Israel’s future hinges on settlements question
Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is very, very cross about last Friday’s United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the creation of illegal Jewish settlements all over the occupied West Bank and in East Jerusalem.
He called in the ambassadors of all the Western countries that voted for the resolution to tell them off. He also had the U.S. ambassador on the carpet, although Washington merely abstained in the vote. But, Netanyahu said, Donald Trump’s incoming administration has promised to fight “an all-out war” on the resolution.
The resolution is only words, but words that have not found their way into any UN Security Council resolution since 1979, because the United States always used its veto to kill any resolution that described the settlements as having “no legal validity” and constituting a “flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-state solution.”
This is a restatement of a truth that was once almost universally accepted. When Israel’s astonishing victory in the 1967 war put the entire remaining area that had been granted to the Palestinians by the UN partition agreement of 1948 under Israeli control, most Israelis initially saw it as an opportunity for peace.
If the Arabs wanted their territories back, they would have to sign peace treaties with Israel — and agree to demilitarize those territories.
To a generation of Israelis who had lived in fear of losing a war, that looked like a bargain. But some Israelis wanted to keep the conquered territories.
If the settler population continues to grow, there could be as many as a million Jews in the occupied territories by 2030. At that point, the long-term prospect of a Jewish majority heaves above the horizon. And that is what the current conflict between President Barack Obama and Netanyahu is about.
Netanyahu avoids peace talks with the Palestinians because a peace deal would mean the end of the settlement project. He can’t say that out loud, but it is the openly expressed view of the settler leaders whose support has been essential to Netanyahu’s various coalition governments.
This is why Netanyahu lies. In a conversation caught on an open mic in 2011, France’s then-president Nicolas Sarkozy told Obama: “I can’t stand him (Netanyahu). He’s a liar.” And Obama replied, “You’re tired of him? What about me? I have to deal with him every day.”
But Obama’s decision to abstain on the vote condemning Israeli settlement policy in the Palestinian occupied territories was not just a last slap at Netanyahu. Obama has a fundamentally different view of what constitutes long-term security for Israel — one he shares with most other outside observers, but a shrinking proportion of Israelis.
It cannot be assumed Arab states will always be relatively poor and incompetently led, and that Israel will always be the military superpower of the region. So, in the view of Obama and other outsiders, Israel’s long-term security still depends on making a fair and lasting peace with its Arab neighbours, including the Palestinians.
The settlements undermine the prospects for such a deal. For a growing number of Israelis, that is irrelevant, because they do not believe that a lasting peace with the Arabs is possible. In which case, Israel might as well grab all of East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
President-elect Donald Trump will stop any further such resolutions with the U.S. veto. We’ll have to wait to know whether it is the perspective of Netanyahu and Trump, or that of Obama and almost all other world leaders, that defines Israel’s future.