Global Courant
Israel has launched a major military strike against gunmen in a Palestinian refugee camp, deploying 1,000 troops and jet bombers to crush guerrilla resistance.
It is the most recent and heaviest effort this year to put down rebellions against his dominance in the West Bank. Israeli forces have killed about 120 Palestinians since January, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Palestinian gunmen have so far killed 20 Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
Jenin, where the refugee camp is located, has been the epicenter of violence in the West Bank for months. In recent decades, such chronic violence would have prompted some sort of diplomacy to stop the immediate violence and at least rhetorical moves to end the long-running confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians.
Perhaps there would have been some kind of revived or revived peace initiative or roving mediation, a tactic that once characterized American diplomacy in the Middle East.
Or in this decade perhaps the intervention of the new global power nearby, China, which took small steps in regional diplomacy by overseeing efforts to ease long-standing tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
But no. Instead, diplomatic players rely on gray platitudes about a moribund peace plan that’s more than 30 years old: the quest for the so-called “two-state solution,” in which Israel and the Palestinians would agree to create a Palestinian state in exchange for lasting peace.
The two-state formula has long been rejected by several Israeli governments, and in particular by current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has occasionally served a total of 15 years in office.
So despite the pledge of allegiance to the two-state concept of the United States, Europe, and even distant China, the division of the so-called Holy Land is more prayer than potential reality.
Concern about the conflict does not equate to concern about other, more serious crises: Russia’s war against Ukraine and rising tensions between the United States and China.
While no concrete steps are being taken to achieve the two-state solution, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken nonetheless warned that ending the unrest in the West Bank was necessary to “avoid measures that undermine prospects for a two-state solution,” according to the statement. the Department. spokesman Matthew Miller.
The European Union has called for an end to “unilateral measures that could further aggravate tensions and jeopardize the possibility of a just and lasting peace based on a two-state solution”.
Map: CNN/Screengrab
China also stepped into the diplomatic arena. Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for Beijing’s embassy in Washington, said “implementation of the two-state solution” is the “fundamental solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”
However, Israel ignored the warnings and advice. In Jerusalem, Netanyahu told a parliamentary committee that Palestinian desires for sovereignty “should be eliminated,” according to a government radio report.
Netanyahu said Israel should maintain the current situation where the Palestinian Authority, established in the 1990s, controls about 18% of the West Bank. The Gaza Strip, a physically segregated area, is ruled by the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS), a vicious rival of the Palestinian Authority.
The Palestinian Authority reacted harshly. President Mahmoud Abbas called on China to intervene to save the two-state solution. “We hope that Israel agrees to Chinese mediation. The truth is that America is blocking the two-state solution,” he told the China Global Television Network.
The two-state proposal gained prominence in the early 1990s, when the United States exercised a near-monopoly of power and influence in the Middle East.
After the first Persian Gulf War, when US forces pushed the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, then-President George H. W. Bush instructed his Secretary of State, James Baker, to organize talks to establish a “new world order” in the region. to create. Bush told the US Congress, “The time has come to end the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
After numerous rounds of shuttle diplomacy, Baker arranged talks between the Palestinians, Israel and the Arab states bordering Israel — Syria, Egypt and Jordan — to be held in Madrid. The conference led to sporadic negotiations, but no breakthrough.
Impatiently, Israel and representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization secretly met in Oslo. They agreed to gradually transfer authority over the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the Palestinians and then, after five years, to discuss issues related to Palestinian refugees, Israeli settlements, final security arrangements and borders.
Some three decades later, Oslo is a dead letter. The Palestinians nominally control 18% of the West Bank. (Israel failed to pacify the Gaza Strip and withdrew its settlements from the area in 2005 — even though it controls Gaza’s coastline and surrounds the strip with high concrete walls.)
The expansion of Israeli settlements, the simultaneous increase in the Israeli population in the West Bank, and the spaghetti pattern of settler roads and high walls in the area mock the two-state idea.
The Israeli settlement of Neve Yaakov, which straddles East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank. Photo: AFP/Ahmad Gharabli
In 1991, the settler population in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, which Israel formally annexed, numbered about 100,000. There are now more than 450,000.
The apparent failure of the two-state program has led some observers to seek a solution where the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is not divided, even if two nationalities live in it.
That would take political acrobatics to convince once warring communities to live side by side on territory each once claimed as its own. Given the impossibility of a relatively simple geographic division, it seems unlikely that a politically complex binational single state will emerge.
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