The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock

3. Passionate Intensities: or Why No Other Plan Will Work

3. Passionate Intensities or Why No Other Plan Will Work All diplomacy and debate about the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip mention their withdrawal or “dismantling” as a necessary measure for peace. But “dismantling” the West Bank settlements is a far more daunting prospect than most people realize. As described in chapter 2, the settlement grid is no bundle of temporary housing that can be taken down and carried off on trucks; it is a huge and deliberately sprawling network of modern cities and suburbs built of stone and concrete. Its economic weight is equally monumental ; just evacuating the settlers, while leaving the settlements intact, would cost billions of dollars in lost private and business investments and in relocation and compensation costs. The grid’s political weight is even more tenacious, being embedded in the programs and even the design of state institutions, including the ministries , some parties, and the Jewish-national state agencies (the Jewish Agency, the World Zionist Organization, the Israel Lands Authority, and the Jewish National Fund). To effect any meaningful withdrawal, then, very hard political decisions would have to be made and vast resources would have to be 51 dedicated. Only a political will of iron—of some Israeli prime minister with an unassailable political base, able to muster the necessary resources and navigate the storms of controversy—could reverse the present trajectory toward annexation. Yet that will is conspicuously missing, for a very good reason: there is no suf‹cient political pressure , internal or external, to create it. To some hopeful observers, the necessary political will seemed to manifest brie›y in Yitzhak Rabin, who negotiated the 1993 Oslo Accord. The 1995 Oslo II Accord laid the basis for the Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority (PA) and seemed to signal that a staged withdrawal of Israeli military forces, withdrawal of the settlements , a viable Palestinian state, and a stable peace might ‹nally be in the of‹ng. But that impression was an illusion. Nothing in Oslo II called for withdrawing any settlements; the entire question was postponed (as always) to never-reached “permanent status” talks. Indeed, behind the scenes, the settlement grid grew rapidly during Rabin’s tenure and continued to expand under Labor Prime Ministers Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak as well as Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, more than doubling its population in the 1990s. Indeed, for political reasons explored in this chapter, no meaningful settlement withdrawal was in Rabin’s political sights. While he gestured with one hand (internationally) about their withdrawal, he signaled with the other (domestically) for their growth. Despite his skilled diplomatic maneuvering, however, Rabin’s posturing about a meaningful withdrawal from the occupied territories engaged Israel’s political mine‹eld, leading to his assassination in 1995. The religious-nationalist youth who killed him hardly de‹nes Israeli public opinion, of course. Jewish-Israeli opinion is deeply divided about the settlements; the grid’s most eloquent critics include leftist Israelis and Israeli-Jewish human rights groups. Some people denounce the settlements because their ruinous impact on Palestinian society so starkly violates Israel’s proclaimed liberal-democratic values; others denounce the settlements simply because they so clearly ruin any peace plans. Centrist and even some right-wing voices now call for withdrawing the settlements because of their ominous implications for a binational state (as explained The One-State Solution 52 later in this chapter). But all these opponents of the settlements lack suf‹cient political cohesion to affect state policy seriously, especially in the fearful context of Palestinian terror attacks and the country’s climate of security emergency. Israeli state policy is instead steered by currents of Zionist thought, which hold that withdrawing from the West Bank would make no political or moral sense or would even defy the will of God. This segment is no microminority of zealots. In the last decade, it has become a well-organized and growing coalition of right-wing religious and ultranationalist groups who have gained central state in›uence and for whom the settlements have a symbolic value beyond material calculation. Any serious attempt at a major settlement withdrawal is precluded by this camp, not so much by direct electoral clout as by its capacity to threaten the very fabric of Israeli national unity. If, under some compelling circumstances, an Israeli government made a withdrawal attempt, abiding ‹ssures within Israeli politics would split apart, rupturing Zionism’s...