Israel-Palestine: will there *ever* be a solution?

[Absolution]

Remember when this was a good thread, about a specific topic raised by the OP, rather then Israeli-Palestine General #4785?

What did you expect from a thread with such a title?

 

[Winner]

Nope. It's, uh, always been a rehash thread.

No, there was a very specific question asked in the OP.

What did you expect from a thread with such a title?

Sticking to the topic.

 

[innonimatu]

This chap doesn't think so (not surprising for a hardline Jewish settler in the West Bank). What's more interesting about his argument is that he favours a continuation of the status quo (= "occupation" in the anti-Israeli dictionary) and claims that pretty much everybody in the region has resigned themselves to that outcome. This means that the Palestinian Authority will remain basically a client state/colony of Israel forever.

Do you think this is realistic? If not, what outcome do you think is the *most* realistic?

Is is never realistic to assume that thing will always continue as they are. However there are indeed many people inside Israel who want hings to continue as they are, because any change would be a loss of power for them.

Israel's policy towards the palestinians it controls are similar to what we've seen many, many times around the world. I think it would benefit people the people looking at the issue to consider the history of citizenship rights,and state repression in other parts of the world.
Let's start with the repression of demands for political or economic rights in 19th century Europe, when governments usually deployed the army to shoot protesters who challenged the "authority of the state", be it for demanding a right to vote, or for organizing strikes for better wages, or for resisting modern forms of taxation or military recruitment. It used to be the case that european governments would order soldiers to "disperse" any protests, and the protocol was to warn (one time, or in some cases three times) the protesters to disband, and if they didn't just shoot at them. A few would die, many would be wounded, the surviving leaders arrested (and occasional executed, legally or extra-judicially), and most would flee and lay low - though not for long - protests kept popping up, and the early "liberal states" that employed this were marred by near-continous social instability. The fact that in the late 19th century anarchists were leading some of those protests and using weapons and bombs against the security forces sent to repress them served as a convenient justification for continuing to have the army and gerdarmeries shoot protesters.

In the european colonies the practice was much worse, the scale of the massacres against the natives much larger. The Amritsar massacre in british India, for example, was a case of an army officer doing what had been usually done at a time when it was already becoming become politically too inconvenient even in some colonies...

Gradually, by the early 20th century, it did became too politically costly for european governments to have their security forces terrorize and kill their own citizens (though the french still got away with murdering algerians in Paris in the 60s). The existent of political oppositions in parliament, the end of censorship, the acceptance of extension of voting rights to every adult, and the possibility of losing elections because of popular anger at killings of protesters, all that finally made governments seek at least "non-lethal" methods of repression. Governments also learned to actually allow protests, strikes and so on, and to contemplate negotiation and actually giving in to some of the protesters' demands rather than just the usual repression.

The process really lasted until the 1980s and the final collapse of the last western and latin american dictatorships. By then even the communist regimes (also still without official opposition) were fearful of using excessively violent repression - 30 years after the "Hungarian Uprising" it was no longer politically tenable to do such a thing again, and when repression was attempted inside the USSR it ended in collapse (in the baltic states).

And what about Israel? Israel had the palestinian intifada - mass protests by unarmed civilians - in the 1980s, and at first it tried to just repress it. But, as europeans had found in their colonies, even going about terrorizing and murdering non-citizens can be politically costly, especially in diplomatic terms. So Israel tried... negotiation, a novel idea to them, but the obvious one which everybody else in the world had finally resorted to, the one which had finally allowed stability in many countries. The problem was... negotiation became deadlocked over the issue of actual palestinian independence (which the palestinians know to be economically unfeasible, and the israelis regarded as militarily threatening). Internal politics in Israel (the smaller right-wing and religious parties opposing it) also contributed to derailing the idea of a settlement of the issue through an independent palestine, but their influence and action wasn't really decisive.

With the deadlock some palestinians decided to replace protest with fight, and the israelis again had an excuse to use violent repression. It has been a reenactment of the anarchist groups of late-19tyh century Europe being formed as a reaction to state repression of popular protests, or the "liberation movements" of european colonies. These things never had a solution merely through repression. Violent groups fighting state security forces in Europe disappeared when governments negotiated acceptable conditions with the vast majority of people and scaled down of their own violence; in the colonies the issue was settled (in the absence of any willingness to grant equal rights to the "natives" through independence. It's obvious that the situation is Israel can only be settled in one of these ways also.

Wanting to preserve things as they are is a recipe for continued instability. It is the reason why israeli politics are so fragmented, why israeli democracy even among the present israeli citizens only is on the way to collapsing. The status quo is not stable and cannot continue as it is. There are political costs to the ongoing repression, even if it seems technically possible to continue to carry it on. It is costly, it creates enemies abroad, it generates internal divisions.