[ The ideological argument over the future of Israel-Palestine
disguises the fact that for the past decade we have been living in a
one-state reality.] [[link removed]]

WE ARE ALL ONE STATERS NOW  
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Noam Sheizaf
December 27, 2019
+972 Magazine [[link removed]]

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_ The ideological argument over the future of Israel-Palestine
disguises the fact that for the past decade we have been living in a
one-state reality. _

Illustrative photo of Palestinian women standing in line as they try
to pass through Qalandiya checkpoint, which separates the West Bank
city of Ramallah from Jerusalem., Issam Rimawi/Flash90 // +972
Magazine

 

In the final days before the second Israeli elections of 2019
[[link removed]], Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu announced a special press conference. Speculation
ran high: was the prime minister about to resign and fight the
criminal charges against him in court? Would he announce the
much-hyped mutual defense pact with the United States? Bibi’s aides
signaled he had something even bigger in store.

The reveal came on Sept. 10: that evening, Netanyahu vowed to annex
[[link removed]] the Jordan
Valley
[[link removed]],
deep inside the occupied territories, to Israel. He delivered his
speech alongside a large map of the eastern West Bank, which he
occasionally gestured at with a pointer.

“The Valley,” as it’s referred to in Israel, is the least
populated region in the West Bank. It consists of one Palestinian
city, Jericho, and numerous smaller communities. It is also home to
several small, non-ideological, settlements. But according to most
maps, the Jordan Valley makes up between a quarter and a third of the
West Bank. In the past, therefore, an announcement on future
annexation would have caused a political storm in Israel, since it
would have spelled the death of the two-state solution, the end of the
“temporary” occupation, and the beginning of a new era in the
conflict. For many, it would have meant the end of Israeli democracy.

Not today, though. Netanyahu’s words were met with a collective
yawn. The same thing happened several months later, when the prime
minister tried to challenge his main adversaries, Benny Gantz’s Blue
and White Party, to join him in supporting annexation
[[link removed]].
Nobody cared.
 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands beside a map of the occupied
Jordan Valley during a press conference before the second elections of
2019, Ramat Gan, September 10, 2019.
Hadas Parush/Flash90  //  +972 Magazine
Part of the reason for the muted response is that such declarations,
made on the evening of the final polls, are always taken with a grain
of salt. But something else is at play here: for some time now, Israel
has been treating the West Bank as its own (and especially the 60
percent of the occupied territory over which the Palestinian Authority
has no power). Annexing it would be just adding legal formality to a
situation that everyone has been used to for a long time.

In practice, Israel has already annexed
[[link removed]] the
West Bank. It has a monopoly over the use of violence in the
territory, over its airspace, over who goes in and comes out, over its
currency and over the population registry. Israel extracts natural
resources and dumps its garbage
[[link removed]] there.
It builds settlements for Jews and rejects any legal authority but its
own.

These elements were cemented in the previous decade. Attempts to
challenge them — through the diplomatic process or popular protests
— failed. Israel has been successful in containing violence as well.
The old axiom that “the status quo is unsustainable” has been
proven wrong.

Another axiom said that Israel cannot be an occupier and a democratic
state at the same time; that it would need to give up one of the two:
democracy or territory. This was also proven wrong. The world
recognizes Israel as a democracy and as a legitimate member of the
western world (where some criticism of Israel and Zionism is even
being outlawed
[[link removed]]).
Israelis themselves believe they live in a democracy, and when they
don’t, the reason has to do with corruption, the lack of good
governance, the power of the judiciary, or Netanyahu’s legal cases
[[link removed]].
Hardly anyone chalks it up to the fact that 40 percent of the
population under Israeli rule is deprived of basic civil rights or
political representation.

To the outsider, it seems that the past decade has changed very little
about the conflict. But the truth is that something very substantial
did, indeed, occur. This was the decade of the one-state solution. The
ideological argument between one staters and two staters, which
continues to this day, disguises the fact that in practice we are all
one staters. Other ideas are completely hypothetical.
 

An Israeli soldier kneels over a Palestinian protester in the village
of Kfar Qaddum, near Nablus, West Bank August 23, 2019.
Nasser Ishtayeh/Flash90  //  +972 Magazine
Israeli democracy consists of a permanent structure made up of two
governing systems
[[link removed]] — one for
the Israeli citizens (including Palestinian citizens of Israel), and
another, authoritarian system for Palestinian non-citizens. People
argue whether this is the result
[[link removed]] of
advanced planning or the outcome of a historical coincidence.
Regardless of the answer, there is no doubting both the existence and
the surprising resilience of this model.

The occupation has been going on for nearly 53 years. The Palestinian
Authority was born
[[link removed]] 25
years ago. The median age in Israel is a little under 30; in Gaza it
is under 20. In other words, this is the only reality most Israelis
and Palestinians know: The one-state reality.

***

I believe that the secret to Netanyahu’s long term
[[link removed]] as
prime minister — the longest in Israeli history — has been his
ability to promote the status quo as the preferred solution to the
conflict. As I’ve argued previously, the status quo is the least
worst option
[[link removed]] as
far as Israelis are concerned, since it doesn’t require them to go
through the painful process of making territorial concessions or
incurring far more dramatic changes that a single democratic state
would bring. Israel could remain relatively secure and prosperous
while maintaining most of the Palestinian population under a military
dictatorship.(*)

 

Palestinian construction workers work on part of the separation wall
between the Gush Etzion settlement bloc and Jerusalem, July 7, 2011.
Nati Shohat/Flash90  //  +972 Magazine
Netanyahu, and later others on the Israeli right, understood that when
the world condemned the occupation, it was threatening them with an
empty gun. Nobody in the U.S. or the European Union, let alone in
other countries, was interested in investing the kind of resources
necessary to push Israel out of the West Bank and establish an
independent Palestinian state.

Following the Arab Spring
[[link removed]],
when regional stability and security became everybody’s main
concern, whatever motivation was left for dramatic changes evaporated,
and the world was more than happy to assist in maintaining the status
quo. It did so by financing the PA; training its security forces;
allowing and even maintaining the blockade on Gaza and the military
operations that went hand-in-hand with the siege;(**) and by moving
diplomacy out of international institutions such as the UN into the
realm of U.S. administrations. Those who are angry at the way
President Trump has recognized Israeli annexation
[[link removed]] can
only blame themselves for letting America monopolize the conflict in
the first place.

***

Looking back, I am amazed at how slow many progressives — myself
included — were to recognize these trends. Because the occupation
was such an aberration in the international system of sovereignty and
citizenship (even authoritarian governments don’t maintain close to
half their native population as “non-citizens” subject to martial
law), I was certain that Israel would either end the occupation on its
own or be isolated and forced to end it. Even before the Arab Spring,
I underestimated the forces maintaining the status quo. I took
declarations by foreign officials at face value rather than for what
they were: lip service to dead ideas. I also believed that nonviolent
protests in the West Bank would be the seeds of a major political
force for change, and failed to grasp the effectiveness of the Israeli
army and the PA in suppressing
[[link removed]] them
and in maintaining the status quo.

The Palestinian Authority was always a a strange hybrid: a state in
waiting with an element of the current political order. In the last
decade, we witnessed the first part collapse; today only the second
remains. The Palestinian national movement split into several pieces,
each with its own political agenda: residents of Gaza, East Jerusalem
Palestinians, prisoners, refugees, Arab citizens of Israel. Each one
of these groups carried out collective struggles, but none carried the
others with it. The only group to successfully advance its cause was
Palestinian citizens of Israel. It’s clear why: despite facing
discrimination, they are still included within the framework
[[link removed]] of
Israel’s democratic institutions, and have learned how to take
advantage of the limited tools afforded to them. Their success has
demonstrated that there is no substitute for civil rights; those who
lack them simply stay behind.

 

PA security forces prevent supporters of Hizb ut-Tahrir party from
praying in Hebron, June 4, 2019.
Wisam Hashlamoun/Flash90  //  +972 Magazine
To be fair, we cannot separate the crisis of progressive politics in
Israel-Palestine from the global crisis of progressive and left-wing
politics. Culturally, progressive politics are doing well. But within
formal political structures — where elections are held and
governments are formed — progressivism is on the ropes. The
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, of course, was never a purely cultural
issue. Whether it is the one- or two-state solution, a confederation,
or anything else, they all require strong, unified political movements
in which people are ready to cooperate with those who hold different
values. They must be willing to compromise on core issues, be loyal to
one another, follow the political leadership, and remain rooted in the
reality on the ground, rather than in symbolism. In an age of
self-centered, abstract liberal politics, we are as far away from that
as possible.

***

So what comes next? After these failed predictions, it would be
pointless to add another one. In fact, I think that any feeling of
“inevitability” in politics has always been part of the problem.
Progressives got increasingly better at working on process, many times
at the expense of investing in hard political currencies. Everybody
waited for “forces on the ground” (or for “outside forces”) to
bring about change — but no such forces appeared, and when things
did change, those who benefited from the status quo were quicker to
adapt and capitalize on them.

Nonetheless, the vanishing of the two-state solution over the past
decade may not be a net negative. I am not certain that the two-state
model proposed in recent years — especially during the negotiations
led by Secretary of State John Kerry — would have led to more
freedom, happiness, security (for both people) and prosperity. A tiny
Palestinian state with a large internal security apparatus, supported
by U.S. and European money, would have looked much like a version of
the “moderate” Arab states — an authoritarian regime that relies
on the persecution of its own people in order to remain intact.

 

Former Sec. of State John Kerry meets with Palestinian President
Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, December 12, 2013.
State Dept photo
The advantage of the two-state solution was that it was a simple idea
for people to envision — especially Israelis and Americans. This
last decade, two states went from being a political program to
a _fata morgana_: the closer you get to it, the further away it
moves. The one-state condition, on the other hand, is the desert where
we now find ourselves.

Any political plan should start with recognizing this reality, not
with the abstractions and fantasies with which we dealt in recent
years. We might not have a clear vision of the future, but we can
unite around what is terribly wrong in the present. Fighting to end
the siege on Gaza — the most inhuman aspect of the status quo —
would be a good start.

(*) _Some argue that the Palestinian Authority is to blame for the
non-democratic system the Palestinians are under, since President
Abbas forbids holding new elections. But even if the Palestinians did
vote for their representatives every few years, they would not be able
to take part in making major decisions that shape their lives, since
the power of the sovereign remains exclusively with Israel. For
example, the Palestinian Legislative Council could decide to build a
new city or to invite Palestinian refugees from Syria to settle in the
West Bank, yet these decisions would be meaningless without Israeli
consent. The PA can issue travel documents to its own people, but
without Israeli consent they won’t be able to travel out of the
country, etc._

(**) _The international community accepted the siege as legal. By
closing the Egyptian border or blocking flotillas from departing from
Europe to Gaza (in the case of Cyprus and Greece), some countries have
actively aided and abetted the siege. As for the military operations,
when Israel ran out of munitions in 2014, the Obama administration
opened its own emergency storage and provided the IDF with artillery
shells and bullets._

_[Noam Sheizaf is an independent journalist and editor. He was the
founding executive director and editor-in-chief of +972 Magazine.
Prior to joining +972, he worked for Tel Aviv’s Ha-ir local paper,
Ynet, and the Maariv daily, where his last position was deputy editor
of the weekend magazine. He is currently working on a number of
documentary films.]_

_+972 Magazine is nonprofit journalism based on the ground in
Israel-Palestine. In order to safeguard our independent voice, we are
proud to count you, our readers, as our most important supporters._

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