Episode 177 Transcript: Getting to a Palestinian State, Part 1
Transcript of today's episode on what Israel can do to help create a Palestinian state
At some point this war will end. The question is what’s next. Everyone is talking about a Palestinian state encompassing Gaza and the West Bank. The United States, Europe, and Saudi Arabia envision one eventually emerging. It’s unclear whether other Arab states would support that. The Israelis definitely don’t want a Palestinian state but don’t really seem to have a better idea. The Palestinians don’t seem to have a clear idea about what they want.
It’s easy to target Israel as the holdup here. Especially Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his intransigent opposition to Palestinian statehood. The conventional wisdom seems to be that once Israel kicks Netanyahu out of office, we’ll all move as one towards the “correct” solution of a Palestinian state. But that view misses a huge part of the picture, which is that the vast majority of Israelis agree with Netanyahu’s opposition. And no one seems to be taking that into account in a serious way.
The problem is that the pro-Palestinian-staters are talking politics when the actual focus needs to be security. Take Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist. In an article last week he wrote that a peace process with the Palestinians is the key for Biden to build a regional Middle East alliance against Iran, and from there a bigger global alliance against Russia and China that stretches from India, across the Middle East and North Africa, and up into Europe and NATO. That’s an enormous, 6,000 mile-long, grand political vision…and a lot to put on this nonexistent Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Friedman argued that Biden’s strategy will be to push hard for a cease-fire and hostage exchange. That will prevent Israel from invading Rafah in Gaza. Then, said Friedman, there will be a “big, fresh American-Arab-EU peace initiative that offers Israel a breadth and depth of normalization with Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, and security guarantees, more than ever before, as the accompaniment to a two-state solution.”
What Thomas Friedman and others miss here is that Israelis aren’t looking for “breadth and depth of normalization” right now. They’re not joining with Biden in thinking about how to counter Russia and China. That’s not why they are opposed to a Palestinian state. They’re opposed to a state because they think it’s going to become another terrorist platform. They’re opposed to a state because they have no faith in either the Palestinians or the international community to prevent that terrorist state from emerging. And with the focus on these grand visions of global alliances and upended Middle Eastern politics and America’s elections in November, no one is putting front and center the security details that are necessary to change Israelis’ minds. Israelis are laughing “security guarantees” right out of the room, because they know that no country is stepping forward to offer what will be necessary to protect Israel’s security. It’s not that the majority of Israelis don’t want a Palestinian state because they are opposed to the Palestinians having a state; they’re opposed because they don’t believe it can actually happen.
So what would be necessary to make it happen? I want to spend the next few episodes digging into this a little from the Israeli side, the Palestinian side, and the world’s side. This is a wide-ranging question with a million different angles. My center here isn’t politics but security. What would it take to craft a Palestinian state that is not a threat to Israel, and that can therefore be a vehicle for Palestinian independence and dignity, rather than a tool of their continued destruction? This isn’t “Jason solving the Middle East.” This is exploring the nuances that are getting missed in the headlines about two-states and Netanyahu’s demise and Gaza’s suffering.
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So let’s get into it, three episodes on getting to a Palestinian state — or not — at the end of all this awfulness. I’m your host, Jason Harris, and this is Jew Oughta Know.
The key to a Palestinian state lies not in Gaza but in the West Bank. And on the Israel side of things, there are two pieces here. One is the Israeli right’s ambition for what we call Greater Israel — an Israel that extends over every inch of the biblical Land of Israel. The desire for Greater Israel is what forms the ideological basis for the right’s opposition to a Palestinian state, because that state would be situated in the core of the ancient Jewish homeland of Judea and Samaria, or what is called the West Bank. The Israeli right insists that Jews have a right to live in the Jewish homeland. The religious right goes beyond that to make settling the land a religious obligation, and therefore any decision to give up land an abomination.
Greater Israel has always had some support within Israeli society. But that brings us to the second piece, which is security. Security is what brought many more Israelis over to the right, even if they weren’t fans of the Greater Israel vision. This process really got going in the late 1990s. The peace process between Israelis and Palestinians fell apart amidst a campaign of terrorism instigated by Hamas. This led many Israelis to believe that the Palestinians weren’t actually interested in peace. Then in 2000 the Israeli army left its 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon, only to see the area filled in with Hezbollah. Then over the next five years came the Second Intifada — a relentless campaign of terrorism and violence that saw suicide bombers destroy buses, pizzerias, Passover seders, night clubs, shopping malls, and more. The Second Intifada came to an end only when Israel did two things: one was to build a huge wall through parts of Jerusalem that separated Jews and Palestinians; and the other was to assassinate terrorist leaders in Gaza and the West Bank. The Second Intifada all but collapsed the left-wing in Israel, as Israelis came to believe, once again, that the Palestinians weren’t interested in peace and could only be deterred through strong military force. Many Israelis wanted separation from the Palestinians, in which Israelis didn’t have to pay attention to, or much deal with, the Palestinians on the other side of the border.
And then came 2005 and the disengagement from Gaza, in which, as we know, Gaza was taken over by Hamas to be used as a terrorist platform against Israel. That pretty much wiped out the remaining left as a political force, as few Israelis anymore believed in coexistence, peace, and that the creation of a Palestinian state was a viable option. Israel became dominated by the center right and then, under Netanyahu, by the hard right.
All of which brings us to October 7. The irony is that the last large bloc of peaceniks were the people living in the Gaza communities that were destroyed on October 7. Hamas murdered the very peace activists who most strongly championed coexistence and Palestinian statehood. Many of those who survived are now completely disillusioned. While they used to believe there was a differene between Hamas and ordinary Gazans, many no longer think that. Even those who still believe in diplomatic solutions are struggling with how to square those views with what happened.
What happened in Gaza on October 7 applies to Israeli thinking about the West Bank. Those of us outside Israel tend to look at the West Bank settlements and occupation through the lens of Greater Israel. That is, we see settlements encroaching on Palestinian land, and what will be the future Palestinian state, and we reject the biblical justification. But if we look at the settlements through the security lens, we see something else. We see that these settlements in the West Bank provide the buffer zone for the rest of Israel. Because they tend to be close to the boundary between the West Bank and the main part of Israel, they add a crucial several miles of depth between, say, Tel Aviv and the Palestinians. Through this lens, the occupation isn’t a tool of Israeli oppression, it’s absolutely essential for Israel’s security. Without the IDF protecting the settlements in the West Bank, the West Bank would become Gaza.
So the short summary here is that the Israeli right united two ideas: Greater Israel and security. Greater Israel became not just a religious idea but a security one. And it’s these two elements which make it so hard for Israel to support a Palestinian state.
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What has been clear for some time was crystallized on October 7: Israelis and Palestinians just can’t live with one another. They need to be separated by a hard border. And so if we look at a Palestinian state through this lens of separation, it starts to look perhaps more feasible. A Palestinian state for the purpose of permanently separating Israelis and Palestinians looks less like a reward for violence that Israelis reject, and more like a necessary component for Israel’s long-term security.
But a Palestinian state isn’t the only mechanism for separation. Here is where Israel’s opposition to a plan for a state gets muddled into the current no-plan. If it’s just a matter of separation, then Israel could, well, take over the West Bank and Gaza and deport all the Palestinians. This is the alternative way to separate instead of a state, and it’s the answer pushed by the far-right. The problem is that there isn’t anywhere to deport the Palestinians to. No other Arab state will take them in, even a small group, even temporarily. Some Israelis will say to that, “Well I don’t care where they go as long as it’s not here.” But as a practical reality, there is nowhere else for Palestinians to go. And doing so will turn Israel into an international pariah. Hence the no-plan situation we find ourselves in: no Palestinian state but also no forced deportation but also no sense of what, exactly, to do with the Palestinians.
But if separation is the goal, then that’s where the Palestinian state — the two-state solution — becomes really the only feasible option. Forget for a moment the moral question, the question of historic claims, the question of who deserves what. If there is nowhere else to put the Palestinians, and we need to separate them from the Israelis, then an independent state seems to be the most plausible option.
So in terms of security, a Palestinian state is in Israel’s long-term best interest because it separates the two people and ensures Israel can have clear defined borders. The problem is that in the short-term, statehood is a security catastrophe.
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All the talk about a Palestinian state acknowledges that it will need to be demilitarized. It won’t have an army and won’t be allowed to import weapons. But Israelis aren’t buying this. They’re looking at southern Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005 and October 7 and saying there’s no way a Palestinian state won’t become a terrorist state. They know that no Palestinian government would be strong enough to resist Hamas and that no other army is offering to come in to patrol the Palestinian state. Sure, the Israeli army could do it, but that’s just a continuation of the current military occupation. Israelis have no faith that there is a realistic way to stop a Palestinian state from becoming a weaponized platform for radical Islam. Right up next to Tel Aviv, and directly under the airspace for Ben Gurion International airport. For Israel, that’s the end of the conversation.
We have to appreciate how difficult demilitarization would be. For one thing, a Palestinian state in the West Bank is much closer to Iran than Gaza, and not just in distance. Unlike Gaza, Iran would be able to send weapons directly to the West Bank over land — through Iraq and Jordan, or down through Syria. It’s one thing to keep an eye out for things like tanks and artillery and rockets. But what about scrap metal, garden hoses, fertilizer, even powdered sugar — all materials that Hamas uses to craft weapons and explosives in Gaza. Much of what they need can be found inside imported cars. And what Hamas doesn’t smuggle in from Iran they can build at home in crude factories in those underground tunnels, which would no doubt be recreated in the West Bank. Without an army taking active and continuous measures to disrupt this, the new Palestinian state would very quickly militarize.
This presents another conundrum: who is going to patrol this supposedly-independent Palestinian state? Palestinian security forces aren’t strong enough to stop the likes of Hamas. There will need to be an actual army both surrounding the Palestinian state and inside it to prevent weapons from coming in, being manufactured at home, and used against Israel. But no other country or even group of countries or UN peacekeepers are offering up troops to do that.
And so I come back to my original point that there is too much emphasis on politics and not enough on security. Yes, the United States and its allies are talking about security guarantees and demilitarization. But while they have a pretty clear idea on the politics of all this — Netanyahu out, diplomatic normalization with Saudi Arabia in, a reformed Palestinian Authority to take over Gaza — there is a lot less detail on how these security guarantees and demilitarization is actually going to work. And this is what Israelis care about the most. What good is Saudi Arabia if terrorists shoot down a United 777 landing at Ben Gurion?
To put it simply, Israelis are convinced that a Palestinian state is a terrorist one, and they’ve made this mistake twice before now in Lebanon and Gaza. They’re not going to do it again. Netanyahu or no Netanyahu.
But let’s say that we’re still looking ahead to the very long-term, where the goal is separation of Israelis and Palestinians. And thus a Palestinian state remains the best long-term option for Israel’s security and its preservation as a Jewish democracy. Are there things that Israel can do to move that along? Let me suggest two.
If a Palestinian state is the eventual goal, there are two things that Israel can do to move in that direction, even if it’s a long way off. And I know that some of this podcast’s listeners aren’t going to like this — but that’s okay, this is part of considering ideas and nuances here. The two things that Israel can do is, one, drop the ambitions for Greater Israel. And related to that is, two, rein in the far-right and return them to the fringe of politics.
Israel needs to drop the ambition for Greater Israel. That is, stop trying to settle Jews on every inch of the biblical Land of Israel. Notice that I say the ambition, not the dream. Religious Jews do not have to give up the dream of someday returning to all the land, hastening the arrival of the Messiah and the redemption of humanity. But Jews have waited thousands of years for the Messiah. Surely we can wait longer, especially since, right now, the price is so high in violence, death, and hatred amongst people all created in God’s image.
What does giving up the ambition of Greater Israel look like? It means giving up some of the settlements in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank. It means easing the occupation to take the Israeli military out of Palestinians’ daily lives. Not all the settlements have to be given up — the larger ones, and the ones close to the border that serve as buffers for the coast, may well be retained as Israeli territory in a future deal to create a Palestinian state. But the illegal settlements built contrary to Israeli law, will have to go, along with some of the smaller ones deep inside the West Bank that break up the continuity of Palestinian land. The security argument for this is that it makes the settlements easier to protect. Rather than dozens of scattered settlements that force the army to spread itself thin, a few dense clusters close to the border will be much easier to defend. A retraction of the occupation will also reduce the friction, resentment, and anger on the Palestinian side, and make it easier for a competent Palestinian government to improve lives and manage a growing economy.
This is a hard idea to swallow, because there is no doubt about the historical Jewish connection to this land. It’s hard to argue that Jews don’t have a right to settle on land that is historically Jewish. But the reality is that to achieve the necessary separation between Israelis and Palestinians, Israel will have to give up that land to serve the greater good.
To give up Greater Israel and reduce the occupation, the far right will have to be kept out of power. Although the right, and sometimes the left, has always supported Jewish settlement, it is the extreme nationalists who today offer a vision of an Israel perpetually in conflict. As we saw last year, their idea of judicial reform is an Israel that is no longer democratic. Their vision of society is one without Arab and non-Jewish participation, rights, or dignity. Their obsession with the land, and the assumption of Jewish supremacy, leads them to incitement against the Palestinians. This makes Israel look terrible. It feeds the view of Israel as a racist, pariah state that is genocidal in its intentions. And in this war they have been spectacularly unhelpful, vilifying the army, blocking humanitarian aid, refusing to support any deal to release hostages, and, just as seriously, mismanaging their own government ministries in a time of national crisis.
To give up on Greater Israel, and to keep the far right out of power, we have to also put out of power the far right’s chief enabler. So we come full circle. Netanyahu is too dependent on the far right to push them aside. He needs to be tossed out not because of his opposition to a Palestinian state, which Israelis share, but because he cannot push back against the far right extremists whom he put in power. The question is whether this is possible.
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The polls in Israel are all over the place. So are the Palestinian polls, which we’ll get to next episode. In Israel, if the elections were today, Netanyahu would be out and, with him, far right leaders like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir. But here’s the thing: Netanyahu wouldn’t be replaced by some leftist government in favor of a Palestinian state. He would instead be replaced by a broad center-right coalition. That coalition might have a less antagonistic approach to Palestinian statehood, but would still not be interested in compromising. Even without the far right, Israelis are too fearful about Israel’s security to support a Palestinian state.
The challenge here is that the left and center are going to have to do what they have long resisted: put the “Jewish” front and center. The right and the ultra-orthodox are the only ones who offer a proud and unapologetic vision of the Jewish state that puts Judaism and Jewish values at its center. That’s why they garner so much support, even from people who disagree with their nasty nationalism. Unless and until the opposition can also speak that language, they are unlikely to bring in those voters. The most likely contender for prime minister right now is Benny Gantz, leader of the centrist National Unity party. But he’s also lost against Netanyahu several times in the last few election cycles. Would the war shake that up? It’s hard to tell.
Israel is not going to — and cannot — relax the occupation or give up land in the present climate, not when a Palestinian state would almost definitely become a terrorist platform like Gaza. So in this the Israelis aren’t going to make the first move. But they could make the first move in tossing out the right wing extremists. Pushing them out would improve Israel on its own merits, even without the question of Palestinian statehood.
But Israel can’t do all this in a vacuum. As long as a Palestinian state remains a vague notion without a concrete strategy for security, Israelis aren’t going to support it. And since no one can yet make that guarantee, it’s not hard to understand why Israelis are so united in opposition, regardless of how much they dislike Netanyahu. They simply do not believe that a peaceful Palestinian state can be achieved.
And so the age-old dilemma remains. For its long term security, Jewish democracy, moral strength, and views in the eyes of the world, Israel cannot continue to occupy the Palestinians. But October 7 shows that for its survival at all, Israel can’t give up the occupation either.
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The problem with creating a Palestinian state is that everyone involved will have to do things that they absolutely don’t want to do. Israel will have to give up on Greater Israel, and will have to find the political means to push out, and keep out, the extreme right.
Israel’s critics are right that Israel cannot defeat Hamas’ ideology. Only the Palestinians can do that. Israel can help that process along by giving up Greater Israel and relaxing the occupation, demonstrating that a path to statehood is possible. But as long as the terrorists are in charge, and as long as the Palestinians remain committed to armed struggle and the delegitimization of Israel, nothing can move forward, and Israel cannot be expected to take actions that undermine its security. And so the Palestinians, too, have to give up something to achieve statehood. We’ll get into that next episode.
Remember that I am now on Substack, putting out a weekly newsletter with a short commentary and other content. Today’s post is on the Philadelphi Corridor in Gaza, something you’re going to start hearing more about as Israel debates how to secure the Gaza border after the war. You can sign up to get this newsletter either at my Substack site, or on my main website at jewoughtaknow.com. Thanks again to the donors and new subscribers. You can reach me at jewoughtaknowpodcast@gmail.com. Thanks for listening everyone, Am Yisrael Chai, the Jewish People Live.
© Jason Harris 2024