How the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is failing
BY THE STANDARDS of the peace process, if not international law, Oranit is not a terribly contentious Jewish settlement. The Palestinians previously accepted that this hilly town of low-slung homes in the occupied West Bank would remain part of Israel in a future two-state solution. In one negotiating session their disagreements amounted to an area of about 400 square metres. It has grown into a commuter town, half an hour by motorway from Tel Aviv, and rates nine out of ten on Israel’s “socioeconomic index”, a measure of education, wealth and employment.Listen to this storyYour browser does not support the element.Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.Look east across the sun-baked hills and one sees Azzun Atmeh, an impoverished Palestinian village. No easy commutes for its residents: it is almost fully encircled by settlements and the imposing separation barrier. This is theoretically part of a future Palestine, but right now it is Israel, with most of its land designated as “Area C”, where Israel holds civil and military jurisdiction.The question of how to divide this land has been more or less answered, yet the parcelling out to two states has not come. Instead it remains under Israel’s control—a single state in which Jewish Israelis and West Bank Palestinians living a stone’s throw from each other hold very different rights and face very different prospects.Almost three decades have passed since Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, and Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s prime minister at the time, shook hands on the White House lawn in 1993 after signing the Oslo accords. That hopeful moment cemented a formal peace process that would create a Palestinian state and end half a century of conflict. It was meant to happen within five years. Hope, alas, gave way to despair. It has now been more than five years since the parties even sat down to talk.Each time there is a bout of bloodletting between Israelis and Palestinians, it is de rigueur to urge them back to the negotiating table. But such rhetoric obscures why the peace process has failed. Decades of meetings produced a mountain of maps and policy papers. The outline of a two-state solution is well known to all. The problem with the peace process is not a lack of process, it is that process became a substitute for peace.To continue that process in hope of a breakthrough is to indulge a fantasy. It pretends that conditions on the ground—the steady growth of Israeli settlements, Israel’s ever-more entrenched control of Jerusalem, the schism between the West Bank and Gaza—are merely obstacles to negotiate around rather than insurmountable roadblocks. And it ignores shifts in politics and public opinion. Most Palestinians and a plurality of Israeli Jews oppose the two-state solution, as do two of the three governments between the river and the sea.It is time to admit the land-for-peace paradigm has failed. Moreover, it has often been unhelpful and counterproductive. The theoretical existence of a peace process gave Israel cover to entrench an occupation that looks permanent, and contributed to the rot in Palestinian politics. What exists today, and will exist for the foreseeable future, is really just one state.The Palestinian Authority (PA), the self-governing edifice set up after the Oslo accords, was meant to exist “for a transitional period not exceeding five years”. That deadline came and went, but the parties came close to a deal in 2000 at the Camp David summit, two weeks of sequestered talks between Ehud Barak, then the prime minister of Israel, and Mr Arafat. Conventional wisdom at the time blamed the latter for walking away; subsequent assessments offered a more muddled picture.Regardless, the failure at Camp David gave way to the brutal second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, which soured many Israelis on making peace. Still, more negotiations followed: the “road map for peace”, the summits at Taba and Annapolis and Sharm el-Sheikh.For the past decade these efforts have been listless. Barack Obama’s two attempts at peacemaking lacked even memorable names. The second segued into a brutal 51-day war between Israel and Hamas, the violent Islamist group that rules Gaza. There have been no direct talks since 2014. Donald Trump’s “deal of the century” was a curious effort to solve the conflict without input from Palestinians.His successor, Joe Biden, seems disinclined even to try. He played at best a secondary role in broking a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel when they fought earlier this month. Then he dispatched Antony Blinken, his secretary of state, for a round of talks. The focus was to be aid for Gaza. The peace process was not on the agenda.UnsettlingIn 1968 one of Mr Blinken’s predecessors, Dean Rusk, sent a sharp memo to the Israeli embassy in Washington. He noted reports that Israel was establishing civilian settlements in the newly occupied West Bank. This not only violated the Geneva Conventions, Mr Rusk wrote, but also “creates the strong appearance that Israel… does not intend to reach a settlement involving withdrawal from those areas”.Today more than 440,000 Israelis live in West Bank settlements, a figure that has grown roughly fourfold since the Oslo accords were signed. The world has done nothing to halt their growth. Diplomats have accepted the fiction that the settlements are temporary, a claim belied by billions of shekels invested in homes and infrastructure over decades. Some settlers have now lived in the West Bank for two generations.Negotiators insist that big settlement “blocs”, which house about three-quarters of the settlers in the West Bank, are no obstacle to a peace deal. Yet one of the largest, Ariel, sits almost halfway across the width of the West Bank. The blocs carve ribbons and punch holes in the outline of a Palestinian state (see map). More than 100,000 Israelis live outside them, in isolated communities that would need to be evacuated—more than 12 times the number removed from Gaza during Israel’s disengagement from that territory in 2005.Settlers wield a level of political power today they did not hold back then. Five parties in the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) are ideologically committed to expanding settlements deep in the West Bank. Together they hold 56 seats, five shy of a majority. Even members of the Labour party have urged Israel to annex large chunks of the West Bank and end the fiction of “temporary” settlement. A poll conducted last year by the Israel Democracy Institute found that just 30% of Israelis opposed doing so.Mr Trump’s peace plan was widely mocked. But the map it offered, an archipelago of Palestinian territory connected by roads and tunnels and pockmarked with Israeli enclaves, was probably a realistic vision of how a peace agreement would look. (It still did not satisfy the settler movement, for which the very existence of a Palestinian state is anathema.)His plan did not offer even the pretence of a capital for the Palestinians in East Jerusalem, which they have long sought (the area is largely Palestinian). Instead they would house their future government in dismal suburbs on the far side of Israel’s concrete separation barrier. That too reflects current trends in Israeli politics. No big party accepts the city’s division.Jerusalem is now ringed with settlements, home to more than 200,000 Israelis, making it impossible to give the Palestinians a contiguous capital and difficult even to connect the northern and southern halves of the West Bank. Right-wing Israeli groups are using courts to try to expel Palestinians from their homes in Arab-majority neighbourhoods. The settler movement is not shy about its objectives. Each hill it claims in the West Bank, each home it seizes in East Jerusalem, makes it harder for Israel to cede the occupied territories in a final agreement with the Palestinians.The settlers’ spoiling is working, but they need not worry, anyway: there is no Palestinian leader to strike such a deal. Mahmoud Abbas has been president since 2005, serving an endless four-year term. Two-thirds of Palestinians are unhappy with his performance; 68% want him gone.Mr Abbas rules by decree, but he has no legitimacy to speak on behalf of Palestinians, half of whom are outside his remit anyway. The community in East Jerusalem feels adrift and leaderless, caught between the PA, which has no authority there, and the Israeli government, which most Palestinians are ineligible to vote for. The 2m in Gaza live under the rule of Hamas, which offers, at best, a lengthy truce with Israel.Out of mindIn Israel, meanwhile, the peace process is no longer a salient political issue. That is largely thanks to the long-serving prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. He tepidly endorsed a two-state solution in 2009, but has spent much of his career working to prevent it. Foreign diplomats often say the occupation is unsustainable. In the short term, Mr Netanyahu has proved them wrong. The security situation is fairly calm, the economy hummed before the pandemic and Israel’s diplomatic position is better than ever. Last year it established overt ties with four Arab states.With no pressure to resolve the conflict, most Israeli parties either oppose the two-state solution or ignore it. The Labour party, once the beating heart of Israel’s peace camp—it held a 44-seat plurality at the time of the Oslo accords—won just seven seats at the last election.A poll of Palestinians in March found that just 40% still support the two-state solution, down from 51% in 2016 and 56% in 2011. Support among Israeli Jews dropped from 53% in 2016 to 42% last year. Five years ago 82% of Israeli Arabs backed the idea; today 59% do.Yet Israelis and Palestinians are not sure what they do support (see chart). Some desire a single, binational state, others an apartheid state. There are Palestinians who hope to throw all the Jews into the sea and Jews who hope to throw all the Palestinians into Jordan. The most popular choice after a two-state solution is to believe there is presently no solution.It need not be a binary choice between one state and two. Some Israelis and Palestinians talk of a confederation that would split the difference. Both communities could fulfil their national aspirations, but with shared institutions and a porous border. Both Mr Abbas and Reuven Rivlin, the outgoing Israeli president, have expressed openness to such an arrangement.It would face obstacles, not least that it requires creating a system of governance that does not exist in the world today. A binational state would have to overcome a century of hostility. Such challenges are often cited as a reason to support the status quo: a two-state solution is desirable because the alternatives would be hard. After three decades of failed negotiations, though, this argument sounds hollow.In his final weeks as secretary of state, in 2016, John Kerry warned that Israel was heading for a permanent occupation, a reality he described as “separate but unequal”. His choice of words, a reference to Jim Crow in America, was meant to jolt listeners. Yet it was less a prediction of the future than a description of reality. The four groups of Palestinians in the Holy Land all face formal and practical discrimination compared with Israeli Jews.Start with Arab Israelis, as Israel calls them, or Palestinian citizens of Israel, as many (though not all) call themselves. They hold full citizenship, if not quite full rights. A “nation-state law” passed in 2018 reserved the right of “national self-determination” for Jews alone. The poverty rate for Arabs, 36%, is double that of Jews; their average monthly income in 2018 was 34% lower. The Supreme Court has upheld the right of small towns to screen residents for “social suitability”, a practice that has been used to bar Arabs from moving in.Palestinians in East Jerusalem exist in a sort of limbo. Most refuse to seek Israeli citizenship, waiting for a solution that never comes. They risk losing their Israeli residency cards if they leave the city; more than 14,000 have been revoked since 1967.A Palestinian born a few kilometres to the north, in Ramallah, cannot visit Jerusalem without a permit. Life in the West Bank is largely confined to the one-third of its territory under a measure of Palestinian control. Hundreds of checkpoints restrict freedom of movement.Then there is Gaza. To be born there, since 2007, is to be born in a place one cannot easily leave. Israel permits only select categories of Palestinians to cross its border, while Egypt allows only a few thousand travellers a month (and some months none at all). Almost half of Gazans are unemployed and 80% need help from aid groups to survive.These divisions occasionally collapse during times of trouble, as they did this May, when unrest in Jerusalem led to rocket fire from Gaza, riots inside Israel and protests in the West Bank. In quieter times, though, Palestinian leaders are happy to help perpetuate divisions among their people in order to preserve their fiefs.Several years ago your correspondent met Mahmoud Zahar, one of the founders of Hamas, in Gaza. In the West Bank, he said, Palestinians faced the routine threat of having their homes demolished by the Israeli army, often for failing to obtain building permits that are nigh impossible to get. Not so in Gaza: “Since Hamas took power,” he said, “there has not been a single house demolition.”That would come as a surprise to Palestinians who recently endured 11 days of conflict. The fighting displaced more than 70,000 people; some have no homes to return to. A longer war in 2014 left an estimated 17,000 families, more than 100,000 people, homeless. In fact, Mr Zahar was one of them: his home was destroyed by an Israeli air strike.Such is the emptiness of Hamas’s rhetoric. To the extent that it remains popular, that is largely in contrast to the superannuated Mr Abbas. At 85, he is old enough to remember a time before Israel existed; most of his constituents are not old enough to remember a time before he was president. The PA he oversees was meant to form the nucleus of a future state. With no state on offer, today it serves mostly to distribute public-sector salaries and conduct security co-ordination with Israel.America alone has provided more than $5bn in aid to the Palestinians since 1994. Many in the West Bank wonder where it went, as they drive on rutted roads and visit overcrowded hospitals. Close to a billion dollars is thought to have vanished during Mr Arafat’s rule. Today Mr Abbas is more interested in prosecuting anti-corruption activists than pursuing corruption. As long as his security forces keep the West Bank quiet, though, the world gives him a pass.The endurance of Hamas and Fatah, Mr Abbas’s party, is indicative of how the Oslo era warped Palestinian politics. Majorities in the West Bank and Gaza think their leaders corrupt and authoritarian. But Fatah enjoys a measure of international legitimacy because it accepts a territorial compromise that is now a mirage; Hamas claims popular legitimacy by rejecting compromise and promising liberation, which is just as illusory.To discard the land-for-peace framework would mean a sea change in Palestinian politics, reflecting a stark disjuncture between generations. Older people have spent a lifetime dreaming of an independent state. Asked why they do not abandon that dream and push for equality, they reply that Israel would never accept it. Many younger Palestinians disagree. The call for statehood, they argue, lets Israel frame the conflict as a struggle between two nations on a more or less equal footing. A battle for equal rights would put the onus more squarely on Israel.The two-state paradigm turned the conflict into a land dispute. If negotiators could simply find the right path for a border, the weary parties could retreat to their respective sides. But this is also a conflict over how two peoples should live together on an uncomfortably small patch of land.Delusions and realitySome on both sides cling to fantasies. Right-wing Israelis persist in believing that the Palestinians can be persuaded to leave or be consigned to live as second-class non-citizens, a cheap labour pool content to cross teeming checkpoints each day to till fields and swing hammers. Groups such as Hamas still insist they can outlast Israel, that one day the Jews will pack up and “go back to Europe”, never mind that most of them are native-born (and often descended from Middle Eastern Jews rather than European Jews, to boot).Here and there in Israel one sees a phrase in graffiti on walls in Hebrew and Arabic: ain lanu eretz aheret; la watan lanna badeel. “We have no other country.” The Arabs and Jews must decide how to share it; the world cannot dictate a solution. That will require a new peace process, a genuine one, with legitimacy and popular support on both sides. It is hard to envision such a process sprouting soon from such poisoned soil. But to acknowledge reality would be a start. What came before has failed, and what comes next will need to talk less of partition and more of parity. ■This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline “A process in pieces”