
“moderate” Arab states — an authoritarian regime that relies on the persecution
of its own people in order to remain intact.
Former Sec. of State John Kerry meets with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas
in Ramallah, December 12, 2013.
State Dept photo
The
advantage of the two-state solution was that it was a simple idea for people to
envision — especially Israelis and Americans. This last decade, two states went
from being a political program to a fata morgana: the closer you
get to it, the further away it moves. The one-state condition, on the other
hand, is the desert where we now find ourselves.
Any
political plan should start with recognizing this reality, not with the
abstractions and fantasies with which we dealt in recent years. We might not
have a clear vision of the future, but we can unite around what is terribly
wrong in the present. Fighting to end the siege on Gaza — the most inhuman
aspect of the status quo — would be a good start.
(*) Some
argue that the Palestinian Authority is to blame for the non-democratic system
the Palestinians are under, since President Abbas forbids holding new
elections. But even if the Palestinians did vote for their representatives
every few years, they would not be able to take part in making major decisions
that shape their lives, since the power of the sovereign remains exclusively
with Israel. For example, the Palestinian Legislative Council could decide to
build a new city or to invite Palestinian refugees from Syria to settle in the
West Bank, yet these decisions would be meaningless without Israeli consent.
The PA can issue travel documents to its own people, but without Israeli
consent they won’t be able to travel out of the country, etc.
(**) The
international community accepted the siege as legal. By closing the Egyptian
border or blocking flotillas from departing from Europe to Gaza (in the case of
Cyprus and Greece), some countries have actively aided and abetted the siege.
As for the military operations, when Israel ran out of munitions in 2014, the
Obama administration opened its own emergency storage and provided the IDF with
artillery shells and bullets.
[Noam
Sheizaf is an independent journalist and editor. He was the founding executive
director and editor-in-chief of +972 Magazine. Prior to joining +972, he worked
for Tel Aviv’s Ha-ir local paper, Ynet, and the Maariv daily, where his last
position was deputy editor of the weekend magazine. He is currently working on
a number of documentary films.]
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