Israel: The ‘one-state solution’

By Jack Segal | Jan. 7, 2017

The past few weeks have seen the sharpest criticism of Israel by the U.S. in decades. Secretary of State John Kerry’s Dec. 28 speech attempted primarily to blame Israel for the continued Israeli-Palestinian impasse. It came a few days after a rare U.S. decision not to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution that asserted Israeli settlements have “no legal validity.”

That resolution also effectively classified Judaism’s holiest site, East Jerusalem’s Western Wall, as “occupied territory.”  This double-whammy by the Obama administration was too much even for the British — normally Israeli critics — who felt compelled to have the new British prime minister reject Kerry’s remarks. 

Kerry cited the growth of Israeli settlements on the West Bank as the primary threat to the realization of a “two-state solution” — one Jewish state, one Palestinian, co-existing peacefully in the land between the Mediterranean and Jordan.  Kerry’s strongest attacks were reserved for those Israelis who have given up on the two-state solution and now envision a one-state solution.

In the one-state scenario, Israel controls all of the West Bank (where today reside about 600,000 Jews and 2.5 million Arabs).   But the Palestinians are granted self-rule in the urban areas where they are concentrated and where few Jews reside. The Palestinians would elect their own leaders, run their own municipalities and have their own police force, as they already do in much of the West Bank, but Israel would be in control and Jewish settlements would continue to grow. This vision of a one-state future is not likely to satisfy Palestinian aspirations for statehood, nor silence Israel’s critics.

Kerry blamed Israel’s ultra-Orthodox religious minority for pushing Israel’s government toward the one-state option. In reality, a majority of religious and secular Israelis are looking for new solutions that provide real security. Israelis are tired of endless war just as, no doubt, Palestinians are fed up with living under occupation. 

But is the two-state solution even still alive? Right now, there are no serious peace talks underway. There are many substantive reasons for this, and the acrimonious relationship between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is one. But I would argue that the principal reason for the lack of progress is political.

Netanyahu leads a fragile coalition government that is dominated by right-wing parties, several of which support annexation of all of the West Bank. For settlers who moved there for economic reasons, and for the ultra-Orthodox, who view Judea and Samaria as part of “greater Israel,” relinquishing the West Bank to the Arabs is unthinkable. 

Israelis of every stripe cite security as their No. 1 concern in any solution. Prominent right-wing party leaders like Naftali Bennett (leader of the Jewish Home party) point to Gaza as one negative example. After Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, elections were held that brought Hamas — an organization labeled a terrorist group by the U.S. and 32 other countries — into a ruling coalition with the comparatively moderate Palestinian Authority.

But after bloody street battles, Hamas expelled the Palestinian Authority, and Gaza became a terrorist stronghold. Hamas built bomb factories and launched rocket and suicide attacks on the nearby Jewish villages and towns in Israel proper. A violent Israeli retaliation against such attacks in 2008-09 drew widespread international condemnation.

Bennett and other right-wing Israeli politicians argue that a similar fate awaits Israel if the Palestinians gain control of the West Bank. Radical Islamists would quickly take over and besiege all of pre-1967 Israel. Even if Hamas could be kept out of the West Bank, the record of the Palestinian Authority leadership in harnessing terrorism is not good. 

Kerry acknowledged Palestinian “incitement” of terror attacks but only paid lip service in his speech to the fact that Palestinian leaders had praised, rather than condemned, the Palestinian attackers. They named public squares after the “martyrs” and condoned their “sacrifice.” 

In Palestinian schools, children are taught to glorify the terrorists and to hate Israelis. Kerry’s brief acknowledgment of this failure of Palestinian leadership did not do justice to how their failures affect Israeli Jews and their willingness to trust any negotiated settlement that relies solely on Palestinian enforcement.

Looking around their “neighborhood,” Israelis see chaos near the Golan Heights, in Syria, in Lebanon and in the Sinai, where terrorist groups linked to the Islamic State organization and al-Qaida compete for dominance. Even liberal Israeli Jews agree that if the West Bank were to become a battleground for these factions, Israel would be under constant attack.

Beyond these “facts on the ground,” what makes Kerry’s sharp critique even more inexplicable is its timing. Based on President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign statements, his administration envisions a very different relationship with Israel.  Trump’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is an orthodox Jew who is committed to settlement expansion and who has written that the “two-state solution is an illusion.” Both the ambassador-designee and the president-elect have also called for the U.S. Embassy to be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Now, the Trump administration will have to weigh whether allowing more settlement expansion and moving the embassy — moves that will please the Israeli right wing — might trigger a backlash against the U.S. and Israel. 

Right now, the Middle East is mired in a Sunni-Shiite sectarian conflict in which Israel-Palestine is not the central issue. But moving our embassy, ignoring settlement expansion or acquiescing in Israeli annexation of all or part of the West Bank might well shift the Arab world’s focus from their inter-Arab conflicts to one in which Israel and the U.S. are in the crosshairs. Moderate and progressive Israelis (40 percent of Israeli Jews) fear that Trump could inflame what is presently a relatively quiet situation on the West Bank without apparent gain. 

Future Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil CEO, is an experienced student of Arab affairs and likely to warn Trump that we don’t need to further upset an already-unstable region by drastically altering our Israel policies. He will likely counsel Trump to protect our current extensive economic and military ties to the Arab states. That would argue for going slow on any changes vis-a-vis Israel and leaving the Palestinians in their current limbo. 

Whether Trump will also go so far as to pressure the Israelis not to seize the opportunity of his first days in office to annex part or all of the West Bank, and whether he will ignore a long-standing congressional mandate to move our embassy will be among his earliest challenges.

Jack Segal served as counselor for political-military affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv from 1988-1991. He and his wife, Karen, co-chair the International Affairs Forum.