Is the Two-State Solution Still Possible?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

I have just returned from a three-week trip to Israel, where the interminable debate about the so-called “two-state solution” seems to go on forever

Though it’s been a quarter century since the Oslo Accords committed both Israelis and Palestinian Arabs to the creation of a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel, both of them within the boundaries of the pre-1948 British Palestine mandate, things have been stuck, despite endless negotiations and interventions by outside countries, particularly the United States.

This article isn’t going into the minutia of the various proposals put forward year after year  about the status of Jerusalem, the fate of Jewish settlements east of the 1949 “green line” boundary between Israel and what had been Jordan, and so on.

I instead examine the thinking on the Israeli side. It’s clear that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the religious nationalists in his Likud coalition would like to hold on to the West Bank forever.

They see biblical Judea and Samaria as Jewish land, the Arabs as interlopers and conquerors, who occupied it while Jews lacked sovereignty for almost two millennia.

Since Netanyahu can’t say this openly, his strategy is to prevaricate and keep kicking the can down the road, in the hope that at some future date world opinion will shift and Israel will be able to openly annex these territories.

He pretend to accept a future division of the land of Israel while at the same time creating “facts on the ground,” by allowing the continued settlement of Jews within the post-1967 territories administered by Israel.

His coalition colleagues, as well as many in his own Likud party, are allowed to campaign in favor of annexation without sanction or reprimand.

A popular new book published in Hebrew last March, Catch 67:The Ideas Behind the Controversy Tearing Israel Apart – the number refers to the 1967 Six-Day War -- discusses the growth of the messianic religious right in Israel.

The conception of the whole land of Israel as one that had been promised to the Jews by the international community has given way to the idea of the land promised by God, asserts author Micah Goodman, who teaches philosophy at the Hebrew University.

“By the end of the 20th century the dominant group on the right placed redemption at the center of things,” he writes. Theirs is a position that brooks no compromise

Of course legally incorporating the territories within the state of Israel, and giving the Palestinians citizenship, with full political rights, would in one fell swoop more than double the non-Jewish population of the country and create a recipe for endless ethnic strife.

Demography would eventually create a non-Jewish majority and put an end to the Israeli state.

Since Israeli nationalists obviously recoil in horror at this possibility, it follows logically that they would prefer to evict the Palestinians. The map of Europe after 1945 is their preferred template.

In 1945, following Hitler’s defeat in the Second World War, the Soviets and Poles not only annexed large areas of pre-war Germany, but also expelled their German populations. Czechoslovakia did the same.

In today’s climate, Israel clearly can’t do this. So Netanyahu and religious nationalists probably anticipate a major war in the region at some future date between the Jewish state and an Iranian-led coalition that would include Arab armed support.

Such a cataclysmic conflict would either see Israel defeated and probably extinguished, or result in an Israeli victory which, as in 1948-49, would facilitate major population transfers in the region.

This would make the West Bank relatively free of its Palestinian inhabitants and so it could become part of a continuing Jewish-majority state.

No one can say this out loud, of course, but logic seems to dictate that this Armageddon is for the right-wing in Israel the preferred solution.

Remember, while the right-wing Zionists want all of the “Land of Israel,” so too do the militant Palestinian Muslims, except they call it “Palestine.”

So the whole endless “peace process” between Israelis and Palestinians will fade into history, the way the Cold War did, and an altogether new map will emerge. We have no idea what it will look like.