How have post-Oct. 7 events affected the chances of Palestinian statehood?

Special How have post-Oct. 7 events affected the chances of Palestinian statehood?
The West Bank separation wall is viewed by Palestinians as undermining the two-state solution. (AFP file photo)
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Updated 29 July 2024
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How have post-Oct. 7 events affected the chances of Palestinian statehood?

How have post-Oct. 7 events affected the chances of Palestinian statehood?
  • Since the attack triggered the war in Gaza, there has been unprecedented pressure on Israel to resolve the decades-old dispute
  • But experts say reviving the two-state solution would require a significant change of government and attitudes among the Israeli people

LONDON: On Oct. 6 last year, the prospect of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict via the two-state solution seemed as far from becoming a reality as ever. Yet in the wake of the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, and Israel’s retaliation in Gaza, new life has been breathed into the concept.

Indeed, such has been the scale of public outcry at the suffering and destruction meted out on the people of Gaza and the West Bank since the conflict began that calls to revive the peace process and establish an independent Palestinian state appear to have grown louder.

“In my view the likelihood of Palestinian statehood has increased,” Itamar Rabinovich, president of the Israel Institute and Israel’s ambassador to the US from 1993 to 1996, told Arab News. “It is going to take time. But the issue of a two-state solution will have to be put back on the table.”




This photo taken on January 25, 2004, shows then Tel Aviv University President Itamar Rabinovich (L) and Jordanian Foreign Affairs minister Marwan Jamil Muasher at the "Breaking the Vicious Circle of the Arab-Israeli Conflict" conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. (AFP file)

Israel’s far-right coalition government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu has been resistant to the idea of a Palestinian state, doubling down on its strategy of containment. A change of government, however, could get the long-stalled peace process back on track.

“Probably as long as the Netanyahu government in its present composition is in power, this is not going to move,” said Rabinovich. “But hopefully this will change in the coming months and a new Israeli government, I think, is likely to take a different view of the matter.”

For Burcu Ozcelik, senior research fellow for Middle East security at London’s Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies, it is “very difficult to talk about anything positive against the backdrop of destruction and loss of life in Gaza.




Palestinians check the destruction after an Israeli strike on a building next to a school sheltering displaced people, in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on July 4, 2024. (AFP)

“But one silver lining has been the redirection of attention to the issue of Palestinian statehood, which over the past few years has been subject to a consensus almost of silence among policymakers, diplomats and observers,” he told Arab News.

“The Abraham Accords, for example, while generally a positive development for the region in terms of Israel’s relations with Arab countries, pushed the Palestinian claim for self-determination onto the backburner.”

Since Oct. 7, international pressure has been building on Israel — most dramatically in the May ruling by the International Court of Justice that Israel should halt its Rafah offensive, and the decision by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to seek arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defense minister Yoav Gallant on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.




Judges of the International Court of Justice attend a hearing in The Hague, Netherlands, (ICJ) on May 17, 2024, on South Africa’s request to order a stop to the Israeli assault on the Gaza city of Rafah. (AFP/File)

But there has also been unprecedented pressure, not only for a political “day after” solution to the war in Gaza, but also to a conflict that has raged for decades and destabilized the entire region.

On May 28, three European countries — Spain, Norway and Ireland — joined the 140 nations that have recognized Palestine as a sovereign state since the declaration of statehood by the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1988.

In a statement, Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Store, spoke for all three nations when he said that, in the midst of the war, “we must keep alive the only alternative that offers a political solution for Israelis and Palestinians alike: Two states, living side by side, in peace and security.”

Since the start of the war in Gaza, nine states have recognized Palestinian statehood.

Opinion

This section contains relevant reference points, placed in (Opinion field)

On April 18, the Palestinian Authority’s latest bid to convert its non-member observer status into full UN membership was supported by 12 votes, but vetoed by the US.

However, US deputy ambassador Robert Wood told the UN Security Council the veto “does not reflect opposition to Palestinian statehood but instead is an acknowledgment that it will only come from direct negotiations between the parties.”

Less than a month later, on May 10, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution by 143 votes to nine that upgraded the rights of the state of Palestine as an observer body, and urged the Security Council to “consider favorably” its elevation to full membership.




The results of a vote on a resolution for the UN Security Council to reconsider and support the full membership of Palestine into the United Nations is displayed during a special session of the UN General Assembly, at UN headquarters in New York City on May 10, 2024. (AFP)

Speaking in support of the resolution, Saudi Arabia’s UN ambassador, Abdulaziz Al-Wasil, said it sought “to implement the will of the international community and contribute to building true peace in the Middle East based on the two-state solution.”

It was, he added, “high time for the international community to re-establish the truth because the world can no longer ignore the suffering of the Palestinian people that has lasted for decades.” 

Sir John Jenkins, a former British consul-general in Jerusalem and ambassador to both Saudi Arabia and Iraq, agrees that Palestinian statehood is the only long-term solution for Israel’s security.

However, he believes achieving this will require a significant change of government, and a massive change of heart among the Israeli people.

“Israeli opinion has been shifting steadily to the right since the 1990s,” Jenkins told Arab News. “Initially that was because of the large influx of Soviet Jews into Israel, who tended to be extremely right-wing, and all voted for Likud. And then you had the Second Intifada, which was a real blow to the peace camp in Israel.”

Since October, “all the Israelis I have spoken to have said the same thing, that this was a profound trauma that has significantly shifted public opinion in Israel away from any conception of a Palestinian state.”

That being said, “although Israel has won a lot of battles since 1982, they have not won the war, and they can’t win the war. They cannot defeat all their enemies, and in the long run the answer to this is a Palestinian state, because that’s the way in which you neutralize the opposition.”

Any calculations about the possibility of progress toward a two-state solution must now also factor in recent political developments in America, where the withdrawal of Joe Biden from the Democratic ticket will have one of two likely consequences.

The re-election of Donald Trump, probably America’s most pro-Israel president to date, would likely impede progress on Palestinian statehood.




Pro-Palestinian demonstrators protest near the US Capitol before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint meeting of Congress on July 24, 2024, in Washington, DC. (AFP)

But although Trump saw a spike in his support following the failed assassination attempt on July 13, polls show his lead over likely Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is slightly less than his already marginal lead over Biden. 

As vice president, Harris has been a more vocal critic of events in Gaza than Biden.

In March during a meeting with Benny Gantz, then still a member of Israel’s war cabinet, she called for a pause in the fighting and “expressed her deep concern about the humanitarian conditions in Gaza.”

In a speech earlier that same month, she condemned the “humanitarian catastrophe” unfolding in Gaza, saying “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed … Our hearts break for the victims of that horrific tragedy.”




US Vice President Kamala Harris and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meet in Washington on July 25, 2024. (AFP)

As vice president, Harris has sat in on at least 20 calls between Biden and the Israeli prime minister and, according to sources quoted in The New York Times, has “emerged as one of the leading voices for Palestinians in closed-door meetings.”

During a meeting with Netanyahu on Thursday she was expected to say “it is time for the war to end in a way where Israel is secure, all hostages are released, the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can enjoy their right to dignity, freedom and self-determination.”

Harris knows she will not move the dial on Palestinian statehood among Republican voters, whose representatives gave Netanyahu such a warm welcome on Wednesday, but she will have a keen eye on swing states such as Michigan, where Biden has been losing support among Arab communities over his stance on Gaza.

It was telling that she chose not to be present for Netanyahu’s speech to the joint session of Congress on Wednesday, but she will have noted the subdued mood among those Democrats who did not boycott the address, and the angry demonstrations outside the US Capitol, where thousands branded the Israeli leader a war criminal.

The right-wing in Israel, and its supporters in the US, are as deeply entrenched ideologically as its liberal critics.

Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, who supervised US policy in the Middle East during the presidency of George W. Bush, delivered a scathing denunciation of what he called the “two-state delusion” in an article published in Tablet, the New York-based Jewish magazine, in February.

The growing call in the West for a two-state solution was “mostly a magical incantation,” Abrams wrote, and political pressure was growing “to skip niceties like negotiations and move quickly to implement the ‘two-state solution.’”

Abrams’ views reflect those of many on Israel’s right, and as such may portend an impending internal struggle over the issue of Palestinian statehood.

Creating a Palestinian state, he concluded, “will not end the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ because it will not end the Palestinian and now Iranian dream of eliminating the State of Israel. On the contrary, it can be a launching pad for new attacks on Israel and will certainly be viewed that way by the Jewish state’s most dedicated enemies.”




Pro-Palestinian demonstrators protest in front of the White House to denounce US President Joe Biden meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington, DC, on July 25, 2024. (AFP)

Abrams told Arab News he believed that “the insistence on one sole outcome, the ‘two-state solution,’ has made it nearly impossible for people to think sensibly and creatively about more logical alternatives that are safer and more realistic.”

One such alternative would be partition, similar to the proposal by the Peel Commission in 1937. But instead of being an independent, sovereign state “it seems to me that the Palestinian entity should be part of a confederation, perhaps, and most logically, with Jordan. The model of Kurdistan is worth exploring.”

In an interview with Politico in January, Netanyahu’s predecessor Ehud Omert said that despite the widespread revulsion in Israel at Hamas’ actions on and after Oct. 7, there remained only one feasible route to peace — with or without the support of the Israeli electorate or its right wing.

“It isn’t fashionable to trust Palestinians, any Palestinians,” he said. “This is the time when you’re meant to hate them. But … When I argue with people, I say, ‘What is the solution? What do you think can be done? Do you think that we can continue to control 4.5 million people without rights, with unlimited occupation, forever?’ Then they, of course, don’t have an answer.”




While Israeli settlements have continued to spring up in Palestinian territories in the West Bank (left), many Palestinian homes, such as these ones in Hebron, are being demolished by Israeli authorities. (AFP)

It was not, he insisted, a question of convincing the Israeli people to accept a two-state solution. “You just have to do it,” he said. “This is an act of leadership. This is what we’re missing now.”

On July 18, just days before Netanyahu left for Washington, the Israeli parliament voted by 68 to nine for a resolution, co-sponsored by an alliance of right-wing parties, rejecting the establishment of a Palestine state “at this time.”

As Olmert said in January, “the two-state solution was never a popular idea for a majority of Israelis.” But, he added, “I’ve learned in my political career that reality is created sometimes by the sheer determination and forceful decisions made by leaders. What’s popular, what isn’t popular, doesn’t really matter.

“Had we sealed a deal in the past, the majority would have gone along.”

But Rabinovich warns that the growth in size, power and influence of Israel’s settler movement, endorsed and encouraged by members of the current government, has created the potential for a dangerous confrontation in Israeli society should any Israeli leader try to emulate Olmert’s 2008 plan, under which Israel would have evacuated the settlements in 94 percent of the West Bank, resettling the 40,000 occupants in the remaining 6 percent annexed to Israel.

The plan would have increased territorial contiguity for a future Palestinian state, but “unfortunately,” said Rabinovich, it was rejected by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.




Palestinians look at burnt out vehicles in a car park following an attack by Israeli settlers in the town of Burqah, east of the West Bank city of Ramallah, on June 7, 2024. (AFP)

Such a scheme “would be much more difficult now, with a large number of scattered, illegal settlements, which the present Israeli government refuses to call illegal, but which are.”

Such a compromise, he said, “is still feasible. But it will take a very determined Israeli prime minister and could very well cause even a civil war in Israel, because the settlers and the right wing could fight violently against this.”

There is one thing on which many commentators agree. There can be no progress toward a two-state solution until Netanyahu is gone — and he will last only as long as the war in Gaza lasts.

“This is probably the end of his government,” said Rabinovich, “and one reason he continues the fighting is because he doesn’t want to get to that point.

“But when the war is over, the demands for a serious commission of inquiry and demonstrations will intensify, and I think political developments in Israel will be expedited.”
 

 


Life returns to raided West Bank city as Israeli army withdraws

Life returns to raided West Bank city as Israeli army withdraws
Updated 06 September 2024
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Life returns to raided West Bank city as Israeli army withdraws

Life returns to raided West Bank city as Israeli army withdraws
  • Days of destructive incursions by soldiers backed by armored vehicles and bulldozers
  • Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967 and its forces regularly make incursions into Palestinian communities

JENIN, Palestinian Territories: The Israeli army withdrew from the city of Jenin and its refugee camp on Friday after a 10-day operation that left 36 dead across the occupied West Bank, witnesses said.

After days of destructive incursions by soldiers backed by armored vehicles and bulldozers, residents who had fled began returning to their homes in the camp, a bastion of Palestinian armed groups fighting against Israel, AFP journalists said.

On August 28, the army launched a military operation in several cities and towns of the northern West Bank including Jenin.

It said in a statement on Friday that Israeli forces “have been conducting counterterrorism activity in the area of Jenin,” without confirming a withdrawal.

“Israeli security forces are continuing to act in order to achieve the objectives of the counterterrorism operation,” the statement said.

Over the course of the operation in Jenin, Israeli forces killed 14 militants, arrested 30 suspects, dismantled “approximately 30 explosives planted under roads” and conducted four aerial strikes, the statement said.

One Israeli soldier was killed in Jenin, where most of the Palestinian fatalities have occurred.

Hamas, whose October 7 attack on southern Israel triggered the ongoing war in Gaza, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have said at least 14 of the dead were militants.

Aziz Taleb, a 48-year-old father of seven, returned to his family home of 20 years to find soldiers had raided it.

“Thank God (the children) left the day before. They went to stay with our neighbors here,” he said.

“If they had stayed, they would have been killed without warning or anything,” he said as he surveyed the damage, glass crunching under his feet.

Many homes in Jenin camp were damaged or destroyed by army bulldozers and pavement was stripped from the roads.

Residents used bulldozers of their own to begin clearing the rubble on Friday after Israeli armored vehicles left, AFP journalists reported.

The early trickle of returning residents turned into a flood, and soon children were playing in the streets.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967 and its forces regularly make incursions into Palestinian communities, but the latest raids as well as hawkish comments by Israeli officials signaled an escalation, residents said.

Since the Gaza war began on October 7, Israeli troops or settlers have killed at least 661 Palestinians in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

At least 23 Israelis, including security forces, have been killed in Palestinian attacks in the territory during the same period, according to Israeli officials.


Rift over ultra-Orthodox education funding deepens Israeli coalition woes

Rift over ultra-Orthodox education funding deepens Israeli coalition woes
Updated 06 September 2024
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Rift over ultra-Orthodox education funding deepens Israeli coalition woes

Rift over ultra-Orthodox education funding deepens Israeli coalition woes
  • The ultra-Orthodox parties have been less vocal about the conduct of the war but have fought hard for benefits for their Haredi community
  • Tensions have run especially high over the recent abolition of an exemption long enjoyed by Haredi men from conscription into the military

JERUSALEM: Israel’s ultra-Orthodox parties, already at odds with coalition partners over demands to draft young religious men into the army, are again testing the unity of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government with a challenge over education funding.
The latest rift centers on an ultra-Orthodox push for schools in their separate education system to receive the same benefits as state-run schools, especially their “New Horizon” program that adds school hours and sharply hikes teacher pay.
“For a year we have been fighting for the entry of ‘New Horizon’ into ultra-Orthodox institutions. There is no reason for our teachers to be discriminated against,” said ultra-Orthodox Education Minister Haim Biton.
Biton, a member of Shas, one of two Orthodox parties in the right-wing coalition, said they would not quit the government over the issue. But the other ultra-Orthodox party, United Torah Judaism (UTJ), notified the coalition whip that until the funding issue was resolved it would boycott votes in parliament.
Coalition whip Ophir Katz said he was working to avert a showdown ahead of a vote on a 3.4 billion shekel ($918.35 million) budget boost to help fund tens of thousands of Israelis displaced from their homes by rocket fire from Lebanon.
The dispute is the latest of many that have highlighted both the tensions within Netanyahu’s unwieldy coalition through almost two years of near-constant crisis punctuated by mass protests against judicial reforms and the Gaza war.
With a grouping of religious and hard-line nationalist-religious parties and his own right-wing Likud party, Netanyahu controls 64 of parliament’s 120 seats but from the start, relations between ministers have been fractious.
Far-right parties led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir have repeatedly shaken the coalition over issues including the handling of the Gaza war, threatening to leave over any move, backed by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, toward a deal to end the conflict.
The ultra-Orthodox parties have been less vocal about the conduct of the war but have fought hard for benefits for their Haredi community, who comprise around 13 percent of the population.
Tensions have run especially high over the recent abolition of an exemption long enjoyed by Haredi men from conscription into the military under a ruling by the Supreme Court, but the education budget has also caused problems.
“The Haredi parties feel that the extreme right secured all of its demands from the government and Ben-Gvir gets whatever he wants from the prime minister, while they are failing,” said Gilad Malach, director of the Israel Democracy Institute’s ultra-Orthodox program.
With Netanyahu’s government likely to face a reckoning at the polls over the security failures that allowed the Oct. 7 cross-border attack by Hamas from Gaza to happen, none of the parties have shown any real inclination to walk out.
But even so, such tensions contain the seeds of future problems, Malach said. “It might begin a process that all parties don’t want right now but that might be the result.”


Tunisian presidential candidate Zammel released from detention, state news agency says

Tunisian presidential candidate Zammel released from detention, state news agency says
Updated 06 September 2024
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Tunisian presidential candidate Zammel released from detention, state news agency says

Tunisian presidential candidate Zammel released from detention, state news agency says
  • Ayachi Zammel is one of three candidates approved by Tunisia’s electoral commission to run in a presidential election on Oct. 6
  • Zammel campaign member Mahdi Abdel Jawad described his arrest as a kidnapping

TUNIS: Tunisian presidential candidate Ayachi Zammel was released from police custody on Friday shortly after he was set free from a previous detention then re-arrested over alleged election-related irregularities, the state news agency TAP reported.

Zammel is one of three candidates approved by Tunisia’s electoral commission to run in a presidential election on Oct. 6 which opposition critics say is rigged in favor of President Kais Saied.

He was arrested on Monday on suspicion of falsifying voter forms. A judge ordered him set free on Thursday. But two lawyers for Zammel, Abdessatar Massoudi and Dalila Ben Mbarek, said he was arrested again immediately after his release from Borj El Amri prison.

On Friday, he was released again on a judge’s orders, TAP said. His case was postponed until Sept. 19.

Zammel campaign member Mahdi Abdel Jawad described his arrest as a kidnapping.

He is accused of falsifying voter forms for next month’s election. Each candidate must submit forms from 10,000 supporters to qualify to stand. He denies the allegation.

Zammel has said he faces restrictions and intimidation because he is a serious competitor to Saied. He has pledged to rebuild democracy, guarantee freedoms and fix Tunisia’s collapsing economy.

Saied was democratically elected in 2019, but then tightened his grip on power and began ruling by decree in 2021 in a move the opposition has described as a coup.

Major political factions say Saied’s years in power have eroded the democratic gains of Tunisia’s 2011 revolution.

Opposition parties and human rights groups have accused the authorities of using arbitrary restrictions to help ensure Saied’s re-election.

Along with Zammel and Saied, politician Zouhair Maghzaoui is approved to run in the election.


UN mission suspects war crimes in Sudan, calls for peacekeeping force

UN mission suspects war crimes in Sudan, calls for peacekeeping force
Updated 06 September 2024
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UN mission suspects war crimes in Sudan, calls for peacekeeping force

UN mission suspects war crimes in Sudan, calls for peacekeeping force
  • Report said that both the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces were responsible for attacks on civilians

GENEVA: Both sides in Sudan’s civil war have committed abuses on a large scale which may amount to war crimes or crimes against humanity, a UN-mandated mission said on Friday, recommending an arms embargo and a peacekeeping force to protect civilians.
The 19-page report by a UN Fact-Finding Mission, based on 182 interviews with survivors, their family members and witnesses, said that both the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) were responsible for attacks on civilians and had used torture and carried out arbitrary arrests. “The gravity of these findings underscores the urgent and immediate action to protect civilians,” said the mission’s chair Mohamed Chande Othman, calling for an independent and impartial force to be deployed without delay.
The report is the three-member mission’s first since its creation in October 2023 by the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Civilians in Sudan are facing worsening famine, mass displacement and disease after 17 months of war between the army and the RSF paramilitary.
US-led mediators said last month that they had secured guarantees from both parties at talks in Switzerland to improve access for humanitarian aid, but that the Sudanese army’s absence from the discussions had hindered progress.


Iraqi date farmers fight drought to protect national treasure

Iraqi date farmers fight drought to protect national treasure
Updated 06 September 2024
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Iraqi date farmers fight drought to protect national treasure

Iraqi date farmers fight drought to protect national treasure
  • Dates are Iraq’s second-largest export product after oil, which dominates export revenues and generates more than $120 million
  • The date palm and its bounty are national icons, but they are being battered by drought

Janajah: Bare feet pressed against the rough trunk of a palm tree, his back supported by a metal and fabric harness, Ali Abed begins the climb to the dates above.
In Iraq, the date palm and its bounty are national icons, but they are being battered by drought.
Once known as the country of “30 million palm trees,” Iraq’s ancient date-growing culture had already suffered from upheaval, especially during the 1980-88 war with Iran, before climate change became a major threat.
In the still lush countryside of central Iraq, near Janajah village in Babylon province, hundreds of date palms stand tall and majestic, surrounded by vines and fruit trees.
During harvest season, the branches are heavy with clusters of yellow and red dates.
Rising at dawn to avoid the searing heat, harvesters climb the palms using only their upper body strength, aided by a harness and rope wrapped around the trunk.
“Last year, the orchards and the palm groves were thirsty; we almost lost them. This year, thanks to God, we had good water and a good harvest,” said Abed, a 36-year-old farmer from Biramana, a village a few kilometers (miles) from Janajah.
Once at the top, they pick the ripe dates, filling baskets that are lowered to the ground and emptied into basins, which are then loaded onto lorries.
Abed noted, however, that the harvest is much smaller now — about half of what it used to be. He once collected more than 12 tons but now brings in just four or five.
Abed criticized the lack of government support, saying aerial insecticide campaigns are not enough.
Iraq has spent over a decade trying to revive the date palm, a vital economic asset and national symbol.
Authorities and religious institutions have launched programs and mega-projects to encourage tree planting and growth.
An agriculture ministry spokesperson told the official INA news agency last month that, “for the first time since the 1980s,” the number of date palms had risen to “more than 22 million,” up from a low of just eight million.
During the Iran-Iraq War, palm groves were razed in vast areas along the border to prevent enemy infiltration.
Today, dates are Iraq’s second-largest export product after oil, which dominates export revenues and generates more than $120 million, according to the World Bank.
In 2023, Iraq exported around 650,000 tons of dates, official statistics show.
Yet around Janajah, many palm trees lie dead and decapitated.
“All these palm trees are dead due to the drought; the whole region is suffering,” said 56-year-old farmer Maitham Talib.
“Before, we had water. People irrigated abundantly. Now, we need complicated machinery,” he said, observing the harvest.
The United Nations has labelled Iraq one of the five countries in the world most vulnerable to some of the effects of climate change.
The country has endured four consecutive years of drought, though this year saw some relief with winter rainfall.
Alongside rising temperatures that have hit 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) in summer and declining rainfall, Iraq also faces falling river levels, blamed on dams built upstream by Iran and Turkiye.
Kifah Talib, 42, lamented the slow devastation wrought by the drought.
“It used to be paradise: apple, pomegranate, citrus trees and vines — everything grew here,” he said.