Greater Israel could spell end of the two-state solution

Trump boosts hopes of West Bank annexation.

A Palestinian woman among the rubble of a West Bank house destroyed by Israeli soldiers.

It’s 2022. Israel has annexed 60 per cent of the West Bank and bestowed citizenship on the 150,000 or so Palestinians living there. The rest of the long-disputed territory is under the control of an autonomous Palestinian leadership that has a capital in Ramallah. Every day hundreds of thousands of Palestinians travel to their jobs in the undivided Jewish capital of Jerusalem and elsewhere in “Greater Israel”.

Israeli shops and industry are well established in the Autonomous Palestinian Territory — maybe one day it will be called a state — and vice versa. Despite periodic bouts of violence from fringe extremists, the region is almost peaceful.

A booming Palestinian middle class is reaping the benefits of integration with the Israeli economy. The price of entry was letting go of their dreams of statehood.

This is a version of the future that a growing and powerful group on the Israeli Right wants to conjure. Some speculate that such a scenario is what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has in mind when he talks about a “two-state solution”.

Right now they, like the rest of the world, are peering through the fog of contradictory signals shooting out of Trump Tower and trying to decipher if they have finally found the man who can help deliver their dream.

“The election of a new US president with new ideas, along with the changes in Europe and the turmoil in the Middle East, presents a unique timeframe and opportunity to remove the failed idea of a two-state solution off the agenda once and for all,” Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett tells Inquirer.

Bennett leads the Jewish Home party, which is most strongly identified with the settlement movement.

“It is an opportunity for Israel,” he says, “because we are the ones who need to make it clear that creating a Palestinian state in the heart of our land is suicide. Invented nation-states are falling apart around us, and extreme Islamic terror is gaining strength.”

Last Monday, amid the rolling Israeli backlash against the passing of a UN Security Council resolution critical of Israeli settle­ments, Bennett stood in the Ma’ale Adumim settlement — considered more a suburb of Jerusalem by many Jewish Israelis — and called on all members of the government to support his proposed annexation of roughly 60 per cent of the West Bank.

Bennett’s kin, who have long yearned for a Greater Israel that they believe will be more secure and truer to Jewish history, sense they are perched on the cusp of a historic moment.

Obscured by the Middle Eastern maelstrom of the past five years, the once unimpeachable wisdom of a conventional two-state solution — a Palestinian state encompassed roughly by the borders of the territories taken in 1967’s Six-Day War and a shared capital in Jerusalem — remains an article of faith only for foreign diplomats and local diehards. Two weeks ago, even acclaimed peacenik author AB Yeho­shua declared “it doesn’t make sense to talk about two states”; an Australian equivalent would be Julian Burnside coming out for offshore processing.

Yet even as the old order crumbles, many conservatives have realised they don’t know what they want victory to look like. For most of recent history they defined themselves only by their opposition to a Palestinian state, neglecting to scribble in the details of this future, larger Israel.

“In the last 10 years I think that you can see that people who grew up on the Right are talking about options, instead of just what they are against or who are their enemies,” says Yoaz Hendel, former head of communications for Netanyahu and now head of a think tank that represents what he calls “liberal-national” values.

“This camp for the last 10 years has crossed a Rubicon regarding the fact that it needs to give some answers to the political situation,” he says. “In the last 10 years we said look, we have to put something on the table, it can’t be the Left talks about a solution and … instead of talking about this challenge we are ignoring it.

“I call this period of time the pragmatic period of Israel. The right wing … should understand the idea of ‘Grand Israel’ does not exist any more.”

In Hendel’s thinking, his people cannot expect to get everything they want. For him, that means recognising the Palestinian right to self-determination and statehood, but in an area of 40 per cent to 50 per cent of the West Bank, much smaller than what the Palestinians would get under the ­traditional two-state formula. Bennett, whose plan is considered a benchmark, is opposed to even this. While proposing a similar area of Palestinian self-control, he advocates “autonomy on steroids” rather than a state.

The 1993 Oslo Accords divided the West Bank into areas A, B and C; A and C are under Palestinian and Israeli control respectively, with B shared between the two. This has always been rejected by the Israeli Right, which used to believe the entire territory was inalienably Jewish. So, as Hendel ex­plains, Bennett’s plan — a huge setback for Palestinians — is a historic compromise for his camp.

“For the first time someone from a strong right-wing perspective said, ‘Look, we are not going to annex everything, we are going to annex 60 per cent,’ ” Hendel says. “What he says, without announcing it, is that he accepts the Oslo agreement. He actually gave up on (areas) A and B. When he said we are going to annex 60 per cent and to create contiguity and to encourage, strengthen or expand autonomy — he actually says we are in a process and we are going to annex this part, and (the rest) will be Palestinian.”

Annexation is no longer a dirty word. Much as the idea of a Palestinian state crept out of the shadows during the late 1980s, now the unilateral application of Israeli law in parts of the occupied territories is openly being canvassed by cabinet ministers.

The move away from total annexation to a “pragmatic Right” also has involved jettisoning some of the staple slogans of the right wing, such as the frequent refrain that the Palestinian people don’t really exist (so they can theoretically be packed off to some other Arab country).

“I’m not saying there’s no Palestinian nation because it’s not my spot to say, ‘You’re not a nation,’ ” says Sara Haetzni-Cohen, head of My Israel, an online advocacy group. She grew up in Kiryat Arba, a hardscrabble settlement that abuts Hebron, and her family is steeped in the settlement movement. “You can’t ignore the reality, and there is the right of self-recognition, and I believe that if they decide that they want to be Palestinians — they can also decide they want to be aliens — they have the right to do it.”

During the northern summer Haetzni-Cohen interviewed a series of thinkers for the conservative broadsheet Makor Rishon with the aim of identifying alternatives to a two-state model. She found a menagerie of ideas, including dividing the Palestinian territories into emirates based on regional affinity and a proposal for total annexation, with only those who declared loyalty to the state of Israel being accepted as citizens.

Plans roughly corresponding with those of Bennett and Hendel have been gaining ground in recent years as prospects for a two-state solution have been trampled by real-world developments. Don­ald Trump’s election is a breakthrough. Now some are anticipating that the idea of Palestinian statehood will be strangled for good.

That hope turned to near ecstasy when the US president-elect nominated his former bankruptcy lawyer, David Friedman, as ambassador to Israel. Friedman believes the two-state solution is an “illusion that serves the worst intentions of both the United States and the Palestinian Arabs. It has never been a solution, only a narrative. But even the narrative itself now needs to end.”

In his columns for a far-right Israeli news website, he also has lacerated the “villainous” Palestinian Authority and its “corrupt stranglehold on the blood money extracted for years from the US and other Western nations”.

Although Trump has tweeted vaguely about “deals” and “peace”, the nomination of Friedman has been interpreted in Israel as a harbinger of a vastly more pro-Israel administration.

Yet that may not be such a boon for Netanyahu. His domestic political standing has been bolstered by a perception of shrewd steeliness against an inherently anti-Israel US President Barack Obama, as shown by his cyclonic reaction to last week’s US abstention on the UN Security Council vote denouncing Israeli settlements.

“Netanyahu has gained to some extent from Obama being portrayed as a President (who) is slightly hostile to Israel, even though facts seem to indicate to Israelis the opposite,” The Jerusalem Post’s editor-in-chief (and former Bennett adviser) Yaakov Katz says. “Having a president who fits into that narrative feeds that perception that we need Netanyahu to protect us.”

Obama’s call to abstain on the Security Council resolution is comfortable territory for Netanyahu. Tongue-lashing the Israeli-obsessed foreign policy elite in New York in defence of Jewish history and self-determination is his political bread and butter.

It may not be so black and white come January 20. If Trump really does build the most pro-­Israel administration in history, he will ask Netanyahu: what do you want?

“Netanyahu is an expert, he is a magician at gaining time … he doesn’t like to decide,” says Hendel, who believes the Israeli Prime Minister will come under extreme pressure from his voters to rule out a Palestinian state and instead push for a partial annexation plan such as Bennett’s.

Similarly, Katz warns: “If (Trump) starts at one point to pressure Israel, it won’t be possible to portray him as anti-Israel” — unlike Obama. This is why supporters of the settlements want to brand US policy with their stamp before the president-elect gets any ideas of his own.