The prime minister said he won’t allow the Palestinian Authority to take over Gaza, his sharpest comments yet against the White House plan for after the war.
I’ve been following this conflict for 30 years, but from afar, so I don’t claim to know the hearts and minds of the participants. I don’t know, and neither do you, if the previous attempts at a two-state solution were genuine or if they could have been implemented on the ground.
What I do know is that there is no perfect solution that will make both sides entirely happy. When you call attempts at coming to agreement “fake” it is neither correct nor helpful. Generally speaking, Labor governments in Israel have been willing to make concessions for a two-state solution, and conservative governments haven’t. That doesn’t mean that the positive efforts have been “fake”.
Since the mid-2000s, it looks to me like the play by both Hamas and Israeli conservative governments has been to ratchet up tension, force new “facts on the ground”, and provoke a violent confrontation. Sadly, the extremist strategy has achieved its goal of provoking massive violence and suffering. It remains to be seen if this strategy will break the status quo or just be another bloody chapter in an unresolved conflict.
I am sorry to tell you this, but you definitely ought look deeper into the peace accords as they were discussed at the time. Especially the ones at Camp David which were supposed to be the most fruitious and the ones Palestinians “threw out the door”. The Oslo accords were more of a guideline than a clear set of instructions. They were a very loose set of vague directions both sides were supposed to go down on. Before that there were no other concrete accords. One would argue that the Camp David Summit was the closest both sides ever got to making peace. So let’s take a look at that one and use it as a good compass in this discussion.
Palestinians were supposed to:
be completely demilitarized
give Israel the right to send troops to Palestine in case of any emergency (what constitutes as an emergency was never defined)
ask Israel for approval for every diplomatic alliance Palestine would ever make with other countries
have Israeli military bases installed in Palestinian territory
give the Israeli military complete control of their airspace
have israeli military outposts be installed on the border between Palestine and Jordan for a temporary amount of time
give Israel temporary control over Palestinian border crossings (without having a specified timeframe)
give up 10% of the West Bank, the most fertile land in the West Bank, for 1% territorial gains of desert land near the Gaza strip (the land that would be conceded included symbolic and cultural territories such as the Al-Aqsa Mosque, whereas the Israeli land conceded was unspecified)
Israel would keep parts of the West Bank under temporary occupation, without a timespan being given
What constitutes the West Bank was to be defined by Israel and not by international law. Israel defined West Bank as being the internationally recognized West Bank minus all the settlements they had at the time.
As you can see, all of these concessions would never amount to a completely sovereign Palestinian state, and as a result of that these talks failed in the end. To me, it looks like they were designed to fail from the get-go. Nonetheless, they did spawn new discussions and as a result of said discussion the Taba negotiations were born. With that being said, these concessions were in no way, shape, or form popular in Israel (only 25% of the Israeli public thought his positions on Camp David were just right as opposed to 58% of the public that thought Ehud Barak compromised too much). The Israeli prime minister at the time, Barak, facing elections, suspended the talks since it greatly affected his popularity in Israel. As a result of trying to broker a peace deal with Palestine, even a very bad one that was meant to fail as it was, he failed to get re-elected. The highly unbalanced concessions were already considered to be too much by Israelis.
Ehud Barak was from the Labour governments you were talking about, and this is the best Israel could ever come up with.
Trying to paint this situation as it being a level field where both sides did the same amount of wrongdoing is not a fair representation of the history of the peace process.
Since the most promising talks ever, the Camp David Summit, Israel has allowed over 750k settlers to move into the West Bank. A military regime has been installed and forced upon the occupied population contrary to international law. If getting the 30k settlers out of Gaza in 2005 was hard enough and almost caused an uproar inside the IDF, getting 750k settlers out of the West Bank will be straight up impossible without a major conflict.
There will never be two states and I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that this was in majority the doing of the Palestinians. We should talk a good look at all these facts when we start discussing this conflict and use them as a compass.
You can read more on that on Wikipedia if you’re interested in all the details. If wikipedia isn’t a good enough source, there is a great book on this subject by a german professor specializing on the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
I appreciate the detailed response. I didn’t say that Israel was willing to make concessions and Palestinians were not. I said that the two populations have factions, some of whom will make concessions.
Yes, it is true that the Palestinians were not being accorded full sovereignty in previous negotiations. The Camp David accords were understood as a “path to statehood”, not the final status. Palestinians were not in a position at the time to take on all the responsibilities of full statehood, and Israel was worried about outside forces like Iran and its proxies taking advantage of the relatively weak state of the PA to create a threat right on Israel’s front porch. Hence why they wanted to control the military and the borders of the nascent Palestinian proto-state. Don’t forget that the surrounding Muslim countries tried to kill Israel in its cradle several times, so Israel had every reason to worry about their security situation.
“in its cradle” is about the most dishonest representation of Israel declaring its statehood upon the land of Palestine as a Jewish ethnostate and forcibly displacing 750,000 Palestinians from their family homes as I have seen
I’ve been following this conflict for 30 years, but from afar, so I don’t claim to know the hearts and minds of the participants. I don’t know, and neither do you, if the previous attempts at a two-state solution were genuine or if they could have been implemented on the ground.
What I do know is that there is no perfect solution that will make both sides entirely happy. When you call attempts at coming to agreement “fake” it is neither correct nor helpful. Generally speaking, Labor governments in Israel have been willing to make concessions for a two-state solution, and conservative governments haven’t. That doesn’t mean that the positive efforts have been “fake”.
Since the mid-2000s, it looks to me like the play by both Hamas and Israeli conservative governments has been to ratchet up tension, force new “facts on the ground”, and provoke a violent confrontation. Sadly, the extremist strategy has achieved its goal of provoking massive violence and suffering. It remains to be seen if this strategy will break the status quo or just be another bloody chapter in an unresolved conflict.
I am sorry to tell you this, but you definitely ought look deeper into the peace accords as they were discussed at the time. Especially the ones at Camp David which were supposed to be the most fruitious and the ones Palestinians “threw out the door”. The Oslo accords were more of a guideline than a clear set of instructions. They were a very loose set of vague directions both sides were supposed to go down on. Before that there were no other concrete accords. One would argue that the Camp David Summit was the closest both sides ever got to making peace. So let’s take a look at that one and use it as a good compass in this discussion.
Palestinians were supposed to:
As you can see, all of these concessions would never amount to a completely sovereign Palestinian state, and as a result of that these talks failed in the end. To me, it looks like they were designed to fail from the get-go. Nonetheless, they did spawn new discussions and as a result of said discussion the Taba negotiations were born. With that being said, these concessions were in no way, shape, or form popular in Israel (only 25% of the Israeli public thought his positions on Camp David were just right as opposed to 58% of the public that thought Ehud Barak compromised too much). The Israeli prime minister at the time, Barak, facing elections, suspended the talks since it greatly affected his popularity in Israel. As a result of trying to broker a peace deal with Palestine, even a very bad one that was meant to fail as it was, he failed to get re-elected. The highly unbalanced concessions were already considered to be too much by Israelis.
Ehud Barak was from the Labour governments you were talking about, and this is the best Israel could ever come up with.
Trying to paint this situation as it being a level field where both sides did the same amount of wrongdoing is not a fair representation of the history of the peace process.
Since the most promising talks ever, the Camp David Summit, Israel has allowed over 750k settlers to move into the West Bank. A military regime has been installed and forced upon the occupied population contrary to international law. If getting the 30k settlers out of Gaza in 2005 was hard enough and almost caused an uproar inside the IDF, getting 750k settlers out of the West Bank will be straight up impossible without a major conflict.
There will never be two states and I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that this was in majority the doing of the Palestinians. We should talk a good look at all these facts when we start discussing this conflict and use them as a compass.
You can read more on that on Wikipedia if you’re interested in all the details. If wikipedia isn’t a good enough source, there is a great book on this subject by a german professor specializing on the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
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I appreciate the detailed response. I didn’t say that Israel was willing to make concessions and Palestinians were not. I said that the two populations have factions, some of whom will make concessions.
Yes, it is true that the Palestinians were not being accorded full sovereignty in previous negotiations. The Camp David accords were understood as a “path to statehood”, not the final status. Palestinians were not in a position at the time to take on all the responsibilities of full statehood, and Israel was worried about outside forces like Iran and its proxies taking advantage of the relatively weak state of the PA to create a threat right on Israel’s front porch. Hence why they wanted to control the military and the borders of the nascent Palestinian proto-state. Don’t forget that the surrounding Muslim countries tried to kill Israel in its cradle several times, so Israel had every reason to worry about their security situation.
“in its cradle” is about the most dishonest representation of Israel declaring its statehood upon the land of Palestine as a Jewish ethnostate and forcibly displacing 750,000 Palestinians from their family homes as I have seen
Calm down. Your hair-trigger outrage is showing.