In my vision of
peace, there are two free peoples living side by side in this small land, with
good neighborly relations and mutual respect, each with its flag, anthem and
government. . . . If we get a guarantee of demilitarization, and if the
Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state, we are ready to agree to a
real peace agreement, a demilitarized Palestinian state side by side with the
Jewish state.
—Benjamin
Netanyahu, June 14, 2009
SEEMINGLY, IT was a historic moment.
The prime minister of Israel and leader of the Likud Party publicly embraced
the two-state solution. A short while into his second term in office, ten days
after the newly inaugurated president of the United States promised in Cairo to
“personally pursue this outcome,” Netanyahu declared an about-face, shifting
from the traditional course he and his political camp had once pursued.
Thus, more than
ninety years after the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, it appeared the
successors of the founders of Zionism were moving toward a historic compromise
to resolve the conflict embedded in that intentionally vague statement. It is
the conflict between “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the
Jewish people” and “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and
religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
Now it appeared
that this dispute, which for decades had split Israeli society into rival
political camps, could be resolved. Forty-two years after the occupation of the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip, formerly held by Jordan and Egypt, a right-wing
prime minister declared his willingness to return these territories to the
people living in them, as well as his consent for the establishment of a new,
independent state of Palestine.
But almost
immediately, other voices emerged questioning whether this solution—dividing
the land into two independent, coexisting states—was still feasible; whether
the “window of opportunity” that might have been available in the past had
already closed for good; whether the Israeli settlement enterprise in the West Bank
had reached a point of no return, creating a new situation that did not allow
for any partition; and whether the division of political powers within Israeli
society had changed, making the dramatic move impossible. As Robert Serry, UN
special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, put it:
If the parties
do not grasp the current opportunity, they should realize the implication is
not merely slowing progress toward a two-state solution. Instead, we could be
moving down the path toward a one-state reality, which would also move us
further away from regional peace.
This article
focuses on the Israeli side of this equation in part because the Palestinian
leadership, as far back as 1988, made a strategic decision favoring the
two-state solution, presented in the Algiers declaration of the Palestinian
National Council. The Arab League, for its part, voted in favor of a peace
initiative that would recognize the state of Israel and set the terms for a
comprehensive Middle East settlement. Meanwhile, various bodies of the
international community reasserted partition of the land as their formal
policy. But Israel, which signed the Oslo accords nearly two decades ago, has
been moving in a different direction. And Netanyahu’s stirring words of June
2009 now ring hollow.
Israel never
overtly spurned a two-state solution involving land partition and a Palestinian
state. But it never acknowledged that West Bank developments had rendered such
a solution impossible. Facing a default reality in which a one-state solution
seemed the only option, Israel chose a third way—the continuation of the status
quo. This unspoken strategic decision has dictated its polices and tactics for
the past decade, simultaneously safeguarding political negotiations as a
framework for the future and tightening Israel’s control over the West Bank. In
essence, a “peace process” that allegedly is meant to bring the occupation to
an end and achieve a two-state solution has become a mechanism to perpetuate
the conflict and preserve the status quo.
This reality
and its implications are best understood through a brief survey of the history
that brought the Israelis and Palestinians to this impasse. The story is one of
courage, sincere efforts, internal conflicts on both sides, persistent
maneuvering and elements of folly.
IN AUGUST 1993,
the foreign ministers of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO), Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas, signed a declaration of principles. In
September of that year, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman
Yasir Arafat exchanged the “letters of recognition,” which led to an impressive
signing ceremony on the White House lawn. Words about historical compromise,
reconciliation and peace filled the air. The world perceived a true, deep
change sweeping the Middle East, with both sides resolved to divide the land
into two states.
Nevertheless,
the negotiating partners’ starting points remained far apart. The Palestinians
considered engaging in a process based on the acceptance of the 1967 borders to
be a major compromise in itself. They believed their willingness to settle for
territory representing 22 percent of mandatory Palestine was already an immense
compromise foreclosing much further concession. Israel, in contrast, considered
these borders the starting point for talks and never intended to withdraw fully
from the occupied territory.
Prime Minister
Rabin accentuated this position in seeking Knesset support for the interim
agreement, or Oslo II:
We would like
this to be an entity which is less than a state, and which will independently
run the lives of Palestinians under its authority. The borders of the State of
Israel, during the permanent solution, will be beyond the lines which existed
before the Six Day War. We will not return to the 4 June 1967 lines.
Rabin further
referred to different areas of the West Bank that Israel would insist on
keeping, including regions that no Palestinian negotiator could give up.
Because of
these differences, the Oslo accords were originally labeled an interim
agreement “for a transitional period not exceeding five years,” meant to lay
the foundations for “a permanent settlement based on Security Council
Resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973).” Yet, even though the final objective
intentionally remained vague, the agreement itself listed detailed timetables
for the implementation of interim phases, including, most remarkably, an
Israeli withdrawal from the cities of Gaza and Jericho in three months. Already
in this sensitive initial phase, cracks appeared. “No dates are sacred,” said
Rabin in December 1993, as the deadline for withdrawal was being postponed.
Nevertheless,
despite the evident differences between both sides and the difficulties that
were clear from the beginning, two-state-solution supporters believed the
dynamics of the process would generate their own power, which would force the
parties to take brave steps and reach an ultimate resolution. Whatever actual
force these developments could have set in motion, the effort suffered a fatal
blow on November 4, 1995, when an opponent of the agreement killed the prime
minister.
SIX MONTHS
later, Israel conducted elections between two candidates for prime
minister—Shimon Peres, perceived as a progenitor of the Oslo plan, and Benjamin
Netanyahu, a fierce opponent of the process throughout his time as head of the
parliamentary opposition. Netanyahu won narrowly.
His election
marked a new era in Israel’s attitude toward the negotiations. Prior to Rabin’s
assassination, one could reasonably argue that the main motivation of the
government was to conclude an agreement. But Netanyahu did everything possible
to safeguard the negotiations as a framework while concurrently evading their
declared objective. All of his successors as prime minister followed this
pattern.
Netanyahu
himself testified to this scheme and his way of handling it in a private
conversation in 2001, when he was out of office. Unaware that he was being
recorded, he bragged about the manipulative tactics he had used in his first
tenure as prime minister to undermine the Oslo accords. He explained that he
had insisted the Clinton administration provide him with a written commitment
that Israel alone would be able to determine the borders of the “defined
military sites” that would remain under its control. He went on to say that by
defining the entire Jordan Valley as a military location, he “actually stopped
the Oslo Accord.” He was right. Without this large area, the Palestinians
wouldn’t have a viable state.
Indeed, under
Netanyahu’s first tenure as prime minister, which ended in 1999, little
progress was made in implementing the agreed-upon phases or moving toward a
final-status agreement. When the five years allocated for the transitional period
passed, no Palestinian state seemed near.
During his
first term, Netanyahu came under attack from both sides. Those opposed to
dividing the land were furious that he didn’t spurn the peace process overtly.
Supporters of the accords, meanwhile, protested against his foot-dragging in
implementing the agreement’s provisions. All condemned Netanyahu’s indecision.
But these critics failed to perceive that Israel’s new status quo approach was
actually a choice—and, indeed, a policy.
No one publicly
embraced this decision, and yet it seemed to generate its own momentum as
various players quietly understood that it served their purposes. A report
published by the International Crisis Group, tellingly titled “The Emperor Has
No Clothes: Palestinians and the End of the Peace Process,” lists benefits to
the various partners in the so-called peace process, including the entities
known collectively as the “quartet” (the UN, United States, European Union and
Russia). The Europeans, said the report, wanted influence in the Middle East,
and by funding the Palestinian Authority (PA) they found they could get a seat
at some prestigious diplomatic tables. Russia and the UN harbored similar
desires for diplomatic advancement.
Meanwhile,
Washington knew its support for the ongoing peace process, however much it may
be a sham, allowed it to maintain good relations with Arab countries even as it
nurtured its “special relationship” with Israel. Thus, the United States saw in
the status quo an opportunity to preserve its influence in the Middle East by
maintaining a delicate balance in its ties with most major regional players.
But this approach is far removed from the evenhanded policy championed by
President Dwight Eisenhower in the early years of Israel’s existence. Israel
today shows immense confidence in the financial aid and large diplomatic
umbrella it gets from America, as reflected in Netanyahu’s oft-quoted comment:
I know what
America is. America is something that can be easily moved. Moved to the right
[direction]. . . . They won’t get in our way. They won’t get in our way. . . .
So let’s say they say something. So they said it! They said it! 80 percent of
the Americans support us.
Even the
Palestinians get sucked into this status quo game, although they pay the
highest price for the current stalemate and have demonstrated in recent years
open hostility to continuing the barren peace talks. But in reality, under such
extremely asymmetrical circumstances, they likely would suffer the most if the
process were to collapse. Since the days of Yasir Arafat, and more intensely
since the beginning of Mahmoud Abbas’s presidency, the PA leadership has relied
almost solely on the international community for generous financial aid and
global attention. Thus, the PA is highly dependent on foreign support. Its
leaders fear that if they take actions that upset the international community,
and particularly the United States, they will lose their aid—and consequently
face a possible collapse in their political standing within the Palestinian community.
So, lacking any
better alternative, the existence of the PA allows for a kind of welfare for
large portions of the West Bank’s political and economic elite. This is true of
Fatah, whose raison d’être has become maintaining the ongoing process. It also
includes tens of thousands of families whose livelihoods depend on the PA. For
these families, stopping the aid would be disastrous. Thus, if the peace
process has become an addiction for many participants, as the International
Crisis Group report notes, this addiction has become an absolute reliance for
the people of the PA.
WHATEVER
MOTIVATES most participants in the process, Israel’s embrace of it is most
intense, for good reasons—including religion, historical traumas, national
security, territorial aspirations, control over natural resources, the threat
of internal social division and political survival. Yet, to understand how
deeply rooted this imperative is for Israel, one must examine the foundation on
which Israeli society and the ethos of its collective identity are built.
If Israeli
citizens were to create a collective identification card, most would probably
embrace the words “Jewish and democratic.” From the 1940s, when Israel was yet
to be established, up until today, these two adjectives have been almost a
binding code, the vision with which the different elements of the state were to
act. This sensibility was embodied in the country’s declaration of
independence, the basis of Israel’s establishment. A body of commentary,
scholarship and civic documents emerged that sought to examine whether those
two terms were contradictory. These studies included the “basic laws,” the
groundwork for a possible future Israeli constitution, restrictions imposed on
the platforms of parties running for the Knesset, and many hundreds of news and
academic articles.
Yet, since
Israel is not merely an abstract idea but an actual political entity, these two
concepts—one connected to a collective cultural and religious identity, the
other a method for governing—must be merged with the realities of geography.
The relationship between the three sides of this triangle—geography, demography
and democracy—has influenced Israel’s nature and policies from day one.
When the United
Nations General Assembly voted on the partition plan in 1947, two-thirds of the
inhabitants of mandatory Palestine were Arabs, while Jews constituted a third
of the population. Of course, this situation did not allow for the existence of
a state that would be both Jewish and democratic. But only a few months later,
with the establishment of the state inside what would become the 1949 armistice
line, 84 percent of the population of newly born Israel—spread over 78 percent
of the land—were Jews. The formation of an almost absolute identity between the
geographic partition and the demographic division over the different parts of
what had been mandatory Palestine was anything but accidental. Israel’s first
prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, summarized the consequences of the 1948 war:
The IDF could
have conquered the entire territory between the [Jordan] River and the Sea. But
what kind of state would we have? . . . We would have a Knesset with an Arab
majority. Having to choose between the wholeness of the land or a Jewish State,
we chose the Jewish State.
In other words,
the demographic concern was the dominant factor in Israel’s decisions on how to
conduct its first war—initially, by encouraging more than seven hundred
thousand Arab inhabitants to leave the territories over which it took control,
then by refraining from conquering additional territory.
However, this
consonance between geography and demography changed dramatically nineteen years
later, with Israel’s decisive victory in the Six-Day War of 1967. Israel’s
military took control over vast amounts of land, including the Gaza Strip and
the West Bank, the latter encompassing a 30 percent increase in territory over
what Israel had controlled before the war. But these territories were not
empty. And although many Palestinians on those lands left their homes, some for
the second time, a large number remained. Thus did Israel’s ability to retain
simultaneously a Jewish and a democratic identity become endangered. But this
departure from the Ben-Gurion formula was not quickly perceived by Israeli leaders,
even though the triangle of demography, geography and democracy became much
more complex and explosive.
ISRAEL’S
GEOGRAPHIC expansion in the 1967 war—and the new demographic proportions
between Jews and Arabs under its control—once again forced Israel to make a
choice: Which sides of the triangle would strengthen, and which would weaken?
Seemingly, the territorial conquests undermined the demographic edge, meaning
the Jewish majority. However, no one intended to allow a weakening in this
fundamental component of the state’s identity.
“The key phrase
in the Israeli experience is ‘a Jewish majority.’ Israelis will do
anything—wage war or make peace—to maintain a Jewish majority and preserve the
Israeli tribal bonfire.” These were the words of Daniel Ben-Simon, former
journalist and current Labor Party member of the Knesset. A senior member of
the rival party has expressed a similar position. In a conference held in March
2002, at the peak of the suicide bombings that killed many Israelis, Dan
Meridor, deputy prime minister and minister of intelligence and atomic energy
in the Israeli cabinet, said: “Of all the various questions—security, the
Middle East peace process, etc.—the demographic-democratic problem is the chief
imminent threat that we simply cannot evade.” More recently, the newly elected
chairman of the Kadima Party, Shaul Mofaz, declared the so-called demographic
threat the most dangerous of all to the existence of Israel.
This outlook,
embraced by the most prominent figures of the mainstream political parties, is
shared by the Jewish Israelis they represent. This is seen in public-opinion
polls such as the Democracy Index, which found in 2010 that 86 percent of
Israeli Jews believed decisive choices for the state must be taken on the basis
of a Jewish majority.
Therefore, a
careful analysis of the triangle model cannot focus on the strength of each
side independently but must focus on possible two-side combinations. On the
collective identity card, the definition of “Jewish and democratic” is being
replaced with “Jewish and geographic.” Whenever two of the edges are dominant,
the third tends to weaken, and the third in this instance is the democratic
component.
THE MOVE toward
a “Jewish and geographic” state became even more prominent following changes
undergone by Israeli society in recent decades. Settlers, although they
composed a relatively small fraction of the population, became the vanguard
that directed political thinking for most of the Jewish religious public. The
ultra-Orthodox political parties, which previously had been considered the
swing faction between dovish and hawkish political camps, accepted the
settlers’ doctrine that occupied territories represented Israeli land. They
stood by the right-wing parties in opposing partition. This political drift
took place at a time when religious groups in Israel became larger in both
absolute and relative terms. A survey conducted by Israel’s Central Bureau of
Statistics in 2008 showed that only 40 percent of Israeli Jews between the ages
of twenty and twenty-four identified themselves as nonreligious or secular.
This trend has great influence on the direction Israeli society is taking
nowadays.
In a survey
conducted on the tenth anniversary of Prime Minister Rabin’s assassination,
Israeli Jews were asked to assess whether the decision to engage in the Oslo
process had been correct. While 62 percent of the secular respondents answered
affirmatively, the answer given by religious and ultra-Orthodox respondents was
the complete opposite; among those respondents, representing a growing segment
of Israeli society, more than 70 percent said it had been wrong. Placing
“greater Israel” at the top of the value system meant that democracy and
demography were undermined among the wider public, to the point where they
believed the executive and the Knesset did not have the mandate to decide on
territorial withdrawals. This is reflected in a recent statement by Benny
Katzover, former chairman of the Shomron settlers’ regional council and a
settler leader: “The main role of Israeli democracy now is to disappear.
Israeli democracy has finished its role, and it must disassemble and give way
to Judaism.”
Gabriel
Sheffer, a prominent expert on the study of regime and societal relations in
Israel, views the lack of separation between religion and state in Israel as
the key factor in understanding the country’s recent history. In a 2005
article, he stressed that the historical failure to separate ethnic-national
identity and religious belief is the primary cause of events in Jewish society
and in the relationship between Israelis, Arabs and Palestinians. He explained
that this issue distorts Israeli democracy. More recently, he characterized
Israel as a Jewish-national-religious state that naturally excludes many citizen
groups from any serious influence on public policy.
Even so, it
would be a mistake to explain Israeli society’s right-wing drift only in terms
of the growing power of religious groups. Another factor is the mass
immigration of the early 1990s and the corollary collapse of the so-called
Zionist Left.
In 1992,
Israeli general elections ended with a change of government: the Labor and
Meretz parties, which represented the Zionist Left in parliament, together won
fifty-six of the Knesset’s 120 seats. This outcome enabled Rabin to form a
Center-Left coalition government that set in motion the historical recognition
of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and signed the
declaration of principles. Seventeen years later, during the 2009 elections—the
most recent in Israel—these two parties won only sixteen seats. Public-opinion
surveys prior to the elections showed that 72 percent of Jewish respondents
defined themselves as “right-wing.” These results illustrate the rise of the
Israeli political Right, which has been growing in force since 1967.
During the
1990s, nearly a million immigrants arrived in Israel, about 85 percent from the
former Soviet Union. This group’s size and demographic characteristics had a
crucial effect on the composition and nature of Israeli society. These
newcomers found in Israel a refuge from a crumbling communist empire that had
shaped much of their historical and cultural thinking. Natan Sharansky, a
“refusenik” and an immigrant from the Soviet Union, explained to President
Clinton, perhaps jocularly, why he was the only Israeli cabinet member who
opposed the peace agreement the president was trying to promote at Camp David
in 2000: “I can’t vote for this, I’m Russian. . . . I come from one of the
biggest countries in the world to one of the smallest. You want me to cut it in
half. No, thank you.”
The 2009
Democracy Index revealed that “in general, the immigrants’ attitudes are less
liberal and less tolerant in almost every realm and concerning every topic
examined.” For example, 77 percent of former Soviet immigrants in the survey
supported policies to encourage Arab emigration from Israel. The right-wing
sensibility of these people, who are largely secular, stems not from religious
attitudes but from a perception of the Jewish society as “landlord” of Israel,
with aspirations to exercise strong national sovereignty over a territory that
should be as extensive and secure as possible.
Former Knesset
member Mossi Raz of Meretz, in analyzing the rise of the immigrant Right and the
dovish political camp’s unprecedented decline in the latest elections, said
that “these million and a half immigrants, who arrived in recent decades,
constitute 20 percent of the voters, but Meretz and the Labor Party together
received only 5 percent of their votes.”
Even
traditional supporters of the Zionist Left, such as secular people of the
middle and upper classes, shifted toward the Right, in part due to Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon and the Likud Party’s success in creating a conceptual
turnabout in Israeli political culture. The conservative Right successfully
separated the notion of “prosperity” from the term “peace” and convinced many
Israelis that economic growth would emerge if the government merely managed the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and practiced a neoliberal economic policy. This
trend accelerated when the West declared a “war on terror” following the
September 11, 2001, attacks, which gave Israeli enterprises new access to wide
markets. As Forbes magazine noted, Israel became the destination for those
seeking antiterrorism technology. The stability and prosperity of Israel’s
economy, even without conflict resolution, diminished the imperative of peace
for many.
Israel’s
Palestinian citizens also have undergone significant political changes since
Oslo. These shifts, seen in voting patterns, result from the deterioration in
the relationship between the Jewish and Arab populations. These, in turn,
reflect a growing sense of Israel’s changing nature as a state; a mistrust
between the two population groups; and a rise in the intensity of hostility and
violence between Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip.
This process
had a twofold impact on voting patterns: first, Arab voter participation
declined; and second, more Arabs who did participate gave their votes to Arab
rather than Zionist parties. In 1996, for instance, 79.3 percent of eligible
Arab voters took part in the first elections after Rabin’s assassination. In
2003, it was 63 percent; in 2009, only 53.6 percent. Yet, as more of these Arab
participants voted for Arab parties, the number of parliamentary seats granted
to the three Arab political parties rose to eleven, the highest ever. In 1992,
only 47.7 percent of Arab voters supported these parties, but in the elections
of 1996, after the assassination of Rabin, sectarian voting jumped to 67.3
percent. In the latest elections, 82.1 percent of Palestinians who are Israeli
citizens voted for one of these three parties.
THE BALANCE of
political power inside Israel is unsustainable, given the demographic facts
between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. For the first time since
the establishment of the state, the proportion of Jews and Arabs living under
Israeli jurisdiction is approaching equilibrium. Sharon, who was aware of this,
tried in 2005 to exclude a million and a half Palestinians from this
calculation by withdrawing Israeli forces and settlers from the Gaza Strip.
Yet, since Israel continued to exercise control over Gaza’s airspace and
sea—and to a very large extent over its land borders—Israel is still
responsible for this territory and its inhabitants, according to a widely
accepted interpretation of international law. Sergio della Pergola, an expert
on demography, estimates that by Israel’s hundredth anniversary, the
demographic balance between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River will return
to what it was before Israel’s declaration of independence: two-thirds Arabs
and non-Jews and one-third Jews. Demographers estimate that by 2030, the proportion
of Jews in the population will decline to 46 percent. According to another
estimate, a similar percentage will be reached by 2020, and some even suggest
that by that time Jews will constitute only 40 percent of the population.
Regardless, by the end of the present decade, Jews are expected to become a
minority between the sea and the river.
The Oslo
accords were intended to mark the beginning of a gradual end to the Israeli
presence in the occupied territories. Instead, the accords opened a new era for
the settlement enterprise, which continues its expansion in the so-called C
areas, which encompass 60.2 percent of the West Bank territory and remain under
full Israeli control. “This is one of the strangest maps of existing and
potential autonomous territories ever agreed-upon by two conflicting parties,”
said Elisha Efrat, Israel Prize winner for geographical research. He referred
to the way 176 “orange stains” (B areas), representing the Palestinian rural
space, are spread throughout the map, with C areas separating them from one
another and leaving Palestinians with mere isolated enclaves that preclude any
national self-sustainment. Jeff Halper, a human-rights activist, compares this
to the Japanese game of Go, in which “you win by immobilizing your opponent, by
gaining control of key points of a matrix so that every time s/he moves s/he
encounters an obstacle of some kind.”
Since Israel
refuses to undertake any commitment to freeze settlement, it uses the interim
phases, whose purpose was to advance toward a two-state solution, to create
obstacles that would impede a fair, agreed-upon partition of the territory. In
the decade following the Oslo accords from 1993 to 2003, the number of West
Bank settlers doubled, from 110,000 to 224,000 (not including East Jerusalem).
Since then, the figure has risen to more than 340,000. Together with Israelis
residing in Israeli-constructed neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, they now
represent more than six hundred thousand people. The number of existing
settlements authorized by Israel is 124, to which one should add twelve East
Jerusalem neighborhoods and more than a hundred “outposts” built by settlers
without formal approval by the state (though with the help of public
authorities and branches of the government). Many of those outposts were
located carefully to prevent any territorial contiguity in a future Palestinian
state. It is in these strategic areas of the mountain strip and across the
separation wall that the Jewish West Bank population grew the most during 2011.
At the same
time, and more formally, Israeli governments worked to increase the settler
population in “block settlements” in order to eventually annex these areas, as
was openly declared. Some of these blocks are close to the 1967 borders, and,
in informal negotiations (such as the Geneva Initiative), Palestinians agreed
in principle to the idea that they would be annexed, as long as the Palestinian
state would be compensated with separate territory equivalent in size. However,
they strongly rejected Israeli annexation of areas such as the Ariel and Karnei
Shomron blocks, necessary for any viable Palestinian state with territorial
contiguity.
To exercise
control over the land without giving up its Jewish identity, Israel has
embraced various policies of “separation.” It has separate legal systems for
traditional Israeli territory and for the territory it occupies; it divides
those who reside in occupied lands based on ethnic identity; it has retained
control over occupied lands but evaded responsibility for the people living
there; and it has created a conceptual distinction between its democratic
principles and its actual practices in the occupied territories. These
separations have allowed Israel to manage the occupation for forty-five years
while maintaining its identity and international status. No other state in the
twenty-first century has been able to get away with this, but it works for
Israel, which has little incentive to change it.
THIS ARTICLE
was written shortly after a coalition government controlling ninety-four seats
out of 120 was formed in Israel. The coalition agreement between the two
largest parties, Likud and Kadima, does not leave room for hope regarding a
future breakthrough toward a two-state solution. The sides talked only in
general terms about the resumption of the political process and instead
emphasized the importance of maintaining Israel as a Jewish and democratic
state. For this reason, they added a clarification regarding “the importance of
maintaining defensible borders,” a phrase implying that any compromise
contemplated by the coalition government centers on gaps between the positions
of Likud and Kadima more than on those between Israelis and Palestinians.
At present,
only fourteen Knesset members (a little more than 10 percent) constitute the
opposition, which supports dividing the land into two states on the basis of
the 1967 borders. Eleven of them are Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, and
three are members of Meretz representing the Zionist Left. Even if we include the
Labor Party, which facilitated the formation of Rabin’s cabinet some two
decades ago with a majority of sixty-one seats, this faction’s presence has now
been reduced to twenty-two Knesset members. Recent opinion polls indicate that,
if the elections were held today, this political bloc would win thirty-two
seats, a little more than a quarter of the parliament. Thus, the formation of
the new unity government represents the monolithic nature of Israeli society.
For decades, the boundaries of Israeli Jewish society, based on the Jews’
relationship with the Palestinians and the question of dividing the land, were
the focus of disputes that at times split Israelis into separate groups. But
now a consensual answer has emerged. While the hawkish political camp has
adopted some rhetoric that used to characterize the dovish bloc, the latter has
been forced to accept the political reality of being dominated. Thus does
Israel’s grip on the occupied territories tighten, even as the issue wanes on
Israelis’ public agenda.
No doubt, the
present unity government can promote almost anything it wishes. That means it
is unlikely to use its power to promote a new partition of the land into two
states in any way acceptable to Palestinians. History teaches us that Israelis
are only willing to take brave and honest steps toward peace when they know the
cost of failing to do so will be even greater. Unfortunately, given the
realities of the current situation, there is little reason to think that the
Israelis will take these steps anytime soon.
Akiva Eldar is
the chief political columnist and an editorial writer for Haaretz. He wishes to thank his
researcher, Eyal Raz, for assistance with this article.
Image: clorofollia
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