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Israeli-Palestinian conflict - A new format now
Read more on - Polity | Economy | Schemes | S&T | Environment
- End of latest round of deaths: After the shooting war over Gaza wound down early on 21st May 2021, it seemed that the Israelis and Palestinians may be poised to return to their fragile status quo. Israel is claiming that military objectives were met after two weeks of relentless bombardment of the blockaded Gaza Strip. After firing more than 4,000 rockets into Israeli territory, the Islamist group Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, may also declare a victory. It is likely to emerge from the fighting as it has after previous rounds, battered but unbowed, and perhaps boosted in the eyes of some of its brethren for not surrendering.
- Same no more: But the intensity of this latest round of violence took both the Israeli government and the Biden administration by surprise. It should not have. The fire was stoked far from Gaza, by the provocations of Israeli police and emboldened Jewish far-right vigilantes marching through Jerusalem. Palestinian protests against planned evictions in the contested holy city and the clashes that ensued all came to a head when Israeli security forces decided to storm al-Aqsa Mosque.
- Hamas then saw an opportunity to don the mantle of the defender of the third-holiest site in Islam as well as broader Palestinian claims to Jerusalem, and launched its attacks.
- The resulting war sprawled across the land between the river and the sea, with clashes in the West Bank as well as between Arab and Jewish Israelis in cities inside Israel’s 1967 borders.
- What the "war" showed: It exposed the internal dysfunctions among both the Israeli and Palestinian political camps. For Israel, more than two years of ceaseless electioneering and the failure to form a stable ruling coalition either with or without PM Benjamin Netanyahu weakened governance and has brought far-right groups into the political mainstream. For the latter, a crisis of legitimacy facing the beleaguered Palestinian Authority and its aging President Mahmoud Abbas has intensified. Hamas’s renewed militancy followed a decision by Abbas to scrap the first planned Palestinian elections after more than a decade and a half.
- What happens next: There is no meaningful dialogue between an unpopular, enfeebled PA and a right-wing Israeli government where many politicians now openly reject the idea of an independent Palestinian state. Israel’s entrenched system of control over the Palestinian territories and its creeping annexation of Palestinian lands, unchecked for years by United States, may only provoke more angry resistance.
- Security coordination between Israel and the PA will not be enough to contain the rising flames. And given the rhetoric around annexation, no right-wing Israeli government will be willing or able to renew a political process.
- This was a long time coming. Many experts now view the two-state solution as an impossibility.
- The population of Jewish settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — where a Palestinian state is supposed to emerge — has grown sevenfold since the 1990s. Once on the fringes of Israeli politics, the settler movement now makes up the vanguard of the Israeli right. And, like its U.S. allies in the Republican Party, the Israeli right has no interest in pursuing the two-state goals enshrined by the Oslo accords in 1993.
- Key ideas: The official Israeli abandonment of negotiated compromise, alongside continued settlement expansion and the forcible relocation of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem and communities in the West Bank, made a new crisis inevitable. Tzipi Livni, a former Israeli foreign minister, hoped “pragmatic moderates” on both sides could revive the peace process. In current circumstances, that seems more a wish than a solution. Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, insisted that the two-state solution remained the only policy goal worth striving for — preferable to a single binational state, or an Israeli-Palestinian confederation where Jerusalem is shared, or other mooted arrangements. That is because alternatives to a two-state solution will never work.
- Summary: For years, Israelis have made peace with the notion that they can manage, however brutally, their relationship with Palestinians instead of resolving it, aided by a process of walling off the ugliness of their rule: Gaza, caged and besieged, might as well have been on a different planet; Israelis could drive throughout the West Bank practically uninterrupted by the sight of Palestinians; Palestinian citizens of Israel have largely been relegated to neglected, concentrated areas.
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