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two state solution
Emboldened by Trump Win, Israeli Minister Vows West Bank Annexation in 2025
"I have no doubt that President Trump, who showed courage and determination in his decisions during his first term, will support the state of Israel in this move."
Nov 12, 2024
Anticipating even greater U.S. support following Republican President-elect Donald Trump's White House return in January, far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Monday ordered officials to prepare to illegally annex the occupied West Bank of Palestine in 2025.
"The year 2025 will be, with God's help, the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria," Smotrich told members of his Religious Zionist Party. "The only way to remove the threat of a Palestinian state from the agenda is to apply Israeli sovereignty over the settlements in Judea and Samaria."
Judea and Samaria is the biblical name for the West Bank and is used by proponents of annexation and the creation of a Greater Israel, which would include all of Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon and parts of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, and Turkey.
"The year 2025 will be, with God's help, the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria."
"I have no doubt that President Trump, who showed courage and determination in his decisions during his first term, will support the state of Israel in this move," Smotrich said.
On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who has repeatedly denied annexationist ambitions during the tenure of U.S. President Joe Biden—signaled that annexation would be back on the agenda in light of Trump's victory, according to Israeli state broadcaster Kan.
Smotrich said Monday that he has directed officials in the Ministry of Defense and Civil Administration "to actually prepare the necessary infrastructure for applying sovereignty" to the lands Israel has occupied and colonized after invading and conquering the West Bank and other Palestinian territories in 1967.
Israel's occupation and settlements are illegal under international law including the Fourth Geneva Convention. The International Court of Justice in The Hague—which is also weighing a Gaza genocide case against Israel—in July issued an advisory opinion affirming that the 57-year occupation is illegal and a form of apartheid.
Smotrich declared his intention to work "with the new administration of President Trump and with the international community to implement Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria."
In a swipe at the Biden administration—which has approved tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military aid for Israel and provided diplomatic cover for its war on Gaza and against Palestinian statehood—Smotrich said Monday that "we were on the verge of applying sovereignty over settlements in Judea and Samaria" during Trump's first term. "Now, it's time to act," he asserted.
While Netanyahu's government may find a willing partner in Trump—who calls himself "the best friend Israel has ever had"—most of the rest of the world is staunchly opposed to Israeli annexation. Nearly 150 nations recognize Palestinian statehood; in May, the United Nations General Assembly voted 143-9 to upgrade Palestine's U.N. status to observer state.
In September, European Union foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell warned that "not only is there no pause in the war in Gaza, but what looms on the horizon is the extension of the conflict to the West Bank, where radical members of the Israeli government—Netanyahu's government—try to make it impossible to create a future Palestinian state."
Israel has already unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights. While the U.N. and most countries' governments consider these moves—and Israeli settlements in the annexed territories—unlawful, the first Trump administration recognized them as legal. In February, the Biden administration reversed the so-called "Pompeo doctrine" and reverted to the State Department's legal opinion from 1978-2019: that settlements are inconsistent with international law.
Netanyahu has openly boasted about thwarting the so-called "two-state solution" and has repeatedly advocated full Israeli control of Palestine.
"From every area we evacuate we have received terrible terror against us. It happened in southern Lebanon, it happened in Gaza, and also in Judea and Samaria," the prime minister said earlier this year. "The state of Israel needs security control over all territory west of the Jordan River. Israel has to control the entire area from the river to the sea."
More than 700,000 Jewish settlers have colonized the West Bank since 1967, according to Israeli estimates.
Settlers often destroy property and attack Palestinians, sometimes in mobs that carry out deadly pogroms, in order to terrorize them into fleeing so their land can be stolen. As the world's attention is focused on Gaza, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed more than 900 Palestinians including over 200 children in the West Bank since January 2023, according to the most recent figures from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Last month, Smotrich and other far-right senior Israeli officials including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir spoke at a conference advocating for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza—which numerous critics say is already underway—to make way for Jewish recolonization of the embattled coastal enclave.
Proponents pointed to West Bank settlements as the example to emulate. But Smotrich has even greater ambitions.
"It is written," he said in a recent interiew, "that the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus."
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Here's the Truth: It Is the Lack of a Two-State Solution That Most Threatens Israel
As a result of its belligerence and intransigence, Israel is now almost completely ostracized by the international community, and also faces grave economic and military threats as the regional war expands.
Oct 06, 2024
Israel rejects the two-state solution because it claims that a sovereign state of Palestine would profoundly endanger Israel’s national security. In fact, it is the lack of a two-state solution that endangers Israel. Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, its continuing apartheid rule over millions of Palestinians, and its extreme violence to defend that rule, all put Israel’s survival in jeopardy, as Israel faces dire threats from global diplomatic isolation and the ongoing war, including the war’s massive economic, social, and financial costs.
There are three basic reasons for Israel’s opposition to the two-state solution, reflecting a variety of ideologies and interests in Israeli society.
The first, and most mainstream, is Israel’s claim that Palestinians and the Arab world cannot live alongside it and only wish to destroy it. The second is the belief among Israel’s rapidly growing religious-nationalist population that God promised the Jews all of the land from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean, including all of Palestine. We recently wrote about that ideology, pointing out that it is roughly 2,600 years out of step with today’s realities. The third is straightforward material gain. With its ongoing occupation, Israel aims to profit from control over the region’s freshwater resources, coastal zones, offshore natural gas deposits, tourist destinations, and land for settlements.
These various motives are jumbled together in Israel’s continued intransigence. Yet taken individually or as a package, they fail to justify Israel’s opposition to the two-state solution, certainly not from the perspective of international law and justice, but not even with regard to Israel’s own security or narrow economic interests.
Consider Israel’s claim about national security, as was recently repeated by PM Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations on September 27th. Netanyahu accused the Palestinian Authority, and specifically President Mahmoud Abbas, of waging “unremitting diplomatic warfare against Israel’s right to exist and against Israel’s right to defend itself.”
After Netanyahu’s speech, Ayman Safadi, Jordan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, standing beside Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa replied to Netanyahu in a press conference:
All of us in the Arab world here, want a peace in which Israel lives in peace and security, accepted, normalized with all Arab countries in the context of ending the occupation, withdrawing from Arab territory, allowing for the emergence of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state on the June 4, 1967 lines with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Minister Safadi was speaking on behalf of the 57 members of the Muslim-Arab committee, who are all willing “to guarantee Israel’s security” in the context of a two-state solution. Minister Safadi, alongside the Palestinian Prime Minister, articulated the region’s peace proposal, an alternative to Netanyahu’s endless wars.
Earlier this year, the Bahrain Declaration in May 2024 of the 33rd Regular Session of the Council of the League of Arab States, on behalf of the 22 member states, re-iterated:
We call on the international community to assume its responsibilities to follow-up efforts to advance the peace process to achieve a just and comprehensive peace based on the two-state solution, which embodies an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital on the lines of the fourth of June 1967, able to live in security and peace alongside Israel in accordance with the resolutions of international legitimacy and established references, including the Arab Peace Initiative.
The many Arab and Islamic statements for peace, including those of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), in which Iran is a repeated signatory, trace back to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative of Beirut—where Arab countries first proposed the region’s readiness to establish relations with Israel in the context of the two-state solution. The initiative declared that peace is based on Israel’s withdrawal from the Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese occupied territories.
Israel claims that even if the Arab states and Iran want peace, Hamas does not, and therefore threatens Israel. There are two crucial points here. First, Hamas accepted the two-state solution, already 7 years ago, in their 2017 Charter. “Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.” This year again, Hamas proposed to disarm in exchange for Palestinian statehood on the 1967 borders. Israel, in turn, assassinated the Hamas political chief and cease-fire negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh.
Second, Hamas is very far from being a stand-alone actor. Hamas depends on funds and arms from the outside, notably from Iran. Implementation of the two-state solution under UN Security Council auspices would include the disarmament of non-state actors and mutual security arrangements for Israel and Palestine, in line with international law and the recent ICJ ruling, which Iran voted in favor of at UN General Assembly.
The giveaway that Hamas is an excuse, not a deep cause, of Israel’s intransigence is that Netanyahu has tactically if quietly supported Hamas over the years in a divide and conquer strategy. Netanyahu’s ruse has been to prevent the unity of different Palestinian political factions in order to forestall the Palestinian Authority from developing a national plan to forge a Palestinian state. The whole point of Netanyahu’s politics for decades has been to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state using any argument at hand.
Israel and its boosters often claim that the failure at Camp David in 2000 proves that the Palestinians reject the two-state solution. This claim also is not correct. As documented by many, including Clayton E. Swisher in his meticulous account in The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story about the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process, the Camp David negotiations in 2000 failed owing to Bill Clinton’s last-minute approach to deal making, combined with then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s political cowardice in failing to honor Israeli obligations under the Oslo Accord.
As time ran out at Camp David, Clinton was a dishonest broker, as were the blatantly pro-Israel US negotiators, who refused to acknowledge Palestine’s legal claim to the borders of 4 June 1967, and prevarications about Palestine’s right to its capital in East Jerusalem. The “final offer” abruptly pushed by the Israelis and their American backers on the Palestinians did not secure basic Palestinian rights, nor were the Palestinians given time to deliberate and respond with alternative proposals. The Palestinians were then falsely blamed by the Americans and Israelis for the failure of the negotiations.
Israel persists with its intransigence because it believes that it has the unconditional backing of the United States. Through decades of large campaign contributions and assiduous lobbying, the Israel lobby in the United States not only controls votes in the Congress, but also has also placed arch-Zionists in top positions in every administration. Yet due to Israel’s brutality in Palestine and Lebanon, the Israel Lobby has lost its ability to control the narrative and votes across mainstream American society.
Trump, Biden, and Netanyahu all believed that Israel could “have it all”—Greater Israel and peace with the Arab states, while blocking a Palestinian state—through a US-brokered normalization process. The Abraham Accords (which established diplomatic relations of Israel with Bahrain and the UAE) was to be the role model for normalizing relations between Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This approach was always cynical (as it aimed to block a Palestinian state) but is surely delusional now. The Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia has made crystal clear in his op-ed in the Financial Times on October 2, that the two-state solution is the only pathway to peace and normalization.
“A two-state solution is not merely an ideal; it is the only viable path to ensuring Palestine, Israel and the region’s long-term security. Uncontrolled escalatory cycles are the building blocks of wider war. In Lebanon, we are witnessing this firsthand. Peace cannot be built on a foundation of occupation and resentment; true security for Israel will come from recognising the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.”
Israel’s ongoing intransigent opposition to the two-state solution, recently reiterated by a vote of the Knesset, has become the greatest danger to Israel’s own security. Israel is now almost completely ostracized by the international community, and also faces grave economic and military threats as the regional war expands. As just one indicator of the emerging economic disarray, Israel’s credit rating is already plummeting, and Israel is likely to lose its investment grade credit rating very soon, with dire long-term economic consequences.
Nor does Israel’s violent pursuit of its extremist vision serve US security or US interests, and the American people oppose Israel’s extremism. The Israel Lobby is likely to lose its grip. Both the US public and the US deep state are very likely to withdraw their uncritical and unconditional support for Israel.
The practical elements of peace are at hand, as we recently spelled out in detail. The US can save the region from an imminent conflagration, and the world from a possible global war of great powers. The US should drop its veto of Palestine’s membership in the UN, and support the implementation of the two-state solution under the auspices of the UN Security Council, with enforcement of mutual security for both Israel and Palestine on the basis of justice and international law.Keep ReadingShow Less
Israel's Ideology of Genocide Must Be Confronted and Stopped
Israel’s violent extremists now in control of its government believe that Israel has the Biblical license, indeed a religious mandate, to destroy the Palestinian people.
Sep 30, 2024
When Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the podium at the U.N. General Assembly last week, dozens of governments walked out of the chamber. The global opprobrium of Netanyahu and his government is due to Israel’s depraved violence against its Arab neighbors. Netanyahu purveys a fundamentalist ideology that has turned Israel into the most violent nation in the world.
Israel’s fundamentalist credo holds that Palestinians have no right whatsoever to their own nation. The Israeli Knesset recently passed a declaration rejecting a Palestinian State in what the Knesset calls The Land of Israel, meaning the land west of the Jordan River.
The Knesset of Israel firmly opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state west of Jordan. The establishment of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel will pose an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens, perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and destabilize the region.
To call the land west of the Jordan the “heart of the Land of Israel” is breathtaking. Israel is one part of the land west of the Jordan, not the entire land. The International Court of Justice has recently ruled that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian lands (those outside of Israel’s borders as of June 4, 1967, before the June 1967 war) is plainly illegal. The U.N. General Assembly has recently voted overwhelmingly to back the ICJ ruling and called on Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territories within one year.
There are many sources of this Israeli brazenness, the most important being the backing of Israel by U.S. military power.
It is worth recalling that when the British empire promised a Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine in 1917, the Palestinian Arabs constituted around 90% of the population. At the time of the 1947 U.N. partition plan, the Palestinian Arab population was approximately 67% of the population, though the partition plan proposed to give the Arabs only 44% of the land. Now Israel asserts the claim to 100% of the land.
There are many sources of this Israeli brazenness, the most important being the backing of Israel by U.S. military power. Without the U.S. military backing, Israel could not possibly rule over an Apartheid regime in which Palestinian Arabs constitute nearly one half of the population yet hold none of the political power. Future generations will look back in amazement at the success of the Israel Lobby in manipulating the U.S. military to the severe detriment of U.S. national security and global peace.
Yet in addition to the U.S. military, there is another source of Israel’s profound injustice to the Palestinian people, and that is the religious fundamentalism purveyed fanatics such as the self-proclaimed fascist Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s Minister of Finance, and Minister of National Defense Itamar Ben-Gvir. These fanatics hold fast to the biblical Book of Joshua, according to which God promised the Israelites the land "from the Negev wilderness in the south to the Lebanon mountains in the north, from the Euphrates River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west." (Joshua 1:4).
At the U.N. last week, Netanyahu once again staked Israel’s claim to the land on Biblical grounds: “When I spoke here last year, I said we face the same timeless choice that Moses put before the people of Israel thousands of years ago, as we were about to enter the Promised Land. Moses told us that our actions would determine whether we bequeath to future generations a blessing or a curse.”
What Netanyahu did not tell his fellow leaders (most of whom had in any event vacated the hall), was that Moses laid out a genocidal path to the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 31):
[The LORD] will destroy these nations before you, and you shall dispossess them. Joshua is the one who will cross ahead of you, just as the LORD has spoken. “The LORD will do to them just as He did to Sihon and Og, the kings of the Amorites, and to their land, when He destroyed them. “The LORD will deliver them up before you, and you shall do to them according to all the commandments which I have commanded you.”
Israel’s violent extremists believe that Israel has the Biblical license, indeed a religious mandate, to destroy the Palestinian people. Their Biblical hero is Joshua, the Israelite commander who succeeded Moses, and who led the Israelites’ genocidal conquests. (Netanyahu has also referred to the Amalekites, another case of a God-ordained genocide of foes of the Israelites, in a clear “dog-whistle” to his fundamentalist followers.) Here is the Biblical account of Joshua’s conquest of Hebron (Joshua 10):
Then Joshua and all Israel with him went up from Eglon to Hebron, and they fought against it. They captured it and struck it and its king and all its cities and all the persons who were in it with the edge of the sword. He left no survivor, according to all that he had done to Eglon. And he utterly destroyed it and every person who was in it.
There is a deep irony to this genocidal account. It almost surely is not historically accurate. There is no evidence that the Jewish kingdoms arose from genocides. Most likely they arose from local Canaanite communities adopting early forms of Judaism. Jewish fundamentalists adhere to a 6th century BCE text that is most likely a mythical reconstruction of purported events several centuries earlier, and a form of political bravado that was common in ancient Near Eastern politics. The problem is 21st century Israeli politicians, illegal settlers, and other fundamentalists who propose to live by—and kill by—6th century BCE political propaganda.
Israel’s violent fundamentalists are some 2,600 years out of step with today’s acceptable forms of statecraft and international law. Israel is duty bound to the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, not to the Book of Joshua. According to the recent ICJ ruling and UN General Assembly resolution backing it up, Israel must withdraw in the coming twelve months from the occupied Palestinian lands. According to international law, Israel’s borders are those of June 4, 1967, not the Euphrates to the Mediterranean Sea.
Israel’s violent fundamentalists are some 2,600 years out of step with today’s acceptable forms of statecraft and international law.
The ICJ ruling and U.N. General Assembly vote is not a ruling against the state of Israel per se. It is a ruling only against extremism, indeed against extremism and malevolence on both sides of the divide. There are two peoples, each with roughly half the overall population (and with no shortage of internal social, political, and ideological divisions within the two communities). International law calls for two states, living side by side, in peace.
The best solution, which we should strive for and hope for sooner rather than later, is that the two states, and the two peoples, get along, and actually draw strength from each other. Until then, however, the practical solution will be peacekeepers and fortified borders to protect each side from the animosity of the other, but with each having the chance to prosper. The utterly intolerable and illegal situation is the status quo, in which Israel rules brutally over the Palestinian people.
Hopefully, there will soon be a State of Palestine, sovereign and independent, whether the Knesset wants it or not. This is not Israel’s choice, but the mandate of the world community and of international law. The sooner the State of Palestine is welcomed as member state of the U.N., with the security of both Israel and Palestine backed by U.N. peacekeepers, the sooner will peace come to the region.
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