Hmmm. Hasn't even Naftali Bennet expressed a desire to annex Area C in which E1 sits? I believe his plan was to extend full Israeli citizenship and sovereignty to those Arabs living in the area. There are valid strategic reasons for annexing the area that go beyond aspirations for a Greater Israel. Parts of the area look down over Jerusalem and 35000+ Jews live in MA. I think those few people who still believe in the viability of a two state solution understand that Jerusalem will not be divided and there cannot be a Palestinian state on Jerusalem's door steps. I'm not a fan of Bibi, Bezalel or Itamar but we should be honest about what is going on there. Israel's growing pariah status is as much about its very right to exist as it is the settlements. Might as well shore up Israel's eastern border while the world is still screaming about Gaza, global intifada and pushing the Jews into the sea. I mean seriously, if Israel would forego the tender process and not have Ben Gvir and Smotrich saying stupid shit, would it really make a difference to all the haters? You think Ed Milliband's Muslim constituents are focused on E1?
I share more of your pessimism than you may think. After the failures of the last 30 years, and especially after October 7, I don’t see a viable two-state agreement waiting around the corner either.
Where I part company with you is the jump from “a Palestinian state is presently politically implausible” to “Israel should therefore make one physically impossible.” Those are very different propositions. Circumstances and governments change; houses, roads and borders are considerably harder to change.
And “some more autonomy” still leaves the central question unanswered. If Israel permanently controls the territory and its external borders, what is the eventual political status of the millions of Palestinians living there? Bennett at least recognized that annexation raises a citizenship question.
Palestinian rejectionism has played an enormous role in bringing us to this miserable place. But Palestinian agency doesn’t eliminate Israeli agency. Israel still has to decide what kind of state it intends to be and what options it wants to preserve for people who may inherit a political landscape very different from today’s.
Maybe two states really are impossible. I’m not yet willing to help make them impossible just to prove the point.
I'm not worried about the haters. They're unpersuadable, and nothing Israel does changes that. But the governments that moved last week aren't the global intifada crowd, though at times they may cater to them. Britain, France, Germany and Italy spent two years not summoning anyone. E1 is what changed that.
Maybe Smotrich gets fewer headlines than Ben-Gvir. He's still handing Israel's critics everything they could want. Bennett's annexation plan was from more than a decade ago, when he led the settler movement. His politics have moved a long way since.
I think you make a fair point that Israel has legitimate security interests around Jerusalem, and you’re certainly right that some hostility toward Israel has very little to do with E1—or even with the occupation.
But “they’ll hate us anyway” strikes me as a dangerous basis for policy. If the world’s worst actors are going to condemn Israel regardless, that still doesn’t relieve Israel of having to judge its own choices on their merits.
And there’s a tension in your argument. If E1 doesn’t materially threaten a Palestinian state, why does Smotrich himself celebrate it as helping bury one? If the answer instead is that Palestinian statehood should indeed be foreclosed, then the harder question follows: what is the intended political future of the Palestinians who remain under Israeli control?
Bennett at least tried to answer that question by talking about citizenship. “Might as well shore up the border while everyone is yelling at us” doesn’t.
The haters don’t get a veto over Israeli policy. But neither should they be allowed to provide its justification.
I guess the short answer is there is not going to be a separate Palestinian state because neither Israelis, nor Palestinians, nor Jordanians nor just about any one else in the region want it. The Palestinians want all the land from the river to the sea and the Arab countries mostly see it as a de-stabilizing force insofar as it is guaranteed to be taken over by genocidal Jihadis. Just because western capitals and progressives cling to the charade of a two state solution doesn’t mean Israel should. Like anything else in diplomacy, packaging, presentation and optics matter. Ben Gvir is anything but diplomatic. At best, Palestinians will get some more autonomy. More important than E1 is the eastern border with Jordan which Israel can never surrender. It sucks for those of us who would love to see peaceful coexistence with two states living side by side in peace but there is absolutely nothing about the last 80 years that would suggest that is possible.
“At best, Palestinians will get some more autonomy.” But not an independent state, and not citizenship / full civic rights in Israel.
I’m curious how Israel will attempt spin this to Westerners - not just the haters but pretty much any ordinary voter - as something other than a variation of apartheid, thereby pretty much finally validating at least one of the charges the haters throw out there.
This is the heart of the conflict. There are a lot of petro dollars and resources and nepharious characters and countries (China, Russia, Qatar, Soros, Singham, Iran) pumping dollars into the perpetuation of the conflict. Could Israel be doing more to improve the lives of Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, absolutely! But Israelis are political beings like any other citizenry and they are simply not going to support a government that is going to divert financial resources to an enemy population that has not been vanquished and is insistent that there can be no Jewish state on any part of the land. This “variation of apartheid” goes away as soon as the Palestinian leadership and body politic decides they want to live in peace side by side with Israel. No doubt that will be politically convulsing for many Israelis who are rightfully traumatized by 100 years of terrorism and war. I wish Palestinians would put Israelis to the test. If you read and watch Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, his Realign for Palestine movement says more or less the same thing. He understands that Israelis also have a vote here and that they are not going to make concessions in the absence of new Palestinian leadership that, with popular support, rejects resistance and incitement. I do not believe that is possible so the cycle of hate, violence and the “variation of apartheid” remains. If you and your children lived 10 miles or less from millions of people who want to exterminate you, the hypocritical and oversimplified criticism from large parts of the international community is a price that has to be paid to keep the country safe. This is the story of the Jewish people and yet we survive and thrive. Check out the video from Corey Gil-Shuster on the “So We Don’t Forget Page”
This is what I hear every time I ask this question.
Only 15%, roughly, of the original Mandate of Palestine remains available for negotiation at this point regardless of whether the Palestinians someday “put Israel to the test” (which I certainly recommend they do, although not for the same reason you might), and Israel’s right wing is doing its best, with seeming success so far, to reduce that percentage to essentially zero within the next decade or so. For some odd reason Israel cannot simply NOT settle the land that would become the topic of negotiation in the future, it just has to keep taking more and more of it and in the meantime tolerate settler violence to an ever escalating degree, almost as though its POLICY objective were to enrage and immiserate the Palestinians to a point where their ongoing and predictable resistance can be used as the excuse to justify even more repression.
The sense I get from Israelis at this point is that they believe their “security” requires annexation of most or all of the West Bank along with the permanent repression if not effective erasure of the remaining 3 million Palestinian Arabs living there. Honestly, the assertion that Israelis want to someday live in peace alongside the Palestinians just doesn’t hold water for me and a lot of other Westerners so long as Israel simultaneously keeps annexing more and of the territory that would necessarily be subject to future negotiation as well as tolerating, and indeed fanning, more settler violence. And yes, I understand future land swaps are possible to a limited degree, but if one party literally takes everything, or close to everything, there’s a point where that ends up becoming impossible as well.
Why is it so completely impossible for Israel to simply put a halt to further settlements for now? And why can it seemingly not rein in the settlers? There’s no way on earth you’re going to convince me that the IDF is incapable of that - what’s clearly lacking is the political will to do so. You cannot expect the Arabs, or any human beings on the face of the earth quite frankly, to not want to “exterminate” you whilst you’re literally taking out from under their feet the last bits of land they have left to live on and sending out religious fanatics to destroy their farms, beat them, and kill them. And yes, I absolutely get that they wanted to exterminate you BEFORE all that, but my point is that if you want them to change, as you claim you do, you cannot do what you’re currently doing - there’s a point where the cycle of repression resulting in anger and violence becomes circular and more or less self-fulfilling.
We here in the US engaged with our Native Americans in much the same way, convincing ourselves after the initial unsatisfactory encounters that they were incorrigible savages, human beings with whom we (vaguely) might have wanted to live in peace but simply couldn’t because, well, they were incorrigible savages who reacted to our peaceful settlements by raping and scalping our women and carrying off our children. So, we reacted in turn by taking more and more of their land, raping and shooting their women and carrying off their children, and ultimately killing off most of them. Nowadays we have some regrets - a sense that we were talking out of both sides of our mouths much of the time, praising the idea of peaceful coexistence in theory while stealing land and committing violence in practice. I realize no analogy is perfect but I get the sense Israel is doing a very similar thing in the West Bank today.
Mike, I think there’s an important distinction inside what you’re saying: Israel doesn’t have to believe a Palestinian state is safe or achievable today in order to preserve the possibility of one tomorrow.
That’s what troubles me about E1. Palestinian politics may change; Israeli politics may change; regional circumstances certainly can change. But roads, tenders and settlements create facts that a future government inherits whether or not it inherits the ideology that produced them.
So perhaps the immediate question isn’t “two states or one?” It’s whether either side should deliberately destroy options that a future generation may desperately need.
Palestinian rejectionism and violence long predate the settlement enterprise, and that history matters enormously. But history doesn’t require Israel to make today’s impasse permanent. Nor does Israel need to trust Palestinian intentions today in order to preserve choices for tomorrow.
There is a difference between saying “we cannot safely walk through that door now” and bricking it shut so nobody can walk through it later.
What strikes me here is the difference between ministers and mechanisms. Ben-Gvir’s rhetoric matters; it can normalize what was once beyond the pale. But ministers eventually leave office. Houses, roads, transferred authority and altered facts on the ground can outlive them.
Perhaps that is the deeper warning in E1: we naturally watch the politician making the most noise, when the more consequential question may be what he—or the quieter man beside him—leaves behind that the next government cannot easily undo.
100% Brad "Ministers and mechanisms" is spot on. That's exactly the distinction. Rhetoric shifts what's sayable, which matters and is real, but it's also reversible in a way that a road and a tender aren't. The next government inherits the buildings whether or not it inherits the ideology. Ben-Gvir's changes could be undone almost instantly. Rolling back what Smotrich has built will take years.
As far as I can tell Eisenkot is also pretty strongly against 2SS and has advocated for Jordan Valley annexation?
Hmmm. Hasn't even Naftali Bennet expressed a desire to annex Area C in which E1 sits? I believe his plan was to extend full Israeli citizenship and sovereignty to those Arabs living in the area. There are valid strategic reasons for annexing the area that go beyond aspirations for a Greater Israel. Parts of the area look down over Jerusalem and 35000+ Jews live in MA. I think those few people who still believe in the viability of a two state solution understand that Jerusalem will not be divided and there cannot be a Palestinian state on Jerusalem's door steps. I'm not a fan of Bibi, Bezalel or Itamar but we should be honest about what is going on there. Israel's growing pariah status is as much about its very right to exist as it is the settlements. Might as well shore up Israel's eastern border while the world is still screaming about Gaza, global intifada and pushing the Jews into the sea. I mean seriously, if Israel would forego the tender process and not have Ben Gvir and Smotrich saying stupid shit, would it really make a difference to all the haters? You think Ed Milliband's Muslim constituents are focused on E1?
I share more of your pessimism than you may think. After the failures of the last 30 years, and especially after October 7, I don’t see a viable two-state agreement waiting around the corner either.
Where I part company with you is the jump from “a Palestinian state is presently politically implausible” to “Israel should therefore make one physically impossible.” Those are very different propositions. Circumstances and governments change; houses, roads and borders are considerably harder to change.
And “some more autonomy” still leaves the central question unanswered. If Israel permanently controls the territory and its external borders, what is the eventual political status of the millions of Palestinians living there? Bennett at least recognized that annexation raises a citizenship question.
Palestinian rejectionism has played an enormous role in bringing us to this miserable place. But Palestinian agency doesn’t eliminate Israeli agency. Israel still has to decide what kind of state it intends to be and what options it wants to preserve for people who may inherit a political landscape very different from today’s.
Maybe two states really are impossible. I’m not yet willing to help make them impossible just to prove the point.
I'm not worried about the haters. They're unpersuadable, and nothing Israel does changes that. But the governments that moved last week aren't the global intifada crowd, though at times they may cater to them. Britain, France, Germany and Italy spent two years not summoning anyone. E1 is what changed that.
Maybe Smotrich gets fewer headlines than Ben-Gvir. He's still handing Israel's critics everything they could want. Bennett's annexation plan was from more than a decade ago, when he led the settler movement. His politics have moved a long way since.
I think you make a fair point that Israel has legitimate security interests around Jerusalem, and you’re certainly right that some hostility toward Israel has very little to do with E1—or even with the occupation.
But “they’ll hate us anyway” strikes me as a dangerous basis for policy. If the world’s worst actors are going to condemn Israel regardless, that still doesn’t relieve Israel of having to judge its own choices on their merits.
And there’s a tension in your argument. If E1 doesn’t materially threaten a Palestinian state, why does Smotrich himself celebrate it as helping bury one? If the answer instead is that Palestinian statehood should indeed be foreclosed, then the harder question follows: what is the intended political future of the Palestinians who remain under Israeli control?
Bennett at least tried to answer that question by talking about citizenship. “Might as well shore up the border while everyone is yelling at us” doesn’t.
The haters don’t get a veto over Israeli policy. But neither should they be allowed to provide its justification.
I guess the short answer is there is not going to be a separate Palestinian state because neither Israelis, nor Palestinians, nor Jordanians nor just about any one else in the region want it. The Palestinians want all the land from the river to the sea and the Arab countries mostly see it as a de-stabilizing force insofar as it is guaranteed to be taken over by genocidal Jihadis. Just because western capitals and progressives cling to the charade of a two state solution doesn’t mean Israel should. Like anything else in diplomacy, packaging, presentation and optics matter. Ben Gvir is anything but diplomatic. At best, Palestinians will get some more autonomy. More important than E1 is the eastern border with Jordan which Israel can never surrender. It sucks for those of us who would love to see peaceful coexistence with two states living side by side in peace but there is absolutely nothing about the last 80 years that would suggest that is possible.
“At best, Palestinians will get some more autonomy.” But not an independent state, and not citizenship / full civic rights in Israel.
I’m curious how Israel will attempt spin this to Westerners - not just the haters but pretty much any ordinary voter - as something other than a variation of apartheid, thereby pretty much finally validating at least one of the charges the haters throw out there.
This is the heart of the conflict. There are a lot of petro dollars and resources and nepharious characters and countries (China, Russia, Qatar, Soros, Singham, Iran) pumping dollars into the perpetuation of the conflict. Could Israel be doing more to improve the lives of Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, absolutely! But Israelis are political beings like any other citizenry and they are simply not going to support a government that is going to divert financial resources to an enemy population that has not been vanquished and is insistent that there can be no Jewish state on any part of the land. This “variation of apartheid” goes away as soon as the Palestinian leadership and body politic decides they want to live in peace side by side with Israel. No doubt that will be politically convulsing for many Israelis who are rightfully traumatized by 100 years of terrorism and war. I wish Palestinians would put Israelis to the test. If you read and watch Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, his Realign for Palestine movement says more or less the same thing. He understands that Israelis also have a vote here and that they are not going to make concessions in the absence of new Palestinian leadership that, with popular support, rejects resistance and incitement. I do not believe that is possible so the cycle of hate, violence and the “variation of apartheid” remains. If you and your children lived 10 miles or less from millions of people who want to exterminate you, the hypocritical and oversimplified criticism from large parts of the international community is a price that has to be paid to keep the country safe. This is the story of the Jewish people and yet we survive and thrive. Check out the video from Corey Gil-Shuster on the “So We Don’t Forget Page”
This is what I hear every time I ask this question.
Only 15%, roughly, of the original Mandate of Palestine remains available for negotiation at this point regardless of whether the Palestinians someday “put Israel to the test” (which I certainly recommend they do, although not for the same reason you might), and Israel’s right wing is doing its best, with seeming success so far, to reduce that percentage to essentially zero within the next decade or so. For some odd reason Israel cannot simply NOT settle the land that would become the topic of negotiation in the future, it just has to keep taking more and more of it and in the meantime tolerate settler violence to an ever escalating degree, almost as though its POLICY objective were to enrage and immiserate the Palestinians to a point where their ongoing and predictable resistance can be used as the excuse to justify even more repression.
The sense I get from Israelis at this point is that they believe their “security” requires annexation of most or all of the West Bank along with the permanent repression if not effective erasure of the remaining 3 million Palestinian Arabs living there. Honestly, the assertion that Israelis want to someday live in peace alongside the Palestinians just doesn’t hold water for me and a lot of other Westerners so long as Israel simultaneously keeps annexing more and of the territory that would necessarily be subject to future negotiation as well as tolerating, and indeed fanning, more settler violence. And yes, I understand future land swaps are possible to a limited degree, but if one party literally takes everything, or close to everything, there’s a point where that ends up becoming impossible as well.
Why is it so completely impossible for Israel to simply put a halt to further settlements for now? And why can it seemingly not rein in the settlers? There’s no way on earth you’re going to convince me that the IDF is incapable of that - what’s clearly lacking is the political will to do so. You cannot expect the Arabs, or any human beings on the face of the earth quite frankly, to not want to “exterminate” you whilst you’re literally taking out from under their feet the last bits of land they have left to live on and sending out religious fanatics to destroy their farms, beat them, and kill them. And yes, I absolutely get that they wanted to exterminate you BEFORE all that, but my point is that if you want them to change, as you claim you do, you cannot do what you’re currently doing - there’s a point where the cycle of repression resulting in anger and violence becomes circular and more or less self-fulfilling.
We here in the US engaged with our Native Americans in much the same way, convincing ourselves after the initial unsatisfactory encounters that they were incorrigible savages, human beings with whom we (vaguely) might have wanted to live in peace but simply couldn’t because, well, they were incorrigible savages who reacted to our peaceful settlements by raping and scalping our women and carrying off our children. So, we reacted in turn by taking more and more of their land, raping and shooting their women and carrying off their children, and ultimately killing off most of them. Nowadays we have some regrets - a sense that we were talking out of both sides of our mouths much of the time, praising the idea of peaceful coexistence in theory while stealing land and committing violence in practice. I realize no analogy is perfect but I get the sense Israel is doing a very similar thing in the West Bank today.
Mike, I think there’s an important distinction inside what you’re saying: Israel doesn’t have to believe a Palestinian state is safe or achievable today in order to preserve the possibility of one tomorrow.
That’s what troubles me about E1. Palestinian politics may change; Israeli politics may change; regional circumstances certainly can change. But roads, tenders and settlements create facts that a future government inherits whether or not it inherits the ideology that produced them.
So perhaps the immediate question isn’t “two states or one?” It’s whether either side should deliberately destroy options that a future generation may desperately need.
Palestinian rejectionism and violence long predate the settlement enterprise, and that history matters enormously. But history doesn’t require Israel to make today’s impasse permanent. Nor does Israel need to trust Palestinian intentions today in order to preserve choices for tomorrow.
There is a difference between saying “we cannot safely walk through that door now” and bricking it shut so nobody can walk through it later.
What strikes me here is the difference between ministers and mechanisms. Ben-Gvir’s rhetoric matters; it can normalize what was once beyond the pale. But ministers eventually leave office. Houses, roads, transferred authority and altered facts on the ground can outlive them.
Perhaps that is the deeper warning in E1: we naturally watch the politician making the most noise, when the more consequential question may be what he—or the quieter man beside him—leaves behind that the next government cannot easily undo.
100% Brad "Ministers and mechanisms" is spot on. That's exactly the distinction. Rhetoric shifts what's sayable, which matters and is real, but it's also reversible in a way that a road and a tender aren't. The next government inherits the buildings whether or not it inherits the ideology. Ben-Gvir's changes could be undone almost instantly. Rolling back what Smotrich has built will take years.