Asia Times
Covering geo-political news and current affairs across Asia
Israel has launched a major military assault on gunmen in a Palestinian refugee camp, using 1,000 troops and jet bombers to crush guerrilla resistance.
It’s the latest and most severe effort this year to put down revolts against its dominance of the West Bank. Since January, Israeli forces have killed about 120 Palestinians, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Palestinian gunmen have meanwhile killed 20 Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
Jenin, where the refugee camp is located, has been the epicenter of West Bank violence for months. In past decades, such chronic violence would have triggered some sort of diplomacy to stop the immediate violence and at least rhetorical steps to end the long-running confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians.
Perhaps there would have been some sort of new or revived peace initiative or roving mediation, a tactic that once characterized America’s diplomacy in the Middle East.
Or in this decade maybe intervention by the new world power on the block, China, which took baby steps into regional diplomacy by overseeing efforts to reduce long-standing tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
But no. Instead, diplomatic players are relying on hoary platitudes about a moribund peace plan that is more than 30 years old: the quest for the so-called “two-state solution,” in which Israel and the Palestinians would agree to the creation of a Palestinian state in return for lasting peace.
The two-state formula has long been rejected by various Israeli governments, and in particular by the current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has off and on served a total of 15 years in office.
So despite vowing fidelity to the two-state concept of the United States, Europe and even distant China, division of the so-called Holy Land is more prayer than potential reality.
Concern over the conflict doesn’t rise to the level of worry over other, graver crises: Russia’s war on Ukraine and growing tensions between the United States and China.
Though no concrete steps are underway to make the two-state solution a reality, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken nonetheless warned that ending West Bank unrest was necessary to avoid “measures that undermine the prospects for a two-state solution,” according to department spokesman Matthew Miller.
The European Union has requested a halt to “unilateral measures that could further increase tensions and endanger the possibility of a just and sustainable peace, based on a two-state solution.”
China stepped into the diplomatic arena, too. Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for Beijing’s embassy in Washington, said “implementation of the two-state solution” is the “fundamental solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”
Israel, however, ignored the warnings and advice. In Jerusalem, Netanyahu told a parliamentary commission that Palestinian desires for sovereignty “must be eliminated,” according to a government radio report.
Netanyahu said that Israel needs to preserve the current situation in which the Palestinian Authority, set up in the 1990s, oversees about 18% of the West Bank. The Gaza Strip, a physically separate territory, is ruled by the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS), a vicious rival of the Palestinian Authority.
The Palestinian Authority responded harshly. President Mahmoud Abbas appealed to China to intervene to save the two-state solution. “We hope that Israel agrees to Chinese mediation. The truth is that it is America that blocks the two-state solution,” he told the China Global Television Network.
The two-state proposal gained prominence in the early 1990s, when the United States exercised a near monopoly of power and influence in the Middle East.
Following the first Persian Gulf War, when US forces expelled the Iraqi army from Kuwait, then-president George H W. Bush tasked his secretary of state, James Baker, to arrange talks designed to create a “new world order” in the region. Bush told the US Congress, “The time has come to put an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
After numerous rounds of shuttle diplomacy, Baker arranged talks among the Palestinians, Israel and Arab states bordering Israel – Syria, Egypt and Jordan – to be held in Madrid. The conference resulted in sporadic negotiations but no breakthrough.
Impatient, Israel and representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization met secretly in Oslo. They agreed to gradually cede authority over the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the Palestinians and then, after five years, discuss issues regarding Palestinian refugees, Israeli settlements, final security arrangements and borders.
Some three decades later, Oslo is a dead letter. The Palestinians nominally control 18% of the West Bank. (Unable to pacify the Gaza Strip, Israel withdrew its settlements from the area in 2005 –-though it controls the Gaza coastline and surrounds the strip with high concrete walls.)
The expansion of Israeli settlements, the concurrent rise of the Israeli population in the West Bank, and the area’s spaghetti pattern of settler roads and high walls mock the two-state notion.
In 1991, the settler population in the West Bank, not including eastern Jerusalem, which Israel has formally annexed, was about 100,000. It is now over 450,000.
The evident failure of the two-state program has led some observers to seek a solution in which the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is not divided, even if two nationalities live within it.
That would require political acrobatics to persuade once-warring communities to exist side by side on territory each once claimed as its own. Given the impossibility of a relatively straightforward geographical division, it seems unlikely to create a politically-intricate binational single state.
Daniel Williams is a former foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Miami Herald and an ex-researcher for Human Rights Watch. His book Forsaken: The Persecution of Christians in Today’s Middle East was published by O/R Books. He is currently based in Rome. More by Daniel Williams
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