Israel-Palestine: Two State Stress Test

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Israel-Palestine: Two State Stress Test

By : Jadaliyya Reports

 [The following report was released by European Council on Foreign Relations on 12 December 2013.]

 

Today ECFR is launching the “Two State-Stress Test” (TSST) – a new online tool that provides a comprehensive assessment of the key issues that would make or break a two-state outcome between Israel and Palestine. The TSST is based on an innovative methodology that allows policy makers to assess the progress towards and the regression away from the goal of a two-state solution.

The main findings of the 2013 TSST show a lead sustainer of the two state option and several strainers:

  • Diplomacy On the one hand, US-led diplomatic efforts were again on display this past weekend when Obama and Kerry addressed a US-Israel forum in Washington. This came after last week’s visit by Kerry to Israel Palestine, the seventh since he was appointed. The Two State Stress Test indicates that a lessening of this intensity would leave the prospects for the two-state solution even more fragile.

On the other hand, the largest strain on prospects for the two-state solution come from two main issues:

  • Settlements: The territorial issue and particularly the continued expansion of Israeli settlements both in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem –at a conspicuously faster pace since peace talks have resumed.
  • Political debate in Israel: The dynamics of the Israeli political and public debate which combines little public confidence in the talks, cabinet and ruling coalition members openly opposing two states and advocating different variations on annexation of the West Bank, and tepid popular support for commonly agreed parameters for a two-state solution.

The findings are grouped into seven categories: the main traditional dossiers for negotiations (East Jerusalem, territory/borders, security and refugees) along with a measurement of the degree of diplomatic activity, and a survey of the political and public debate on both sides.

 


The TSST Factsheet

Categories are scored from 0 (maximum sustain for the two-state solution) to 5 (maximum strain for the two-state solution). 

Territory: score – 4

The number of settlers in the West Bank grows at a higher speed than natural population growth in Israel. The first six months of 2013 saw a 70 percent increase in new construction starts in settlements of the West Bank compared to the same period in 2012. No permanent checkpoints have been dismantled while flying checkpoints have been established at a higher rate than in 2012.

Jerusalem: score - 3

Despite occasional claims of an undeclared settlement freeze in East Jerusalem, the Israeli government issued tenders for 1,618 housing units in the settlements of East Jerusalem, when talks were underway. Demolitions and evictions of Palestinians are on the rise from 2012.

Diplomacy: score - 2

Since Barack Obama’s first presidential visit to Israel and the West Bank in March 2013, the US has entered a period of intense engagement while the EU’s decision to issue guidelines excluding settlements from EU projects along with increasing talk of labelling settlement products, and the consequent alarm this has provoked amongst Israelis, represent a potentially significant milestone in attempts to alter Israel’s cost/benefit calculations towards the occupation – although the extent to which the EU will apply its leverage remains unclear.

Security: score 3

 Palestinian violence was limited during the first half of 2013, almost reaching the level of security enjoyed by Israel in 2012, when no Israelis died in the West Bank. The second half, however, saw an up-tick in “lone-wolf” attacks. Palestinian factions have fired a total of 87 projectiles towards Israel from the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. This represents 3.42 percent of those fired in 2012. Israeli state violence has also remained limited and, despite occasional flare-ups in Gaza, the November 2012 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has largely held.

Refugees: score 3

Almost all Palestinians polled (92 percent) think that at least an acknowledgement in principle of the right to return is needed in order to make a peace deal “tolerable”, while a majority is ready to compromise on the implementation of the right of return. Only 15.3 percent of Jewish Israelis polled support a limited return for Palestinian refugees and only 23.9 percent agree that Israel should accept partial historical responsibility for the suffering of Palestinian refugees.

The Palestinian debate: score 3

The Palestinian debate: 55 percent of Palestinians from the OPTs said in March 2013 that they supported a two-state solution but only 11 percent of Palestinians from the OPTs said that the current talks will lead to an agreement in one year, 19 percent predicted that this would happen in five years, and 22 percent said that an agreement is inevitable but that it would take more than five years; 47 percent, meanwhile, said that they did not believe that a peace agreement would ever be reached.

The Israeli debate: score 4

In 2013, 62 percent of Israelis supported the two-state solution but only 28.8 percent think that a two-state solution can be achieved through negotiations; 51 percent of Israelis think that it is absolutely impossible to reach a final status agreement with the Palestinians; and 68 percent said that this would be impossible to achieve in the next five years.

 

 

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412