Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
The outcome of the Israeli election has sounded the death knell for the two-state solution. There are not 61 votes for it in the new Knesset of 120 seats. A good 64 of the just-elected and/or re-elected Members of Parliament favor accelerated Israeli colonization of the West Bank and oppose Palestinian statehood. Most militant of all is Avigdor Lieberman, a former bouncer from Moldova who has risen in Israeli politics on a platform of racial hatred for Israeli-Palestinians (20% of the population), whom he has urged be “executed” or made to take loyalty oaths, stripped of their citizenship and possibly transferred to the Palestine Authority.
With Lieberman emerging as kingmaker in the new government, logically speaking, there are only three other plausible future relationships of Israel and the Palestinians:
1. Apartheid, with Israeli citizens dominating stateless Palestinians and controlling their borders, land, water and air. Apartheid would be accelerated under Lieberman’s baleful influence. Over time, this outcome would break down, since it will be unacceptable to the rest of the world over the coming decades).
2. Expulsion. The Israelis could try to violently expel the Palestinians (and possibly Israeli-Palestinians as well), creating a massive new wave of refugees in Jordan or Egypt’s Sinai. (This option would almost certainly end the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan and might well push the Arab states into the arms of Iran, creating a powerful anti-Israel military coalition and a huge set of threats to the United States.)
3. One State. The Israelis could be forced over time, by economic and technological boycotts, to grant citizenship to the Palestinians of the occupied territories.
Some Neoconservatives have proposed that Jordan could take back part of the West Bank and Egypt could take back the Gaza Strip. However, the Jordanian and Egyptian regimes will absolutely not do so, leading back to option (2) above. Jordan’s government is based on the East Bank, Bedouin-origin population and has anxieties about the 60 percent of the population that is already of Palestinian origin. Egypt’s relatively secular elites are afraid of Muslim radicalism and would not want to have Hamas become part of Egypt. Both Egypt and Jordan bought into the Arab League position that the PLO is the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and they cannot go against this principle without enormous trouble, even from their own populations, who engaged in huge protests during the recent Gaza war against these governments continuing to have diplomatic relations with Israel.
Since President Obama sent out George Mitchell to attempt to kickstart the peace process and get back on track to a two-state solution, both have now had the rug pulled out from under tham by an Israeli public moving to the far right.
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2 responses so far ↓
1 israeli // Feb 18, 2009 at 1:28 pm
i am an israeli, who is very opposed to liberman and voted for one of the left-wing parties. i am opposed strongly to his participation in a government.
however, i have to note that you have some factual errors — liberman has never called for ‘execution’ of palestinians. and although he is a nationalist, he is not opposed to a two-state solution. his idea of a two-state solution is to transfer parts of israel with large arab populations to the future palestinian state. this is the reason that the far-right nationalist parties like the National Union are opposed to liberman, too.
israeli politics is quite complex and it strikes me that much of it gets ‘lost in translation’. regardless, the bottom line is that avigdor liberman is a man accused of corruption and money-laundering, who uses cheap populism and appeals to primal instincts. and these are reasons enough to oppose him!
2 Astrid Bullen // Mar 2, 2009 at 1:55 am
Lieberman is bent on showing his new colleagues he’s just like them, and he’s even giving up his plans to bomb Tehran to prove just that.
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