Could Trump’s radical approach bring peace to Israel and Palestine?
By Ian Lustick
The Guardian
A broken watch is right twice a day. Occasionally, so is Donald Trump. In his press conference with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, he was correct to say that the two-state solution used to be the “easier” route to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. He was also correct to say that it is up to Israelis and Palestinians to decide whether they want to live in peace in two states or in one.
Trump’s affirmation that there is no alternative to peace was a dramatic, if largely unrecognised, repudiation of Netanyahu’s policy. Netanyahu, with broad support within his coalition government, rejects peace, while paying lip service to it, in favour of “managing the conflict” by militarily “mowing the lawn” every few years in Gaza and Lebanon and by means of settlement, undercover raids, and mass imprisonment in the West Bank.
Avoiding a direct clash with Netanyahu, Trump nevertheless made his rejection of that policy clear. He would be happy, he said, to support a one-state or a two-state solution, whichever was agreed to by both Israelis and Palestinians. By this simple statement, the White House excluded the option of “managing the conflict”, while transforming the “one-state solution” – some arrangement by which Palestinians and Israelis can participate equally to rule themselves within one political arena – from a nightmare or utopian vision into a framework that is no less imaginable, and no less deserving of consideration, than a framework featuring two separate arenas.
Of course neither version of a peace agreement will be forthcoming any time soon. With 10% of Israel’s Jewish population living in the West Bank, the two-state idea has been a “dead solution walking” for at least a decade. The idea of negotiations to establish one democratic state from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean is just as far-fetched. Accordingly, the only reasonable course for those committed to both peace and democracy in Palestine/Israel is to push the parties towards thinking about their predicament in radically new ways. The words spoken by Trump on Wednesday were an important step in that direction.
Granting more depth of thinking to the president’s remarks than may be warranted, they can be seen to reflect recognition that obsessive pursuit of the impossible dream of a negotiated two-state solution has only given the whip hand to Israelis and Arabs who reject both peace and democracy. Under the cover of prolonged and hopeless negotiations to trade land for peace, Israel’s government has entrenched its control over the West Bank, deepened its enforcement of an apartheid-like system of domination over the nearly three million Palestinians in the West Bank, while brutalising and immiserating nearly two million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, as the wave of terror attacks against Israelis and the recent elections within Hamas have indicated, the phony peace process does nothing for Palestinians but deepen their despair and yearning for revenge.
By advancing more than one image of what peace could look like, the president has broken new ground. Whether Jared Kushner or anyone else in his administration can foster productive moves toward peace is an open question. I do not believe it. Nevertheless, by signaling his rejection of the peace process as it has been conducted under the last three US presidents – a time-consuming merry-go-round of endless movement with no progress – the US has for the first time in decades helped to move Israelis and Palestinians towards thinking creatively about the future.
Indeed, at least one leading Israeli politician will take heart from Trump’s comments. Israel’s president and head of state Reuven Rivlin recently denounced recent Israeli legislation to take portions of the West Bank without permitting Palestinians to become Israelis. Instead he issued a dramatic call for outright Israeli annexation of the West Bank, including the granting of full and equal citizenship to all its Palestinian inhabitants. That is precisely what Israel did after the 1948 war, when it annexed the Arab areas it occupied that were to have been part of the Palestinian state called for by the United Nations. By virtue of that act of annexation, all Arabs in those formerly occupied areas (though not those that had been expelled and barred from returning to them) automatically became Israeli citizens.
In one stroke, annexation of the West Bank would create a political arena of immense potential. It would not generate many warm and fuzzy feelings, but it would transform politics from a zero-sum struggle between Israeli Jews and Palestinians to a more complicated and potentially more productive competition among different Palestinian and Jewish groups searching, within and across the boundaries of their national communities, for political allies and power.
The mixed governments that would arise from a citizenry comprised of Jews and Arabs divided into religious, ideological, regional and economic factions would face enormous challenges – not least what to do about Gaza. But with the likely enthusiastic support of the international community, new ways forward would also become available.
It is much too soon to speak of such a move as a solution. But it is the right time to imagine trading the festering problems Israelis and Palestinians have been facing for a better set of problems associated with learning to live with one another as equals. Trump is likely not the man for this job, but it is only by thinking seriously about how to honour both democratic principles and the equal legitimacy of both Jewish and Palestinian aspirations, that Israeli, Palestinian and American leaders can inject new life and new hope into a land long stalked by death and bereft of hope.
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