2-state solution remains best hope for Israel, Palestinians
The dream of Israelis and Palestinians living peacefully in neighboring homelands is on life support, the chances of it surviving as a viable Middle East peace option slowly ebbing away. That doesn’t mean it can’t be saved.
Secretary of State John Kerry attempted some very public CPR in his impassioned address last week, explaining why the Obama administration refused on Dec. 23 to veto a United Nations resolution condemning the proliferation of Israeli settlements that place the two-state solution in jeopardy.
Hard-liners derided the speech as little more than a eulogy for the hope of an independent Palestine, a peace doctrine dating to the birth of Israel seven decades ago. But if Kerry’s goal was to breathe life into that option until Palestinians have a leadership brave enough to embrace both independence and compromise, there are ways to preserve the two-state solution. It could be left to President-elect Donald Trump, the self-styled artist of the deal who called an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement the “ultimate deal,” to make it happen.
Kerry’s speech was an excellent primer for why the only other option — a one-state solution — is a recipe for endless misery. Israel would carve what it wants from the West Bank and perpetually occupy or isolate the remain- der and Gaza. Palestinians in the annexed territory would either have to be granted Israeli citizenship — adding their embittered population to a growing Arab-Israeli society that would someday outnumber and outvote their Jewish counterparts — or be relegated to second-class citizenship.
“If the choice is one state, Israel can either be Jewish or democratic — it cannot be both — and it won’t ever really be at peace,” Kerry warned about a solution that is growing ever more popular within Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet.
There have been more than 2,000 Palestinian terror attacks on Israelis in the past year — stabbings, shootings and bomb- ings. These actions block a pathway to peace.
At the same time, the solution at the end of that pathway is being destroyed by ever expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, now home to half a million settlers.
For the past 17 years, three successive American administrations have tried and failed to achieve a grand-slam Middle East agreement. Preserving the two-state solution for a fourth effort might mean, for now, more modest goals, such as a U.S.-Israeli agreement to limit, if not end, new settlement construction.
There’s an avenue for this. Palestinians have acknowledged that a peace agreement requires small land swaps: chunks of the West Bank given to Israel in exchange for similar pieces of Israel. All but about 90,000 Jewish settlers live in about 5% of the West Bank that includes portions of East Jerusalem.
Israel’s defense minister, Avigdor Liberman, suggested that Israel could freeze construction outside those blocs if the U.S. would agree to construction within the blocs. Should an accord one day be reached, settlers living in outposts outside those blocs would most likely have to move to Israeli territory.
This isn’t a perfect idea. It isn’t even a solution. But it could save a solution.