The two-state solution still looks least bad to me
I do not follow the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians closely because it is complex, well outside my area of expertise, and deeply depressing. I find it depressing because I have always believed in a two-state solution, and it has long been difficult watching that goal slip ever further out of reach. After the barbaric terror attack on Israelis by Hamas and the increasing likelihood of an excessively brutal Israeli response it is worth asking if a two-state solution is still a sensible goal and, if so, how we can move towards it, no matter how long or difficult the path looks.
My personal metaphor for the Palestinian/Israeli conflict has long been a dog fight. The dogs are too angry and scared to just stop and make peace. Instead, a bystander needs to hit the dogs with a stick to get them to stop fighting. That bystander is the international community, and especially the United States. Peace, or at least a cessation of hostilities, must be forced upon initially reluctant parties.
Unfortunately, the United States has spent decades pretending that the dogs must be allowed to stop fighting on their own. Rather than dealing with the dog fight, American policymakers pretend we are witnessing a well-mannered disagreement at high tea. (Like all metaphors, the dog fight shines light on some aspects of reality and casts shadows on others, notably the unequal power of the Israelis and Palestinians, and the importance of outside actors besides the United States. It’s just a metaphor.)
I have no objection to efforts to persuade the Israelis and Palestinians to change course. Words matter. Given the current level of animosity between them, however, the most promising route to something that looks even remotely like peace is to persuade Americans to pressure the Israelis and Palestinians to agree to a settlement that both sides would rather reject.
To state the obvious, we seem to be far from that goal. Former Representative Andy Levin, D-MI, introduced a bill in the last Congress to make achieving a two-state solution an explicit goal of United States foreign policy. For his trouble, AIPAC, an organization that does not represent the views of most American Jews but has a formidable fundraising and political influence operation, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to ensure that Levin lost his re-election bid. The expenditures were not the only reason Levin lost. He had been redistricted, and his opponent in the Democratic primary had previously represented more of the new district than Levin had. In addition, his opponent was a woman, which was probably a significant advantage in the post-Dobbs political environment. Indeed, it is reasonable to suspect that the money AIPAC gave to his opponent was intended primarily as a deterrent to any future Democratic defections from the laissez-faire attitude that has marked American policy towards the peace process for so many years. (Andy is a close life-long friend of mine. I have no idea why anyone would find this relevant to my argument, but the point of disclosure is to let you decide for yourself.)
Despite the daunting obstacles, I still see little alternative to a two-state solution. It is even possible that the current hostilities will help to persuade Israelis as well as Americans that the long and uncertain road to a two-state solution is worth pursuing. The attack by Hamas showed that the threat posed by Palestinian radicals is greater than had generally been understood. It is, of course, very unlikely that Hamas or Hezbollah or any other hostile force will be able to conquer and hold Israeli territory. (Some news reports suggest Hamas intended to capture territory, but this is so crazy it is hard to believe.) But the ability of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other groups to rain missiles down on Israel and overwhelm Israeli defenses will likely grow, and improvements in drones and other technologies may make Israeli society perennially vulnerable to highly damaging attacks. It is not inconceivable that perpetual conflict with Palestinians and other opponents armed with more numerous and sophisticated weapons will make it difficult for normal life to proceed in Israel, just as the threat of ongoing conflict with Russia could undermine an economic recovery in Ukraine, even if Ukraine recaptures all of its territory.
You can argue that making peace with Hamas is impossible, and that an Israeli campaign to destroy Hamas is a precondition of any moves towards peace. You can argue that Gaza cannot be a viable state. You can argue that the Palestinians will never accept Israel’s right to exist. Maybe. But a cold peace may develop into something more durable. Protestants and Catholics learned to live together.
It seems unlikely that Israel can defeat Hamas, if only because civilian casualties and IDF casualties will be unsustainably high. At some point in the not-too-distant future we may get an opportunity to push for peace. I hope we are ready when that moment comes.
To reiterate, this is all above my pay grade. But it is difficult to see what better alternative there is to a peace process with a two-state solution as the end goal, even if the road is long and there is no assurance that a two-state solution will bring peace. The alternatives all look much worse, at least to me.
Kind of like with Russia and Ukraine. Or three-state, if you add in Belarus.
Would that be similar to Gaza, Israel & the West Bank?
There’s too much hostility present for this to work, clearly.
Despite that there are a lot of Arabs living peacefully in Israel, and quite a few Israelis who would like to see a peaceful future, and probably a lot of Palestinians in Gaza & the West Bank who feel the same way. The factions opposed are very vocal.
The Ukraine/Russia debacle is a rather good demonstration of how hard it is to make this work.
It works for Protestants & Catholics (in Northern Ireland) in the British Isles because the UK and Republic of Ireland guv’mints insist that it work. Not so long ago, before the Irish republic removed itself from the UK, this would not have been possible. These are unique circumstances. You really can’t expect the US to accomplish this.
You might ask it of the UN. Remember them? The US would certainly not expect the UN to be able to make much headway. Maybe they will have some success in Haiti.
“UN Security Council approves troop deployment to Haiti, months after Kenya proposed sending 1,000 officers to the country. The United Nations Security Council (recently) approved the deployment of international forces led by Kenya to curb escalating gang violence in Haiti.”
Previously …
“The United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) became the first UN Peacekeeping in May 1948, tasked with mediating conflict between Israel and its neighbors both during and after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.”
The United States vetoes any UN resolution criticizing Israeli actions in any way whatsoever.
Israel absorbs Gaza and makes everyone an Israeli citizen.
They won’t do that because the Palestinians will eventually outnumber them.
@ Dave,
That will happen co-terminus with the first verified report of porcine aviation.
Where is that Jesus Christ when you really need him (as in to resurrect Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by Israeli right-wing extremist Yigal Amir in 1995)? That is when I gave up on the possibility of peace in the Middle East. Animosities among religious factions in the monotheistic Holy Lands predate the British bumbling 1917 Balfour Declaration by millennia going back to the Roman conquest in the BC. Muhammad was a symptom more than a cause.
Actually, the period that the Ottoman Empire controlled Palestine et al was a period of relative peace for the Jews in the Holy Lands, which makes the Balfour Declaration all the more bumbling. Ottoman rule was both heavy handed and restrictive of individual freedoms (especially for Jews and Christians), but effective at providing peaceful partitioning of civic and private affairs compared to the alternatives in European nations (especially for Jews).
The Ottoman Empire was backwards and repressive. No one liked it, not Jews, not Christians, not Muslims. It was a pretty wretched place for Jews who were second class citizens under civil and religious law, were confined to ghettos and faced frequent pogroms to let the locals blow off steam. The Ottoman Empire was not a great model for a multi-ethnic state anymore than Yugoslavia was.
The situation got worse after the Europeans took over and encouraged ethnic liberation and radical ideas about the rights of man. The Balfour Declaration arguably opened Palestine to Jewish refugees, and over the next few decades there were plenty of good reasons for Jews to leave Europe and North Africa. The British tried to discourage this. Jews were bad news. No one wanted them as refugees. Still, as more arrived in Palestine, it became the least bad option, and the rest is history.
History is full of least bad options.
@Kaleberg,
Yes sir – totally agreed. However, things would have gone much better for the Jews if after WWII the nation of Israel had been reestablished in Miami-Dade County FL instead of Palestine.
Couldn’t have that; would have displaced Miami-Dade residents who are American citizens, not just Palestinisn Arabs.
“Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.”
A. Lincoln
James Lovelock: Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change
The Guardian – long ago
The late British climate environmentalist (1919-2022, died on his 103rd birthday), futurist & nuclear power advocate eventually decided that human kind is just too stupid to do enough to fix climate change. I will suggest that we are also far too stupid to be able to deal with ‘religious differences’ among the various branches of the Abrahamic religions, let alone the various sects within them.
As for the UN, since it was fundamentally modelled on the US (arguably) and headquartered here, you’d think we’d have worked much harder to make it work. But noooo!
One of these days an errant asteroid that maybe we could have pushed aside is going to put us out of our misery. With any luck, none of those currently alive will be around. But maybe we will avoid thermonuclear destruction, for the sake of your grandkids though I wouldn’t bet on it.
@Fred,
If thermonuclear war doesn’t kill our grandkids, resource wars from climate change will. Their future is bleak.
It’s possible that resource wars (& maybe even thermonuclear war) will only reduce humsn populstion down to one thst is more viable. There’s hope?
@Fred,
If you consider reducing human civilization back to a feral state more viable, then yes.
@Fred,
Muchas gracias. I have a liberal friend living in Tucson AZ that had been (prior to 2023) quite a bit skeptical about climate change. He’s born again now and denying that he had previously been skeptical. Guess some people just must deny something or other.
In any case, I could only remember the name of the other climate change James (Hansen that is). So, thanks for bring up Lovelock, who is quite a bit more direct and scary. So, now I got to tell my buddy Joe to check out what James Lovelock wrote on the subject.
I’d like to believe that Lovelock was wrong about humans being too stupid to fix climate change.
Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a very optimistic book a couple of years ago that I highly recommend to put you in an optimistic mood.
The Ministry for the Future
Not too late, the UN establishes this outfit to see to fixing it. And they are successful, even using nuclear reactors (on a very small scale) to do so. Various other large-scale enviro-engineering schemes are tried that actually help.
Have some faith in the UN maybe. It could work. One of Obama’s favorite books for 2020.
@Fred,
Thanks, but I am sticking with Lovelock because scaring the children seems like the right thing to do now since we have been kicking that can down the road for a half century while the risks were essentially known. Theoretically the risks were realized over a full century ago (late 19th per Neil deGrasse Tyson in “The World Set Free” – the twelfth episode of the American documentary television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.) OTOH, I am aware of the risk that pessimism might lead to further inaction, but I believe we can take that pessimism now all the way to sheer horror, which will get people into grasping for an alternative to extinction.
The last time the two state model looked like a real solution it led to the Intifida. The two state solution was popular enough in Israel, especially with the US encouraging it, but, judging from the Palestinian reaction, it was much less popular an idea among Palestinians. I thought it was a good idea then and would be a good idea now, but I don’t see the Palestinians buying it and I can’t imagine Hamas accepting it as it would force them to govern and accept responsibility for their own failures. Right now, I don’t see the Israelis buying it either. Any Gazan state would have launched a similar attack. It’s not like the sides have gotten closer since the 90s.
Kaleberg:
Is Israel still squeezing The Gaza economically? October 4th and just before the uprising.
Gaza unrest shows economic misery under Israeli blockade