I had the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to have dinner with Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian physician, politician, and advocate of nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation and a two-state settlement of the conflict. His message was the same as that from every other moderate in the Arab world, but it was powerful to hear it in person -- the clock is running out on the two-state solution, by far the most humane and practical possible resolution to the dilemma. But with every passing day of Israeli occupation and every additional Israeli settler, the idea of a negotiated settlement seems less -and -less credible to the Palestinian population, while Palestinian demands for basic rights and human dignity become no less urgent.
Nobody on the Arab side likes to get very explicit about what happens next, but one can envision two possibilities. The first would be that the Palestinians embark upon an ethical, restrained, nonviolent campaign to demand rights of citizenship equal with those enjoyed by Arabs in Israel proper and Jews on both sides of the pre–1967 border. This would see international support for Israel vanish rapidly, as Israel would be put formally in the same position as apartheid South Africa. If one wants to be rosy about it, the Israelis could be forced to give in and maybe Jew and Arab would live happily ever after in one state. But at best, this would be the end of Zionism.
More plausibly, substantial numbers of Palestinians will continue to embrace violent resistance to Israel. This would stave off the complete collapse of external support for Israel, since the argument that a de facto apartheid regime was necessary for the physical security of Israel's Jewish population would have some purchase in the United States and perhaps elsewhere in the West. The endgame here is something more like Rhodesia/Zimbabwe -- uglier and ultimately worse for everyone -- but the end of Israel as a Jewish state would be, either way, inescapable.
Outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel, to his credit, came to understand this after corruption scandals and the misbegotten war in Lebanon wrecked his political future. In early 2008 he observed to the newspaper Haaretz that "if the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished. … The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents."
Unfortunately, he seems almost alone among Israeli political elites in appreciating the urgency of the situation. Other Israeli leaders differ, to some extent, in their approach to the situation, but all are agreed in downplaying how acute it is in favor of an emphasis on the threat of Iran.
Differing coverage of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's trip to Israel on Tuesday captured the divergence of opinion. The Associated Press' headline kept the focus on Clinton's somewhat news-making proclamation about Palestine: "US: 'Inescapable' movement to Palestinian state." The story highlighted how Clinton emphasized to Israeli leaders across the spectrum -- including Benjamin Netanhayu, almost certainly Israel's next prime minister and an opponent of a sovereign Palestine -- the vital need to continue work toward a two-state solution.
The Jerusalem Post headline, by contrast, was "Netanyahu, Barak urge Clinton for Iran dialogue deadline." Israeli leaders, from the Labor Party to the Likud Party, think that the most important thing they can be doing right now is urging the United States to get tough on Iran. The March 3 Haaretz had an article about Israeli leaders intending to present Clinton with "red lines" on talks with Iran.
How the client state in this relationship got in the position to start dictating red lines is an issue I'll leave for others. The larger issue is that this Israeli consensus on priorities is dangerously out of line with reality.
The Iranian nuclear threat is, at this point, merely hypothetical. The Palestinian threat, by contrast, is quite real. What's more, Israel already possesses the best defense to any current or future nuclear threats -- second-strike capabilities. Clearly, any country would prefer, deterrent or not, that no regional rival acquire nuclear weapons. But if Israel really has as little faith in its own nuclear deterrent as its leaders suggest, it might want to consider asking why it built those deterrents in the first place. Iranian negotiators enjoy raising the prospect of a "nuclear free zone" in the Middle East -- which is to say Israeli nuclear disarmament -- as part of the resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue. This is normally treated as a nonstarter by the international community, but if Israel really thinks its nukes don't work as a deterrent and that an Iranian bomb is an existential threat, then why not explore this possibility?
Meanwhile, neither the Israel Defense Forces nor a nuclear weapon can protect Israel from the catastrophic erosion of its international legitimacy that will result from a failure to resolve the Palestinian issue in a timely manner. This is not what Israelis want to hear, but it's the message that their real friends in the United States will have to send.
