The war that will never end
Peter Boyce details the tangled bloody web that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
THIS week marks the 70th anniversary of Israel’s proclamation of independence, and recalls the Nakba (“catastrophe”) that displaced 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from Israeli territory.
Despite the extraordinarily successful achievement of Israeli state-building since the promise of a Jewish homeland was first issued by imperial Britain during the Great War, that achievement must be measured against the heavy price paid by the roughly 5.3 million Arab Palestinians who remain under Israeli occupation or blockaded in Gaza.
The elaborate 1947 United Nations-sponsored plan for a Jewish state to coexist alongside a Palestinian state was shattered by Israel’s sensational victory in the sixday war of 1967. Despite repeated international endorsement of the “two-state solution”, we can now fairly confidently conclude that it will not materialise.
Furthermore, recent realignments of power in the Middle East, with Iran now posing an immediate threat to Israeli territory from its footholds in Lebanon and Syria and Saudi Arabia unexpectedly talking peace with Israel, the plight of Palestinians has probably slipped down the radar of international concern.
Although the prospects for establishment of a Palestinian state had been receding for several years, the advent of the Trump administration in the United States probably sounded its death knell.
The December 2017 promise of American recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and commitment to transfer of the embassy from Tel Aviv on May 12 persuaded Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to abstain from peace negotiations hosted by the Americans, since the US could no longer be deemed an “honest broker”.
It could be argued the US never did qualify as an honest broker in the conventional diplomatic sense of being a disinterested third party. From the moment of Israel’s independence proclamation in 1948 the US assumed the role of chief protector of the Zionist project.
In recent decades Washington has funded Israeli defence to the tune of more than US$ 140 billion (in current dollars), believed to be the largest ever transfer of funds from one sovereign state to another, and the current level of defence aid is about US$5 billion a year.
But American support went well beyond defence funding. Year after year the US has used its Security Council veto to block criticism of Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Israel’s Cabinet was never likely to commit to the twostate formula, even if the Gaza-based Hamas militants had conceded Israel’s “right to exist”. Several key members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition remain firmly opposed to the concept, including Defence Minister Lieberman and Jewish Home Party leader Naftali Bennett.
As for Hamas, Sunni-led descendant of the Muslim Brotherhood, it certainly qualifies as a terrorist organisation, but its primary objective since establishment in 1987 has been withdrawal of the Israeli occupying force.
Its political wing has on more than one occasion signalled a willingness to negotiate a truce in return for recognition of the pre-1967 territorial boundaries. Were these signals adequately checked out?
If it is now too late to persevere with the two-state formula, the only alternatives appear to be a unitary state or a confederation of two selfgoverning polities economically linked. But unitary status would annul any claim by Israel to be a Jewish state, because the Arab population is almost equal to the Jewish population and predicted to eclipse it by 2020. Moreover, Israel could no longer lay any claim to being a democratic state if it failed to accord equal rights to Palestinians. Israel’s proud boast of being the only democracy in the Middle East has long been a cherished plank of that country’s vigorous public diplomacy.
The ageing and ailing Palestinian President Abbas now seems a somewhat helpless bystander, but it would be difficult to imagine a less credible trio of American negotiators in a revived peace process than US President Donald Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner or VicePresident Mike Pence.
Moreover, Washington’s outright gift of Jerusalem to Netanyahu as the Israeli capital was not accompanied by any bargaining chip for the Palestinians.
Kushner is an Orthodox Jew with no foreign policy experience but with precarious financial investments in Israel. More critically, he has had his US government security clearance downgraded from top secret. Pence is scarcely more credible. During a visit to Israel this year he admitted his Christian fundamentalist convictions placed him in the Christian Zionist camp, whose members eagerly await the end times of Armageddon.
There seems little likelihood of the UN becoming a decisive player in resolving the IsraeliPalestinian dispute, but we should not discount other possible threats to the status quo. The first is the chance of Netanyahu being indicted on corruption charges, as recommended by the Israeli police chief. Another possible scenario is a third intifada or massive uprising in the crowded and blockaded Gaza Strip. Yet another possibility is eventual Israeli annexation of the occupied territories. A fourth and perhaps most ominous possibility is an outbreak of war between Iran and Israel.
On the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence, the leaders of Australia’s major political parties heaped lavish praise in Parliament on the Israeli political and economic achievement without a single mention of the fate of Palestinians. One must hope that any fresh parliamentary tributes this month will include acknowledgment of the Nakba. Peter Boyce is adjunct professor in the University of Tasmania’s Politics and International Relations Program and immediate past president of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, Tasmania. The views expressed here are his own.