Palestinians celebrate the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas on May 21,2021 in Gaza City,Gaza.Credit:Getty Images Europe
Yet to many analysts and close observers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,there may be no going back to the way things once were. The intensity of this latest round of violence took both the Israeli government and the Biden administration by surprise. It should not have.
The coals were stoked far from Gaza,by the provocations of Israeli police and emboldened Jewish far-right vigilantes marching through Jerusalem. Palestinian protests against planned evictions in the contested holy city and the clashes that ensued all came toa head when Israeli security forces decided to storm al-Aqsa Mosque. Hamas then saw an opportunity to don the mantle of the defender of the third-holiest site in Islam,as well as broader Palestinian claims to Jerusalem,and launched its attacks. The resulting war sprawled across the land between the river and the sea,with clashes in the West Bank as well as between Arab and Jewish Israelis in cities inside Israel’s 1967 borders.
The explosion of tensions exposed the internal dysfunctions among both the Israeli and Palestinian political camps. For the former,two years of ceaseless electioneering andthe failure to form a stable ruling coalition either with or without Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu weakened governance and has brought far-right groups once considered too extremist into the political mainstream. For the latter,a crisis of legitimacy facing the beleaguered Palestinian Authority and its ageing President Mahmoud Abbas has only intensified. Hamas’s renewed militancy followed a decision by Abbas to scrap the first planned Palestinian elections after more than a decade and a half.
Israeli and US officials may tout the return of calm after a ceasefire,but experts fear the opposite. There is no meaningful dialogue between an unpopular,enfeebled PA and a right-wing Israeli government where many politicians now openly reject the idea of an independent Palestinian state. Israel’s entrenched system of control over the Palestinian territories and its creeping annexation of Palestinian lands,unchecked for years by the United States,may only provoke more angry resistance.
“Given Israeli efforts to marginalise Abbas and the PA,it will not be easy to keep the West Bank out of the next conflict or even the current one,”wrote Khalil Shikaki,a Palestinian political analyst and pollster. “Security coordination between Israel and the PA will not be enough to contain the rising flames. And given the rhetoric around annexation,no right-wing Israeli government will be willing or able to renew a political process that would require negotiations with the PA leadership,even for small incremental steps.”
This state of affairs was a long time coming. In a recent survey of US-based Middle East scholars,a majority now viewed the two-state solution as an impossibility. The population of Jewish settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem - where a Palestinian state is supposed to emerge - has grown sevenfold since the 1990s. Once on the fringes of Israeli politics,the settler movement now makes up the vanguard of the Israeli right. And,like its US allies in the Republican Party,the Israeli right has no interest in pursuing the two-state goalsenshrined by the Oslo accords in 1993.
“The official Israeli abandonment of negotiated compromise,alongside continued settlement expansion and the forcible relocation of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem and communities in the West Bank,made a new crisis almost inevitable,” wrote Tamara Cofman Wittes,a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “It made inescapably obvious what was already clear to many:that the Oslo framework was exhausted,and the rationale for the prevailing order in the West Bank,including the existence of the Palestinian Authority,was defunct.”