V. NEGOTIATION

Shlaim, The Iron Wall, p. 517.

11. MORE THAN ONE STATE, LESS THAN TWO

This chapter was updated in September 2016.

0.     For details of Olmert’s proposal, see Abrams, Tested by Zion, pp. 276–95; Susser, Israel, Jordan, and Palestine, pp. 64–68; Rabinovich, The Lingering Conflict, p. 178; Aluf Benn, “Haaretz Exclusive: Olmert’s Plan for Peace with the Palestinians,” Haaretz, December 17, 2009; Bernard Avishai, “A Plan for Peace That Still Could Be,” The New York Times Magazine, February 7, 2011; Josef Federman, “Abbas Admits He Rejected 2008 Peace Offer from Olmert,” Associated Press, November 19, 2008; “Factbox: Israeli, Palestinian Papers Reveal Peace Deal Moves,” Reuters, January 28, 2011; and the more than one thousand leaked documents archived in “The Palestine Papers,” Al Jazeera Investigations, accessed October 25, 2016.

0.     For Olmert’s quote (“I’ve been waiting”), see Avi Issachoroff, “Olmert: ‘I Am Still Waiting for Abbas to Call,’” The Tower (online), May 24, 2013.

0.     For Palestinians stating that they never heard back regarding their questions to Israel, see Abrams, Tested by Zion, p. 292. For a summary of the large gaps remaining, see comments to Abrams by Olmert’s foreign policy adviser, Shalom Tourgeman: “There was no agreement on the land swap and where it will be, no agreement of the worth of the Gaza-West Bank passage and in principle on the size of land Israel will keep. We said the major [settlement] blocks are at least 6.3 percent, if not more, and they said not more than 1.9 percent. On foreign forces [replacing Israeli ones in the West Bank] I don’t recall that it was ever an option; in all our talks we said it cannot be an option, not NATO and not other forces.” Abrams, p. 290.

0.     For discrepancies on the amount of land to be included in a swap, see Abrams, Tested by Zion, pp. 288–90; “The Palestine Papers.” Throughout the 2008 Annapolis talks, Palestinian negotiators recorded what Israel claimed was the percentage of land to be annexed and then wrote in parenthesis beside this number a higher percentage, which they believed the Israeli proposed annexation actually represented. In calculating the percentages there was confusion not just about what denominator was used (representing the total area of the pre-1967 territories) but also the numerator (representing the amount of territory Israel would annex). Palestinian negotiators weren’t sure that in the area to be annexed Israel included, for example, the 49-square-kilometer no-man’s-land or the 70 square kilometers of East Jerusalem. (Abrams and others write of percentages of the West Bank, but a territorial expert who worked with Olmert told me the percentages were of the entire Occupied Territories.) The figure of 6.8 percent (in exchange for 5.5 percent) was what Abbas wrote in the upper left corner of his hand-drawn rendition of Olmert’s September 16, 2008, map. These are the same figures a leaked PLO document states Olmert offered weeks earlier, on August 31. Abrams describes a November 24, 2008, White House meeting in which Olmert said it was an annexation of 6.5 percent, not 6.3 percent, that he proposed to Abbas; this number was repeated by the PLO’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, who himself has given inconsistent descriptions of Olmert’s proposal.

0.     For Abrams’s quote (“looked very much the same”), see Abrams, Tested by Zion, p. 291.

0.     For discrepancies on refugees (Palestinian negotiators insisted that Israel acknowledge responsibility for the refugee problem and viewed as insufficient Olmert’s offer to “acknowledge the suffering” of Palestinian refugees) and for Qurei’s quote (“territory is the easiest issue”), see ibid., pp. 288, 271.

0.     For Abrams thinking Abbas shouldn’t take the deal, Abrams telling Palestinians not to take the deal, and Abrams’s quote (“The weaker he became”), see ibid., pp. 286, 288, 233.

0.     For Abrams’s quote (“too many lacunae”), Abbas’s statement (“many people in the Israeli government”), see ibid., pp. 291, 285. For Rice’s confirmation of Abbas’s assertion (“Livni urged me (and, I believe, Abbas) not to enshrine the Olmert proposal”), see Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (New York: Crown, 2011), p. 723. For Bush’s statement (“dead simply because he was its sponsor”), see Abrams, Tested by Zion, p. 285.

0.     For Shavit’s quotes (“Abbas has not responded”) and (“the whole world to the Palestinians”), see Ari Shavit, “Hamas Still Wants to Liberate ‘All of Palestine,’” Haaretz, December 17, 2009; Ari Shavit, “Thinking Outside Two Boxes,” Haaretz, March 19, 2009.

0.   For a summary of the gap in Israeli and Palestinian perceptions, see the article by the former Palestinian negotiator Ghassan Khatib, “A Fundamental Difference of Understanding,” BitterLemons.org, accessed May 4, 2016, http://www.bitterlemons.org/previous/b1290609ed25.html: “Israelis should understand that Palestinians have a concept of compromise that is different from theirs. The Israelis are coming to the table with the idea that they are going to compromise on the Occupied Territories, i.e., the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians, on the other hand, come to negotiations with the understanding that the original dispute with Israel is over historic Palestine, and the 1967 borders are themselves a compromise that cannot be further compromised.” For the PLO’s formal, written recognition of “the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security,” which came in a September 9, 1993, letter from Arafat to Yitzhak Rabin, see “Israel-PLO Recognition-Exchange of Letters Between PM Rabin and Chairman Arafat—Sept 9–1993,” Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, accessed May 4, 2016, http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/peace/guide/pages/israel-plo%20recognition%20-%20exchange%20of%20letters%20betwe.aspx. For the PLO’s first recognition of Israel’s right to exist in peace and security, which came in a December 14, 1988, statement by Yasir Arafat that mentioned “the right of all parties concerned in the Middle East conflict to exist in peace and security and, as I have mentioned, including the state of Palestine and Israel and other neighbors according to the Resolutions 242 and 338,” see “Arafat: ‘We Are Committed to Peace. We Want to Live in Our Palestinian State and Let Live,” The Washington Post, December 15, 1988. Several days prior to this, Arafat stated at a news conference in Stockholm, “We accept two states, the Palestine state and the Jewish state of Israel.” Steve Lohr, “Arafat Says PLO Accepted Israel,” The New York Times, December 7, 1988.

0.   For Abbas’s 2009 statement (“The gaps were wide”), which came under withering criticism in the United States and Israel and which, three years later, he denied having made, see Jackson Diehl, “Abbas’s Waiting Game on Peace with Israel,” The Washington Post, May 29, 2009. For Abbas’s subsequent denial, see Raphael Ahren, “Rebutting Abbas, Condoleezza Rice Confirms Her Account of Their 2008 Refugee Conversation,” The Times of Israel, July 11, 2012. For a useful history of the territorial dimension of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, see Michael Herzog, “Minding the Gaps: Territorial Issues in Israeli-Palestinian Peacemaking,” Washington Institute for Near East Policy, December 2011. Between May 2000 and September 2008, Israeli negotiators made the following proposals: May 2000 in Eilat (66 percent, no swaps); May 2000 in Stockholm (76.6 percent, no swaps); the beginning of Camp David, in July 2000 (88.5 percent, no swaps); the end of Camp David, in July 2000 (91 percent, with a swap of Israeli land equivalent to 1 percent of the West Bank); Taba, in January 2001 (92 percent, no swaps); Livni-Qurei negotiations during the Annapolis process, in 2008 (92.7 percent, no swaps). The two offers in May 2000 proposed that additional territory (17 percent in the first offer in Eilat, 10.1 percent in Stockholm) remain under Israeli control for security reasons but ultimately become Palestinian territory.

0.   For Kerry’s quote (“or it’s over”), see Josh Gerstein, “Kerry: 1–2 Years for Mideast Peace ‘or It’s Over,’” Politico, April 17, 2013, http://www.politico.com/blogs/politico44/2013/04/kerry-1-2-years-for-mideast-peace-or-its-over-161945.

0.   For Netanyahu’s declaration of support for two states, see Address by PM Netanyahu at Bar-Ilan University, Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, June 14, 2009, http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/PressRoom/2009/Pages/Address_PM_Netanyahu_BarIlan_University_14-Jun-2009.aspx. For the quote from a founder of the settler movement (“a revolutionary ideological turn”), see Israel Harel, “Likud’s Final Term,” Haaretz, January 31, 2013. For skepticism that Netanyahu meant it, aggravated by his statement prior to the 2015 Israeli election that a Palestinian state would not be created on his watch, see Jodi Rudoren and Michael D. Shear, “Israel’s Netanyahu Reopens Door to Palestinian State, but White House Is Unimpressed,” The New York Times, March 19, 2015. Netanyahu’s statement prior to the election was retracted just after it: “I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution, but for that, circumstances have to change.… I was talking about what is achievable and what is not achievable. To make it achievable, then you have to have real negotiations with people who are committed to peace.” Though Netanyahu’s expressions of skepticism about a two-state solution have received a great deal more attention, his avowals of support for it have been far more frequent. For Netanyahu’s demographic argument in favor of two states, see Isabel Kershher, “Israeli Premier Backs Referendum on Any Peace Deal,” The New York Times, May 3, 2013.

0.   For polls showing that a majority of Israelis (and a greater majority of Israeli Jews) oppose a peace agreement based on the pre-1967 lines, see, for example, “Poll: Most Israelis Oppose Withdrawing to 1967,” Reuters, August 6, 2013. Some polls are able to find greater support among Jews for dividing Jerusalem and a peace agreement based on the pre-1967 lines, but do so by coupling these two with numerous concessions that Palestinians have given little indication they would make, for example, recognizing Israel as the state of the Jewish people, renouncing totally any right of refugee return, and accepting Israeli annexation of the large settlement blocs. For Bennett’s quote (“where exactly”), see “Bennett: A Palestinian State Will Never Be Formed,” The Jerusalem Post, May 8, 2013.

0.   For Eizenstat’s quote (“commonly understood”), see Stuart E. Eizenstat, The Future of the Jews: How Global Forces Are Impacting the Jewish People, Israel, and Its Relationship with the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), p. 152. For fierce fights over so-called “consensus” settlements such as Ma’ale Adumim, see Gregg Carlstrom, “‘The Biggest Yerushalayim,’” Al Jazeera, January 23, 2011; “Meeting Minutes: Trilateral–United States, Israel and Palestine,” The Palestine Papers, Al Jazeera Investigations, June 15, 2008.

0.   For increased Israeli trade with countries where BDS has made large gains, see David Rosenberg, “Three Cheers for Yair Lapid,” Haaretz, April 3, 2013: “Israeli exports to South Africa climbed 35.6% in the last three years, to Britain by 148%, and to Turkey by 32.3%.” For the steady increase in the EU’s trade of goods with Israel from 2013 to 2015, see “Israel—Trade Statistics,” Directorate-General for Trade, European Commission, accessed September 23, 2016, http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2006/september/tradoc_111672.pdf. For the steps against settlements so far taken by the EU, most notably the July 2013 approval of guidelines that restrict the awards given by the European Commission—but not those by European Union member states—to Israeli entities operating in territories Israel conquered in 1967, see “Guidelines on the Eligibility of Israeli Entities and Their Activities in the Territories Occupied by Israel Since June 1967 for Grants, Prizes and Financial Instruments Funded by the EU from 2014 Onwards,” Official Journal of the European Union, July 19, 2013, C 205/9-11. The guidelines received considerable attention in the Israeli press but substantively changed very little: they were not binding on EU member states; though they restricted European Commission support—e.g., grants, prizes, and financial instruments—to Israeli entities in the West Bank and Golan Heights, such support was minimal to begin with; they did not affect trade between Israel and Europe; and they did not apply to Israeli government offices, such as the Ministry of Justice, that are located beyond Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries.

0.   For figures showing that the majority of the settlement workforce is employed outside the settlements, see Human Rights Watch, “Occupation, Inc.: How Settlement Businesses Contribute to Israel’s Violations of Palestinian Rights,” January 19, 2016. Among the minority of jobs inside the settlements, many are in the public sector, not in factories whose products could be boycotted; settlements receive a disproportionate share of the state budget, allowing them to hire greater numbers of state employees in such fields as education. For studies showing that municipalities and settlements east of the separation barrier have received about twice as much per resident and per student as communities in Israel proper, see MACRO—The Center for Political Economics, “A Comprehensive Analysis of the Settlements’ Economic Costs and Alternative Costs to the State of Israel,” February 19, 2015; Roby Nathanson and Itamar Gazala, “Allocation of Government Resources to Education by National Priority Areas and the West Bank,” MACRO—The Center for Political Economics, July 20, 2015, p. 3.

0.   American support for Israel has been quite consistent in annual surveys over the past decade. If anything, it has slightly increased in Israel’s favor. In 2006, the share of Americans who stated that their sympathies lie with Israel was 59 percent; sympathy with the Palestinians was 15 percent; and sympathy with neither was 26 percent, http://www.jewishdatabank.org/studies/downloadFile.cfm?FileID=2772. In 2016, the numbers were almost identical: support for the Palestinians remained the same, support for neither dropped to 23 percent, and support for Israel rose to 62 percent. See “Americans’ Views Toward Israel Remain Firmly Positive,” Gallup, February 29, 2016, http://www.gallup.com/poll/189626/americans-views-toward-israel-remain-firmly-positive.aspx. For a separate study showing similar consistency over time, see “Public Uncertain, Divided over America’s Place in the World,” Pew Research Center, May 5, 2016, p. 41, http://www.people-press.org/files/2016/05/05-05-2016-Foreign-policy-APW-release.pdf. The same poll found that, compared to older generations, those born after 1980 (“Millennials”) supported Israel (43 percent) much more than the Palestinians (27 percent), but this gap was smaller than that found among the population at large (54 percent support for Israel and 19 percent for the Palestinians). Among Jews, there may also be a generational gap, though both the findings and the possible causes of it have been disputed. For a 2013 Pew poll finding that 18- to 29-year-old American Jews are more attached to Israel than 30- to 49-year-olds (both overall and among Conservative Jews, Reform Jews, and Jews of no denomination), see chapter 5, “Connection with and Attitudes Toward Israel,” in A Portrait of Jewish Americans: Findings from a Pew Research Center Survey of U.S. Jews, Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project, October 1, 2013, p. 82. For a 2012 poll finding young Jews have greater attachment to Israel than their elders, see Chemi Shalev, “Poll: Young American Jews Are Growing More Attached to Israel,” Haaretz, July 9, 2012. For a study that finds younger Jews more distant from Israel than older Jews, but that attributes this more to intermarriage and generational effects than to political disagreements, see Steven M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kelman (with the assistance of Lauren Blitzer), “Beyond Distancing: Young Adult American Jews and Their Alienation from Israel,” Jewish Identity Project of Reboot, 2007; see also Theodore Sasson, Benjamin Phillips, Graham Wright, Charles Kadushin, and Leonard Saxe, “Understanding Young Adult Attachment to Israel: Period, Lifecycle, and Generational Dynamics,” Contemporary Jewry 32, no.1 (April 2012): 67–84. If current trends continue, the distancing of young non-Orthodox American Jews from Israel may be temporary. The majority of American Jews in their twenties today have one non-Jewish parent, but leading sociologists such as Steven Cohen expect that many of their children will not identify as Jewish at all; the result is that these offspring, self-identified non-Jews, will have attitudes toward Israel that resemble those of the rest of the US population (if the current trajectory does not change), while the remaining population that identifies as Jewish will be more Orthodox, conservative, and pro-Israel than the current generation.

0.   For Kerry’s quote (“left to choose”), see Paul Richter, “Kerry Presses Peace Deal at American Jewish Committee Meeting,” The Los Angeles Times, June 3, 2013.

0.   For protests that erupted in Jewish neighborhoods in which Palestinian families bought homes, see Noa Shpigel, “Hundreds Rally in Northern Israel Against Housing for Arabs,” Haaretz, December 27, 2015. For more on the sense of a fading Green Line, see the interview with former Jerusalem deputy mayor Meron Benvenisti in Ari Shavit, “Jerusalem-Born Thinker Meron Benvenisti Has a Message for Israelis: Stop Whining,” Haaretz, October 11, 2012.

0.   See Susser, Israel, Jordan, and Palestine, p. 220; Yehouda Shenhav, Beyond the Two-State Solution: A Jewish Political Essay, Dimi Reider and Efrat Weiss, trans. (Cambridge: Polity, 2012). For Susser’s quote (“little if any real progress”), see Susser, p. 218.

0.   For the inequality in collective rights, see Dr. Yousef T. Jabareen, “The Politics of Equality: The Limits of Collective Rights Litigation and the Case of the Palestinian-Arab Minority in Israel,” Columbia Journal of Race and Law 4, no. 1 (2013): 23–54; Amal Jamal, “On the Morality of Arab Collective Rights in Israel,” Adalah Newsletter, vol. 12, April 2005; International Crisis Group, “Back to Basics: Israel’s Arab Minority and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Middle East Report no. 119, March 14, 2012. For restrictions on marriage, see “660,000 Israelis Unable to Get Married Here,” The Times of Israel, January 12, 2016. Because Israel does not offer civil marriage and the Chief Rabbinate of Israel will not perform interfaith marriages, Jews who wish to marry those the Rabbinate considers non-Jews (a category that includes hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, many of whom consider themselves Jewish) must either have their partners convert to Orthodox Judaism (non-Orthodox conversions are not recognized), marry within a church (an option that very few Jews choose), or travel abroad to conduct a civil marriage. Approximately one in five Israeli couples register their marriages abroad. For the inequality in reclaiming homes abandoned in the 1948 war, see Association for Civil Rights in Israel, “East Jerusalem 2015: Facts and Figures,” May 12, 2015, p. 9; for a recent example, see Nir Hasson, “Five Palestinian Families in East Jerusalem Evicted from Homes,” Haaretz, October 19, 2015.

0.   For more on Palestinian citizens and residents of Israel who lived under military rule from 1948 until the end of 1966 and were unable to obtain citizenship until 1952 (and in many cases not until long after that, if they were not counted in the population registry or had no proof of identity), see chapter 2. For Shenhav on the “emulation” by West Bank settlers of what Zionists did within Israel proper prior to 1967, the “false distinction” between pre-1967 and post-1967 Israel, the inequality of Palestinians in Israel living under military rule until 1966, and the fact that pre-1967 Israeli settlements more often sit atop ruined Palestinian villages than post-1967 ones, see Shenhav, Beyond the Two-State Solution, pp. 15, 20, 23, 99–102.

0.   For the Susser quote (“never a fully sovereign”), see Susser, Israel, Jordan, and Palestine, p. 220.

0.   For Rabin’s quote, see Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin: Ratification of the Israel-Palestinian Interim Agreement—The Knesset,” October 5, 1995.

0.   The war that followed the November 1947 UN Partition Resolution, commonly referred to as the 1948 war, is typically divided by historians into two phases: first, a civil war in Mandatory Palestine, beginning just after the UN General Assembly passed the November 29, 1947, resolution calling for partition; and second, an Arab-Israeli war, which commenced with attacks by Arab states on Israel following the latter’s May 14, 1948, declaration of independence (the day the British Mandate expired) and ended with the armistice agreements Israel and its neighbors signed in 1949. Many of the war’s deaths and displacements took place during its first phase. By the time the second phase began, in May 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians (most estimates range from 250,000 to 350,000) had already been displaced, and more than 2,000 Jews had already been killed (of a total of roughly 6,000 Jewish deaths during the war). For sources and more detailed figures, see chapter 2, n. 8.