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?
This is the second of a two-part essay. The first, The Palestinians need a De Klerk, not a Mandela – Part 1, was published yesterday.
Between the adoption of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine on 29 November 1947. dividing the territory into an Arab state, a Jewish state, and a Special International Regime encompassing the cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and 1973, Israel fought five wars with Egypt: the war of independence (for Israelis) or al-Nakba (“catastrophe” for the Palestinians) which produced the declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948 and ended with the 1949 armistice and establishment of the “Green Line”; 1956; 1967 (or al- Naksa, the “setback”), the war of attrition which followed, and finally October 1973.
“The fundamental problem,” says Yaakov Amidror, a retired general who later served as Israel’s national security advisor, “is that the Palestinians have never accepted the legitimate right of Israel to exist as a state in the Middle East. They are willing to deal with it as a fact, but not as a legitimate entity. It is,” he says, drawing a historical analogy, “like the treaty of al-Hudaybiya signed by Mohammed with Mecca when he was weak, to bring about a temporary peace. Compromise was only a tactic.” He draws a distinction between finding an end to conflicts around interests – which can be negotiated and traded – and values “in which annihilation or exhaustion are the only options for change”.
“The points of departure for negotiations for Israelis and Palestinians are in different historical time zones,” says Asher Susser, Professor Emeritus of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University. “Israelis set out from 1967, while the Palestinians start from 1948. Thus, from the Israeli point of view, the negotiations are about the future of the West Bank and Gaza whereas the Palestinians come to the table with a powerful sense of grievance that begins with 1948. The unwillingness of the Palestinians to compromise over any territory in the West Bank and Gaza and the demand that Israel withdraw to the 1967 boundaries is seen by Israelis as inflexible. But for Palestinians it was a major compromise.” He points out that the inter-state conflict between Israel and Egypt (or Syria) differs fundamentally from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Between Israel and the neighbouring Arab states, there are only 1967 issues, that is, the return of their territory occupied in 1967. “But with the Palestinians there are two files, 1967 and 1948 (refugees) which gives rise to questions about Israel’s existence as the nation-state of the Jews and not just its expansion in 1967.”
“Presently unbridgeable”
Underlying this are the “presently unbridgeable” national narratives of Israelis and Palestinians. For Israelis and Jews in general, says Professor Susser, who came to Israel from his native South Africa in 1965, “the foundation of Israel in 1948 was the epitome of historical justice for the downtrodden of the earth; for the Palestinians it was the epitome of historical injustice, defeat, dispersal, and the loss of their homeland, the very essence of the Palestinian national narrative and the core of Palestinian identity.”
“The challenge,” summarises Tzipi Livni, who has served in eight different cabinet positions including that of deputy prime minister, “is in the pendant that Arabs and Israelis wear around their necks, which is in the shape of the land of Israel. But for the Arabs, it represents their land, and for the Israelis theirs.” Instead of the concept of a state as a place of security, governance and opportunity, it has become synonymous with land. “There is a danger,” she adds, “that Israelis think they can replace Hamas with another Israeli regime.” In this way, there is little difference between a radical, racial Hamas which wishes to push the Israelis into the sea, and a right-wing Israeli regime with the same view about Palestinians through occupation and expulsion. And the Palestinian Authority is, in this polarising context, like the Israeli moderate centre attempting to manage the conflict.
In this environment, disagreements about land and refugees are simply symptoms of a deeper malaise.
There will be many in the ANC, perhaps even a majority, who would see victory for the Palestinians through their own struggle, as a victory against colonialism and oppression. For them, victory would be about seizing control of the land and consigning Israel to the dustbin of states as a failed experiment. This much is wishful thinking in many respects, not least the notion that Palestine should be free, since there has never been a Palestinian state. It is a misnomer of history, too, to see Jews through the prism of colonialism, since they have been kicking about those parts for 3,500 years.
Considerations and consequences
But this does help to explain South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICJ, though there were likely other considerations and consequences. “By accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza, when it is not, it has undermined the domestic criticism of the government at home in Israel,” says Gilad Kariv, a pro-peace Member of the Knesset. South Africa has simultaneously undermined the prospects for any mediating role it might have played drawing on the experience of its own negotiated experience; that is, if it actually preferred such a negotiated outcome.
The answer as to how victory could be reached may lie in the Camp David process which produced the peace between Egypt and Israel with the sponsorship of the United States.
“In very low times,” says Gilead Sher, “when you are in the midst of a bloody conflict with little hope for a different future, you never know when will be the opportunity for change. Then, once it happens and it’s over, you look back and say, how come I didn’t think of that.”
Sher was a tank commander in the 1973 war. “I lost three classmates in the ‘73 war. When the war started we had 103 tanks. After 24 hours we had 26 serviceable tanks. I fought for three consecutive weeks until we crossed the canal and arrived at the point of 101km. I would never imagine that four years later, after Israel had lost more than 2,600 people, that the president of the roughest and biggest enemy would arrive in Israel, and that I would be applauding him on the sidewalk and that two years later peace would come. I believe that conflicts are doomed to be resolved.”
The government of Golda Meir might have missed the signals of military preparedness that produced the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. But she and subsequent leaders, including the right-wing Menachem Begin, “got it”, in the sense that they understood the imperative to maintain Israel, birthed as it was out of the Holocaust, as a safe haven for Jews. The significance of the peace agreement in 1978, following the Yom Kippur War, was that Israelis were able to feel more secure, for the first time, by ceding territory. “The peace with Egypt is one of the greatest historical achievements in the 20th century,” reflects Olmert. “Begin did something very few leaders could do – a 180-degree turnaround.”
Dangers of caricature
The success of the Camp David process in making peace between Israel and Egypt illustrates the dangers of caricature. The May 1977 election of Begin, a founder of the Zionist underground organisation Irgun Zvai Leumi − seen as terrorists by several international actors, including the British who had been subjected to terrorist bombings by Irgun − had been viewed with disquiet in Washington, fearing his annexation of the West Bank. Irgun’s symbol depicted, after all, the two sides of the Jordan River as the intended Jewish homeland.
While Begin might have been portrayed as right-wing, anti-democratic, and even by some as fascist, in the process it was overlooked that he had for years in opposition kept the government honest. He had lost most of his family to the Nazis in his hometown of Brest, now in Belarus. A humble man, living in Israel in a modest basement flat, he had spent time in a Soviet prison for his Zionist beliefs and had served in the Free Polish Anders army with which he arrived in Palestine in 1942. His Irgun organisation had conducted numerous acts of terrorism against the British (notably the King David Hotel bombing of 1946) and against Arab civilians (including the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948). Yet, in Begin’s own words, he yearned and prayed for peace. As he said before the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony on receiving the award with Sadat in 1978, “No more war. No more bloodshed. We shall negotiate and reach agreement.”
The role of the United States in political normalisation remains critical. And whereas improved regional relations was the objective of the peace exercise in 1977, today regional ties, notably those with Saudi Arabia, may well be the conduit for a Israel-Palestine deal.
Reward for boldness
The Egyptian-Israeli peace also highlighted the reward for boldness. Sadat’s November 1977 visit to Israel broke a taboo, for instance, but was a necessary gesture. As the Egyptian leader observed, Egypt would achieve its ends “(t)hrough negotiation around the table rather than starting wars, we have had enough.” There was a recognition, too, that the visit was the start, not the end of a peace process. It also illustrated the importance of not making one issue (the Sinai in this instance) hostage to another (Palestine).
It exemplified the limits of translating military success – or in this instance, the perception of military success – into an enduring political outcome. While Sadat was honoured in Egypt as the Batal al-Ubur, the “hero of the crossing” of the Suez Canal, in practice the war ended far from achieving its intended result of kicking Israel out of the Sinai. Before Camp David, all Sadat’s Egypt had been able to negotiate with Israel was a 1975 interim arrangement, which only provided for potential withdrawal from Sinai by Israel and the reopening of the Suez Canal.
The Arab Israeli MP Mansour Abbas has identified several factors that have influenced the (lack of) progress in negotiations. One is leadership. “I have discovered that if you always want to satisfy your voters, you will never be able to take the right decisions,” he says, “for Israelis or Palestinians.”
Overall, peace processes are very tough on leaders and their beliefs. But leaders are elected to make tough decisions, not to form their next coalition. Thus, says Abbas, sounding a little like Margaret Thatcher, “you have to make a compromise, accept the other, look to the future, and not stay stuck in the past.” “Consensus”, wrote the former British prime minister, was “(t)he process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead.”
In this regard, some Israelis think alike.
“Being led by the voters”
Dan Meridor was part of Barak’s Camp David negotiating team. The peace with Egypt reminds him of the premium of leadership: “Leadership is not doing what your voters like, this is easy. This is being led by the voters. Leading the people means telling them what you think is right, convincing them it is right.”
Victory requires setting out a clear end goal against which you can be measured. The challenge is then to possess the personal courage and strategic vision to make concessions to that end. Meridor said that on meeting FW de Klerk that the South African leader had one piece of advice for him: “Cut a deal as soon as you can.”
Tony Blair has written that in every “successful country, there will have been a turning point, a moment when they moved ahead, developed, liberated potential and expanded.” For the former British prime minister, “(l)eaders have the courage not to go with the flow. They speak up when others stay silent. They act when others hesitate. They take the risk, not because they fail to identify it as risk but because they believe a higher purpose means the risk should be taken. They’re prepared to say what needs to be said, including to their own supporters.” A leader is someone who can find the resources, he writes, to “keep going even when it looks like defeat is as plausible an outcome as victory; to retreat tactically, but never strategically. This is leadership. And to realise that giving people what they want is not the goal of leadership.” Otherwise, Blair adds, “the leader is just a follower.”
Focusing on building a state
Leadership in this context will demand Palestinians giving up the conflict as a means to achieve their aims, and to stop investing in violence and start focusing on building a state. The liberal world, for its part, will need to stop allowing the Palestinians to play both sides off against the middle in accepting the call “from the river to the sea”. And Israel will have to wean itself off a similar notion, but for Jews, and stop believing in Hamas as an asset, if only for rotten domestic considerations.
“If you had asked most Israelis in 1974 if there would be a peace with Egypt that lasted for half a century, they would have said it was not possible,” says Gilad Kariv. A member of the Knesset representing the Democrats and previously the Labour Party, he was speaking on the margins of the weekly gatherings in central Tel Aviv loudly protesting for the release of the 240 Israeli hostages taken by Hamas during the attacks of 7 October. Kariv’s left-of-centre politics aligns with many in the crowd. There is little doubting the anger of the crowd towards the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Banners shouting “Guilty”, “Resign”, “The Head is Responsible”, “Election Now”, “Dismissal Now”, and “No Absolution” were hung on the barriers, carried on sticks, and laid out on the road. Red caps emblazoned with “Stop the F**king War” punctuated the milling crowd, while stickers were handed out, flags draped and flown, trade done in merch and bagels, and hooters blasted amidst speeches from the hostages’ relatives and chants calling “now, now, now”. Kariv says, like his former Knesset colleague Mossi Raz, that “what is required to get out of this situation is leadership – and that is lacking”. Such leadership requires an end goal around which a plan can be created and compromises made.
Whereas Israelis require a Mandela to be gracious and generous in victory, counter to their preferred narrative, Palestinians need a De Klerk to get them there.
“Historic concession”
“De Klerk was a man of history,” says Olmert, “a man of positive history. He deserved a lot of praise. He made the historic concession that no-one believed was possible, just as Mandela made a historic contribution of the highest order afterwards for South Africa not becoming an arena of retribution.” Or. as Livni puts it, in making concessions, the Palestinians will lose on some issues, “but their people will lose more if there is no peace.”
While Trump’s proposed Gaza Riviera is unlikely to be the answer, a new way has to be found to find traction to the only solution that provides Palestinians and Israelis both with security and with a state. For if there is no peace, as the former head of Mossad, Efraim Halevy, dishearteningly observes, “in the end there will be no end”.
* The interviews cited above were conducted in Israel in December 2023 and January/February 2025.
[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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