There is a disturbing feeling that we could be heading toward a form of an abrupt closure in the Palestine question in the coming few months. Like a silent and deadly perfect storm the elements are lining up and no one really knows when and how the tempest will strike. We appear to be suspended in a state of political inertia, but on the ground the undercurrents are picking up speed.
One thing is for sure. No one is in control of these elements. All the hubris about the need to restart negotiations, enlarge engagement in the peace process and aim for a historic mega deal that would achieve a sort of utopian settlement involving Israel, the Palestinians, Arabs and indeed the entire Muslim world will prove what we had known for a long time: The bigger the stakes, the meager the rewards.
False hopes have been part and parcel of the decades-old search for peace in the Holy Land. Historically, initiatives and peace plans have had a tendency for being anachronistic; by the time they arrive the “reality on the ground” would change. A substantial time gap has always separated grand gestures from the complex issues they aimed to resolve.
While solutions were being calibrated, amended and re-evaluated, the basic components of the conflict continued to escalate and evolve. The reality of Israeli occupation today is very different from that of more than 40 years ago. It is much more than a military takeover of neighboring territories. The West Bank today resembles nothing of the Jordanian governorates, which Israel overran in the June 1967 war. The territory, its population, its cities, towns and refugee camps have all undergone major transformations. Israeli occupation has metastasized over the years into full and vicious colonization.
While occupation, in its various forms and manifestations, is the root cause of the conflict, colonization — Judaization of Arab Palestinian territory — is now the terminal problem. Ending occupation, the physical withdrawal of military troops from subjugated territories, will not solve the issue or reverse decades of sustained digestion of major chunks of Palestinian land.
While diplomatic efforts focused on ending Israeli occupation, there was no serious attempt to stop the occupying force from undertaking one of the biggest projects of colonization in the post colonial era. As much as occupation is a breach of international law, Israel’s most heinous crime against the Palestinian people is the sustained expropriation, partition and colonization of their native land since 1967.
But until recently the issue of Jewish settlements, in and around Jerusalem and across the West Bank, was never given the importance it deserves. Israel has been able to withstand all forms of international pressure and continued to expand and fatten existing settlements while allowing new ones to emerge. About 40 percent of West Bank settlements are built on private Palestinian lands and between East Jerusalem and the rest of occupied territories about half a million Israeli settlers now live.
To say that Jewish settlements constitute the biggest de facto barrier to the establishment of an independent, contiguous and viable Palestinian state is an understatement. From Israel’s point of view the fate of the majority of these settlements is non-negotiable. They are part of Israel and will continue to be so.
IN recent years Israel has systematically increased its settlement activities even when it made commitments to freeze them. It has built special settler-only highways that crisscross and dissect the West Bank and partitioned parts of the territories by erecting a barrier wall. None of these superstructures are likely to be removed or dismantled unilaterally by Israel. Recently Israel has doubled its efforts to economically suffocate the remaining Arab residents of East Jerusalem to pre-empt Palestinian claims to the city. As a result, the future Palestinian state, as envisioned primarily by the Palestinians, has become a physical impossibility.
But if the two-state solution is becoming increasingly unrealistic as a result of successive waves of geographic, demographic, social and economic shifts that had taken place over 40 years of occupation, what then are the alternatives? There is little evidence to suggest that Israel, which has been leaning perceptibly toward the right and extreme right in recent years, will ever accept Palestinian demands over Jerusalem, the integrity of the future state, refugees and settlements. Even when we consider the new policies of the Obama administration it is difficult to embrace the belief that Washington will ever resort to dire confrontation with Israel over these issues.
If there is going to be any stepping back from positions it is more likely to come from the Palestinians and by extension the Arabs. But even then Palestinian concessions are not expected to bring the Israelis around. Occupation could come to an end; an Israeli troop redeployment that could leave Palestinian urban centers free but falls short of genuine sovereignty.
While such an interim scenario might please Israel, it will not placate the Palestinians. A more radical alternative will be to establish economic and later political links, between the Palestinians in the West Bank with Jordan, and between Gaza and Egypt. But no Arab party, not to mention Palestinian, will accept such a formula.
For all its careful planning Israel has failed to envision a realistic closure to its four decades of occupation and colonization of Palestinian lands. What took place in Oslo and later in Washington in the mid 1990s was a brief experiment with the notion that two states, representing two nationalisms, can co-exist in the Holy Land. That test was short-lived.
In the absence of viable alternatives Israel and the Palestinians are losing time. Both are facing existential challenges and while the Palestinians will not simply disappear from the face of the earth, the Israelis will soon discover that one remaining scenario which is anathema to die-hard Zionists may one day prove feasible; that of a bi-national secular state in Palestine.
But before we arrive to that conclusion we will first face difficult and testing times. A perfect storm is looming in the horizon and as we slip toward what would seem like a closure to the Palestine question, we better get ready for some distasteful results.
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