The article “Israel-Palestine: the paradigm shift that the European Union continues to ignore” condemns acts and attitudes of the European Union which it considers anachronistic with respect to the support of the “two-state” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Beyond the dysfunctions and objective weaknesses constitutive of EU foreign policy and hitherto unresolved – unanimity rule, complex mechanisms that inhibit the passage from the sphere of declarations to that of operational action, etc. – I find the underlying reasoning erroneous, all based on apodictic assertions about the “colonial” nature of Israel or its emergence from settler colonialism.
The doctrine that informs this thesis is very vast, but it is invalidated by the fact that unlike other cases of the kind – United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Zionism and the birth 75 years ago of the state of Israel in that land – Eretz Israel or Palestine – is not the product of European settlers who leave their lands of origin exporting with them the new culture, language, interests, prosthesis to replace or “convert” the natives, but of Jews fleeing Europe with its infamous history of exclusions and anti-Semitic persecutions and they reject that Europe, its culture, its language, its racism.
Zionism and Palestinian national identity
The conflict that has gripped the two peoples for over a hundred years contrasts two national movements who claim a right of self-determination on the same strip of land. An embryo of Palestinian national identity was formed precisely in the 1920s shortly after the beginnings of Jewish immigration. The two peoples are also united by the ironies of demography: about 7 million Jews and a similar number of Arab-Palestinians inhabit the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
Il zionism was the national liberation movement of the Jewish people: the Jews asserted themselves above all in Eastern Europe as an ethnic group, no longer as a religious community, yearning to escape from anti-Semitism and to become a “normal” nation after centuries of exile and persecution; but that land was inhabited by other peoples – Arabs – subjects of the Ottoman and then British empires, who over time and also by virtue of the harsh confrontation with Jewish nationalism acquired a conscience of nation as Palestinians.
Ai Palestinians Zionism appeared as a movement of colonizing foreigners which had to be resisted. Even today, for their collective psychology which experienced the settlement of the Jews in Palestine as an injustice, it is difficult to accept the consequences of these events, ie the legitimate existence of the State of Israel. To many of them, the Jews still appear as a transient reality in the Muslim “umma”, or a religious community, not a people, whose right to a state of their own is recognized. Belatedly, at least in the official instances, they recognized him, with the Oslo Accords of 1993.
A difficult deal
Certainly a 56-year occupation is no longer temporary; it is no longer an element of negotiation, as in the years following the war of 1967 and up to the Oslo accords of 1993, for an exchange between territories and peace. Under the pressure of the settler movement and the right-wing parties that support it, the expansion of settlements, the confiscation of land even of private Palestinian subjects, make a future of two independent states and in good neighborly relations more difficult and the emerging factual reality of a single state with unequal rights closer. Yet the “two-state” solution remains the only possible one, perhaps with corrective measures of the confederal type – on which there are solid proposals in both the academic and political spheres -; this solution requires the agreed division of that disputed land.
The agreement must concern the “final status” and include: the borders between the two states, the status of Jerusalemphysically united but administratively divided capital of the two states, the withdrawal of 100-130 thousand settlers of the 450 thousand who live in the West Bank thus excluding those whose settlements will be subject to land exchange with the state of Palestine, the return of some Palestinian refugees to their future state except for a limited number already negotiated in 2000 at Camp David and Taba who could move to the state of Israel .
The hegemonic strength of right-wing parties and the profound shift in Israeli society towards ethno-nationalist positions they are also a nefarious consequence of the nihilistic road taken by the Palestinians years ago: the explosion of terrorist violence against Israeli civilians in the years 2001-05; the useless guerrilla war waged by Hamas from the Gaza strip, the rejection by Abu MazenMore of the Olmert government’s positive offers in the 2008 negotiations that opened the door to Netanyahu’s premiership and since then to Likud governments with religious parties allied with it.
Status quo and prospects
The status quo is not tolerable, as evidenced by the recurring outbreaks of violence and the same inter-ethnic violence that erupted in 2021 between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel. Especially the repetition of one destructive war with Hamas in the Gaza Stripattacks against Israeli civilians inside the country or on West Bank roads, the endemic weakness of the Palestinian Authority and the emergence of militarized Palestinian formations opposing it demonstrate that the cost of non-peace is enormous and the illusion that the Palestinians accept the continuation of a humiliating occupation is dangerous for Israel itself.
In the current government the dominant ideology preaches theannexation of all or part of the West Bank. It’s not just the more than 400,000 settlers in settlements in the West Bank that make the two-state solution more difficult in fact; even a large part of society prefers Palestinians to remain “invisible” behind the separation wall.
According to opinion polls, just over a third of Israelis strongly support a “two-state” solution, 19% opt for a single, democratic and egalitarian state, 15% advocate full annexation of territories without political rights for the Palestinians. In this great uncertainty, the thrust of Israeli governments has been to to maintain the status quo, without formal annexation but by expanding the settlements and their residents. The effective impulse of the United States and the EU should instead be to push the Israeli leadership towards a “two-state” solution, with a incentive and sanctions programme; the same normalization agreements concluded with the Emirates and Bahrain, in addition to facilitating Israel’s integration into the region, can act on public opinion in the country in order to push it in favor of a negotiated solution to the conflict.
The article Europe and Israel: a complex relationship that avoids schematisms comes from International Affairs – Foreign Policy and Economics.