UNITED NATIONS INTERNATIONAL MEETING IN SUPPORT OF ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN PEACE

The two-State solution: a key prerequisite for achieving peace and stability in the Middle East

Moscow, 1 and 2 July 2015 ______

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PLENARY III Efforts in the United Nations: the next steps

Paper presented by

Mr. Henry Siegman President U.S./Middle East Project New York

CPR/IM/2015/15 2

The Two-State Solution is Dead. Long-live the Two-State Solution

Anyone addressing a United Nations conference on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at this time faces the difficult task of not allowing himself to be distracted by the many timely subjects that virtually cry out for comment—beginning with the report of the United Nations committee that investigated the Gaza war, the Israeli elections that resulted in an extreme right-wing, anti-democratic government, the Palestinian submission to the International Criminal Court, new initiatives for a Security Council peacemaking role, and the pathetic and chronic inability of Palestinian leadership to heal its internal divisions that constitute a gift to its enemies that keeps on giving.

I will avoid these important subjects and limit my remarks to my assignment, defining the present situation and where we go from here.

The two-state solution is dead.

It did not die a natural death. It was strangulated as Jewish settlements in the West Bank were expanded and deepened by successive Israeli governments with the express purpose of preventing 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 dominant political clout of the settlers and their supporters within Israel who have both ideological and economic stakes in a Greater Israel.

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 apartheid, as former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and other Israeli leaders warned 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, as well as “for Jews only” buses if the settlers will get their way.

Israel’s colonial project has been successfully disguised by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pretense that he is seeking 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, if only because of the inability of settlers to restrain triumphalist pronouncements of their achievement of a Greater Israel and their defeat of the Palestinians’ hopes for statehood, boastings that are rarely reported in our media, and because of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s public repudiation of his earlier commitment to a two-state solution during the last Israeli elections.

But paradoxically, it is the triumph of the settlement project that contains the seeds of its ultimate reversal.

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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 Jordan, which controlled the West Bank before the war, or 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.”

Avoiding a solution became the central strategic objective of nearly every succeeding Israeli government, but most particularly of the governments headed by Prime Minister Netanyahu.

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. And when it no longer can, Israel would unilaterally draw borders around areas A and B, and Palestinians can call the imprisoned enclaves a Palestinian state, if they choose to do so.

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 charge will have been neutralized— at least sufficiently so to placate American Jews and the U.S. administration. That was stated explicitly by Naftali Bennett, the head of HaBayit HaYehudi, a party that has a disproportionate number of ministers in the current government.

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. 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. But if those two options were precluded and the choice were either to grant citizenship to the Palestinians in 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 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 by vetoing efforts to bring the issue to the Security Council—but whether it is prepared to defend what finally 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. In these circumstances, one must assume no American 4

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 who are committed to the Palestinians’ permanent disenfranchisement and subjugation. The key to changing the deadlocked status quo is therefore exposing the Greater Israel that has already 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 to consign Palestinians to enclaves in areas A and B, as proposed by Bennett. But Israel’s government has already done exactly that. 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 such a strategy would put at risk. It is highly doubtful that Israel can survive another half century of its subjugation of the Palestinians. The region has been transformed by the emergence of radical Islamic entities that, unlike their predecessors, will not suppress the regional furies provoked by Israel’s permanent disenfranchisement of the Palestinians. America’s ability to impose its own political order on the region or to protect Israel from the consequences of its own policies is in decline. Even Arab royals in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Emirates will in time be pressed to prove their legitimacy by joining efforts to deepen the ring of Arab hostility that surrounds and threatens a Jewish state that has permanently based its existence on the suppression and humiliation of an Arab Palestinian population under its control. The heightened sense of isolation and insecurity that Israelis will experience is bound to lead to an exodus of Israel’s best and brightest, and in time 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 is already underway.

An honest Israeli offer of Palestinian statehood based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed territorial swaps would avert such a calamity, and remove a most incendiary issue from the region’s agenda.

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 Israelis but the United States and the international community to finally stand up to the most reactionary 5

government in Israel’s history. If a Palestinian struggle for equal rights does not bring back the two-state option, nothing will. In that case, their struggle for citizenship and equal rights in Greater Israel could not have been more compelling and more timely.

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