Please tell me, where is Israel headed?
By John J. Mearsheimer
Benjamin Netanyahu is in the final stages of putting together
Israel’s next government, which will be opposed to a two-state
solution. Most importantly, the new prime minister and his Likud
Party are firmly against a Palestinian state.
The Labor Party, which will be part of the governing coalition
and which has been identified with the two-state solution for the
past two decades, did not insist that Likud support that policy as
a condition for joining the government.
Its leader, Ehud Barak, merely asked for and got a vague
statement saying that Israel was committed to promoting regional
peace. Avigdor Lieberman, who heads Yisrael Beiteinu, the other
major party in the ruling coalition, is not likely to push to give
the Palestinians a viable state of their own. His main concern is
“transferring” the Palestinians out of Israel so that it can be an
almost purely Jewish state.
So Israel will continue expanding its settlements in the West
Bank. In fact,
the Israeli press is reporting that Netanyahu and Lieberman agreed
in their negotiations to form a government that Israel would build
3,000 housing units in an area between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim
(a huge settlement bloc) known as E-1.
Once that is accomplished, Israel will have effectively cut the
West Bank in half, making it almost impossible to create a viable
Palestinian state. This deal was supposed to be secret, because the
United States is opposed to Israel building in the E-1 area.
The Palestinians, of course, will remain locked up in Gaza and a
handful of enclaves on the West Bank. In essence, Netanyahu and his
two key ministers - Ehud Barak (Defense) and Avigdor Lieberman
(Foreign Affairs) - are committed to creating a Greater Israel,
which will cover all of the territory that was once Mandate
Palestine.
The Obama administration will surely try to push Netanyahu to
change his thinking about a two-state solution and work to give the
Palestinians a real state of their own. The Israel lobby, however,
will adamantly defend Israel’s right to do whatever it wants in the
Occupied Territories and make it impossible for the president to
put significant pressure on Israel.
Netanyahu, like all Israeli leaders, understands this basic fact
of life. He knows that he will just have to say a few nice words
about the “peace process” and blame the whole thing on the
Palestinians, who he believes are a bunch of terrorists anyway, and
he will be pretty much free to do whatever he wants in Gaza and the
West Bank.
It seems clear to me and to many smart people I know that this
story does not have a happy ending. Indeed, it looks like a
disastrous ending. Greater Israel cannot be a
democratic state, because there will soon be - if there aren’t
already - more Palestinians between the Jordan River and the
Mediterranean Sea than there are Israeli Jews.
So, if you give each person one vote, Israel becomes Palestine.
That is not going to happen anytime soon, if ever, which leaves two
possible outcomes: apartheid and expelling the Palestinians- and
there are more than 5 million of them - from Greater Israel. Talk
about repulsive options.
It is worth
remembering that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said that if there
is no two-state solution, Israel will end up in a South Africa-like
situation and that will mean the end of the Jewish state. In
effect, he is saying that Israel is turning itself into an
apartheid state.
My bottom line is that Israel, with the backing of the lobby, is
pursuing a remarkably foolish - Ehud Olmert would say suicidal -
policy towards the Palestinians.
I would appreciate it greatly if Israel’s American backers would
explain what I am missing here. They must think that there is a
happy ending to this story that Olmert and I simply fail to see.
Otherwise they would not be backing the Greater Israel
enterprise.
There is no need for Christian Zionists to respond, because I
know what their happy ending is: the Battle of Armageddon and then
the Second Coming of Christ. Israel’s Jewish backers do not buy
this story, which, in fact, many consider anti-Semitic. But they
must have an alternative explanation for how Greater Israel is good
for the Jews.
What is it?
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/03/26/