New thinking about Palestine

Time is running out for a reasonable and fair Palestinian-Israeli settlement, which prompts many Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank to call for the one-state solution.

The right-wing Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been aggressively expanding its usurpation of the remaining 20 per cent of the original homeland of Arab Palestinians.

The Israeli land grab began in 1967, though its share of the 1948 UN Partition Plan disappointingly gave the Palestinians only 45 per cent of their homeland.

After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the Arab Palestinian population ended with only 18 per cent of its homeland and Israel in control of the entire Arab region called the West Bank.

Israel is still expanding its settlements in the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem without any loud reprimand from key Western nations, especially the United States.

For example, Israel recently issued demolition orders for 20,000 Palestinian houses in occupied East Jerusalem.

“The Israeli demolition of Palestinian homes is an old-occupation policy, but the new thing is mainly targeting the homes of Palestinian martyrs,” said Ziad Al Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights.

The Islamic Christian Commission in Support of Jerusalem and the Holy Sites reported that a primary school in East Jerusalem and a mosque in a Negev Desert village were demolished.

The estimate puts Israeli demolitions at 120 to 130 houses every year, done under the pretext of “demolishing everything illegal”.

Human Rights Watch has recently revealed that there are 1,000 Israeli businesses, mainly manufacturing plants, in the West Bank, operating in violation of international law because they were built on occupied land. Most of these businesses are located in 16 industrial zones.

They produce about $600 million worth of goods annually — “a small portion of Israel’s $300 billion economy”.

In a move that caused a stir among US lawmakers and some lobby groups, reported The Hill, the US Customs and Border Protection agency issued a reminder that goods produced in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank or Gaza should not be labelled “Made in Israel”.

In rapid retaliation, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) proposed a bill to reverse that 20-year established labelling regulation, calling it “nonsensical” and “invidious”.

It appears, the paper reported, that Cotton is taking his cue from senators Marco Rubio and Ron Wyden, who proposed a bill objecting to the guidelines issued by the European Union on Israeli settlement made products.

According to a World Bank study, reported Foreign Policy, 68 per cent of the resource-rich Area C of the West Bank has been reserved for illegal Israeli settlements, while less than 1 per cent has been allowed for Palestinian use.

The Palestinians are prevented from living, building or farming there under the pretext that the land is either “state land”, “military zone” or a “nature reserve”.

An unbelievable column appeared last week in The Washington Post, written by two senior fellows at the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Dennis Ross and David Makovsky, the former president Bill Clinton’s Middle East peace negotiator and special assistant to President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2011, the latter a member of the negotiating team of Secretary of State John Kerry during the 2013-14 Israeli-Palestinian talks.

In their column headlined “A bargain with Israel on settlements”, they noted that the prevailing attitude is that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict “is not about to be resolved”.

Nevertheless, they said, “this is all the more reason to think about what can be done to preserve the possibility of a two-state outcome, particularly with Palestinians entering a period of uncertain succession”. They argued that “the most direct way to begin changing the climate between Israelis and Palestinians in the hope of affecting Israel’s settlement policy [is] by adopting a new approach on the contentious issue”.

A “differentiated” approach to the settlements, they wrote, “could alter the perception”, that “approximately 80 per cent of illegal settlers live in approximately 5 per cent of the West Bank, largely adjacent to the pre-1967 lines...”.

In other words, Israel has to accept the new approach in order “to stem the drift towards a binational state, blunt the international delegitimisation movement and “give us leverage to block future European sanctions against Israel. It would also — after decades — remove settlements as a constant irritant to US-Israel relations”.

On the other hand, a decision adopted on the sidelines of the Munich security conference on February 12 has been described by an Israeli author, Uri Savir, as “a landmark for the efforts of the international community to revitalise an Israeli-Palestinian two-state solution process”.

The Quartet (the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia) reportedly decided to issue a report that will outline the obstacles that are today preventing a renewed peace process, as well as recommendations for restarting Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, thanks to the efforts of Federica Mogherini, the EU High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

The writer is a Washington-based columnist.