Whispers of breaking the mould

All eyes here are on Washington, where on Wednesday President Donald Trump will welcome Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House. No one knows what will emerge from that meeting, and while Netanyahu took no joy from meeting Barack Obama, he at least knew what to prepare for. Preparing to meet Trump is an unpredictable venture.

Unpredictability is precisely the order of the day. The predictable future is no longer so predictable here.

I have been coming to Israel regularly for more than 10 years, and on this visit I am hearing for the first time people discussing openly that that two- state solution is dead, or that its time is past, or that it needs to be revived, or that it should be rejected. Apparently no one thinks it likely. Such views are not new, but the public rhetoric at least honoured the two- state consensus, which has been the basis of global Israeli- Palestinian policy for the nearly 25 years since the Oslo Accords.

Senior ministers in the Netanyahu coalition government speak openly about annexation of parts of the West Bank — the “Area C” territories where the overwhelming majority of Jewish settlers live ( some 400,000) and where the Arab population (some 100,000) could be granted Israeli citizenship without upsetting the demographic balance of Israel, which is about 75 per cent Jewish, 21 per cent Arab, and 4 per cent others.

While the end of Obama and advent of Trump might explain some of the more frank talk, the underlying dynamics have been in place for years. Neither Netanyahu nor Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, believes the other is sincere in wanting a twostate solution. Neither trusts the other to keep promises made. And on the Israeli side, there is no confidence that Abbas, who is in his eighties, will be succeeded by a stable partner for peace.

To the contrary, the fear is that the Hamas takeover in Gaza might be replicated in the West Bank, or that the broader regional dynamics — disintegration of Syria and Iraq and Yemen, regime change in Libya and Egypt, the expansion of Iranian influence, the rise of ISIL — might visit themselves upon Israel’s eastern border.

Indeed, there is more talk now than I have heard in years about a regional conference that would include the Arab powers in addition to the Israelis and Palestinians. Along with open talk of annexation, there is talk of a kind of confederation that would link Gaza and the West Bank with Jordan and Egypt.

All of which brings about a certain déjà vu. After the first Gulf War, there was the regional conference in Madrid in 1991, convened by the United States and co- sponsored by the Soviet Union, then in the last days of its existence. Today, Russia is back in the Middle East as it has not been since the early 1970s, and its arrival makes any peace less likely.

Madrid produced the various bilateral talks that led to the Israel- Jordan peace treaty and the Oslo Accords which created the Palestinian Authority. Israel’s agreement to the latter in Gaza and the West Bank, headed by the PLO’s Yasser Arafat, was agreement in principle to a future Palestinian state. The entire existence of the Palestinian Authority is premised on being a state in waiting.

Waiting is perhaps the most ancient practice of politics in the land of Israel, from biblical times until today. In that light, the quarter century since Madrid, or even the 50 years since the Six Day War, or the even the nearly 70 years since the independence of the modern state of Israel, might not seem so long. Yet the widely held conviction is that waiting for a new situation, new circumstances, new leaders, will not produce progress toward peace in a two- state solution. There are popular majorities in favour of it on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides, but similar majorities also believe that it is impossible given the failings of the other side.

Which leaves the status quo, no longer as the default in light of failed peace talks, but as a deliberate choice for an unhappy but tolerable situation, as opposed to an exhausting striving for an impossible situation. The alternative is to break the existing mould, the consensus of experts who for decades have insisted that the only way forward was toward a solution that successive generations of leaders could not deliver.

In Washington on Wednesday, it is likely that Netanyahu will try to secure the status quo. Perhaps Trump will accept that, perhaps not. But if there someone who is willing to break the mould, to be unconventional in pursuing what he calls the “ultimate deal,” then Trump is it.

Breaking the mould is not without danger. A great many things get broken in the Middle East. Many fewer get put back together.

WAITING IS PERHAPS THE MOST ANCIENT PRACTICE OF POLITICS.