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"Mideast Peace: Israel Grows More Comfortable with the Status Quo" by Tony Karon
From time to time, the
Palestine Center distributes
articles it believes will enhance understanding
of the Palestinian political
reality. The following article by Tony Karon
was published in the TIME website on 15
February 2010. To view
this article online, please go to http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1962232,00.html.
"Mideast Peace: Israel Grows More
Comfortable with the Status Quo"
By Tony
Karon
"If, and as long as between
the Jordan (River) and the [Mediterranean] Sea
there is only one political entity, named
Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish
or nondemocratic," warned Israel's Defense
Minister Ehud Barak last week. "If the
Palestinians vote in elections it is a
binational state, and if they don't vote it is
an apartheid state."
Former President
Jimmy Carter suffered a verbal pummeling three
years ago for comparing the standoff between
Israel and the Palestinians to apartheid — the
South African system that meant not only
segregation, but a denial of citizenship to a
whole category of people. And so it was ironic
that a key Israeli leader warned his people
that the status quo on the territories
conquered by Israel in 1967 amounts to the same
thing. Barak's point was to warn that unless
the Palestinians are given an independent state
of their own, the world will eventually notice
that their lives are controlled by an Israeli
state that denies them citizenship, raising the
specter of the sort of international isolation
and sanctions that helped change South Africa.
If Defense Minister Barak sounds a
little exasperated, that may be because he's
swimming against Israel's domestic political
tide in seeking to restart momentum toward a
two-state solution. Whatever the long-term
dangers, Israelis right now don't see any
negative consequences for maintaining the
status quo. The Palestinians are under siege in
Gaza and walled off in the West Bank. Terror
attacks are rare today and most Israelis are
scarcely aware that the Palestinians exist.
Israel's booming economy, increasingly
integrated with those of Europe and the U.S.,
is knocking on the door of membership to the
OECD; its lifestyle is increasingly American;
its culture entirely integrated with the
globalized West.
The peace process of
the 1990s collapsed in a spiral of bloodshed,
and most Israelis have simply moved on. Opinion
polls indicate that they would prefer a peace
deal with the Palestinians, but also that most
don't believe such a deal is possible. Yitzhak
Rabin in the old days promised to "pursue peace
as if there was no terror and fight terror as
if there is no peace," but now that terror has
been largely subdued, Israelis feel no urgency
about peace.
For even the most moderate
segment of Palestinian leadership, a two-state
solution would have, at the very least,
involved setting the 1967 borders as the basis
for negotiation, and accepting East Jerusalem
as the Palestinian capital. But Israel's
political median has moved steadily to the
right since the days of Rabin, and the minimum
demands acceptable to Palestinian moderates are
deemed too much for the Israelis. The militant
settlers who believe they have a God-given
right to build their homes in the occupied
territories are now part of the mainstream,
disproportionately represented in the army's
mid-level officer corps, and an important
support base of the Netanyahu government.
Israel's Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman,
is himself a settler. The religious-nationalist
ideological core of the settler movement has
threatened to violently resist any attempt to
move them, and for many Israelis, the
cost-benefit analysis weighs against uprooting
them: Why risk a domestic civil war in order to
return land to the Palestinians, who might
later turn it into a base to fire rockets at
you? Perhaps in another generation.
The
situation may be intolerable for the
Palestinians, but for Israel there simply is no
immediate downside to maintaining the status
quo. Telling Israelis about the specter of
apartheid and demographic "time bombs" is like
telling Americans that they must fix social
security. Nobody disagrees, but don't hold your
breath.
Barak sounded his warning in the
same week that South Africa marked the 20th
anniversary of the decision by the then
President F.W. De Klerk to free Nelson Mandela
and begin negotiating an end to apartheid. It
was certainly a courageous decision by De
Klerk, but it's important to remember that it
was not some epiphany about the immorality of
apartheid that changed his mind. By 1989, with
the Cold War essentially over, Pretoria had
gotten the message that it could no longer
count on U.S. support to head off sanctions and
other international pressure in the name of
anticommunist solidarity. Financial sanctions
were beginning to bite and the price of
maintaining the status quo was beginning to
appear prohibitive. De Klerk, to his credit,
realized that his people had more to gain from
negotiating from a position of relative
strength. And the political unrest in the black
townships, combined with the expanding
sanctions and growing isolation, helped him
make the case to his own
electorate.
Political leaders typically
change course not because they change their
philosophy, but because the cost-benefit ratio
in maintaining the status quo no longer makes
sense. That was true for Rabin — who embraced
the Oslo process after calculating that Israel
could not forever count on unconditional U.S.
support — and also for Yasser Arafat and
Mahmoud Abbas. Rabin's cost-benefit analysis
told him that Israel's best interests required
moving toward a two-state solution from a
position of strength, and the Palestinian
leadership recognized that, as much as they
desired a return to the homes and land they
lost in 1948, the balance of forces made that a
futile goal. They decided to instead seek a
state in the West Bank and Gaza as a more
limited, but attainable objective. Hamas has
not yet formally made such a shift, although
its leaders are clearly moving toward accepting
some version of a two-state outcome — and the
more Hamas takes responsibility for the
well-being of the residents of Gaza and the
West Bank, the more likely they will be to
accept Israel's existence as a bitter but
inescapable compromise.
Even Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who made a
political career out of opposing a two-state
solution, this year committed himself to the
principle, albeit on terms too restrictive to
be embraced by the Palestinians. Netanyahu
adapted his view because he was left no
alternative by the international
community.
Still, President Obama has
admitted that the domestic political calculus
on both sides of the divide has blocked
progress toward realizing a two-state solution.
But if his efforts are to bear any fruit, Obama
and his international partners will have to
change the cost-benefit analysis for the
Israelis and Palestinians by raising both the
inducements to act and the consequences of
inaction. As long as the status quo remains
more politically comfortable than the
alternative, there's no reason to expect any
progress.
The
views
expressed in this article are those of the
author and do not necessarily
reflect
those of The Jerusalem
Fund.