EU mission in Gaza reflects waning Western vision

Possibility of 2-state solution seems to dwindle

JERUSALEM — It’s been 16 years since the borders of the Gaza Strip slammed shut after Hamas militants seized control of the territory.

The takeover forced the European Union to withdraw monitors who had been deployed at a Gaza border crossing to help the Palestinians prepare for independence. Yet the EU has regularly renewed funding for the unit since then, most recently late last month.

The continued existence of the unit known as EUBAM is an extreme example of the West’s willingness to keep pumping hundreds of millions of dollars a year into the moribund vision of a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians.

Proponents say this approach remains the best chance for securing an eventual peace deal. Critics argue that opting for such costly conflict management helps keep a 56-year-old Israeli military occupation in place and allows Europe and the United States to avoid making the hard political decisions needed to end the conflict.

This week’s deadly Israeli raid of a West Bank militant stronghold and previous eruptions of violence also underscore the limits of international efforts to contain the conflict.

“The international community, in my view, understands the reality that the two-state solution is gone,” said Marwan Muasher, a onetime Jordanian foreign minister and former ambassador to Israel. “It does not want to acknowledge this publicly, because acknowledging it publicly is going to have to force the international community to start talking about alternatives, all of them problematic.”

Muasher, now a vice president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is unusual among his peers. The legions of diplomats and politicians who have devoted their careers to Mideast peacemaking remain committed to the two-state vision, even as the ground around them has shifted.

“I am still a believer,” said Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister who led the last round of substantive peace talks with Palestinian leaders before leaving office in 2009.

“There is no other solution. Everything else is almost inevitably a prescription for disaster,” Olmert said.

The two-state approach has guided international diplomacy since the 1993 Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The interim accords were meant to lay the groundwork for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Even some members of the Palestinian Authority, which has the most to gain from independence, have begun to speak publicly about equal rights between the river and the sea, rather than two states.

“The basis for us is ending the occupation, obtaining freedom,” said Mahmoud Aloul, an aide to President Mahmoud Abbas. He said it does not matter if the conflict ends with two states or a single binational state for Israelis and Palestinians.

Florin Bulgariu, the current director of EUBAM, said he is proud of what the mission has accomplished but also frustrated.

“This is the only solution that might work in the end, separate borders, everyone with his own business,” he said.