The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine--A Tale of Two Narratives - Softcover

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Padraig O’Malley is the Moakley Chair for Peace and Reconciliation at the McCormack Graduate School of Global and Policy Studies, University of Massachusetts. He has dedicated his career to studying and helping to resolve conflicts in Northern Ireland, South Africa, and beyond. He is the author of Shades of Difference and Biting at the Grave, one of the New York Times’ ten best books of 1990. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Author Padraig O'Malley is the subject of the new acclaimed documentary The Peacemaker.

"Impressive . . . [O'Malley] has done a tremendous amount of research about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." -The New York Times Book Review

Disputes over settlements, the right of return, the rise of Hamas, recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, and other intractable issues have repeatedly derailed peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine.

Now, in a book that is sure to spark controversy, renowned peacemaker Padraig O'Malley argues that the moment for a two-state solution has passed. After examining each issue and speaking with Palestinians and Israelis as well as negotiators directly involved in past summits, O'Malley concludes that even if such an agreement could be reached, it would be nearly impossible to implement given a variety of obstacles including the staggering costs involved, Palestine's political disunity and economic fragility, rapidly changing demographics in the region, Israel's continuing political shift to the right, global warming's effect on the water supply, and more.

In this revelatory, hard-hitting book, O'Malley approaches the key issues pragmatically, without ideological bias, to show that we must find new frameworks for reconciliation if there is to be lasting peace between Palestine and Israel.

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Introduction

Within forty-eight hours of taking the oath of office in January 2009, President Barack Obama appointed Senator George Mitchell as his Special Envoy for Middle East Peace. Obama’s Joint Chiefs were already telling him the anti-Americanism among Muslims that U.S. soldiers encountered in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and elsewhere in the region posed a danger to their mission and lives. While much of this sentiment could be attributed to post-9/11 sensitivities, Muslims’ perception of America’s lack of evenhandedness during the long Israeli-Palestinian conflict and their perception that the United States always sides with Israel no matter the circumstances served as ongoing sources of resentment. Settling the conflict in the Middle East could no longer be left to the protagonists. Now American national-security interests superseded their parochial concerns. For decades the two peoples, Israelis and Palestinians, had fought one calamitous engagement after another, dithered from one fruitless negotiation to another, always managing to end up further from peace than ever. A resolution of this conflict was required.

Obama agreed with the Joint Chiefs’ assessment. Finding a settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict became one of the new administration’s foreign-policy priorities. Getting Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiation table, with the United States “running interference” and prepared to play “tough love” if necessary, could lead the two sides to agree to some kind of two-state solution—perhaps one that neither side was entirely satisfied with but one that met their needs, if not necessarily sufficiently meeting their interests. Perhaps the new borders for the two states would be even more complicated than gerrymandered congressional districts and the mapmaking creatively accommodating. But no matter: A two-state resolution was the only feasible option. All of the “experts” agreed—and on this alluring subject there are hundreds, if not thousands, of experts.

“It’s not rocket science,” said Robert Malley, then director of the Middle East program at the International Crisis Group (ICG), now a senior director of Obama’s National Security Council. “And a lot of people who have looked at this have reached the conclusion that the parties won’t reach there on their own. If the U.S. wants it done, it will have to do it.”1

Wanting it done, yes; putting its own proposals on the table, a very different matter.

Special Envoy Mitchell hit the road, shuttling throughout the Middle East, with numerous stops in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to visit Israel’s newly elected prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; in Ramallah to visit Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and president, too, of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); and in the capitals of Arab countries in the region.

“The most relevant question to the two sides,” Mitchell told me in 2012, “is how they cannot see that their interests would best be served by getting into a serious negotiation in which they could reach an agreement that would then allow them to achieve what they say they want to achieve. That the longer it goes without that kind of negotiation and without that kind of agreement, the less likely they are going to be able to achieve it.”2

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Act I opened in Cairo.

On June 4, 2009, at Cairo University, President Obama delivered a speech that reverberated throughout the Muslim world.3 He promised “a new beginning” to undo the damage to the relationship between the United States and its Muslim counterparts, which had deteriorated badly following 9/11. Addressing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he reiterated that the United States did not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements and cautioned that further construction should stop.

Days later, during a speech at Bar-Ilan University, Netanyahu reluctantly embraced a two-state solution for the first time, albeit postulating a Palestinian state in terms that fell well short of what hitherto had been discussed in negotiations.4 Netanyahu’s coalition was one of the most right-wing governments in Israel’s sixty-year history, and his policies on the Palestinian issue were dictated by the need to hold his coalition together. Any proposal that would further arouse the ire of parties in the Likud, the party he headed, or any to the right of it, of which there were several in his governing coalition, would almost certainly be rejected out of hand if it threatened their time-worn shibboleths.

The Israelis were deeply insulted that Obama did not follow up his Cairo speech with a trip to Israel and furious that he would admonish Israel on settlements before an Arab audience. Israel interprets anything less than overt displays of unwavering support on the part of every American administration as signaling some kind of policy shift, now signified, it believed, by Obama’s calls for halting settlements. Meanwhile, the PLO seized upon Obama’s repeated insistence on a halt to settlement construction and made it a condition for resuming talks. After much cajoling—and some pressure from his allies in Europe—Netanyahu offered a ten-month freeze, which would not include construction already in the works or in East Jerusalem. He made the formal announcement in Tel Aviv on November 25, 2009.5 Weeks earlier, during a visit to Israel, U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton had praised Israel for making “unprecedented” concessions on West Bank settlement construction and urged both sides to renew stalled peace talks.6 The Palestinians insisted that the freeze had to include East Jerusalem.7 Haggling over the issue ate into the ten-month moratorium.

In May 2011, Netanyahu visited the White House, following a March 2010 visit that had gone badly.8 By all accounts the May meeting wasn’t much better,9 further acerbating the already strained relations between the two men going back to Obama’s Cairo speech. In the joint press debriefing that followed, Obama was unequivocal: Settlements had to stop. In response, Netanyahu ignored the issue and focused on their discussion of the threat Iran’s continued enrichment of uranium posed.

In September, the freeze lapsed with the Israelis and Palestinians still hunkered down in their bunkers. The Palestinians were adamant: no freeze on settlements, no talks. The Israelis met obstinacy with obstinacy: no preconditions, no talks.

The curtains closed on act 1.

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Meanwhile, events across North Africa, hitherto unimaginable but with far-ranging and unforeseeable repercussions, moved to the fore. Spontaneous mass demonstrations of “people power,” beginning in Tunisia in December 2010, toppled long-entrenched dictators.10 Demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, where hundreds of thousands of Egyptians from all walks of life demanded the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled Egypt with an iron fist for thirty years, were a riveting spectacle and ushered in the Arab Spring. The Middle East was being remade.

When Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, ordered his troops to kill unarmed Sunni Muslim demonstrators in March 2011, what had begun as a peaceful protest escalated into a revolt by Sunni Muslims against the ruling minority Alawites, a Shia offshoot.11 The scale and brutality of Assad’s attempts to quell the revolt led to massive opposition to his regime; the revolt drew increasingly large numbers of the population to its side. Assad’s response: “Kill my citizens.” Although the ranks of rebel groups swelled, they lacked the weapons to withstand Assad’s...