That, in turn, followed a major eight-hour Israeli operation Monday against Palestinian militants in the West Bank city of Jenin. Seven Palestinians were killed, including two teenagers, amid a fierce battle that saw Israel launch missile strikes from Apache helicopters hovering around the city. It was the first time helicopter gunships have been deployed since the grim days of the second intifada almost two decades ago.
The bloodshed and chaos come on the heels of a far-right Israeli government’s decision to approve plans for thousands of new housing settlements in the occupied West Bank, in a move that also bypassed the six-stage process that Israeli authorities customarily follow for such constructions. Critics said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has given a greenlight to the extremist, pro-settler factions within his coalition to advance an agenda that seeks the de facto annexation of large chunks of the West Bank, which is home to 3 million Palestinians and comprises much of the land that would make up a future Palestinian state.
On Tuesday, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres called on Israel to “cease” its expansions of settlements, which are understood to constitute violations of international humanitarian law. Analysts and policymakers also see it as a clear impediment to the long-mooted “two-state” solution — that is, two independent, sovereign Israeli and Palestinian states existing side-by-side, a goal that remains the guiding policy of many the world’s governments.
Settlement expansion “further entrenches Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, encroaches on Palestinian land and natural resources, hampers the free movement of the Palestinian population, and undermines the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination and sovereignty,” Guterres said in a statement.
But the reality on the ground belies any wishful thinking about Palestinian self-determination or sovereignty. Instead, there’s entrenching of de facto Israeli supremacy over the Palestinian territories, the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank (and therefore Israeli roads and segregated infrastructure), the enfeeblement and growing irrelevance of the traditional Palestinian leadership, and mounting signs that more aggressive Israeli military action may be around the corner. All the while, millions of Palestinians live without the same civil and political rights as their neighbors.
Israeli officials warn that a more sophisticated — and nihilistic — wave of Palestinian militancy may be taking root. Palestinians contend that the Israeli authorities and settler groups are provoking the violence to further cement their control over the occupied territories. The Biden administration has courted the ire of the Israeli right by reversing some of the previous Trump administration’s moves that pandered to the pro-settler movement. But despite talk of a “chill” in U.S.-Israeli ties, the White House has shown little willingness to stake much of its political capital and diplomatic energy on diverting the current course of Netanyahu’s government.
The formulation put forward by Secretary of State Antony Blinken is that the United States seeks “equal measures of freedom, justice, security, and prosperity for Israelis and Palestinians alike.” That’s rhetoric that summons the aspirations of a two-state solution, while implicitly recognizing how remote a possibility it now is.
Instead, numerous international organizations and a growing body of mainstream scholars view the prevailing situation in Israel as that of a “one-state” reality where Palestinians live under the Israeli thumb in what Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch openly describe as “apartheid”-like conditions.
On Thursday, former U.N. secretary general Ban Ki-moon and former Irish president Mary Robinson, both top figures among the Elders, an international advocacy group, issued a warning after a fact-finding mission to the region that a “one-state reality” was “extinguishing” the prospect of peace. They added that they heard “no detailed rebuttal of the evidence of apartheid” and said that the current Israeli government has demonstrated “an intent to pursue permanent annexation rather than temporary occupation, based on Jewish supremacy.”
For the better part of a decade, there has been discussion of the “one-state” reality. But things are coming to a head, argued scholars Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami in an April essay in Foreign Affairs that triggered a fevered debate in policy circles. “Israel’s radical new government did not create this reality but rather made it impossible to deny,” they wrote. “Palestine is not a state in waiting, and Israel is not a democratic state incidentally occupying Palestinian territory. All the territory west of the Jordan River has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where the land and the people are subject to radically different legal regimes, and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste.”
They called on U.S. officials to stop tacitly enabling this status quo, as they have for a generation since the forging of the now-moribund Oslo accords in the 1990s. And they argued that, in the absence of a separate Palestinian state, U.S. policymakers should push for equality of rights for everyone living within these borders.
Staunch defenders of Israel in Washington angrily rejected this conclusion, suggesting it was tantamount to calling for the erasure of Israel as the world’s sole Jewish state. Others argued that the essay’s authors downplayed or glossed over the Palestinian hand in the crisis, including the fecklessness of the Palestinian leadership and its toleration of anti-Semitic extremism. In a bemused rebuttal to these criticisms, the essay’s authors insisted they were not prescribing any clear political outcome, but simply diagnosing the situation that exists.
Michael Koplow of the Israel Policy Forum, which advocates a negotiated two-state solution, suggested the essay’s critics needed to engage more seriously with the actual circumstances in the West Bank. “It does not follow and never has that maintaining security control of the West Bank through a military occupation also requires putting half a million Israeli civilians there, with many more on their way,” he wrote. “What this Israeli government, in a faster and more comprehensive manner than any before it, is doing is proving the truth of the one-state reality the authors describe, and hastening the day in which their prescription becomes a fait accompli as well.”
