So what exactly is the big problem?
In 1993, Israel agreed to withdraw from the Palestinian territories of the West Bank – an area about a quarter of the size of Israel between the River Jordan and East Jerusalem – and Gaza, a smaller region by the Egyptian border. This division between Israeli and Palestinian land has been called the ‘two-state solution.’ It is recognised as a promising basis for peace, but in recent years the ascendance of Hamas and the movement of Israeli settlers into the West Bank have threatened to jeopardise it.
There are further fundamental difficulties: should Jerusalem be an undivided capital for the Israeli state, or shared between Israel and Palestine? What will happen to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees outside Palestine? How will absolute consensus on borders ever be achieved? ‘The biggest problem,” says Rogan, “is getting both the Israelis and the Palestinians to recognise that they need to broker the two-state solution immediately, that the status quo is untenable for both sides. Ironically, democracy is the main impediment: the Knesset usually returns weak coalition governments reliant on minor parties and incapable of decisive action.”
What can the international community do?
“We need to work within established legal parameters. It confuses an already confused situation when countries try to reopen questions like borders or refugee rights. The international community “should recognise the two-state solution along the lines of UN Security Council Resolution 242. Drafted over Israel’s overwhelming defeat of the Arab States in the Six-Day War in 1967, this resolution pioneered the ‘Land for Peace’ agreement. According to this deal, Israel would return land she had occupied during the war – such as Sinai in Egypt and the Golan Heights in Syria – in exchange for her first ever peace treaty with the Arab states. “If you recognise the bounds of resolution 242, issues like settlement are put in their correct legal context, which is to say that the settlers are putting buildings on the sovereign state land of another country, and should be treated as expatriates.”
What can other Middle Eastern states do to help?
“The Arab states have made a major contribution, when in 2002 they made a plan pledging full normalisation of relations in return for all territory occupied by Israel in 1967. The thing about that plan is that the best way forward is to recognise the international legal positions on boundaries. The UN and the EU should encourage Arab initiatives, and Israel should work with them – there would be no better way to demonstrate Israel’s full acceptance into the Middle East. All West Bank territory should be returned to the Palestinian Authority, the Golan Heights should be returned to Syria, the Shebaa farms to Lebanon. The demands for the restoration of territory are the absolute condition of the Arab peace effort.”
What can be done to promote this solution in Israel and Palestine?
“I think the only way for Israel to move forward would be an election on the specific agenda of the two-state solution. It would take a period of negotiations producing terms of peace that would satisfy Palestinian demands, and also Syrian demands. You need to come up with a Plan that the PA would be able to agree to with US support, and then put that plan to the electorate.
There is enough will in Israel. Polls taken in 2007 showed that the majority of the Israeli people still want the two-state solution. Also, if current population trends continue, it is thought that there will be more Palestinians than Israelis in Israel within a decade.”
And Palestine? “Hamas and Fatah must reconcile their differences and agree to work together under the structures of the Palestinian Authority. Divided, the Palestinians will never be able to negotiate a two-state solution with the Israelis. They owe this to the Palestinian people, who want to build their lives; they want economic stability and freedom of movement; they want peace.”
Dr Eugene Rogan is Director of the Oxford Centre for Middle Eastern Studies and University lecturer in the Modern History of the Middle East.
