Could Trump’s radical approach bring peace to Israel and Palestine?
By Ian Lustick
The Guardian
A broken watch is right twice a day. Occasionally, so is Donald Trump. In his press conference with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, he was correct to say that the two-state solution used to be the “easier” route to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. He was also correct to say that it is up to Israelis and Palestinians to decide whether they want to live in peace in two states or in one.
Trump’s affirmation that there is no alternative to peace was a dramatic, if largely unrecognised, repudiation of Netanyahu’s policy. Netanyahu, with broad support within his coalition government, rejects peace, while paying lip service to it, in favour of “managing the conflict” by militarily “mowing the lawn” every few years in Gaza and Lebanon and by means of settlement, undercover raids, and mass imprisonment in the West Bank.
Avoiding a direct clash with Netanyahu, Trump nevertheless made his rejection of that policy clear. He would be happy, he said, to support a one-state or a two-state solution, whichever was agreed to by both Israelis and Palestinians. By this simple statement, the White House excluded the option of “managing the conflict”, while transforming the “one-state solution” – some arrangement by which Palestinians and Israelis can participate equally to rule themselves within one political arena – from a nightmare or utopian vision into a framework that is no less imaginable, and no less deserving of consideration, than a framework featuring two separate arenas.
Of course neither version of a peace agreement will be forthcoming any time soon. With 10% of Israel’s Jewish population living in the West Bank, the two-state idea has been a “dead solution walking” for at least a decade. The idea of negotiations to establish one democratic state from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean is just as far-fetched. Accordingly, the only reasonable course for those committed to both peace and democracy in Palestine/Israel is to push the parties towards thinking about their predicament in radically new ways. The words spoken by Trump on Wednesday were an important step in that direction.
Granting more depth of thinking to the president’s remarks than may be warranted, they can be seen to reflect recognition that obsessive pursuit of the impossible dream of a negotiated two-state solution has only given the whip hand to Israelis and Arabs who reject both peace and democracy. Under the cover of prolonged and hopeless negotiations to trade land for peace, Israel’s government has entrenched its control over the West Bank, deepened its enforcement of an apartheid-like system of domination over the nearly three million Palestinians in the West Bank, while brutalising and immiserating nearly two million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, as the wave of terror attacks against Israelis and the recent elections within Hamas have indicated, the phony peace process does nothing for Palestinians but deepen their despair and yearning for revenge.