No End in Sight? Prolonged Conflict in Israel/Palestine

Until 1967 the 1949 ceasefire lines between Israel and two of its Arab neighbors – Jordan and Egypt – functioned as boundaries between Israel and the Palestinian people. Those boundaries were breached in 1967 and the West Bank and Gaza Strip became frontier areas, where Israel and the Palestinians have struggled for control. The Oslo Accords of 1993, where both sides recognized, formally at least, each other’s nationhood and legitimate national aspirations, were an attempt to reestablish the boundary between the two national entities. The failure of the Oslo peace process in 2000 doomed the Occupied Palestinian Territories to the status of open frontiers where two population groups of unequal power vie for domination. This was a tragedy culminating, so far, in the current brutal war in Gaza (and its offspring in Lebanon), triggered by the massacre carried out by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Even during the years when Israel was formally committed to reestablishing the boundary between itself and the Palestinians through a two-state solution, in actual fact it treated the West Bank and Gaza Strip as frontier areas by establishing Jewish settlements there. The Jewish settlers, spearheaded by militant, messianic Religious Zionists, succeeded in sabotaging the Oslo peace process. The highest point of their efforts was the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had signed the Oslo Accords, in 1995. In 2005 Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a retired general and staunch hawk, attempted to close the Gaza frontier by withdrawing Israeli forces and civilian settlements from that area while maintaining tight control over it from the outside. The rationale behind that unilateral withdrawal, other than saving Israeli lives and money, was to differentiate between Israel’s mode of control in Gaza and in the West Bank, so as to help undermine the notion that there was a unified Palestinian national entity. After 18 years of periodic skirmishes, the idea that this could be a viable way of closing the Gaza frontier blew up on October 7, 2023. In 2018 Israel enacted the Jewish Nation Law, stipulating that only the Jewish people have the right of national self determination in “the State of Israel,” without specifying the territorial boundaries of that land. Correspondingly, many Palestinian intellectuals and public figures have been arguing that Jews constitute a religion, not a nation, and thus do not enjoy the right of national self determination. Israel is governed now by the most right-wing populist government in its history, so the pursuit of peace through a two-state solution is not on the agenda. Should a more liberal government take power in the future, the pursuit of that policy would risk a full-scale regime crisis — mass disobedience in the military, challenges to the authority of the state, and intra-Jewish political violence. The most likely outcome, therefore, is continuation of the current one-state reality encompassing two frontier areas where a more-or-less violent conflict is a permanent feature of life and where both sides deny each other’s right of national self-determination.