the situation

By: Gershon Baskin

Here's the situation: Israel and Palestine are stuck in a political impasse. The current Israeli government and any potential Israeli government in the coming years do not have a political mandate or political will to negotiate any kind of agreement with the Palestinian people.

This most important issue facing Israel is not on the political agenda of any political party that will lead the next government. The Palestinian side faces a divided political house between the West Bank and Gaza where the two governments do not have much legitimacy from their own streets. The Palestinians are united only by their overwhelming desire to hold elections. Israel is stuck in a political stagnation due to its inability to form a stable government with a long political life, and therefore; It faces repeated elections with a fundamentally unchanged constituency. Those of us on both sides, in Israel and Palestine, who believe we must go back to the table to figure out how to move forward toward resolving this conflict, have no political leaders to turn to and few constructive ideas about how to do so and end the impasse.

The vast majority of the younger generation on both sides see no hope for peace, and therefore; They are either completely detached, have no desire to contact the other party, are preoccupied with their careers, or tend to adopt extremist ideas.

I saw a recent poll by a leading Israeli pollster that found that less than a third of Israelis believe there is a need to end the occupation of the Palestinian people. Does this mean that two thirds of Israelis believe that Israel can continue to rule over millions of Palestinians and that is a good thing? Do these millions of Israelis believe that there is no price to pay for the continued denial of the rights of the Palestinian people to enjoy the same rights as the Israeli people? The number of Palestinians who believe in the necessity of reaching a political agreement with Israel is declining.

The vast majority of Palestinians, especially the younger generation, no longer believe in the two-state solution. The reality they see all around them is increasing Israeli land grabs and settlement expansion. Two weeks ago, I traveled all over the southern West Bank and saw dozens of new outposts on hilltops across the region. In the northern West Bank there are more. They all know, as every Israeli knows, that not long ago those few caravans on the tops of the hills would become homes to be called new neighborhoods from the existing settlements kilometers away. The few caravans are already connected to the electricity grid and soon all the infrastructure needed for normal life will be available. At the same time, Palestinians are trapped in small areas in towns and villages with no possibility of expansion while 62% of the West Bank, designated by the defunct 1995 Oslo Accords as Area C, has been placed under full Israeli control. Every Palestinian in the West Bank feels suffocated by Israeli settlements and the military government. Palestinian homes are demolished by Israel almost every day. Every night, Israel arrests dozens of Palestinian youth. Occupation surrounds their lives and there is no escape for them. They see their government as nothing more than a subcontractor of the Israeli regime. It should come as no surprise that Palestinian public opinion polls show an increase in support for the armed struggle against Israel.

This mostly comes from the younger generation who did not live through the terrible era of the Second Intifada. A former Israeli prime minister asked me this week if a third intifada was possible. Of course, not only that, there is a fair chance that if that happens we will face Nakba-type measures to expel entire communities of Palestinians from their homes because there is growing support among right-wingers in Israel for doing so. Israel is already doing this in the Yatta path in the south and in small communities in the Jordan Valley and there is complete silence in Israel and around the world.

What can we do? We who still believe that we must find a way to live together on this earth. First, do we all need to work on our part to gain more power within our political systems. In Israel, we are working to launch a joint Arab-Jewish Equity Party, which even if we do not succeed in the next elections, we will begin to challenge the discourse in Israel, and eventually carve out a place in Israeli political culture where the equality of all citizens is a foregone conclusion rather than a point of contention. In Palestine, there must be elections for a president and parliament and there must be agreement among all parties that the will of the people will be fulfilled and that the separation between the West Bank and Gaza will finally come to an end. The political forces that reject the course of violence in Palestine must unite, gain strength, and become strategic in how they present themselves to the public.

Israelis and Palestinians who believe in a shared future must immediately begin their campaign for the release of Marwan Barghouti from prison after twenty years in prison, and Barghouti remains the only Palestinian capable of winning any election against any other candidate. Barghouti is also the one who believes that ending the occupation and resolving the conflict must happen, preferably through negotiations and cooperation. When there are Palestinian elections, Barghouti will run, and he will win. If he is in Israeli prison, there will be an international campaign for his release. The prospect of a democratically elected Palestinian president in an Israeli jail is not far off. That is why I wrote several months ago to the head of the Israeli Shin Bet and encouraged him, as its new chief, to engage Barghouti in a political dialogue while he was in prison, just as they did in South Africa with Nelson Mandela. But as I have been told with people who have the right to visit Barghouti in prison, no one on the Israeli side has engaged him in any kind of political conversation.

I have lost all hope that the international community will come to our rescue. As long as the United States and most of Western Europe still talk about two states but recognize only one of the two states, it is of no use to us politically or even worse. Maintaining the two-state slogan while doing nothing to achieve it only served to increase the unviability of the two-state solution. So, we are stuck here, by ourselves, the Israelis and the Palestinians, who both have no intention of going anywhere else. This is our situation.