Tag Archive for: Palestine

A new chance for the Middle East

The word ‘opportunity’ rarely appears in the same sentence as the Middle East, and for good reason, but there is a case for suggesting we are approaching an exception. An opportunity—if not for lasting peace, then at least for an end to the ongoing conflicts and the prevention of new ones—is in fact knocking. The question is whether political leaders will open the door.

Israel has decimated the military capability of both Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. But continuing military action on its part is running up against the law of diminishing returns, as fewer high-value targets are left.

Moreover, continued military efforts threaten the country’s regional and global standing. The International Criminal Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant is the latest indication of the political isolation and economic sanctions that could become Israel’s fate unless it changes course.

The case for a ceasefire on both fronts is strong. The recent agreement between Israel and Hezbollah requires Hezbollah (which is so weakened that it dropped its insistence that a ceasefire in southern Lebanon be linked to one in Gaza) to move its heavy weaponry north of the Litani River, away from the border with Israel. Lebanese troops will patrol southern Lebanon, and the Israel Defense Forces will withdraw from the area and agree not to maintain a presence. Israel has obtained assurances that under certain conditions it would still be able to take military action against Hezbollah to frustrate the group’s attempts to reconstitute itself along the border or if it were preparing to attack.

This accord, if it holds, permits some 60,000 Israelis to return to their homes after more than a year of displacement. In addition, the ceasefire will allow Israel’s exhausted and overextended military to recover and focus on other challenges, including Iran, which is inching ever closer to developing a nuclear-weapons capability that would pose an existential threat to Israel. And the ceasefire should spare Lebanon and its people further devastation.

Yes, the ceasefire will also allow Hezbollah a degree of time and space to regroup, which is why some in Israel oppose it. That said, open-ended military operations will accomplish little, as Hezbollah can be weakened but not eliminated. Israel’s past failed occupation of southern Lebanon demonstrates as much. Israel’s goal, which this agreement puts within reach, should be to restore deterrence.

Gaza poses a more difficult challenge. It is not clear that Hamas would agree to a ceasefire, although it is much weakened militarily and might have difficulty resisting one if Israel agrees to terms that are widely deemed reasonable.

But will Israel agree? It should, because a ceasefire would allow the return of the more than one hundred remaining hostages in Gaza, half of whom Israeli intelligence services believe are still alive. Moreover, as with Lebanon, it is far from clear that Israel stands to gain from continuing military operations in Gaza. Hamas is certainly unable to launch another attack like the one it carried out on 7 October 2023. But Israel’s refusal to start a diplomatic process that would give Palestinians a chance to secure elements of their nationalist aspirations has made it possible for Hamas—with its insistence on endless struggle—to remain relevant.

The big question, then, is whether Israel would agree to a political process that holds out the possibility (however distant, conditional, and vague in terms of territorial reach) of creating a Palestinian state. In the near term, such a process would pave the way for the entry into Gaza of a regional stabilisation force and the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Over time, a Palestinian state properly constituted would enable Israel to remain both Jewish and democratic as well as prosperous and secure.

Some in Israel much prefer a future that allows for Israeli settlement of parts of Gaza and annexation of large swaths of the West Bank. And if they do not get their way, they have vocally threatened to bring down Netanyahu’s government. That is a risk Netanyahu has been loath to take, given that, once out of office, he faces pending legal action and official investigations into Israel’s failure to anticipate and respond to Hamas’s 7 October attack.

Donald Trump, whose return to the Oval Office on 20 January 2025 is already looming over these dynamics, could prove to be the critical variable. While the Israeli right sees his return as an opportunity to achieve maximalist aims, even calling 2025 the year of Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank and an opportunity to begin reducing Gaza’s Palestinian population through ‘voluntary emigration’, Trump has expressed a desire to calm the region.

Trump is in a position to achieve this goal. Owing to events in Lebanon, Netanyahu may be sufficiently strong to stare down his right-wing coalition partners, form a new government without them, or even get a fresh mandate from the voters. And even if not, Trump, whom the Israeli right see as a friend, could lean on Netanyahu and his government in a way that President Joe Biden never could. It would be more difficult for Netanyahu to resist Trump’s pressure, and much easier for Trump to apply and sustain such pressure, given his support among American evangelicals and certain American Jewish communities.

Richard Nixon comes to mind. Nixon, it is said, was able to reach out to Mao’s China because he alone didn’t have to worry about Nixon.

Much the same now applies to Trump. He could build on the ceasefire in Lebanon and press for one in Gaza, launching what would be a promising diplomatic process. Pulling this off would constitute quite a coup for the 47th president. The opportunity is there for the taking.

Israel’s endless occupation

In the 55 years Israel has been occupying Palestinian lands, there have been two intifadas, four wars in Gaza, and a long series of failed efforts to negotiate a two-state solution roughly adhering to Israel’s pre-1967 borders. The situation may truly be as hopeless as it seems.

Intransigence on both sides—which no US president has managed to overcome, though virtually every one since the Six-Day War has tried—has gotten us to this point. While the Palestinians have sometimes embraced international diplomacy, they have also engaged in periods of obdurate resistance. It was the Palestinians who thwarted two promising peace initiatives, led by the forward-looking Israeli governments of Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert.

Given sentiment in Israel today, they might not get another chance. With each failed peace process, the promise of peace has lost its potency as a mobilising cause in Israel. Meanwhile, Israel has gradually tightened its control over the occupied territories, with virtually no international pushback. Even the Arab states—six of which have normalised ties with Israel—seem to have grown indifferent to the agony of the Palestinians.

All of this has driven Israeli voters radically to the right, leaving Israel’s peace camp demoralised and weak. The religious-nationalist bloc that former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu leads now represents the majority of Israelis. And as far-right as Netanyahu may be, he is practically a leftist compared to the tens of thousands of radical Jewish nationalists who marched through Jerusalem’s Muslim Quarter on Jerusalem Day last month waving Israeli flags, repeating violent and Islamophobic chants like ‘death to Arabs’, and attacking Palestinians.

When Algerians rebelled against their French occupiers in one of the most brutal anti-colonial wars of the post-1945 era, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, ‘It is not their violence, but ours, which turns back on itself.’ In fact, the French found the violence being enacted in their name so abhorrent that 75% of them voted to grant Algeria independence in the 1961 referendum.

A similar sentiment is difficult to discern in Israel. On the contrary, popular support for the military’s fight against ‘Palestinian terrorism’ is overwhelming.

To be sure, Israel has known its share of mass demonstrations in support of a peace deal, with protest movements like Women in Black still going strong. Israeli non-government organisations such as B’Tselem, Peace Now and Breaking the Silence work hard to alert Israeli society of the sins of occupation. Joint Israeli–Palestinian organisations, like those bringing together family members of those lost to the ongoing conflict, do similarly admirable work.

But none of these efforts has had a transformative impact on the peace process. This stands in stark contrast to the experience in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, when checkpoints, home searches, abusive language, blackmail, beatings and arbitrary arrests were once standard practice, just as they are today in the occupied Palestinian territories.

In Northern Ireland, pressure from civil-society groups and NGOs eventually drove the security forces to curb abusive practices, improve their recruitment processes and introduce training for dealing with intercommunity tensions. The path to peace in Northern Ireland was paved largely by a mobilised civil society.

In Israel, however, only the Supreme Court stands between the military and worse behaviour. The reason seems to lie in the nature of the conflict. Algeria’s war of independence was an anti-colonial struggle taking place far away from France’s shores. And the Troubles came down to an intercommunity cleavage, which could be resolved through disarmament and power sharing.

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict, by contrast, is existential. The question of where to draw borders is not merely practical; it has deep religious and cultural significance. For the Palestinians, Israel is the occupying power, impinging on their right to self-determination, but it is also their homeland. And for the now-dominant Israeli right, the occupied territories are the cradle of Jewish Biblical civilisation.

By fighting for the same lands, the two sides are effectively calling for the unconditional exclusion, even destruction, of the other. That goes a long way towards explaining their eagerness to alter the demographic balance—Israel through Jewish immigration and the expansion of settlements, and the Palestinians by demanding the ‘right of return’ for all refugees. Yasser Arafat, the late founder of the Palestine Liberation Organization, once called the womb of the Palestinian woman his ‘strongest weapon’ against Israel, as it would give the Palestinians a demographic advantage in the occupied territories.

Even if Israel did accede to the creation of a Palestinian state, it might continue to face threats to its survival. After all, Palestine wouldn’t be located far from its borders, like Algeria was from France.

What if a radical Islamist group rose to power in Palestine and challenged the peace agreement? What if state-building faltered or failed, generating rising instability on Israel’s doorstep? Or what if Palestine became a frontline outpost of a hostile foreign power? Already, Hamas and Hezbollah—with robust assistance from Iran—have turned Gaza and southern Lebanon, respectively, into launching pads for missiles targeting Israeli territory.

Fifty-five years after Israel began occupying Palestinian lands, it is more difficult than ever to imagine a way out. The seeds of the two-state solution that were planted by visionary leaders on both sides have failed to take root. All that remains is a fatalistic acceptance of the conflict’s insolubility. For both the occupied and the occupier, the future is bleak.

Learning from Rabin

Assassinations are by definition significant because they involve the murder of a prominent individual for political purposes. But not all assassinations constitute turning points. World War I, for example, would likely have happened even without the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The stage was already set for what was to become the Great War, and something else would have provided the spark.

Nor is it obvious that the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy, as significant as it was, was a historical turning point. Some say that, had he lived, he would have limited US involvement in Vietnam, a war that in the hands of his successors ultimately claimed some 58,000 American lives. Obviously, there’s no way of knowing. What can be said with some confidence, though, is that the US political system was sufficiently robust that the broad direction of domestic and foreign policy alike was not dependent on a single person.

By contrast, the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin 25 years ago by a right-wing Jewish extremist almost certainly was a turning point in the Middle East. The reason is clear: Rabin may well have been the only Israeli leader of his generation both willing and able to make peace with the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. He saw the need to compromise and was strong enough to take calculated risks and persuade a majority of Israelis that it was wise to do so.

By contrast, Rabin’s rival and successor, Shimon Peres, had the desire to make peace, but his very enthusiasm undermined his ability to rally sceptical Israelis behind him. Rabin’s reluctance proved invaluable. And several subsequent Israeli prime ministers, including the incumbent, Benjamin Netanyahu, possessed the hardline credentials to make a deal with the Palestinians, in the sense that the anti-communist Richard Nixon could broker the US breakthrough with China a half-century ago. But, unlike Nixon, they lacked the desire to do so on terms that had any chance of being accepted.

This is not to say that Rabin would have succeeded had he lived. It takes two to make peace. It was Nelson Mandela’s—and South Africa’s—good fortune that President F.W. de Klerk was a willing partner in ending apartheid. Peace requires leaders who are both willing and able to compromise and sustain their commitments. And here it’s not obvious that Rabin had a viable partner in Yasir Arafat, although it is instructive that Rabin ultimately judged that it was worth pursuing, because only Arafat possessed the authority to make a deal.

What also made Rabin remarkable was his openness to change. As Israel’s defence minister from 1984 to 1990, he imposed harsh measures on Palestinians living in Israeli-occupied territories and cracked down on violent protest. I was working on the Middle East at the White House at the time. When I challenged Rabin on the wisdom of saying Israel would break the bones of the protesters, he responded, ‘What would you have us do? Kill them?’

For Rabin, it was a legal and political necessity to maintain order, but it was also a moral imperative to minimise the loss of life. Using non-lethal force was to him the right approach.

Over time, however, Rabin concluded that force alone wouldn’t succeed. He came to see political and economic incentives as essential as well. And in his second term as prime minister, he accepted the Palestine Liberation Organization as a negotiating partner despite its history of terrorism, and approved the 1993 and 1995 Oslo Accords that established a path designed to bring about ever greater political autonomy for Palestinians.

As we know, the Oslo Accords were never implemented in full. Rabin was assassinated, subsequent attempts at negotiating peace failed, Arafat died, and no Palestinian state materialised.

All this is relevant now given the recent diplomatic breakthrough between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Arab governments, motivated by the threat from Iran and a desire for access to Israeli technology and US arms, have determined not to allow the unresolved Palestinian issue to stand between them and normal relations with Israel. Other Arab states eventually will do much the same.

The Palestinian reaction has been equal parts predictable and disappointing. Most Palestinians still seem unprepared to accept that the path to a state of their own does not run through the Arab League or the United Nations or even Washington, but rather through direct talks with Israel.

As Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank continue to expand, time is running out. Israel’s government has agreed to postpone annexation of significant portions of the West Bank for just three years. The question is whether the next generation of Palestinian leaders will, like Rabin, be willing and able to compromise for peace.

But Israelis would be wise to learn from Rabin as well. He believed that Israel must remain both Jewish and democratic, and understood that this requires separate states. The only alternatives are to make Palestinians citizens of Israel (thereby ending Israel’s Jewish character) or to deny Palestinians voting rights (thereby ending Israel’s democratic character).

For good reason, Rabin rejected both alternatives. There would be no better way to honour his legacy than by reviving a diplomatic process leading to the creation of two separate states living side by side in peace.

The last days of Netanyahu?

At long last, Israel has taken a step back from the religious nationalist abyss into which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been leading it. In the 17 September parliamentary election, the country’s second in five months, the ‘natural coalition’ of Netanyahu’s Likud party, Orthodox groups, and proto-fascist factions failed to reach the 61-seat threshold that would have enabled him to form another government.

For Netanyahu, who has spent 13 years in power, this election was only partly about his nationalist political project. His main aim was to reproduce the only coalition that could grant him parliamentary immunity from his imminent indictment on charges of fraud, bribery and breach of trust.

Fighting literally for his freedom, Netanyahu ignored legal and ethical rules of campaign conduct. For starters, he recklessly pledged to annex the Jordan Valley—part of the West Bank—without any strategic assessment of the consequences. In addition, he proposed a bill that would have allowed Likud activists to place cameras in polling stations; when the bill failed to pass, Likud claimed that opposition parties were planning to steal the election. Meanwhile, the prime minister’s Facebook page warned supporters that Israeli Arabs ‘want to annihilate all of us’.

Furthermore, Netanyahu called on the public to boycott Israel’s most popular television channel for producing an ‘anti-Semitic’ series on the kidnapping and murder of a Palestinian teenager by Jewish extremists in 2014. In reality, he was attempting to stop the channel from airing leaked material pertaining to the criminal investigation against him.

In his desperation to be re-elected, Netanyahu also irresponsibly fanned regional tensions in order to bolster his reputation as ‘Mr Security’. Israeli attacks against Iranian targets in Syria and Iraq suddenly increased amid a blaze of media publicity (against the advice of the military, which has always counselled opacity in such matters).

More audaciously still, Netanyahu considered postponing the entire electoral process by starting an all-out war against Hamas in Gaza, which he had always been averse to doing. Thankfully, the army’s chief of general staff, Aviv Kohavi, and Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit blocked this initiative, arguing that Netanyahu could not initiate hostilities without following due legal procedure. Netanyahu spoke with US President Donald Trump about a US–Israel defence treaty, an absurd idea that the entire security establishment has always opposed for limiting Israel’s freedom of action.

Alas, Israel’s fractious political scene and absurdly proportional electoral system hardly ever produce clear-cut results. True to form, the country now faces a period of political deadlock. Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party, a recent amalgamation of centre-right groups headed by three former army chiefs of general staff, won a similar number of seats to Likud. But it will be unable to form a viable alternative coalition with the diminished left—the Labor Party and the Democratic Union (which includes former prime minister Ehud Barak’s new party)—and the Arab Joint List.

Even if these parties did command a majority, it would take a dramatic act of political bravery for three former generals to form a government with an Arab party consisting of anti-Zionists and Islamist groups. Yet excluding the Joint List from the coalition-building process would be an unpardonable blunder. These Arab parliamentary factions represent a genuine desire among Israel’s Arab minority—which comprises 20% of the population and is currently undergoing a momentous process of ‘Israelisation’—to form part of an all-Israeli political project based on democratic governance and an end to the politics of xenophobia and incitement.

To complicate matters further, the key to breaking the post-election deadlock is Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party. A political cynic known for his anti-Arab outbursts and annexationist zeal—he himself lives in a West Bank settlement—Lieberman almost doubled the number of seats won by his party. He did so by pledging to enter only a grand national unity government with Likud and Blue and White, while excluding the Orthodox parties and the messianic far right. Blue and White eventually seconded Lieberman’s proposal, but with one crucial twist: it would not share power with an indicted Netanyahu.

The political battle will therefore now center on the key question in this election: Netanyahu, yes or no? Will Blue and White stand by its pledge? And will Likud members find the courage to unseat their leader (presumably an easier task now that his spell has clearly been broken)?

Israeli politicians’ ingenuity in circumventing their professed principles should never be underestimated. One way out of the impasse could indeed be Lieberman’s grand coalition, but with the premiership rotating between Gantz and Netanyahu: the former could head the new government for the first two years of its term, while Netanyahu deals with his legal problems. But this is only one of many creative options that might emerge in the coming days.

Clearly, this election is no victory for the Israeli peace camp, or even for the centre-left. Whatever government emerges will not resuscitate the all-but-dead two-state solution, and will most likely launch a massive military campaign against Hamas in Gaza—something on which the two largest parties concur. It is also likely to engage with the US regarding Trump’s ‘deal of the century’ aimed at strengthening the Palestinian economy—a plan that the Palestinians are expected to ignore altogether.

Nonetheless, the election result comes as a relief, and one is right to sense a breath of fresh air. Israeli voters have stopped the country’s slide towards xenophobic theocracy (one hopes not just temporarily). Moreover, halting Netanyahu, with his imperial ways and his divisive politics of hate and incitement, was no small achievement.

Israel’s national poet Nathan Alterman might therefore have described the outcome as the ‘joy of the poor,’ also the title of arguably his most famous work. But with the country again preoccupied with political bargaining, and regional tensions on the rise, it remains to be seen how long the elation will last—and whether Netanyahu really has left the political stage.

In memoriam: Tim Fischer

Tim Fischer belongs to a unique generation of Australian political leaders we are farewelling fast, including Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke. Whether you agreed with their ideology or not, you could not but respect them.

I was in regular contact with Tim in my role as the representative of Palestine and the Palestine Liberation Organization in Australia. One day in February 1997, I was sitting in my office when Tim rang me and asked me to come over to see him. My office was within walking distance of the federal parliament. He told me he was going to Israel and Palestine and asked if I could arrange for him to meet President Yasser Arafat. At the time Tim was leader of the National Party and deputy prime minister.

I welcomed his visit and reminded him of the fact that, although Arafat had been invited and visited all corners of the world—including the United States, Sweden, England, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, China and Japan—Australia was one of the few countries that had not yet invited him, and it would be timely and nice for him to carry such an invitation. He said, ‘Leave it with me.’

He indeed got the approval of the cabinet to invite Arafat, and during their meeting in Arafat’s office in Bethlehem he extended the invitation on behalf of the Australian government. Arafat accepted, thanked Tim and the Australian government, and said, ‘We will find a mutually suitable time in the future for a visit.’

During the meeting, Tim whispered in my ear that he would like to visit the Church of the Nativity. It was night-time and the church doors had already been closed. I informed Arafat of Tim’s wish, so he asked his protocol official to contact the church and ask them to do him a favour by allowing his visitor to see the church. Arafat had excellent relations with the church leaders in Palestine and they held him in high regard also.

When we arrived at the Church of the Nativity, priests from all different denominations were at the door waiting to welcome Tim. They gave him a tour of the church and took him down a flight of steps to the Grotto of the Nativity, the cave underneath the church where Jesus was born. Tim knelt, prayed and kissed the silver star in the floor that marks the spot where Jesus is believed to have been born. He was very emotional and immensely appreciative of being able to visit the church.

During his visit he also inaugurated, together with the Palestinian minister of justice, Freih Abu Middain, the court in Gaza that the Australian government had contributed towards the cost of building. He later met with officials from the Ministry of Education to inspect the land allocated by the Palestinian government for a technical school, which Bob Hawke was hoping to raise $5 million from the Australian government to establish.

Three months later, following a meeting between an Israeli lobby delegation and then prime minister John Howard in his Sydney office and a private lunch with another Israeli lobby group with then foreign minister Alexander Downer in Melbourne in the same week, I was informed by the Department of Foreign Affairs on 23 June 1997 that they had been instructed by the minister that ‘Arafat’s visit is not appropriate’, although we had not yet discussed a time for the visit and it was not even on Arafat’s busy itinerary at the time.

A controversy erupted. This decision put Tim and the Australian government in an embarrassing position and was widely condemned by the opposition and nearly all major Australian media outlets.

Nevertheless, when John Howard visited Palestine and met with Arafat on 1 May 2000, he again officially invited him to visit Australia.

Tim was highly critical of Israel’s occupation, violations and aggression against its Arab neighbours. The Australian newspaper reported him on 21 July 1993 saying, ‘It is high time the West took off its rose-tinted glasses and examined the actions of Israel in detail.’ And the next day it reported him saying, ‘It’s time we got back to the facts of the situation and examined all the facts associated with the complex issue of the Middle East.’ He told the Australian media on 2 August 1993, ‘It is a pity we don’t have a more wide-ranging debate in Australia on the Middle East. There is an extremely well-organised Jewish lobby in Australia which is better organised than the Arab lobby, and this is part of the equation influencing debate on the Middle East.’

During one of our meetings, he asked, in astonishment, regarding Israel’s prohibition of the export of Gaza’s products to Europe, ‘How does the export of Gaza’s cut flowers threaten Israel’s security?’

Tim was indeed a man of courage and a fair-dinkum Australian.

Forgetting Palestine

Israel is approaching another parliamentary election, and Palestinians have barely been mentioned. The vote comes at a time when the United States is pushing its poorly conceived economy-focused ‘Peace to Prosperity’ plan. With the Israeli–Palestinian conflict no longer undermining Israel’s economic prosperity or global standing, it has all but fallen off the domestic political agenda.

Next month’s parliamentary election will be Israel’s second this year. After the first, held on 9 April, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—whose Likud party won 35 out of 120 seats—failed to create a governing coalition. Barely a month after the parliament was sworn in, its members voted to dissolve it.

That failure had nothing to do with Palestine. Netanyahu lost the support of part of his right-wing alliance over disagreement on a military draft law (relating to an exemption for ultra-Orthodox Jews). And he was unable to get the main centrist opposition party, Blue and White, to work with him, owing largely to his expected indictment on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust.

As for the somnolent election campaign that is now underway, its only brief moments of vitality have been brought by corruption-related smears and other ad hominem attacks, mostly relating to Netanyahu and his family’s ‘kingly’ behaviour. Blue and White—which poses the most serious challenge to Likud’s rule—is focusing on the fight against Hamas in Gaza, which it claims it can manage more effectively than Likud could. Even the Labor Party, the presumed inheritor of former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s peace-building legacy, is running on domestic ‘social issues’.

The Israeli public shares this lack of interest in the Palestinian issue. Last month, Netanyahu’s pledge, made at a ceremony marking the 40th anniversary of the Samaria Regional Council, that Israel would ‘forever control the entire land down to the Jordan River’ barely elicited a reaction.

This partly reflects disillusionment with the peace process: a 2018 poll found that 81% of Israeli Jews don’t believe a two-state solution is viable. But it also underscores the extent to which Israel has escaped any consequences for its treatment of the Palestinians, including its cavalier defiance of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative.

As Europe remains preoccupied with its own challenges, the US under President Donald Trump has become more uncritically supportive of Israel than ever. At Trump’s urging, Israel initially decided to deny entry to two Muslim US congresswomen, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, over their support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, known as BDS, which protests Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

That decision was perfectly in keeping with Netanyahu’s portrayal of BDS. As the movement has gained support in the US and Europe in recent years, Netanyahu has been at pains to portray it as a global juggernaut hellbent on destroying the Jewish state. Yet, in truth, BDS has had only a marginal effect on Israel’s expanding global economic and political clout.

In fact, with its innovative economy and high-tech military industry, Israel has become an indispensable partner for countries in the region and beyond; it is regularly courted by powers like China for its technological prowess. And with the discovery of massive natural-gas fields in the eastern Mediterranean, it no longer has to depend on unstable, largely unfriendly neighbours for fuel supplies.

At the same time, those neighbours are becoming somewhat less unfriendly—or, at least, less interested in the Palestinian issue. Their own formidable challenges—including large and frustrated youth populations, tenacious terrorist movements, and regional proxy wars – leave them with little impulse to fight for the Palestinian cause.

Even Palestinians themselves seem to be losing vigour in the battle against their occupier, their energies drained by the struggle between the Palestine Liberation Organization, which controls the West Bank, and Hamas, which controls Gaza. Uncertainty surrounding the impending end of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s long tenure only weakens the Palestinian position further.

Never before in Israel’s history has it been able to develop a foreign policy so free of the Palestinian issue. This could portend a significant escalation in Israel’s territorial grabs. In the past, Netanyahu has exercised just enough restraint in approving new settlements to avoid excessive political blowback, even if it meant disappointing his far-right allies, who dream of annexing most of the West Bank.

With the two-state solution virtually dead and the international community having largely abandoned the Palestinian cause, there is little stopping Israel from cementing the one-state reality that its right-wing government has long sought, regardless of whether that leads to a permanent civil war. But that is precisely why the Israeli–Palestinian conflict should be at the forefront of the current election campaign. There should be a large-scale effort to educate the Israeli public about the consequences of staying on the current path, and about the quotidian violations of Palestinians’ human rights. Politicians should be forced to answer the question US President Lyndon B. Johnson asked Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol in 1968: ‘What kind of Israel do you want?’

Instead, Israel—seemingly convinced that Palestinians will always be history’s victims and Israelis its victors—is offering only complacency. Will it take a regional cataclysm to humble the country? With Israel ramping up its challenges to Iran—including by providing the US with intelligence about potential Iranian attacks, and by launching strikes against Iran-backed militias in Syria and Iraq—it might not be long before we have an answer to that question.

Israel chooses identity over democracy

Israel’s new ‘nation-state law’ asserts that ‘the right [to exercise] national self-determination’ in the country is ‘unique to the Jewish people’, sets Hebrew as the country’s official language, and establishes ‘Jewish settlement as a national value’ that the state will work to advance. Liberals denounce the law for infringing on the Arab minority’s civil rights. But it may weaken Israeli democracy in an even more insidious way.

The new law—the latest move in the reckless drive by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition to turn Israel into an illiberal democracy—contradicts the 1948 Declaration of Independence and the 1992 Basic Law: human dignity and liberty. Both guarantee the individual rights of all, Jews and Arabs.

Yet, in practice, the Israeli government has been defying those legal norms for a long time. While Arab Israelis may technically be constitutionally equal to Jewish Israelis that has not stopped the government from discriminating against them. Most state land, for example, is held in trust for the Jewish people.

Likewise, long before the new law established that the Israeli government would ‘labor to encourage and promote’ the ‘establishment and development’ of Jewish settlements, the government was doing just that. Not a single new Arab village—much less a city—has been created since the establishment of the state of Israel 70 years ago, and old villages lack planning and zoning programs. This is why illegal construction is so common in Arab villages.

Moreover, a broad array of Israeli laws already explicitly and implicitly defines Israel as a Jewish state—a definition on which the international community agrees. The 1947 United Nations Partition Plan defines Israel as the state of the Jewish people. And the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has long been based on the principle that the Palestinians should exercise their right of national self-determination in a separate state on the other side of the pre-1967 borders.

Most Israeli Jews believe that there should be limits on their Arab counterparts’ political influence, with ‘crucial national decisions’, such as self-determination, being left to the Jewish majority. That is why former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who made social investment in Arab communities a national priority, resisted making the passage of the Oslo Accords dependent on Arab parliamentary support.

Despite all of this, as of 2017, over 60% of Arab Israelis reported that Israel is a good place to live (down from 64% in 2015), and 60% would rather live in Israel than in any other country in the world (up from 58.8% in 2015). Furthermore, in 2012, 60% of Arab Israelis reported that they accepted Israel as a Jewish-majority state, with official Jewish characteristics, such as Hebrew being the official language and Saturday being the accepted day of rest.

If the nation-state law’s tenets were already in effect, and generally accepted by the population, why pass it at all? The obvious explanation lies in the fact that, like US President Donald Trump and populist leaders throughout Europe, Netanyahu amasses political capital by appealing to the population’s base tribal instincts.

With ultra-nationalist and anti-Arab rhetoric, Netanyahu manipulates Israelis into believing that they are under threat, physically, demographically and even existentially, thereby pitting them against their Arab compatriots. He won the 2015 election after having warned that the Arabs were heading to the polling stations ‘in droves’.

All of this, together with the demise of the peace process, has left a majority of Israelis convinced that their country cannot be both Jewish and fully democratic. So they have accepted the erosion of democratic values that Netanyahu has overseen, determining that they must put identity first. Given this, it is perhaps unsurprising that Israeli Arabs’ recognition of Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish and democratic state fell from 53.6% in 2015 to 49.1% just two years later.

But the nation-state law is not just another means of accumulating political capital among an increasing identity-focused electorate. There is another motivation at play—one that poses an even more serious threat to Israeli democracy.

Israel is a prosperous, advanced economy, but it is built on a labor market that is too small. Arab Israelis, however, represent a considerable labour pool (as does the Orthodox Jewish community, among whom the labour-force participation rate is much lower than among secular Jews). To advance its interest in Arab Israelis’ economic and social integration, in December 2015 the Israeli government approved a truly historic five-year plan.

Nearly three years later, the integration of Arab Israelis is progressing apace. According to the 2017 Israel Democracy Institute Index of Arab-Israeli relations, 70% of Israel’s Arabs speak fluent Hebrew, and 77% are not interested in separation. Moreover, Tel Aviv University’s Amal Jamal has highlighted the consistent increase in the number of Arab academics in Israel and the emergence of an Arab middle class in the country. This goes, he found, with a rise in national sentiments.

This is where the nation-state law comes in. The increasing integration and prosperity of Arab Israelis is empowering them to push back against discriminatory policies. With the nation-state law in place, however, their legal recourse will be severely constrained.

But this may not only be a matter of silencing an increasingly empowered minority; Israel’s government could be laying the groundwork to suppress the Arab majority that would emerge if (or when) it annexes the occupied Palestinian territories. In this sense, the nation-state law is a kind of hedge against the government’s own expansionist policies—and a potentially devastating blow to Israeli democracy.

With the two-state solution all but dead, Israel has determined that its Jewish identity is more important than its democracy. This will be bad not just for its Arab citizens, but ultimately for Jewish Israelis as well.

New US peace plan can and should stick to two-state model

As US envoys Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt toured the Middle East last month, apparently on the verge of announcing President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan, many commentators warned the US to postpone unveiling its plan. ‘The two-state solution is dead’, they said, and in any case it will most certainly be rejected by the Palestinian Authority (PA), which has been boycotting the US since Washington moved its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

While friction between Israeli and Palestinian leaders may prevent the parties from sitting at the negotiating table anytime soon, the ingredients for a territorial partition into two states along the 1967 lines continue to exist. And such a partition could become a reality if the Israeli and particularly the Palestinian leaders were ready to make it so.

It’s now 10 years since 2008, when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered the Palestinians a state covering nearly all of the West Bank (with land swaps for settlements), the Gaza Strip and Arab neighbourhoods of east Jerusalem; compensation, resettlement, or both, for Palestinian refugees; and sovereignty over holy sites. His offer was even more far-reaching than the similar offer by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2000–01. All of those offers were effectively rejected by the PA.

The rejections and years of political stalemate have led some Israeli politicians to call for either annexing Israeli settlements or unilaterally withdrawing from parts of the West Bank, as Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005. However, that isn’t the position of the Israeli government, and many Israelis are sceptical of unilateral withdrawal following what happened to Gaza when Israel left: the Islamist terror group Hamas took over the Strip, leading to its deterioration and thousands of repeated rocket attacks on Israel.

Some commentators, such as Peter Rodgers (‘Israel–Palestine: vale the two-state solution, where to now?’), make much of the fact that the current Israeli government contains two-state resolution opponents such as Housing Minister Naftali Bennett. Yet the presence of two-state opponents like Bennett in both the Knesset and Israel’s cabinet is neither new nor unusual. Bennett heads the Jewish Home party, the only party in the Knesset that’s ideologically opposed to a two-state resolution ever coming about. It holds 8 seats out of 120—hardly a sign that the Israeli voting public or the Knesset is now opposed to a genuine two-state outcome.

Meanwhile, it has become increasingly fashionable for commentators to declare a two-state solution dead because of the growth of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. That argument appears to ignore that little has materially changed in terms of settlements since the 2008 Israeli offer under Olmert.

No new settlements have been built since then, while the built-up areas of the existing settlements have shown no substantive territorial growth, and are estimated to be less than 2% of the West Bank (according to the BBC). While we often hear that the ‘settlements are growing’, that’s largely due to high birth rates in existing settlements; construction in settlements over the past 10 years has been measurably lower than in the previous decade.

In any two-state model, it’s widely expected that Israel would use land swaps to keep the settlement blocs where most Israeli settlers live—that is, by annexing a small area of the West Bank in exchange for conceding equivalent Israeli territory to the PA.

Yes, the number of Jews living in those blocs—and to a lesser extent, outside of them—has risen over the past 10 years. But given that it’s expected that the settlement blocs will remain part of Israel in virtually any conceivable deal, it is hard to view this as an overwhelming impediment to any genuine peace deal.

Still, given that the PA isn’t speaking to the US, the timing of this ‘peace plan’ may seem odd. The Trump administration appears to be relying on the influence of Arab states, including Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, to publicly back the plan. This approach recognises that the strategic landscape in the Middle East has changed. Jordan and Egypt already have longstanding peace agreements with Israel and cooperate extensively with Israel on security matters, and any Palestinian state would directly affect their interests and borders. Saudi Arabia has increasingly made it clear that it shares Israel’s profound strategic concerns regarding Iran, and that it views Iran, and not the Palestinians, as its main priority. Arab states can’t make the Palestinians negotiate or accept a deal, but they can help to encourage them to do so.

With the PA not speaking to the US, Kushner attempted to address Palestinians in a newspaper interview with Al Quds published on 24 June. He said, ‘There have been countless mistakes and missed opportunities over the years, and you, the Palestinian people, have paid the price … Don’t let your leadership reject a plan they haven’t even seen.’ When asked about comments by PA adviser Nabil Abu Rudeineh, who said that the US peace mission was a waste of time, Kushner replied, ‘I think the Palestinian leadership is saying those things because they are scared we will release our peace plan and the Palestinian people will actually like it because it will lead to new opportunities for them to have a much better life.’

Fresh ideas are certainly needed to bring Israelis and Palestinians back to negotiations. Those ideas should build upon 30 years of negotiations, which began with the Oslo Accords, to make progress towards a workable, ultimately two-state, agreement. The issue ahead, which is likely to be clarified soon, is whether a new US proposal can break the political stalemate or will be remembered as yet another ‘missed opportunity’.

Israel–Palestine: vale the two-state solution, where to now?

As millions around the globe contemplated New Year resolutions on 31 December 2017, Israel’s ruling Likud party came up with one of its own. Its Central Committee overwhelmingly endorsed a resolution seeking to extend Israel’s legal jurisdiction to its settlements in the West Bank, home to some 400,000 Israelis.

Noting the 50th anniversary of the ‘liberation’ of the West Bank, the resolution called on Likud’s elected officials ‘to allow free construction and to apply the laws of Israel and its sovereignty to all liberated areas of Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria’.

Like New Year resolutions elsewhere, Likud’s was non‑binding. That, and its timing, possibly explains why it attracted little media attention. But it may prove an important marker in the burial of the two‑state solution. Steven Cook, a senior fellow at the US Council on Foreign Relations, commented that the resolution had ‘significant consequences’ as ‘a prelude to annexation’.

In the government halls that matter most in Israeli and Palestinian affairs—Jerusalem and Washington—the resolution captured the spirit of the time. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is at his most credible when he denies any possibility of a Palestinian state. His Education Minister Naftali Bennett, one of two Jewish Home party representatives in the current Knesset, lauded Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory as a tremendous opportunity for Israel, signalling ‘the era of the Palestinian state is over’.

The two‑state solution, Bennett told a gathering of Jewish students in New York in March 2018, was a terrible idea and ‘we’re done with that’. Citing the example of Israel’s annexation in 1981 of the Golan Heights, he spoke of the benefits of international amnesia. ‘It’s never pleasant two weeks after, but after two months it fades away, and 20 years later and 40 years later it’s still ours.’

Early in his presidency, President Trump gestured towards an open mind, commenting, ‘I’m looking at two-state and one-state and I like the one that both parties like.’ The idea that ‘both’ parties could possibly agree on what they like was fanciful. In any event, Trump’s subsequent actions made clear that the US wasn’t interested in using its clout to help the parties find a way through the maze of claim, counterclaim and mutual acrimony.

Trump and those around him have made the US a partisan player as never before. His former adviser on Israeli affairs, and now ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is an unabashed supporter of ‘Israeli annexation’ of the West Bank, has been president of a fundraising organisation for the West Bank settlement of Beit El, and reportedly backed Netanyahu’s ludicrous claim that opposition to settlements amounts to ‘ethnic cleansing’.

Writing in The Atlantic in May 2018, Israeli author Yossi Klein Halevi described Israelis and Palestinians as caught in a cycle of denial. ‘The Palestinian national movement denies Israel’s legitimacy, and Israel in turn denies the Palestinians’ national sovereignty.’ The latter ‘sovereignty’ is greatly weakened by the schism between the feeble Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and the Islamist Hamas in Gaza.

For Israel, it is the gift that keeps on giving. Of the parties most closely entwined in the conflict, the PA has the strongest interest in a two‑state solution and the least capacity to do anything about it. It governs fully in less than a quarter of the West Bank, which, under the Oslo Agreements of the early 1990s, remains divided into Areas A, B and C. The PA has full control of Area A, about 18% of the whole territory. Israel has full control of Area C, about 60%. Area B, the remainder, is divided between Palestinian civil control and shared security control.

The terminal problem for two‑staters is what to build the state with. Israeli settlement has so sliced and diced the West Bank that it’s hard to imagine how the geographic shards might meaningfully be gathered together. US Ambassador Friedman has argued that settlements occupy only 2% of the West Bank. If true, that would make settlements easier to remove. But it completely overlooks the settlements’ administrative reach. Israeli Human Rights Organisation B’Tselem calculated in late 2017 that the settlements and their governing ‘regional councils’ directly controlled 63% of Area C and 40% of the West Bank overall.

Besides the West Bank’s geographic fragmentation, there’s the open sore of the Gaza Strip, ruled by Hamas. In its revised charter, Hamas hinted for the first time in 2017 that it might accept ‘a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967’. That amounts to a two‑state solution, if not one that Israel would accept.

The charter also described armed resistance as the ‘strategic choice for protecting the principles and the rights of the Palestinian people’. This points backwards. Israel has long declared that it won’t negotiate if under fire; Palestinians retort that Israel won’t negotiate unless it’s under fire.

A week after the Likud Central Committee’s New Year resolution, Daniel Kurtzer, former US ambassador to Israel and Egypt, now at Princeton University, wrote that Israelis and Palestinians were careening towards a one‑state reality, which ‘carries extremely dangerous risks’.

These risks hark back to Israel’s decades‑old ‘trilemma’ of deciding what it wants to be: Jewish, an occupier or a democracy. It can’t be all three. The two‑state solution was premised on the idea of ending the occupation, thereby preserving both Israel’s Jewish identity and its democratic ways.

Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak warned in mid‑2017 that if Israel kept control of the area from the Mediterranean to the river Jordan, ‘it would become inevitably—that’s the key word, inevitably—either non-Jewish or non-democratic’. If Palestinians in an annexed West Bank were given full rights, Israel would quickly become ‘a binational state with an Arab majority and civil war’. Israel’s current path he described as a ‘slippery slope toward apartheid’.

Demography has long been a pressure point in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat once claimed ‘the womb of the Arab woman’ as his ‘strongest weapon’. But population figures—totals and growth rates—are sharply contested (see, for example, Israel’s Impending Demographic Reality and Demographics and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict).

According to the CIA’s World Fact Book, in 2017 there were 8.3 million people in Israel, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem, of which 74.7% were Jewish. The West Bank’s population was 2.75 million, which included 391,000 Israeli settlers. Gaza’s population was 1.8 million. Rounded, this produces a total Jewish population of 6.59 million and a non-Jewish, primarily Muslim Palestinian, population of 6.25 million, a 51:49 split. Take Gaza out and the split firms in Israel’s favour 60:40. While Israel has always had a significant non‑Jewish minority, the larger this minority, the weaker the country’s sense of identity and the more complicated its internal politics.

One ‘solution’ to the demographic dilemma involves the claim that ‘Jordan is Palestine’, given its high proportion of citizens of Palestinian descent. ‘Relocate’ Palestinians from the West Bank to Jordan, so the argument runs, and they’ll have their state and Israel will have demographic and identity comfort.

Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, also from the Jewish Home party, last February outlined her plan for Israeli law to apply in Area C of the West Bank while Areas A and B would ‘be part of a confederation, with Jordan and Gaza’. She rightly acknowledged that this might seem ‘a bizarre option to the international community, but … in three years from now the international community will understand this is the right solution’.

To many of us, the ‘right’ solution has long been two states for two peoples, reached through their own negotiations, supported and encouraged by others. That hasn’t happened, and there’s no reason to believe it will.

Sputtering efforts at negotiations over the past 20 years or so kept the ‘peace process’ on life support. They also made it increasingly clear that the two‑state solution is dead, overwhelmed by the weight of the past, as well as by myopia, ignorance, inhumanity, indifference, deceit, fanaticism and miscalculation.

It’s a long charge sheet. The solution won’t be rescued by a change of political leadership in Jerusalem or Washington, though we might see more subtle funeral directors. Despite the recent flare-ups on the Israeli–Gaza border, a new Palestinian uprising doesn’t seem imminent. A new round of stalemate does.

This may well blur the issues that governments around the globe, including the 140 or so that officially recognise a non‑existent ‘State of Palestine’, will eventually be forced to consider. Those issues comprise (at least) the prospect of Israeli annexations and forced relocations; a Palestinian statelet in the West Bank; and an Islamist de facto state in Gaza that offers its citizens little more than rhetoric.

That may sound not much different to present‑day reality. But governments to date have been able to chant the two-state mantra to avoid having to think anew. To continue in that vein will peddle false hope at best and, at worst, amount to calculated deceit.

Myths and facts about Gaza’s ‘march of return’

The demonstrations along the Israel–Gaza border dubbed the ‘Great March of Return’ are a calculated and desperate propaganda move, largely organised and funded by Hamas alongside other terrorist organisations.

Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2007, is designated in part or entirely a terrorist organisation by the United States, the European Union and Australia. It’s using the campaign to respond to its own international isolation, recent Arab–Israeli rapprochement and more overt American support for Israel’s position, such as the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

This ‘march’—a series of demonstrations that began on 30 March and that are intended to continue until mid-May—is neither a grassroots campaign against ‘occupation’ nor a demand for amelioration of the admittedly difficult living conditions in Gaza, as some have implied. It’s also certainly not ‘a rebuke aimed at Hamas’, as Mohammed Ayoob said in his 3 April article, ‘Gaza points the way to Palestine’s future’. Hamas is authoritarian and forbids independent political actions in Gaza—and senior Hamas figures have been both leading the protests and organising them to ensure they occur.

Ayoob is correct that the protests are a ‘rejection of the two-state solution’. That’s Hamas’ position, and Hamas is the leading force behind the protests.

The demonstrations are explicitly about championing the ‘right of return’—a legally baseless demand that descendants of refugees from the 1948 war return to their ancestral homes in what is now Israel. While a key part of Palestinian discourse, the right of return is simply a euphemism for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state by demographic means—an effort to reverse the outcome of the 1948 War and turn all of Israel into an Arab-dominated state called Palestine.

The Hamas leaders who’ve led the demonstrations were explicit about this: ‘Palestine and Jerusalem belong to us. We will break the walls of the blockade, remove the occupation entity and return to all of Palestine,’ Hamas’ political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, declared on 9 April.

Hamas’ Gaza and military chief, Yahya Sinwar, was equally explicit, telling protesters: ‘The march of return … affirms that our people can’t give up one inch of the land of Palestine.’

By drawing Israel into a no-win public relations nightmare, Hamas hopes to re-establish its own relevance internationally, and to deflect attention from its ruinous administration of Gaza.

The historical background to these events is that Israel expelled thousands of its own citizens from settlements in the Gaza Strip in 2005, leaving it under full Palestinian control. In 2006, Palestinians elected Hamas to run the Palestinian Authority (PA) and in 2007, Hamas drove the competing Fatah faction of Mahmoud Abbas out of Gaza in a brief but bloody civil war.

Since then, Israel has imposed a blockade of military goods entering the strip (while Egypt blocks the entry of virtually all goods) because Hamas refuses to moderate its uncompromisingly hostile stance towards Israel, firing rockets, building tunnels into Israeli territory for terrorist purposes and constantly diverting civilian aid for military use. Since 2008, it has initiated three wars with Israel that have left the area devastated.

Its relationship with the secular Fatah, which rules the West Bank, has been overwhelmingly hostile despite nominal reconciliation agreements, with reported coup attempts in the West Bank and a recent assassination attempt against PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah. Fatah head Mahmoud Abbas, for his part, continues to squeeze Gaza by cutting salaries, restricting medical supplies and declining to pay for electricity and other services to the area.

Israel obviously can’t accept demands for its own destruction, nor can it allow thousands of Palestinian rioters to breach the Gaza border fence and march on Israeli towns—a scenario that would likely lead to massive bloodshed.

Because Hamas fears it wouldn’t survive a fourth war, it’s opted for mass mobilisation and demonstrations with major violence that includes repeated attempts to place explosives along the border fence. Having its people killed and injured is the only currency it can offer in the Palestinian and international political arenas.

Ayoob essentially endorses all this and argues that Palestinians should reject the two-state solution in favour of using the ‘right of return’ to bring about the dissolution of Israel into ‘a bi-national and multi-religious state’. He basically supports Hamas’ goals but wants it to focus less on ‘Islamist ideological rigidity’.

Sadly, his views are typical of those held by many supporters of Palestinian nationalism. Having evolved from believing in the 1960s that the armies of Arab states would destroy Israel through a reliance on terrorism and economic boycotts, to a belief that international bodies can impose a resolution without Israeli consent, many Palestinian partisans are convinced that Israel’s establishment can still be reversed with sufficient willpower, patience and tactical flexibility.

But it’s a pipe dream to imagine that mass demonstrations demanding the incorporation of millions of Palestinians into Israel as full citizens, who can then ‘democratically’ turn the country into Palestine, will be any more effective.

These Palestinian nationalist fantasies lie behind repeated missed opportunities for statehood, and the repeated failure of Israeli–Palestinian negotiations, despite three serious Israeli offers of Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza since 2000. After 70 years, Israel is not only the most successful and coherent society in the region, it has never been better accepted internationally, including, increasingly, by its Sunni Arab neighbours.

Perhaps, at the conclusion of the latest theatre along the Gaza borders, more Palestinians will recognise that Israel is permanent. No tactics, steadfastness, self-sacrifice or willpower will dislodge it, and the only way forward is a negotiated outcome that recognises the validity of both Jewish and Palestinian rights to self-determination in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.