More Than One State, Less Than Two
At his Jerusalem residence on September 16, 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert showed President Mahmoud Abbas a map representing the most far-reaching territorial compromise ever proposed by an Israeli premier. According to Olmert, his plan granted the Palestinians a state with a land area equal to 99.5 percent of the West Bank and Gaza. Israel would annex 6.3 percent of Palestinian territory, compensating the Palestinians with Israeli lands equivalent to 5.8 percent, as well as a corridor that would connect the two regions but remain under Israeli sovereignty. Jerusalem would be home to two capitals—its eastern, Arab neighborhoods part of Palestine, its Jewish neighborhoods in both halves of the city part of Israel—and a roughly two-square-kilometer area encompassing the Old City would be under international administration.1
Olmert has said to numerous interviewers that he told Abbas it was the best offer any Israeli leader would give in the next fifty years. Abbas asked to take the map to his experts. Olmert refused, fearing that Abbas would insist that it serve as a new starting point for future talks. The two agreed that their negotiators would meet the following day. In the years that followed, Olmert frequently asserted that he never heard from Abbas again. “I’ve been waiting,” he later said, “ever since.”2
This story, which is widely accepted in Israel and has done much to discredit the idea of a negotiated settlement, contains a number of inaccuracies. First, Olmert and Abbas did negotiate again on more than one occasion, as noted in former US deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams’s Tested by Zion, a detailed, frank, and perceptive account of the George W. Bush administration’s involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Second, Abrams writes that rather than ignoring the proposal, the Palestinians asked for clarifications and then said it was they who never heard back. Third, Olmert’s descriptions of the offer, which he has not shown to the public or to anyone who could attest to its accuracy, have been inconsistent, adding credibility to Palestinian claims that it was less far-reaching and more vague than he has suggested.3
Olmert never provided absolute numbers when describing the territory he proposed to annex. Palestinian negotiators weren’t able to ascertain whether the percentages he cited were of the entire Palestinian area that Israel conquered from Jordan and Egypt in 1967 or of a much smaller tract, excluding East Jerusalem and Gaza, among other regions. On top of this, calculations of the West Bank’s size differ by several hundred square kilometers, according to the source of the figures. In some Palestinian accounts, Abbas couldn’t be sure whether Olmert’s proposed annexation of 6.3 to 6.8 percent of the West Bank and Gaza was not in fact closer to 8.5 percent—more than four times the 1.9 percent limit Abbas had placed on any swap.4
Adding to Palestinian doubts was that Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni had presented her own maps; these annexed 8 to 10 percent of the Occupied Territories, yet, Abrams notes, to the Palestinians “they looked very much the same [as Olmert’s] … So how could the maps be so similar?”5 The parties never agreed which Jewish settlements would be removed; Palestinians balked at Olmert’s insistence on retaining Ariel, whose eastern border extends nearly halfway across the West Bank.
Still larger than these territorial discrepancies were ones concerning the division of Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees, and security arrangements. Olmert suggested that 5,000 refugees could return to Israel over five years while Abbas wanted 150,000 over ten years, with the possibility of renewal. Israel refused to acknowledge responsibility for the refugee problem, as Abbas insisted it do. Olmert’s diplomatic adviser told Abrams that Israel demanded its armed forces remain in the future Palestinian state, a condition Abbas rejected. As the lead Palestinian negotiator, Ahmed Qurei, told Abrams and other US officials, “Territory is the easiest issue.”6
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Abrams didn’t think Abbas should take the deal. Olmert was mired in corruption scandals. He had been polling in the single digits for months and had promised to resign as soon as his party, Kadima, selected a successor. He presented his map the day before Livni was named as his replacement. Several days later, he formally resigned. “The weaker he became politically,” Abrams writes, “the more Olmert seemed willing to risk.”7
Abbas had good reason to be cautious. The legal standing of a peace treaty made with a lame-duck Israeli prime minister was less than clear. Abbas would be making painful concessions in a deal that could not be carried out until he somehow regained control of Gaza from Hamas. There seemed to be little prospect of Hamas accepting such an agreement. There were, Abrams writes, “too many lacunae in this deal.” At a meeting with Bush in New York days after Olmert put forward his map, Abbas said that “many people in the Israeli government were encouraging him to break off with Olmert,” an assertion later confirmed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Bush told Abbas that he “worried that any deal Olmert negotiated would be dead simply because he was its sponsor.”8
Few of these details are known to Israeli voters, and even if better known would likely do little to alter the conclusion most of them have drawn: there is no Palestinian partner for peace. Ari Shavit, the author of My Promised Land, is a leading promoter of this view: “To this day Abbas has not responded positively to the offer of 100 percent made to him by … Olmert.” In a column about the futility of further negotiations, Shavit wrote: “Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, and Tzipi Livni offered the whole world to the Palestinians, and the Palestinians were not satisfied.”9
Whatever the public’s misperceptions regarding Olmert’s proposal and Abbas’s calculations, they are right about three key points. First, over the past two decades, Palestinian positions have not changed significantly. The PLO has remained fixed in its demand for territory equivalent to all of the West Bank and Gaza; in its view, it has already made major concessions by formally recognizing Israel, in 1993, and agreeing, in 1988, to a state on 22 percent of Mandatory Palestine.10
Second, Olmert offered far more land than any other Israeli leader, continuing a trend of increased territorial concessions in each successive round of official negotiations. In May 2000, Israel offered 66 percent of the West Bank, annexing 17 percent with another 17 percent not annexed but under its control and no swap of Israeli land; the numbers steadily rose until Olmert’s proposal of 99.5 percent, including swaps. Third, Abbas did not accept the deal. As he has explained, “The gaps were wide.”11 In the years since, they have only widened.
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In 2013, Israel’s highest-rated television station, Channel 2, showed a news segment asking whether the possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict was not already dead. The answer, as presented in the anchor’s concluding remarks and by most interviewees—left, right, religious, secular—was that two states had become unattainable.
Even as Secretary of State John Kerry expressed renewed American hope of resolving the conflict—within “a year and a half to two years or it’s over,” he said before launching talks in 2013—the Israeli public had never been more skeptical about the prospect of a negotiated settlement.12 Some of this pessimism surely derived from familiar, frequently cited reasons: the failure of Palestinian leaders to accept what most Israelis view as generous offers; the suicide bombings during the Second Intifada; increased rocket fire from Gaza following Israel’s withdrawal; Hamas’s electoral victory.
But these causes cannot fully account for Israeli doubts. None of them explains how in March 2006—weeks after Palestinians nominated Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh as prime minister, and months after Israel’s retreat from Gaza was met with continued projectile fire—Israelis gave an overwhelming plurality of their votes to the Kadima Party, which advocated further negotiations and a unilateral withdrawal from much of the West Bank if those talks were to fail. This election and the subsequent one, three years later, took place amid heightened tensions with the Palestinians, yet parties proposing compromise and territorial withdrawal were embraced.
By June 2009, even Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of Likud, home to many supporters of annexation, had declared conditional support for two states. A founder of the settler movement called Netanyahu’s declaration “a revolutionary ideological turn equivalent to the shattering of the party’s Ten Commandments.” Others were and have remained skeptical that Netanyahu meant it—not only his liberal critics but also many of his allies. The Likud charter still maintained its rejection of a Palestinian state. Yet Netanyahu’s declared support for Palestinian statehood grew only firmer. In May 2013—when the share of Jews had already shrunk to less than half the population of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza—for the first time he used a demographic argument: the purpose of an agreement was to prevent the eventuality of a binational state.13
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By 2013, Israel’s government represented a significant rightward shift in mainstream Israeli thought. More than one in six of the coalition’s members resided beyond the pre-1967 lines. Roughly one-third of Knesset members were religious, a record. Another overlapping third were members of the Land of Israel caucus, dedicated to strengthening the settlements. And many government ministers advocated some form of annexation of the West Bank. Like Netanyahu, however, most Israeli Jews said they would accept a two-state solution (even though they also believed it unlikely to materialize), but the terms on which they were willing to do so were hardly realistic. As the leader of the pro-annexation Jewish Home Party, Naftali Bennett, pointed out, “Some say they are against the division of Jerusalem but they are in favor of a Palestinian state. And I ask, where exactly would the Palestinian capital be? In Jericho? In Bethlehem? In Berlin?”14
The right grew stronger as the arguments of the left and center were discredited. Promoters of negotiations failed to convey how high a price a peace agreement would exact. They told themselves and the public that the outlines of a deal were well known and asserted that agreement existed where it did not. Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat, a veteran of the Carter and Clinton administrations, writes in The Future of the Jews that it is “commonly understood that the largest settlement blocks would remain under Israeli control in any final peace agreement.” Israelis, likewise, speak of “consensus” settlements. But the common understanding of which Eizenstat writes was shared only by Israelis and their supporters. Leaked Palestinian transcripts from the Annapolis talks of 2007–2008 record the two sides fighting fiercely over the future status of what Israelis consider one of the most “consensus” settlements of all, Ma’ale Adumim, east of Jerusalem, with some forty thousand residents.15
Claims that peace is within grasp have been as overstated as warnings that the perpetually closing window for a two-state solution has nearly shut or that the occupation of the West Bank will make Israel an international pariah. In the countries in which the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel have made the largest gains—South Africa and the United Kingdom—Israeli exports have in fact sharply risen. Israelis are not overly worried that the EU will go significantly beyond wringing its hands over the way its financial support of the PA effectively underwrites Israel’s occupation.16
Even if boycotts of Israeli companies headquartered in the West Bank gained steam, they would not stop the country’s banks, cable television companies, or supermarkets from operating beyond the 1967 lines; nor would they significantly reduce the number of settlers, most of whom work not at factories adjacent to Ariel but in government jobs in settlements and in the private sector in Israel proper—at places like Intel, Bank Leumi, and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries.17 And while elite attitudes toward Israel in the United States are changing, the share of Americans who support Israel over the Palestinians is as large a majority today as it was a decade ago.18
Years of relative quiet in the West Bank following the Second Intifada undermined the charge that the half-decade-old military occupation was unsustainable. Secretary Kerry warned that Israel would “be left to choose between being a Jewish state or a democratic state.”19 But limited Palestinian self-governance, including close security cooperation with Israel, has protected the country from having to make any such choice.
Thanks in part to a well-financed international support system for the occupation, Israelis could afford to be supportive of a two-state solution on unrealistic terms, justifiably skeptical that such a deal would be made, and apathetic about the consequences of not reaching one. And since partial territorial withdrawals had not put an end to Palestinian violence, the right was able to advance its argument that the conflict is neither primarily territorial nor based on grievances stemming from Israel’s 1967 conquest. In this view, the century-long struggle is insoluble, because for Palestinians the core of it is not occupation but their displacement due to Zionist settlement.
Among intellectuals, too, there was growing skepticism that the old model of land for peace could work in Israel-Palestine. The assumption of American and Israeli negotiators that solving the problems of 1967 would close the door on those of 1948 came under powerful rebuke in two original books, published in 2011 and 2012, from distant points on the Israeli political spectrum: the historian Asher Susser’s Israel, Jordan, and Palestine: The Two-State Imperative and the sociologist Yehouda Shenhav’s Beyond the Two-State Solution. Susser documents how the gaps between the two sides, or at least some leading spokesmen from the two sides, have narrowed on issues deriving from the 1967 war—borders, settlements, and security arrangements—while “little if any real progress was made in resolving the 1948 question of refugee return.”21
The right’s case was further bolstered as strife expanded on each side of the Green Line. The border between Israel and Palestine seemed to fade: it was systematically buried under Israeli settlement housing and infrastructure, and its prominence further eroded as Jewish nationalist attacks spread from the Occupied Territories to Israel, taking the form of arson, vandalism, and violence against Palestinian citizens of the state. Jewish activists extended their demographic battle to cities in Israel proper, buying homes in Palestinian neighborhoods in Ramla, Akko, and Lod. Dozens of Israel’s municipal chief rabbis signed a ruling forbidding the rental of homes to non-Jews.20 Palestinian citizens of Israel forged closer ties with communities in the West Bank, and, in the Palestinian diaspora, the BDS movement grew.
But these trends, which to many seemed to signal the hopelessness of territorial division, could also be seen as a backlash against the more powerful forces of partition. Rather than ruin the chance of separation, the Second Intifada had accelerated it, culminating in the evacuation of all settlers from Gaza. After the Gaza withdrawal, right-wing and national religious Jews strove to reverse the division of Mandatory Palestine, their efforts reflecting the desperation of those who identified a seemingly inevitable partition that they had little ability to stop.
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Alongside Israel’s diminishing faith in a territorial resolution came an overdue shift in focus from the borders of the state to what lies within them. Among the country’s citizens, Jews but not Palestinians have collective rights to land, immigration, symbols such as their own flag, and commemorations. Jews may not legally marry non-Jews in Israel. Current residents of Jerusalem homes that were abandoned during the 1948 war have been evicted to make room for former owners and their descendants—but only when the deed holders are Jews.22
The inequality of Jews and non-Jews within Israel’s pre-1967 lines prepared the ground for still more unequal arrangements in the West Bank after 1967. Both were created by the Ashkenazi Labor Zionist elite that later criticized the settlers for dynamics it set in place. On what grounds, Shenhav asks, is the idea of Jewish settlement in ruined Palestinian villages within the pre-1967 boundaries—some of them formerly inhabited by Palestinians who were internally displaced by war—considered more moral than Jewish settlement on Palestinian agricultural lands of the West Bank? The former, he argues, involved far more human suffering. Susser, indeed any Zionist, would surely object to comparisons that would cast doubt on Israeli claims to its pre-1967 territory. But he offers strong support for the underlying premise that the root of the conflict lies in the more than century-old project of Zionist settlement itself.23
The growing awareness of these deeper, pre-1967 disputes initiated a gradual breaking with illusions and a return to the true nature of the conflict: a struggle between two ethnic groups between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The peaceful arrangements they had so far discussed had all fallen short of both the full sovereignty Palestinians desired and the hard ethnic separation the Israeli mainstream sought. As Susser writes: “The Palestinian state that the Israelis were willing to endorse was never a fully sovereign and independent member of the family of nations, but an emasculated, demilitarized, and supervised entity, with Israeli control of its airspace and possibly of its borders too, and some element of Israeli and/or foreign military presence.”24 This was as true for Netanyahu as for Olmert, Barak, Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin, who a month before his assassination told the Knesset that the Palestinians would have “less than a state.”25
In addition, Susser argues, Israel almost certainly will not achieve an end of conflict, much less recognition of a Jewish state, unless it meets Palestinian demands to admit responsibility for the flight and expulsion of refugees of the 1948 war.26 Israeli leaders have been unwilling to answer these calls, fearing that any such acknowledgment or acceptance of claims to return would shake the foundations of the state, undermine its international legitimacy, and upend decades of Zionist teaching by conceding that at its birth Israel was responsible for forcibly dispossessing large numbers of Palestinian civilians from their homes.
Kerry’s talks, like those between Olmert and Abbas, did not come close to resolving the 1967 issues, much less the 1948 ones. As the list of failed negotiations grows, Israelis will be more prone to ask themselves whether the time has come to postpone hopes of a full peace in order to achieve—perhaps through cease-fires or additional withdrawals—a further separation. They would thereby fortify an arrangement that is more than one state but less than two, which is, in fact, all that was ever on offer.
—July 2013