Israel does not want peace. There is nothing I have ever written that I would be happier to be proved wrong about. But the evidence is piling up. In fact, it can be said that Israel has never wanted peace — a just peace, that is, one based on a just compromise for both sides.
And, at the drop of a hat, almost every Israeli will say he wants peace, of course he does. Israelis want peace, not justice, certainly not anything based on universal values. It has despaired utterly of it.
Peace has disappeared from the Israeli agenda, its place taken by the collective anxieties that are systematically implanted, and by personal, private matters that now take precedence over all else. The Israeli longing for peace seemingly died about a decade ago, after the failure of the Camp David summit in , the dissemination of the lie that there is no Palestinian partner for peace, and, of course, the horrific blood-soaked period of the second intifada.
But the truth is that even before that, Israel never really wanted peace. Israel has never, not for a minute, treated the Palestinians as human beings with equal rights. It has never viewed their distress as understandable human and national distress. The Israeli peace camp, too — if ever there was such a thing — also died a lingering death amid the harrowing scenes of the second intifada and the no-partner lie.
All that remained were a handful of organizations that were as determined and devoted as they were ineffectual in the face of the delegitimization campaigns mounted against them. Israel, therefore, was left with its rejectionist stance. In plain words: The builders of settlements want to consolidate the occupation, and those who want to consolidate the occupation do not want peace.
Every act of building in the settlements, every mobile home and every balcony, conveys rejection. If Israel had wanted to achieve peace through the Oslo Accords, it would at least have stopped the construction in the settlements at its own initiative. That this did not happen proves that Oslo was fraudulent, or at best the chronicle of a failure foretold. If Israel had wanted to achieve peace at Taba, at Camp David, at Sharm el-Sheikh, in Washington or in Jerusalem, its first move should have been to end all construction in the territories.
Without a quid pro quo. The fact that Israel did not is proof that it did not want a just peace. There, at the deepest level, lies the concept that this land is destined for the Jews alone. That is the point of departure, and there is no way to get from there to a just peace. There is no way to reach a just peace when the name of the game is the dehumanization of the Palestinians. Most Israelis are convinced of the truth of both those statements.
In the past decade, the two peoples have been separated from each another. The average young Israeli will never meet his Palestinian peer, other than during his army service and then only if he does his service in the territories. Nor will the average young Palestinian ever meet an Israeli his own age, other than the soldier who huffs and puffs at him at the checkpoint, or invades his home in the middle of the night, or in the person of the settler who usurps his land or torches his groves.
Consequently, the only encounter between the two people is between the occupiers, who are armed and violent, and the occupied, who are despairing and also turn to violence. Gone are the days when Palestinians worked in Israel and Israelis shopped in Palestine. Gone is the period of the half-normal and quarter-equal relations that existed for a few decades between the two peoples that share the same piece of territory.
It is very easy, in this state of affairs, to incite and inflame the two peoples against one another, to spread fears and to instill new hatreds on top of those that already exist. This, too, is a sure recipe for non-peace. The two-state vision has gained widespread adherence, but without any intention to implement it in practice. A single state will not materialise until a majority of Israelis want it, and so far they overwhelmingly do not.
If and when Israel is confronted with the threat of a single state, it can enact a unilateral withdrawal and count on the support of the great powers in doing so. But that threat is still quite distant. In fact, Israelis and Palestinians are now farther from a single state than they have been at any time since the occupation began in Palestinians have a quasi-state in the occupied territories, with its own parliament, courts, intelligence services and foreign ministry.
Israelis no longer shop in Nablus and Gaza the way they did before the Oslo accords. Palestinians no longer travel freely to Tel Aviv. And the supposed reason that partition is often claimed to be impossible — the difficulty of a probable relocation of more than , settlers — is grossly overstated: in the s, Israel absorbed several times as many Russian immigrants, many of them far more difficult to integrate than settlers, who already have Israeli jobs, fully formed networks of family support and a command of Hebrew.
Indeed, Israel has had a non-Jewish majority in the territory it controls for several years. Yet even in their sternest warnings, western governments invariably refer to an undemocratic Israel as a mere hypothetical possibility. C ontrary to what nearly every US mediator has asserted, it is not that Israel greatly desires a peace agreement but has a pretty good fallback option. It is that Israel greatly prefers the fallback option to a peace agreement.
No tactical brilliance in negotiations, no amount of expert preparation, no perfect alignment of the stars can overcome that obstacle.
Only two things can: a more attractive agreement, or a less attractive fallback. The first of these options has been tried extensively, from offering Israel full normalisation with most Arab and Islamic states to promising upgraded relations with Europe, US security guarantees, and increased financial and military assistance.
But for Israel these inducements pale in comparison to the perceived costs. The second option is to make the fallback worse. This is what President Eisenhower did following the Suez crisis when he threatened economic sanctions to get Israel to withdraw from Sinai and Gaza.
This is what President Ford did in when he reassessed US relations with Israel, refusing to provide it with new arms deals until it agreed to a second Sinai withdrawal. This is what President Carter did when he raised the spectre of terminating US military assistance if Israel did not immediately evacuate Lebanon in September And this is what Carter did when he made clear to both sides at Camp David that the United States would withhold aid and downgrade relations if they did not sign an agreement.
That was the last time the United States applied pressure of this sort. As a result, Palestinians have been unable to induce more from Israel than tactical concessions, steps meant to reduce friction between the populations in order not to end occupation but to mitigate it and restore its low cost.
Forcing Israel to make larger, conflict-ending concessions would require making its fallback option so unappealing that it would view a peace agreement as an escape from something worse.
That demands more leverage than the Palestinians have so far possessed, while those who do have sufficient power have not been eager to use it. No less importantly, the United States has consistently sheltered Israel from accountability for its policies in the West Bank by putting up a facade of opposition to settlements that in practice is a bulwark against more significant pressure to dismantle them.
The US and most of Europe draw a sharp distinction between Israel and the occupied territories, refusing to recognise Israeli sovereignty beyond the pre lines.
When the limousine of the US president travels from West to East Jerusalem, the Israeli flag comes down from the driver-side front corner. And US regulations, not consistently enforced, stipulate that products from the settlements should not bear a made-in-Israel label.
Israel vehemently protests against this policy of so-called differentiation between Israel and the occupied territories, believing that it delegitimises the settlements and the state, and could lead to boycotts and sanctions of the country. But the policy does precisely the opposite: it acts not as a complement to punitive measures against Israel, but as an alternative to them.
Differentiation creates an illusion of US castigation, but in reality it insulates Israel from answering for its actions in the occupied territories, by assuring that only settlements and not the government that creates them will suffer consequences for repeated violations of international law.
Opponents of settlements and occupation, who would otherwise call for costs to be imposed on Israel, instead channel their energies into a distraction that creates headlines but has no chance of changing Israeli behaviour. It is in this sense that the policy of differentiation, of which Europeans and US liberals are quite proud, does not so much constitute pressure on Israel as serve as a substitute for it, thereby helping to prolong an occupation it is ostensibly meant to bring to an end.
Support for the policy of differentiation is widespread, from governments to numerous self-identified liberal Zionists, US advocacy groups such as J Street that identify with centrist and centre-left parties in Israel, and the editorial board of the New York Times.
Differentiation allows them to thread the needle of being both pro-Israel and anti-occupation, the accepted view in polite society. There are of course variations among these opponents of the settlements, but all agree that Israeli products that are created in the West Bank should be treated differently, whether through labelling or even some sort of boycott. What supporters of differentiation commonly reject, however, is no less important.
Not one of these groups or governments calls for penalising the Israeli financial institutions, real estate businesses, construction companies, communications firms, and, above all, government ministries that profit from operations in the occupied territories but are not headquartered in them. Sanctions on those institutions could change Israeli policy overnight. But the possibility of imposing them has been delayed if not thwarted by the fact that critics of occupation have instead advocated for a reasonable-sounding yet ineffective alternative.
Supporters of differentiation hold the view that while it may be justifiable to do more than label the products of West Bank settlements, it is inconceivable that sanctions might be imposed on the democratically elected government that established the settlements, legalised the outposts, confiscated Palestinian land, provided its citizens with financial incentives to move to the occupied territories, connected the illegally built houses to roads, water, electricity and sanitation, and provided settlers with heavy army protection.
They have accepted the argument that to resolve the conflict more force is needed, but they cannot bring themselves to apply it to the state actually maintaining the regime of settlement, occupation and land expropriation that they oppose. S ince the end of the cold war, the United States has not so much as considered using the sort of pressure it once did, and its achievements during the past quarter-century have been accordingly meagre.
US policymakers debate how to influence Israel, but without using almost any of the power at their disposal, including placing aid under conditions of changes in Israeli behaviour, a standard tool of diplomacy that officials deem unthinkable in this case. Listening to them discuss how to devise an end to occupation is like listening to the operator of a bulldozer ask how to demolish a building with a hammer.
We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice. Through pressure on the parties, a peaceful partition of Palestine is achievable. But too many insist on sparing Israelis and Palestinians the pain of outside force, so that they may instead continue to be generous with one another in the suffering they inflict.
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