Israel-Palestine conflict: ‘A peaceful solution exists, just not the leaders to deliver it’
The Accidental Diplomat, a column by Paul Knott
Politicians on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict are failing their people
Over recent years, one of the world’s longest-running conflicts has become one of its most neglected too. But the old wisdom “if you ignore it, it might go away” does not apply to the Israel-Palestine dispute. And this festering situation now stands on the brink of one of its periodic explosions of violence that make it impossible to disregard.
Like other supposedly unsolvable conflicts, such as the troubles in Northern Ireland, this part of the Middle East suffers from a surfeit of history that is difficult to overcome.
The roots of the current Israeli-Palestinian dispute can be traced to the development of Zionism in the late 1800s by a group of European Jews. The Zionists advocated a return to their historic home in the Holy Land as a way to take control of their own destiny and escape the persecution to which the Jews were repeatedly subjected in parts of Europe.
The movement to establish a secure homeland for the Jewish people was given horrific urgency by the Holocaust perpetrated against them by the Nazis. This safe haven was formalised by the creation of the internationally recognised State of Israel in 1948.
Tragically, in doing so too little account was taken of the rights and wishes of the Arab people, the Palestinians, living on the land, which had previously been part of the (Turkish) Ottoman Empire for several centuries until it collapsed in 1917 and was then then run by Britain until 1948 as part of an internationally-granted mandate. A post-Second World War attempt by the United Nations (UN) to partition the land between Arabs and Jews failed. In the ensuing fighting, many Palestinians were expelled from their homes. They and their descendants remain refugees scattered, mostly, around the Arab world to this day. The Palestinians call these events the “Nakba” (catastrophe).
Further wars followed in the 1950s, 1967 and 1973 as the Palestinians and the neighbouring Arab states, sought to defeat Israel. The outcome was that Israel’s battlefield successes left it occupying areas of East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of the River Jordan that are beyond its internationally recognised borders.
Despite assorted patchy, incomplete peace agreements and various Palestinian uprisings (known as “Intifadas”, from the Arabic word for “shaking off”) in those Israeli-occupied territories since, this remains the situation on the ground today.
Some outsiders struggle to understand how Jewish Israelis, given their own sufferings over the centuries, find it possible to oppress another people. Indeed, there is such a “peacenik” constituency in Israel itself. It has, though, become a minority viewpoint as another, understandable but less idealistic, Holocaust-influenced expression of human nature has become predominant there. This “nobody is ever going to do anything like that to us again” perspective prioritises physical security above all else. It is an attitude that has been exacerbated by decades of Palestinian “push Israel into the sea” rhetoric and prioritisation of violence over peaceful protest and reaching an accommodation with Israel.
This is, also understandably, matched in the minds of Palestinians by years of Israel’s violent oppression of them and creeping attempts to illegally annex the occupied territories by settling thousands of Jewish Israelis there.
Picture credit: Cole Keister
The problem for all concerned is that, in the long-run, neither aggressive approach works. Palestinian bombs on buses and in cafes during the late 1990s and early 2000s only persuaded a majority of Israelis to support security through force, rather than a peace process. In turn, the Palestinians rightly resist an occupation that inflicts death, destruction and daily harassment on them.
Matters are now coming to a head again because of political failings on both sides of the divide.
The Palestinian Authority (PA), which has had some limited responsibility for governing parts of the West Bank since the 1993 Oslo Accords with Israel, has lost much of its legitimacy in the eyes of its people. Its ailing 87-year-old president Mahmoud Abbas is now in the 18th year of the four-year term to which he was originally elected, having repeatedly cancelled elections and refused to establish a succession plan for fear of losing power. The PA has also become mired in corruption and incompetence. It is now widely seen as doing little more than abetting Israel’s occupation through its own, often human rights abusing, security enforcement.
Aside from the longer running split with the Islamist extremist Hamas movement, which controls the separate Gaza Strip, this disillusionment is leading to a profusion of Palestinian splinter groups springing up, such as “Lions’ Den” and the “Jenin Brigade”, to pursue a return to violence against Israel.
Meanwhile, Israel now has the most dangerous government in its history. In a desperate attempt to stay out of jail on corruption charges, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has formed a coalition with assorted religious and far-right extremists. These were the only people willing to ally with his Likud party and help him to undermine the legal system. Securing their support has involved Netanyahu appointing an openly racist advocate of violence, the “Jewish Power” party leader Itamar Ben-Gvir, as Minister of National Security, and making a representative of the most extremist West Bank Israeli settlers who favour forcing Palestinians out of the territory, Bezalel Smotrich of “Religious Zionism”, the Minister of Finance.
These individuals know Netanyahu needs them more than they need him, thus putting them beyond his usual crafty political control. Rather than the heavy-handed Israeli policy of suppressing unrest in the occupied territories that has prevailed for years now, they and their supporters are intent on inflaming the situation. The signs are that the conflagration may have already begun. At least 40 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli security forces so far this year, alongside an increase in Palestinian attacks on Israelis, including the murder of seven people outside a synagogue in occupied East Jerusalem on 27th January.
This is all a dead end. In Northern Ireland, the Good Friday peace agreement enabled people to profess allegiance to the adjacent country of their choice, Republicans to the Republic of Ireland and Unionists to Great Britain as part of the UK, whilst staying exactly where they were. The Palestinians and Israelis have no such an option or anywhere else to go. Ultimately, they are doomed to finding a way to share the same patch of land.
As the currently more powerful party to the conflict, the greater onus for finding a sustainable peaceful solution arguably falls on the Israelis. For decades, Israel was justly proud of being both a “Jewish state” and the only democracy in a tough neighbourhood. The long-standing international proposals for a two-state solution, with a viable, independent Palestinian state being established alongside Israel, would still be the best way to preserve those pillars of Israel’s existence, provide some justice and a future for the Palestinians and build peace.
Overcoming the challenges of assembling a credible negotiating team from the fragmented Palestinian leadership and undoing much of Israel’s illegal settlement building in the occupied territories will be difficult. But the alternative of a one-state solution covering the whole of internationally recognised Israel and the occupied territories is even more problematic.
This would either involve granting the Palestinians equal democratic rights, thus preserving democracy but ending Israel’s unique character as a Jewish state, and forcing both groups to work out how to govern a country containing two adversarial communities of roughly equal size. Or it would mean an extension of what we have now; a country that is essentially an apartheid state based on the continuous oppression of one large group of people, with all of the societal and moral corrosion and sporadic violence such an existence entails.
Rather than being an “unsolvable” conflict, the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has long been pretty clear – two states, living side by side. The problem is progressing beyond all of the accumulated grievances and man-made obstructions, such as the settlements and extremists of all stripes, in order to reach the destination. The role of the outside world is to exert more pressure than it currently does to steer the parties in that direction and to hope that one day both sides will produce leaders of sufficient stature to get them there.