Hamas Is That Doggie in the Window?

“Israel has no better friend than the United States. The bond that unites our people is evidence of our shared values and decades of close cooperation and as we continue to strengthen our partnership, the United States remains unwavering in its support for Israel’s security. My administration is fully committed to working with the new Israeli government to advance security, stability, and peace for Israelis, Palestinians, and people throughout the broader region.” 

Joe Biden, June 15, 2001

“The genius of American democracy and Israeli democracy is that they are both built on strong institutions, on checks and balances, on an independent judiciary. Building consensus for fundamental changes is really important to ensure that the people buy into them so they can be sustained.” 

Joe Biden, February 11, 2022

There are so many distractions, major conflicts and forces seeking to rule the roost, that it is easy to overlook the machinations in one of the United States’ most reliable allies, Israel. With an ultra-rightwing and vehemently anti-Arab coalition, recently reelected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu has moved Israel into a more confrontational relationship with Arab residents in Israel proper as well as its antagonists in Hamas governed Gaza. Facing his corruption trial as well, Netanyahu seems equally hell-bent on legislation aimed at curbing his Supreme Court’s ability to overrule laws passed by his unicameral legislature, the Knesset.

Indeed, Netanyahu is slowly dismantling judicial power (a proposed bill would allow a simple majority of the Knesset to overrule the Supreme Court) and making sure that the notion of a “two state” Palestinian solution becomes structurally impossible. Reveling over Trump’s blank check support of Netanyahu, even recognizing Jerusalem as the official capital – election posters of Trump and Netanyahu together were all over Israel – the Prime Minister has proceeded to legitimize and expand the Jewish settlements on the West Bank (once assumed to become the independent new Palestine) and has completely rejected what has been an anchor policy from the United States for decades: that two-state solution.

Writing for the February 13th Los Angeles Times, Tracy Wilkinson explores the depth of the “complete loss of hope” for the two-state solution: “The intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians over land, rights and safety has entered a new phase, one plumbing new depths of hatred and radical intransigence that the U.S. government no longer seems in a position to resolve or even mitigate… Now, an increasing number of experts are sounding the death knell for the two-state solution… Dennis Ross, the former special envoy who has negotiated Middle East peace issues for both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations, says Israelis and Palestinians have reached ‘the lowest ebb’ he has ever seen… ‘There’s a complete loss of hope on both sides,’ Ross recently told a television interviewer.

“Three of the administration’s most senior officials — Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, CIA Director William Burns and White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan — made urgent trips to the region in recent days in a bid to deescalate rising violence and find common ground on which to build peace. But they came away unable to offer any reason to be less pessimistic than Ross… They spoke of a ‘shrinking horizon of possibility’, bad governance on both sides and the likelihood of major outbreaks of deadly fighting…

“Some in the new, far-right Israeli government — the most extreme and religiously conservative in the nation’s history — want to see the collapse of the Palestinian Authority, expulsion of many Palestinians and confiscation of most West Bank land, where the Palestinian state would have been created… Many Palestinians see their government as weak and useless — President Mahmoud Abbas has overstayed his term by a decade and refused to hold elections — and have watched as Jewish settlers have expanded their occupation. The heavily guarded settlements have in effect made the creation of a contiguous Palestinian state impossible.

“‘The United States is committed to working toward our enduring goal of ensuring that the Palestinians and Israelis enjoy equal measures of freedom, security, opportunity, justice and dignity,’ Blinken said on his last day in the Middle East after zipping through Cairo, Jerusalem and Ramallah in late January. ‘The only way to achieve that goal is through preserving and then realizing the vision of two states for two peoples.’

“U.S. officials ‘keep talking about their desire for a two-state solution, but they do nothing to implement it,’ said Diana Buttu, a Palestinian attorney who once advised the Palestinian Authority. Implementation, she said, would have to include blocking settlement expansion along with the confiscations, demolitions and evictions of Palestinians by Israel that have become routine… ‘It is a fantasy,’ Buttu said from her home in Haifa, Israel. ‘ ‘It will happen, it will happen,’ they say. In reality, it is as dead as a dodo bird.’…

Martin Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Middle East special envoy, said the administration cannot declare the two-state solution dead because there is no viable alternative… One oft-mentioned option is a single state of Israelis and Palestinians with equal rights. Some polling of Palestinians has shown growing support for the arrangement.

“But the prospects for that happening are perhaps even dimmer than for the two-state solution. What would such a state be called? Who would be in charge of security?... It would be neither Israeli nor Palestinian and wouldn’t satisfy the nationalist aspirations of either side. And because of higher birth rates among Palestinians, Israeli Jews might be a minority in such a state.”

So what can we expect? Israel’s becoming an illiberal democracy along the lines of Hungary and Turkey? Increased violence between Arab Israelis and Hamas, on the one side, and Jewish Israelis, on the other? What about those Arab Israelis, now treated as second class citizens, who wish to participate as full citizens in a new and vibrant Israel? Don’t hold your breath. Unless and until a more open and tolerant Israeli government rises, expect the hard lines being draw to be even harder, reinforced with a lot more violence.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it does seem unnecessary and illogical for each side to hate the other more, and for the Israeli government to do as much as possible to exacerbate that hatred into increased and seemingly inevitable violence.