US Secretary of State John Kerry has given Israel and Palestine nine months to come up with a new peace agreement. The deadline expires in April. The objective is, as before, a two state solution. However, this solution has encountered a number of problems recently. The US managed, temporarily, to halt a new, massive expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, so that the Palestinians would not back down. Any potential solution between the two ‘parties’ has also been criticised for favouring Israel, as the US, in its role as mediator, clearly supports the Israelis.
If anyone was hoping for a genuine Palestinian state solution, they must have been disappointed after John Kerry stated at a meeting in Washington in December that they were working to establish Palestinian state institutions: ‘It will take time to train, build, equip and test Palestinian institutions to ensure that they are capable of protecting Palestinian citizens […] and also preventing the territory from being used for attacks on Israel.’ ¹ Kerry also said that Palestinian citizens of Israel constitute a ‘demographic time bomb’ that threatens Israel’s ‘future as a democratic Jewish state’. As early as autumn 2011, Jonas Gahr Støre pointed out that the Palestinians already had all the necessary institutions in place to be recognised as a state.² Why is one now pretending that these need to be established in the future?
The day before Kerry’s remarks, Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, speaking in Washington, denied that Israel is occupying Palestinian land. Lieberman has previously advocated ethnic cleansing, but later moderated his stance to describe it as ‘not a transfer, but an exchange of land and people’. According to the progressive Jewish-American foreign affairs website Mondoweiss, he would prefer to strip just over a million Israeli Palestinians of their Israeli passports. On the final day of the meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised US support for Israel. Netanyahu sees no reason to agree to any peace settlement with the Palestinians as long as Iran lurks in the background – or, as some would say, as long as he is able to propagate such enemy stereotypes. Obama, like Kerry, gave the impression that they are now refocusing the negotiations on a Palestinian quasi-autonomy – the formal establishment of a Palestinian state is no longer on the negotiating table.
Kerry subsequently stated during a visit to the Middle East in December that the US now wants an Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley for the next 10–15 years. This contrasts with President Abbas, who wants an international force. Kerry is also pushing for a temporary agreement, which the Palestinians regard as merely a strategic move that all too easily becomes permanent.

The repeated peace negotiations are clearly cementing the current situation, in which Israel is expanding its occupation under the guise of negotiations. Israeli politicians are now talking about ‘Palestinian settlements’: they believe the government should annex more land. The Jewish Home party says it wants to annex the whole of Area C in the West Bank, whilst other politicians envisage that, in future, the Palestinians should be confined to urban centres such as Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron and Jenin.
In the fertile Jordan Valley, the Palestinian population has already been reduced to 60,000, down from 300,000 in 1967. Furthermore, Israel built 68 per cent of the security barrier within the 1967 borders, prompting Noam Chomsky to call it the ‘annexation wall’. In tiny Gaza, the long, wide security zone along the border has seized large swathes of land. And ever more parts of #Jerusalem’s Palestinian areas are being occupied.
The occupation is allowed to continue unhindered – Obama no longer calls the occupation ‘an obstacle to peace’, but merely ‘not helpful to peace’. At the same time, the US is sustaining Israel’s militarisation through its annual $3 billion in aid for the purchase of American military equipment. The US still has strong political and economic interests in the country, although the Americans may well turn out to have other agendas in the wake of the recent détente with Iran.
Another relevant question is the extent to which American Jews support US policy in the Middle East: a recent report from the Pew Research Centre states that 70 per cent of American Jews vote for the Democrats and half describe themselves as liberal (the average for all US citizens is 50 and 20 per cent). Only 17 per cent support Israel’s settlement policy. One in four under the age of 30 believes the US supports Israel too much. Furthermore, only 38 per cent believe that Israel genuinely wishes to resolve the conflict. But most interestingly, only one in ten believes that anti-Semitism is a threat to Israel.³

Neither a two-state solution nor a one-state solution is immediately on the horizon. The march continues unhindered towards a ‘Greater Israel’, where Israeli Palestinians will continue to be second-class citizens, and the populations of the West Bank and Gaza are left to fend for themselves, in a system of apartheid without civil rights.
At the conference organised by Le Monde diplomatique to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Oslo Accords last autumn, Terje Rød-Larsen pointed out that the aforementioned peace negotiations would not take nine months, but rather nine years or more. Furthermore, he considered a one-state solution with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians to be unrealistic. No Jews want that. The Zionists’ goal is a ‘democratic, Jewish state’ – they will never accept the possibility of a Palestinian demographic majority.
But the two-state solution is, as the Oslo Accords unfortunately defined the two parties, just as much a ‘two-state problem’ – for which Norway must take responsibility for having created it together with the Israelis. Palestinian Omar Barghouti pointed out at the conference that the Oslo Accords were and are a success – for the oppressor. The strategy has always been not to give in to the Palestinians’ demands and aspirations for independence for historic Palestine. In reality, they want them—by force or by any means necessary—to be sent off to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
Although the two-state solution has, since 1993, held strong appeal internationally and amongst Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, the solution is, at its core, racist. In contrast to the fundamental democratic principle of equality, Jewish ethnicity and religion are used as the sole basis for the State of Israel. They have long since ‘forgotten’ that it began as a multicultural entity – today’s Jewish Israel is a fusion of Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Arabs, Persians, Turks, Levantines and North Africans. And half of Israel’s Jewish population has cultural roots in Arab and other Middle Eastern cultures.
A morally viable path must be to uphold the vision of a shared state for all of Israel’s nationalities. At the same time, Israel must, culturally speaking, be able to maintain a Jewish nation, in ethical coexistence with Arabs and others.

Whilst Netanyahu declares friends and enemies because it brings greater power and short-term benefits, I would like to recall here what the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote as early as 1948 in Jewish Writings: If the Jews and the Arabs fail to cooperate, the Jewish project will be doomed.
Today, many Israelis and American Jews, both secular and Orthodox, fear that Netanyahu and his right-wing allies are now destroying the Jewish national project. Israel may end up as a pariah state, an isolated fundamentalist stronghold – rather than a liberal, secular and democratic society enjoying full international acceptance.
The aforementioned website Mondoweiss, together with the organisation Jewish Voice for Peace, has launched the series of articles ‘What Comes Next: A Forum on the End of the Two-State Paradigm’ to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Oslo Accords. In one of the 25 articles on the one-state solution, the Israeli Jeff Harper (head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions) calls for ‘a cultural federation in the Middle East’, in which the one-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians is the first step on the path. A united Israel and Palestine is not enough to resolve the issues of refugees, water resources, economic development and security. He therefore proposes seven people’s assemblies in the region: a people’s assembly for the various ethnic groups (Bedouins, Jews, Alawites), a national assembly for communities (Palestinians, Israelis, Syrians), a religious assembly (Muslims, Jews, Christians), a free assembly (other citizens), as well as a women’s assembly, a youth assembly and an assembly for political groups (Hezbollah, Hamas, LGBT, environmental organisations).
A one state solution combined with such a confederation or federation for the entire region could resemble the original idea behind the EU, namely that all the region’s citizens should be able to participate in political decision-making, as well as choose where they wish to work and settle.

The US opposed the two-state solution as early as 1976, when Egypt, Syria and Jordan raised the issue in the UN Security Council. Since then, it has been clear that neither the US nor Israel wants an independent Palestinian state. Although a one-state solution seems utopian today, it may de facto become the ultimate outcome of a lack of willingness to make peace. A one-state solution without border posts is the possible long-term outcome of an international community that is increasingly imposing sanctions and boycotting Israel’s racist behaviour (for example, BDS – Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions). A possible one-state solution, still largely controlled by the Jewish power elite, could thus gradually establish itself – even though it is entirely unrealistic to impose it on Israel today.
The gradual steps towards such a solution must include a dismantling of Israel’s apartheid system: limiting economic discrimination against Palestinians (high prices for water and electricity, and significant wage disparities); granting greater freedom of movement for work; providing access to modern welfare institutions; establishing more joint schools and a joint health service; and introducing compulsory teaching in both Arabic and Hebrew. Further political rights could then gradually follow. In the long term, this could be balanced out, but a just one-state solution will for a long time be constrained by the fact that the Jewish community has far greater resources.
The Electronic Intifada ⁴ describes the current Palestinian Authority as a ‘Quisling government’, a subservient and extended arm of Israel. Palestinians also accuse the Authority of a culture of corruption and of acting as a sort of Palestinian elite.
Last summer, former Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide pointed out that the Giverland Group (AHLC) was considering cutting the annual aid of just under six billion kroner to the Palestinian Authority, because they believed the group was merely helping to fund Israel’s occupation – rather than furthering the objective of the Oslo Accords to establish an independent Palestinian state. With Kerry’s peace initiative, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reportedly chose instead ‘to sit tight’. But when the peace initiative fizzles out, the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee – chaired this year by Foreign Minister Børge Brende – may react once more. With no prospect of a solution, they will, as Defence Minister Ine Marie Søreide stated in July, have to reassess the situation regarding their support.⁵

The Palestinian Authority is thus at risk of ceasing to exist if the administration’s 150,000 employees no longer receive subsidies to cover their salaries. The next meeting of the Donor Group in September could therefore lead to the closure of the unpopular self-governing authorities – and the entire social responsibility for the West Bank returning to the hands of the occupying power, Israel.
That is all it would take for the one-state solution itself to get off to an unpleasant, but very real, start.

© Norwegian LMD.