President Donald Trump has thrown a curve ball into the longstanding debate about how to achieve a settlement in the conflict between Palestine and Israel with his proposal of a ‘Gaza Riviera’ and the eviction of Palestinians to Egypt and Lebanon. His proposal has temporarily expunged the likelihood of a two-state solution, which has been the basis of US policy in the region for decades. Until now, any vision of a Palestinian state living alongside Israel has included Gaza and the West Bank.
Setting aside the considerable legal and moral issues inherent in such a proposal, along with the political unrest it would create among Arab states if carried out, it reflects the waning support in both Palestine and Israel for a two-state solution and the increasing radicalisation of the debate on both sides towards a one-state alternative ‘from the river to the sea’, but for these two extremist poles, one Jewish dominated, the other Muslim. Such polarisation has widened especially after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 that killed 1,200 people, which led to an Israeli retaliation in Gaza that has reportedly claimed the lives of 47,000 combatants and civilians.
This has been in spite of – and perhaps because of – considerable diplomatic efforts to reach a settlement. In the serial failures to accept a deal, the Palestinians have proven their own worst enemy. Is there any prospect now for a two-state solution?
In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) likes to equate its moral cause with that of the Palestinians, with Yasser Arafat as a Mandela-like figure astride the world stage. But to get to a different, better tomorrow, the Palestinians need a De Klerk more than they need a Mandela, a person willing to make compromises to achieve a solution, which no Palestinian leader has hitherto been willing to do.
Between 1991, at the start of the peace process in Madrid, and the failure of prime minister Ehud Olmert’s offer to Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority widely also known by the kunya Abu Mazen, in Annapolis in 2008, the search for a lasting two-state solution between Palestine and Israel had what former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak describes as a “tailwind, a Zeitgeist for peace”.
This process ran aground after repeated attempts to make concessions to the Palestinians resulted in a repetitive response of “we’ll get back to you” and they never did. Perhaps the Israeli negotiating style didn’t help, given that the Palestinians don’t have the hurry of an election cycle to consider.
The tailwind was eventually, notes Barak, “dissipated by the passing of time” when the lack of success “created a counter movement” as did “accumulated disappointments and the drift into the Arab Spring along with the emergence of Iran as a counterweight”.
Even though all Israeli prime ministers since Yitzhak Rabin − including Barak, Peres, Olmert and even Sharon and (before 2014) Netanyahu − pursued peace (albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm) premised on disengagement from the occupied territories and a two-state solution, the extent of time commitment may not have been enough.
Barak’s Chief of Staff and Chief Negotiator Gilead Sher notes that Israel has committed only “around three years in the last 34 to intensive negotiations. Yet we have multilayered, multi-issue problems to resolve, relating to religion, topography, geography, demography, psychology, culture and people. To resolve all of these you need more time and stamina, and a mindset to go with this. But most politicians are … driven by the need to achieve something within their political term.”
‘Yes, but …’
But there is no doubt that the Israelis, from his perspective, took the peace process seriously. “We had just a month to decide on the Clinton Parameters,” Sher recalls of the presentation of the final document on 23 December 2000, “before the President left office. We had an 18-hour cabinet meeting under Barak. But Arafat did not respond – he said ‘Yes, but …’ which in all practical purposes was a ‘no’. Yet the Clinton Parameters would serve still as a cornerstone for any future agreement between Palestine and Israel.”
Under these Parameters, Israeli settlements were to be dismantled to create a Palestinian state. This would have encompassed 100% of the Gaza Strip and 97% of the West Bank, though territories would be transferred from Israel in exchange for the land the Palestinians conceded in the West Bank. The Palestinian state would have included the Arab sections of Jerusalem, which would serve as its capital, while the Jewish sections of the city would have remained Israel’s capital. This split would have granted shared sovereignty over al-Haram al-Sharif (which Jews call the Temple Mount). Israelis would have retained control over the Western Wall and its surrounding area.
A corridor was to be created between Palestinian lands – in President Clinton’s words, “permanent safe passage” – making the two bits of the new Palestinian state contiguous. Finally, Palestinian refugees would be able to choose to return without restrictions to the new state of Palestine, to return to the state of Israel with restrictions (within a family-reunification scheme), to resettle in a third country, and/or to receive financial compensation.
The Clinton Parameters remains the best offer made to the Palestinians by Israel. The Taba Talks ended similarly. And the same, he says, happened with Annapolis, where despite the 34 tete-a-tete meetings between Olmert and Abu Mazen and more than 300 meetings in all, “Abu Mazen did what he does best when he reaches a crossroads, which is to do nothing. There is an asymmetry,” notes Sher, “in the willingness to make concessions.”
Olmert, who followed Barak as prime minister, went even further than his predecessor in making concessions, especially over Jerusalem. Olmert was Israeli prime minister between 2006 to 2009, serving before that as a cabinet minister from 1988-92 and 2003-06 before his career was engulfed by corruption charges dating from his decade as Mayor of Jerusalem.
Palestinians failed to respond
“I begged him [Abu Mazen] to accept the deal,” says Olmert. “I said that you will never get a better deal. Let’s change history together. But he said, ‘I will think about it’ and never came back to me. We have many good reasons to be pissed off.” At a crucial time, Palestinians failed to respond. Then, over the last 15 years, Olmert notes, “we did everything to ignore them”.
Tzipi Livni was Olmert’s Foreign Minister and later served the Government of Netanyahu as its Chief Negotiator. “Frankly,” she admits, “since 2000, the Palestinians missed the opportunity, and couldn’t say ‘yes’. Abu Mazen never said ‘no’, but he never said ‘yes’.
“In 2000, we thought that Arafat could not make compromises because he didn’t have the support of the Arab world. The negotiations in 2007 involved the Arab world with the presence of ambassadors. But it didn’t help. In Annapolis the idea was to have a detailed proposal allowing for trade-offs within and between issues. When Olmert produced the map and said ‘sign here’ I thought that we may have given away too much. While the Palestinians understood the need to address issues, [Abu Mazen] just couldn’t do it.
“When in 2014 Netanyahu said ‘yes’ to the plan put forward by John Kerry, Abu Mazen did not give an answer. He explained that he was waiting for a smaller, petit plan. I said that you have a plan for a state with the 1967 borders offered by a right-wing government, why do you not say yes? This way he would at least have deniability. He said that he did not know that Netanyahu agreed; and he thought that the US would simply pocket his consent. The same thing happened with Olmert. Now the problem is that [Abu Mazen] is too old to make a deal. While he can give his people victories through the ICC, ICJ or through demonstrations against Israel, there is little more. Now a gulf has been created.”
The Oxford-educated historian Shlomo Ben-Ami served as Barak’s foreign minister. His obvious respect for some of his Palestinian negotiating counterparts repeats itself throughout the conversation. He, for instance, says that he would not have accepted Camp David if he was Arafat, but would have accepted the much better offer on the table shortly thereafter in the Clinton Parameters. “Arafat was shrewd: he turned down Camp David, launched the Intifada, and got a better deal, but then he failed to accept it.”
Two dilemmas
Ben-Ami identifies two dilemmas which continue to bedevil the creation of two states. The first is the “link between Israeli domestic and foreign policy towards the Palestinians. You can only go as far as your political system will accept – as you will break your neck and lose power. This happened to Rabin, Barak and Olmert since they went beyond what their polity could accept. I used to personally say this to Arafat. If you go beyond, you will remain empty-handed. He was so incognisant to these political concerns. He turned down the Clinton Parameters believing haughtily that he would get a better deal with George W Bush who turned out, as his mother put it, to be the first Jewish president of America.
“Arafat was a leader of consensus – he had to reconcile a whole amalgam of organisations. He knew that peace with Israel would be a divisive enterprise in which he would run the risk of civil war. He thought that the best way to avoid this was to push for more concessions, and in the process pushed the whole thing over the precipice.”
The second aspect, or dilemma, identified by Ben-Ami, who was born in Tangier, Morocco, is the “tension between the positive and negative ethos of state building. Zionism before 1948 had a positive ethos. They wanted the territorial space to give an answer to the traditional Jewish sphere, in which they could unleash the energies of the Jewish people, what Ben Gurion said was ‘using science to create what nature has denied us’.” This, he says, explains why “the Zionists accepted any proposal about land in the 1947 or later proposals, since there was a positive ethos. The size of the land was not important; what was important was what you were going to build on the land itself. In this way it was more about restitution than constitution.
“If Arafat had a positive ethos,” he notes, “the extent of the land would not matter. For 40 years he was the rockstar of international relations, greater than life itself. This was a man who spoke with a gun on his hip at the United Nations in 1974. When, in 1988, Reagan denied him a visa to attend the UN General Assembly, the UN went to Geneva to hear Arafat. Now, take this figure, add it to the tragedy of the Palestinian people and ask why he would want to be the president of a Palestinian mini-state of 5,000 square kilometres, sandwiched between Israel and Jordan, countries that hated the idea of Palestine? He was not interested in governance, or education. He was a mythical figure, which is why only Jerusalem and the Temple Mount gave meaning to his life, explaining his saying: ‘If they gave me Jerusalem, I would give them everything’. He saw peace as the hosting of Friday prayers on Temple Mounts of all Arab leaders, who hated him, which would be the apex of his career, as the Custodian of Islam.”
Perverted logic
Other negotiators found a similar experience, even though there was a perverted logic to Arafat’s obduracy. As Arafat responded to the Israeli plan to build a railway in the West Bank as a means of improving transport and people’s lives, “I know what you are trying to do. You are trying to improve Palestinian lives, and make the world fall asleep to our concerns”.
In this way, Palestinian political bodies are a liberation movement not a state-building exercise.
As the conflict has ground on, others have occupied the political space that might have been dominated by the peace-makers.
Israelis are as famous for their internal divisions as they are for their ingenuity and fortitude in building a state out of a strip of desert. It is said jokingly that the problem with Israel is that “one third work, one third pay taxes, and one third fight in the army. But the problem is that its all the same one third.” There is a clash between the ethos and practices of the Israeli start-up nation, the dynamic high-tech country, and the shift rightward in Israeli politics, itself a product of domestic religious extremism and Palestinian recalcitrance, which has questioned the commitment to democracy in the face of a single-state outcome, where Jews might one day conceivably be the minority in an Israeli state.
Livni speaks of Israel now possessing “two national GPSes: one as a secure nation-state for Jews, which is not fundamentally about land, but is based around a set of values. This is Ben-Ami’s ‘positive ethos’, in terms of the use of nationalism to build capacity.
“The other GPS is about the historic land of Israel and the rights of the Jewish people across this territory. Nation-building is in this case about beliefs not values.” In this version, settlements are a metaphor for the state of Israel and this biblical connection.
This polarisation has translated into political turmoil in Israel, a growing unease among voters (and taxpayers) of the role of the ultra-Orthodox Haredi population, today comprising 15% of Israel’s ten million people, but fast-growing with around 60% under the age of 20. Currently the Haredi are exempt from military service, despite shortages in military personnel, which has translated into political tensions. More than two-thirds of Israelis polled are against the Haredi exemption from military service.
Rightward tilt
Such domestic tensions have implications for the nature of a peace deal. Livni tells a story against herself in her negotiations with Saeb Erekat, Arafat’s Chief Negotiator. “I had a confrontation with him about the awful Palestinian textbooks which I said did not project the existence of the state of Israel. His answer was: ‘I will. But please give me the map of Israel and I will put it in my textbooks’.” The influence of the religious right is practically expressed in the settlements on ‘the wrong side’ of the 1967 borders, what Israeli negotiators have agreed is Palestinian territory. It also finds expression in the rightward tilt of Israeli politics, where the radical views of those Palestinians who want to rule from the ‘river to the sea’ (the Jordan to the Mediterranean) which is a metaphor for the elimination of the state of Israel, is matched by Israeli radicals who talk in terms of occupation and moving the Palestinian population. The political sensitivities of the latter group are coupled with a sense of trauma and insecurity along with Biblical vengeance, which fuelled the brutality of the Israeli response in Gaza after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023.
And on the Palestinian side, a nihilism pervades. The failure to grab offers of peace has exposed other limits, not least the belief that if you accept the premise of the existence of the state of Israel, you betray Allah. For this group, the destruction of the state of Israel is about improving devotion to Islam. This search for meaning can only be compounded by the endemic corruption and nepotism that defines the Palestinian Authority. According to a recent survey, 36% of Palestinians polled said they prefer Hamas to Fatah (21%). Satisfaction with the performance of Abu Mazen as president stands at 18%, and dissatisfaction with him at 81%. In a poll conducted in September 2004 by the Palestinian Institute for Policy and Survey Research, 90% of West Bankers and 75% of Gazans demanded the resignation of the president.
This reflects a core problem: the two sides comprise traumatised people whose narratives depend on the continuation of conflict, where victimhood is central to the narrative. This explains the colonial label used by the Palestinians, despite the 3,500 years of Jewish connection with the land. The Palestinians do not have an alternative to this narrative, and yet the peace process depends on them so doing. Israel on the other hand was born out of a history of insecurity and constant failure in trusting security to others, of which 7 October is a vivid and recent reminder.
* The interviews cited above were conducted in Israel in December 2023 and January/February 2025. The second part of this essay will be published tomorrow.
[Image: Background map, detail from https://itoldya420.getarchive.net/amp/media/1881-la-palestine-d4636d]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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