The Role of Israel in the Security and Security of the Palestinians: The Case for a Resolution of the Second Intifada
The most critical Democratic voices are Black and Hispanic Democrats who helped fuel Mr. Biden’s victory. All 18 House members who signed onto the resolution were people of color.
In labor unions and liberal activist groups, there is a raw emotional divide in the country over the conflict.
Liberals want Mr. Biden to break with decades of American policy and to call for a cease-fire.
One of the cease-fire resolution’s co-sponsors said that they had experienced pain in their lives or had historical connections to it. “So we understand that cruelty and war and violence do not have positive outcomes.”
“A decent number of Israelis and Palestinians have come to conclude that it’s not a solution, that the nature of Israeli behavior, especially in the West Bank, makes a Palestinian state unviable,” says Alterman, noting that many members of the Israeli government want to annex the West Bank altogether.
He says security in Israel is improving, Palestinian demands are diminishing and it would be politically divisive to make concessions to them. The Palestinians didn’t feel like they could make an agreement with Netanyahu’s government, and it was because they didn’t think giving up rights was worth it.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies says that it is hard to have productive peace talks when no side sees either immediate need or urgency to reach an agreement.
There has been no significant progress since the millennium. The Second Intifada grew from the collapse of the 2000 peace process.
Almost immediately after the Oslo Accords were signed, Israel enhanced its policy of fragmenting Gaza from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, says Atalia Omer, a professor of religion, conflict and peace studies at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame.
That has persisted in the years since. The population of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, grew from 520,000 to more than 700,000 between 2012 and 2022, according to the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The deal raised expectations for a two-state solution. There was an attack on a mosque by settlers from the States and the assassination of Rabin in 1995 by an Israeli who was against the agreement.
The PLO was given the title of representative of the Palestinian people and a partner in future negotiations, and the Israel government recognized its right to exist.
U.S. President Bill Clinton brought Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin together in 1993 to negotiate the agreement that came to be known as the Oslo Accords.
Those territories have been a major point of contention and peace negotiations ever since. The UN’s resolution in 1967, which called for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from captured areas, has been disputed.
Jon Alterman says that the two-state solution was baked into Israel’s creation, but that it did not necessarily play out as planned.
That set up the current occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, which are collectively home to some 5 million Palestinians. Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but they still exert control over it, even though it was not an agreement to do so.
Israel gained territory four times its original size, taking control of the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.
The Arab community rejected the partition plan due to concerns over how much land it would get and where resources would come from. But the plan was embraced by the Jewish community as legal justification for the establishment of Israel.
Jewish proponents of the Zionist movement began moving to Ottoman Palestine — which was predominantly Arab — in the late 19th century, seeking safety from European antisemitism in their ancient homeland. Many people followed suit after the Holocaust.
One is how exactly the borders would be drawn. Most international diplomacy favors Israel reverting to a version of its pre-1967 borders, without a consensus on how that would account for the Palestinians living within those borders or the Jewish Israelis beyond them.
“We believe that there has to be a two-state solution,” he said, repeating a comment he made in Israel. “And that means a concentrated effort for all the parties — Israelis, Palestinians, regional partners, global leaders — to put us on a path toward peace.”
As heartbreaking as the situation is in the Middle East, eventually there will need to be a day after, according to Dennis Ross.
But failed peace talks, logistical questions, expanded Israeli settlements, Palestinian attacks and recurring clashes have kept it from becoming a reality. The two-state solution has seen waning support from both Palestinians and Israelis. It seems as if its prospects are dimmer due to Hamas attack and Israel’s response.
The president said on Wednesday that there will be no return to the status quo before Oct. 7 because there needs to be a view of what is next.
Israel bombards Gaza and prepares for a ground offensive in response to Hamas’ attack. Humanitarian groups are calling on the warring sides to stop fighting. But what are the prospects for long–term peace?
He says it’s too early to say where the current conflict will go, though many Israelis believe Israeli politics are more likely to move to the right than the left in the wake of Hamas’ attack, which killed some 1,400 people in Israel and resulted in more than 220 hostages taken.
That doesn’t mean Israeli citizens aren’t pushing for peace at all. Sally Abed is a member of Standing Together, an organization that aims to improve Arab-Jewish relations within Israel, and she’s also a Palestinian.
“I don’t think we needed to go through this kind of loss here in Israel,” she told NPR. Maybe we can have a different viewpoint on how we view the wars and how we view the leadership in this country, if we can change our paradigm from this dark corner.
The problem of the two-state solution for Israeli-Palestinian peace is still possible: A Land for All campaign, and a petition
In theory, there are alternatives to a two-state solution, including a one-state solution, confederation, annexation and maintaining the status quo.
“If you have a one-state solution that gives citizenship to all of the natural-born residents of Mandatory Palestine — which includes Gaza and the West Bank — you don’t have a Jewish majority,” he explained. “A substantial line of thought [in Israel] is that it’s more important that Israel be Jewish than democratic.”
Most Americans would choose a democrat over a Jewish Israel, according to a University of Maryland and Ipsos polling done this year.
Many people see the current reality as that of a single state. She points to the exclusionary practices and annexationist policies of the right-wing Netanyahu government, like a 2018 law that demoted Arabic as one of Israel’s official languages, and the recent findings of human rights groups in and beyond Israel that its practices toward Palestinians amount to apartheid.
Leftists and Palestinians support the creation of a secular country in which Arabs would outnumber Jews. But some rightists and Israelis would prefer to see Israel annex the West Bank — either forcing out Palestinians or denying them the right to vote — which is illegal under international human rights law.
Some activists, like the group A Land for All, argue that solutions based on separation have failed in the past, and they are instead pushing for a confederal framework, with two sovereign states sharing the capital of Jerusalem and an open border.
There are some historical examples of life that are not part of the paradigm of domination. She acknowledges that it’s not easy to imagine those kind of possibilities in a current situation, but that the need for change is clear.
“What we can see depends on, also, an expression of how the paradigm that had been there before Oct. 7 is completely collapsing,” she says. “And all these contradictions can’t be sustained anymore.”
Biden‘s Israel Ties Rooted in Long Career: From His Gut to His Heart to His Head’, Revealed in a Conversation with Mr. Ross
“There needs to be a recognition and kind of naming, and then put in place mechanisms to redress — how can Palestinians be compensated for historical injustice they experienced — and then figure out ways of respecting Jewish citizens in the space through principles of equality and democracy,” Omer says.
Mr. Ross has studied presidents of both parties for more than 20 years, and believes that there is something deep in him. Of all of them, he said Mr. Biden’s ties to Israel appeared strongest. The day in 2002 when Mr. Biden showed up during the second intifada was very moving, said Mr Ross. I think it speaks volumes about him and his emotional connection.
Mr. Blinken said Mr. Biden was able to be blunt with Mr. Netanyahu behind the scenes. “Because the president has so much credibility built up over so many years with Israelis, with the Jewish community here, he’s able to have very direct and sometimes, as warranted, very hard conversations that maybe others would have more difficulty having,” he said.
In those private sessions, advisers said, Mr. Biden asks pointed questions rather than lecturing. Why do you plan to do it this way? What comes next, have you thought about it? What did you do to ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza?
Mr. Biden feels that it is not his place to tell another leader how to manage their own politics, as he advised him during his Senate days. “He’ll offer advice, but he’s not going to do it like Tony Soprano.”
Blinken’s response to the Holocaust: From Hitler’s heart to his head to the world’s shame, and from the heart to the head
He quoted his father, who said the world should be ashamed for not responding to Hitler’s atrocities against the Jews.
“This is something, as I’ve seen it and experienced it, that goes in a sense from his gut to his heart to his head,” Mr. Blinken said of the president in a phone interview. Other presidents may process the situation through an “intellectual policy prism,” he added. I’ve been able to observe that it seems more personal to him.