Netanyahu should tread carefully on Israeli-Palestinian conflict

By OKIYA OMTATAH OKOITI
Published August 30, 2009

For quite some time now, successive American and other Western governments have been toying with the idea of establishing two separate states, Israel and Palestine, as the solution to the Palestinian problem. The latest of such efforts, led by US President Barack Obama, is being opposed by the ultranationalist Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who desires to establish a de facto unitary Israel State in Palestine, or the biblical Canaan.

In a direct challenge to President Obama’s common sense demands that Israel freezes all settlement activities in the occupied territories to enable him launch negotiations that can lead to Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab peace, Prime Minister Netanyahu, backed by hawkish Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, is encouraging the ongoing seizure and destruction of Palestinian homes in the occupied East Jerusalem.

While mouthing support for the two-state solution, Netanyahu is using the expansion of settlements and outposts to deal a fatal blow not only to Obama’s peace efforts but to the very idea of an independent Palestinian State established alongside Israel.

People see this controversy in different ways, including as a political showdown between Netanyahu and Obama; as a trap cleverly set by Netanyahu for Obama to walk into; as a bold diplomatic offensive by Netanyahu, designed to re-assert Israeli strength in its bilateral relationship with the US; or, for what it is: a transparent ploy Netanyahu is using to try to end US pressure regarding settlements and outposts, and to mobilize support for his government – from Israelis and American Jews alike.

President Obama, who was elected with overwhelming support from American Jews, is viewed nearly unanimously by Israelis as unsupportive. But why hasn’t Obama’s unbending opposition to Israeli settlements caused an American Jewish outcry to match the one in Israel?

Three main reasons for this are, first, that leading Zionist Jewish figures in the US Diaspora like Thomas L. Friedman, Jeffrey Goldberg and Ed Koch, view the settlement enterprise as a betrayal of true Zionism and, hence, a risk to Israel’s security, conceptually, militarily, and diplomatically.

Second, anti-Zionist figures like Michael Chabon, Tony Kushner, Philip Weiss and Tony Judt, see the settlement enterprise as the epitome of Zionism. For them, the annexation of Palestinian land implicates Zionism itself. So there is no reforming Zionism; there is only ending Zionism, accomplished by the deus ex machina of a unitary state.

Finally, and probably largest of all, most American Jews living today don’t have a real life recollection of the Holocaust, and they came of age after the 1967 and 1973 Israel’s existential wars with Arabs and are, therefore, not engaged enough with Zionism to defend it blindly. In fact, they feel a kind of embarrassment with Israeli excesses.

Hence, Obama may be more deeply committed to Israel than an increasing number of American Jews. Netanyahu needs to wake up to the fact that the world has changed and be careful what he wishes for, because he just might get a unitary state.

Even though the two-state solution is now an article of faith among virtually every prominent party involved or interested in ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there are strong arguments and voices to persuade one to reject it in favour of the unitary democratic state, or the one-state solution, that would see the populous Arabs, including returning Palestinian refugees, overwhelm Israeli numbers in a unified Palestine.

The arguments include that the two-state solution should be rejected just as the notion of equal but separate races, in which one people structurally and conceptually dominates the other, was rejected in the USA, in apartheid South Africa and, recently on matters of religion, in Northern Ireland.

That there are no realistic ways two antagonistic ethno-religious and ethno-nationalist states can co-exist side by side, without seeking to annihilate each other. That only a single non-religious, non-ethnic secular democracy uniting Arabs and Jews, where citizens are not primarily seen as Arab, Jew, Christian, or Muslim, has the capacity to break the Israeli-Palestinian impasse and contain both Islamic fundamentalists and Jewish ultranationalists.

By, among others, eliminating the military occupation, unifying the territory, granting equal rights to all, allowing the return of Arab refugees, and effectively restoring Palestinians to (shared) sovereignty with Jews in their historical homeland, the one-state solution will re-frame regional and local tensions, and cast them as contests within a democratic polity rather than between polarised and mutually demonised combatants. It would also remove the ‘Palestinian problem’ as a source of outrage all over the world.

If Netanyahu makes Israel the de facto unitary state in Palestine, the arguments above could persuade the US and other Western powers to adopt the one-state solution, complete with its democratic secular formula that will have no room for ethno-nationalism from either side. This would include re-conceiving obtaining unitary Israeli state and equipping it with a post-Zionist vision, not as a secluded Jewish State but as a united modern democratic Palestine in which Jews and everybody are guaranteed ethnic freedoms and security on equal bases, but in which Zionist hawks like Netanyahu will either be extinct or will play a very peripheral role.

Related Posts