Settlements, annexation, and the prospect for hope in Israel and Palestine
Yuval Joyce Shalev
In November of 2019, the Trump administration declared that the United States has officially reverted its position on the legality of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Contra to the previous four decades of American policy with respect to the settlements, and in direct contravention of international law, the settlements are no longer illegal, in the eyes of the Trump Administration. “We’ve recognised the reality on the ground”, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters, and “the establishment of Israeli civilian settlements, in the West Bank, is not, per se, inconsistent with international law”.
Seemingly acting with the intention of further vitiating Palestinian-Israeli relations, the Trump administration later announced their new, ‘Deal of the Century’. This ‘peace plan’ hopes to offer the Palestinian people economic investment into Palestine in return for collective – Palestinian – acquiescence and the relinquishment of their hope for meaningful autonomy and self-determination. Bartering money for freedom is hardly redolent of the American dream. Yet, policy failures of this kind are hardly surprising, given that under the general auspices of U.S. foreign policy – and with the U.S. acting as the self-proclaimed custodian of the region – the Israel-Palestine conflict has become the most intractable conflict in the world.
What is clear, though, is that Trump’s newly announced ‘Middle East peace plan’ is not much more than a façade. A tawdry exhibition of peace-making. Having facilitated the atrophy of Palestinian-Israeli relations, and having eroded any semblance of a coherent two-state solution, it is only par for the course that the capacity of the Trump administration – and any U.S. government in general – to arbitrate in any meaningful manner has been called in to question.
Trump’s newly announced ‘Middle East peace plan’ is not much more than a façade. A tawdry exhibition of peace-making.
The already emaciated, ailing two-state solution is now quite simply unworkable. Though for most of the world it is plain to see, the Trump administration is either blind to, or simply ignores the fact that a viable two-state solution is necessitated by two, contiguous territories with secure pre-determined borders. By building new settlements and reconfiguring the borders of a would-be Palestine to accommodate these new settlements, the Netanyahu and Trump administrations have shown that they are not committed to a two-state solution.
Outwardly and as a whole, Israelis may seem ostensible beneficiaries of the Netanyahu-Trump collusion. The obscure alliance of the hawkish Israeli right and its evangelical American counterpart is uniquely corrosive in that it harms, or will harm in the future, all the conflict’s stakeholders. Continued settlement building engenders further conflict by precluding a viable future Palestinian state. Some Israelis, like myself, do not particularly welcome a future in which we live in a state that is quarrelling endlessly with its neighbours, and we are not especially enamoured of the fact that this is happening, in part, so that settlers can live out their messianic delusions.
It is difficult to quantify the exact proportion of the Israeli population that share this sentiment, and the degree to which it is felt across Israel’s various demographics, though a recent 2015 poll carried out in Israel has found that 38% of respondents support the dismantling of settlements in the West Bank, with another poll showing that 25.4% of Israeli Jews ‘strongly oppose’ formally annexing all the territories conquered in the 1967 war that Israel still holds.
The one thing that is certain for Israelis like myself who find themselves in this quandary, is that we can no longer reconcile the actions of sections of our population, and of our government, with what we believe to be true about the nature of the conflict, and the prospect for its resolution.
The very notion of a liberal, secular Israeli is a contradiction in terms, unless they – we – endeavour to make a change.
Israelis who believe in the most elementary human rights principles, who also live under the protective aegis of a government that continuously denudes our nearest neighbours of those very rights, are living lives that are increasingly ego-dystonic, so long as they remain silent. The very notion of a liberal, secular Israeli is a contradiction in terms, unless they – we – endeavour to make a change.
The settler endeavour into the West Bank, following its victory during the Six-Day War of 1967, is illegal by light of international law, and given that settlements and their settlers receive a disproportionate chunk of Israeli government financial support – some of which is funded by the American taxpayer – it is easy to see why some secular Israelis are not happy with America’s support of the settler mission. Solipsistic as we all are, why has this fact only become a source of outrage for so few Israeli and American taxpayers?
Continued settlement building, and the looming spectre of further annexation paint a bleak picture of the immediate future of the Palestinians. A quick glance at the cartographic cheeseboard that is an up-to-date map of the West Bank and you will see that Israeli settlement, and consequent militarised road building, has transformed the remaining areas of the West Bank still under Palestinian control into a number of non-contiguous enclaves. This is hardly a viable model for a future Palestinian state.
The Palestinians are, however, extremely resilient. Armed with the power of facing unpleasant facts, it is unlikely that further settlement building or the prospect of imminent annexation like these will attenuate their demands for self-determination. What has been illustrated, if nothing else, by the supercilious smiles of Netanyahu and Trump, as they announced the ‘deal of the century’, is that they only ‘do’ diplomacy ostentatiously. The triangulations of these two demagogues has backed them into a corner. They have no one left to lie to.
By shattering the façade of the two-state solution – a solution which was probably never offered to the Palestinians with an earnest intention of making it work in the first place – Trump has unwittingly given the Palestinians the perfect platform. Rather than labour on hopelessness and without consolation the Palestinians must use the death of the two-state solution as a platform from which to demand their true freedom.
For more geographical context on settlement-building in the West Bank, please visit this explainer.