Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans: More Politics, Please, Less Process.

• Author: Lustick, Ian S.
• Position: COMMENTARY - Report

Deal of the Century?

The announcement on January 28, 2020 of the long-ballyhooed and long-delayed Trump-Kushner-Netanyahu "deal of the century" marked a change in American foreign policy, but not nearly as important a change as its critics charge or its promotors claim. The former, of course, vastly outnumber the latter. They condemn Washington's consignment of the Palestinians to be crowded into an archipelago of walled ghettos, and its public and full-throated endorsement of almost all right wing Israeli talking points. These include:

* Faulting the Arabs entirely for the conflict;

* Defining the main problem to be solved as that of guaranteeing every aspect of Israel's security;

* Treating the Palestinian-Arab refugee problem as no different from that of Jews who left Muslim countries for Israel;

* Requiring Palestinians to recognize Israel as the "nation-state of the Jewish people;"

* condemning Iran as a crazed and all-devouring menace to civilization in the Middle East;

* Stripping Palestinians of any claim to, control of, or official presence in the actual city of al-Quds (Jerusalem);

* Characterizing Hamas and all militant resistance against Israel as terrorism;

* Negating any Palestinian refugee "right of return;"

* Voiding all previous United Nations (UN) resolutions except those favoring Israel;

* Demanding that questions no longer be asked about the truth of key Zionist ideological claims;

* Requiring an end to Palestinian "incitement" against Israel, with no mention of Jewish incitement or vigilantism against Palestinians;

* Affirming the validity of Israeli legal and political claims to sovereignty over lands captured in 1967.

The Trump plan's promoters declare, in stentorian tones, that it provides the first realistic "vision" for a two-state solution and a detailed path to its realization, with Israel and Palestine living side by side in peace, security, and mutual prosperity. It is, they say, an arduously and expertly prepared blueprint arrived at through dogged efforts and years of negotiations.

Of course, the negotiations never took place between Israel and the Palestinians, or between the United States and the Palestinians. They were overwhelmingly the product of consultations between a fervently committed array of right wing Zionist officials in Washington and an unprecedentedly right wing government in Israel. It is entirely unsurprising that the participants in these "negotiations" whose political and ideological commitments are so closely aligned could come to an agreement that could be celebrated at the White House in a campaign-like rally atmosphere. It is even less surprising when one considers that both of the event's main attractions--Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu--were facing political and legal threats capable of ending their careers.

On the other hand, most critics of the "no-deal" deal are also mischaracterizing it. Yes, it is a transparent fake. It offers "a two-state solution" by demarcating the creation (within the borders of sovereign Israel or of Israeli military control) of a glorified Birobidzhan the "Jewish Autonomous Region" created by Stalin in 1934 as a Jewish homeland on the Soviet-Chinese border. Even this partially "sovereign" state of Palestine, this "state minus," as Netanyahu has called it, is not actually achievable until such time as a long list of unperformable Palestinian requirements is met. For all this, and more, it deserves, and will receive, intense criticism and even ridicule.

But there is one charge most proponents of the two-state solution who criticize the plan have no right to make. The Trump plan is no phonier, and no more a pretense of being something it is not, than the years of empty talk about advancing two-state negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

The real need now is for a new way to think, not about how the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean can be agreeably divided, but how the one state, Israel, that rules all the people and regions in that territory, can be transformed and democratized. In other words, both the promoters and the critics of the Trump plan remain captive to an outmoded, politically and intellectually disorienting "two-state solution" paradigm. The assumption that the West Bank and Gaza are not, already, fully incorporated into the power field of the Israeli state, and that therefore a separation between "Israel" and "territories occupied by Israel" can still transpire as the result of negotiations, is fundamentally wrong. This false assumption serves as a frame of reference forcing those who use it to adopt false beliefs, and to say false things about the world and about what they are doing. It also allows and even encourages them to pursue objectives (alleviation of anxiety, emotional satisfaction, political convenience, economic profit, or organizational survival) disconnected from, and counterproductive for, improving the lives of both Jews and Palestinians.

How Did We Get Here?

To appreciate how desperately the problem needs to be re-understood from dividing the country to transforming the kind of state that rules it, consider this abbreviated chronicle of diplomacy intended to achieve partition.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, most Israelis were flying high, thinking they could have all the territory captured by their army in the 1967 war and ignore the Palestinians. Efforts by some Palestinians and Israelis to move toward a solution based on establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel in the West Bank and Gaza Strip went nowhere. Most Palestinians still did not accept the...