Haaretz: The 'Two-state Solution' Only Ever Meant a Big Israel Ruling Over a Palestinian Bantustan. Let It Go

This is a skewered view, to say the least. In fact, every Israeli government since 1967 has failed to live up to those proud liberal values by pursuing an expanded Israel ruling over a truncated Palestinian Bantustan, even if they did it under the guise of a "two-state solution."

Within weeks of the start of the occupation in 1967, the Allon Plan (under Labor prime minister Levi Eshkol) already proposed Israel annexing territory surrounding and isolating the Palestinian population centers. [...]

By Oslo’s end in 2000, there were 400,000 settlers in massive "settlement blocs" that fragmented the Palestinian territory into some 70 tiny enclaves of Areas A and B, plus the prison that is Gaza. Today, the settler population approaches 800,000.

If the two-state solution is gone, it is because of successive "sane" Israelis in government, in particular those of Golda Meir and Ehud Barak, as well as of the Likud, Kadima and the religious right, and the Zionist left, "hard" right, and the always malleable center that put them into office. [...]

But Yoffie is also wrong about how he characterizes what he calls the "hard left's" one-statism. Left groups who acknowledge the death of the two-state solution have not moved to a one-state alternative – at least not yet. Jewish Voice for Peace, which Yoffie demonizes because of its support for BDS, does not actively advocate for such a solution. And the rest of the "hard" left is still wrestling with where to go.

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The Washington Post: American Jews vs. Israel

The Israeli government proceeds as if none of this matters. Its preoccupation, naturally enough, is with its domestic constituency — the voters of the upper Galilee and not the donors of the Upper West Side. Not only don’t American Jews vote in Israel, but as Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely dismissively put it, they don’t serve in the army, either. Just as important, the vast majority of American Jews are not Orthodox, and they resent the hold that the very religious have over Israeli political life. As we see with Sunni and Shiite Muslims, interreligious fights are the most ugly.

For moderate or liberal Jews — in other words, for the 76 percent who did not vote for Donald Trump — Israel has become like a relative who always has to be explained. While religious restrictions matter a great deal, the overriding issue is the future of the West Bank — whether, along with the Gaza Strip, it will comprise a future Palestinian state or whether Israel will simply swallow it. This is usually called a one-state or a two-state solution. Another way of putting it is whether Israel will remain a Jewish democracy or will need to repress a Palestinian majority far into the future. [...]

But he is also somewhat typical. He is one of many retired generals or intelligence chiefs who favor a two-state solution. These are men who would not trifle with Israel’s security, and so when Netanyahu argues, as he has, that a Palestinian state would become a terrorist enclave, Barak and others insist otherwise. They can handle the situation.

In the meantime, Israel is increasingly criticized. On American campuses, it is routinely accused of being a racist and colonial power. Not so. But American Jews on those very campuses find it harder and harder to mount a defense. The continuing occupation of the West Bank and the Trumpian persona of Netanyahu leave them mute. Jeremy Ben-Ami, head of the liberal pro-Israel group J Street and a frequent campus speaker, finds that many college students feel a contradiction between what they believe are Jewish values and the policies of the Netanyahu government.

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Haaretz: Israel's Shabbat Wars Are a Symptom of a Much Deeper Crisis Among ultra-Orthodox Jews

Behind the scenes, even the most devout ultra-Orthodox politician will admit that in reality, it is impossible to enforce a Shabbat standstill on the economy. After all, Haredim make up only a minority of Israeli society. They also understand that any Haredi attempt to do so would dramatically decrease their power to influence other matters close to their hearts. That’s not news and Health Minister Yaakov Litzman’s announcement on Friday that he would be resigning over weekend work on the railway network is an anomaly.

Crucial infrastructure maintenance has been taking place on Saturdays for decades, without causing tension – as long as the work was going on quietly, far from public view. When the Israel Electric Corporation transported a massive turbine on Highway 2 on Shabbat in 2001, it was a public event that the Haredim could not ignore and the ultra-Orthodox party United Torah Judaism left Ehud Barak’s coalition in protest. But week after week, the low-profile maintenance work on the railway and power lines has on the whole been ignored. [...]

The failure of the rabbis to articulate a clear position on the Shabbat issue is just a symptom of the much deeper malaise. The Haredi community is comprised largely of hundreds of thousands of young men and women, trying to build their new families while being cut off from the opportunities the Israeli economy affords bright and eager people like them. Despite the rabbis’ edicts against using the internet, many of these young Haredim are fully exposed to the world outside and yearn to have some connection with it, especially through their workplaces. Secular Israelis may be angry at Haredi attempts to impose religious strictures on public life, but the real rage is the one that is building up among young Haredim at their leaders, rabbis seventy years older than them, who have no comprehension of the obstacles facing them. 

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Haaretz: Temple Mount Crisis: Fears of Political Rivals Led Netanyahu to Make a Grave Error

Given his responsible conduct in the first hours following the attack, it’s puzzling how 24 hours later he committed such a grave error in the rushed decision last Saturday to install metal detectors at all the entrances to the compound. After 24 hours in which he seemingly prevented an escalation, that decision reversed the trend and greatly exacerbated tensions, leading to the explosion which erupted over the weekend. [...]

Netanyahu’s mistake was not just in installing the detectors, but mainly in the decision-making process that preceded it. Even though he knows very well that the Temple Mount was the most volatile point in the Middle East, if not in the entire world, he elected that evening to deal with a complex, strategic topic based on tactical security considerations. All complexities were set aside, and the issue boiled down to metal detectors.

Netanyahu’s miscalculation in that discussion and in setting up those detectors put him in an impossible bind. When it turned out that this move was meeting stiff opposition, the government was left with no good solutions, stuck between a rock and a hard place. If it were to remove the detectors, this would be interpreted as weakness, showing it capitulating to threats and admitting that it does not truly have sovereignty over the Temple Mount. If it left the detectors in place, it could find itself sliding towards a violent eruption in Jerusalem and the West Bank, and a crisis with the entire Muslim world. [...]

In both cases the reason is the same – his worries about political rivals on his right. Netanyahu found himself in a government without a token leftist such as Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni or Moshe Ya’alon whom he could count on to block dangerous moves and then draw fire from the settlers’ lobby in the cabinet, the Knesset and the media.

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Vox: The real reason for Netanyahu’s showdown with Obama

The top US diplomat was instead making an accurate assessment of an important, and dangerous, shift in Israel’s domestic politics. With the country’s left wing hobbled by electoral losses and bitter infighting, Netanyahu believes his biggest political threat comes from the right, not the left. That’s leading him to adopt precisely the sorts of hawkish policies — like overseeing a massive increase in the population of Israel’s West Bank settlements — that prompted Kerry’s speech, and that have left Israel more isolated at the United Nations than ever before.

“Bibi is not concerned at all with anyone from the center left,” Gilead Sher, a former Israeli peace negotiator and chief of staff for Prime Minister Ehud Barak, tells me in an interview, using the prime minister’s nickname. “He’s concerned about far-right politicians inside and outside his own party that are totally against any division of the land or agreement with the Palestinians. Those are the only people that he thinks could push him out of office.” [...]

The dramatic change in Israel’s domestic politics has shaped Netanyahu’s handling of the moribund peace process with the Palestinians, the primary focus of Kerry’s blistering speech on Wednesday. Netanyahu has publicly committed himself to a two-state solution to the decades-old conflict. In practice, though, he has overseen a massive expansion of Israel’s web of West Bank settlements, which now house more than 500,000 Israelis and occupy so much territory that it would be almost impossible to cobble together a contiguous Palestinian state. [...]

The election also continued the right wing’s historical political dominance. Sher notes that of the 17 Israeli governments in the past 39 years, just two were led by left-wing prime ministers: the 1992 government of Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by a far-right ideologue, and the short-lived one led by Sher’s former boss, Ehud Barak, after he beat Netanyahu in 1999. Even the left-wing, Nobel Peace Prize-winning Shimon Peres, whose death this year prompted mourning from leaders around the globe, ran for prime minister five times but never won an election outright.

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Politico: Netanyahu vs. the Generals

But Netanyahu doesn’t seem to be going anywhere; instead it is Israel’s former generals, like Barak, who are being marginalized while the longest-running prime minister in the Jewish state’s history consolidates his power. Barak wasn't speaking only for himself when he attacked Netanyahu in such strong language. Over the past few months, the top news story in Israel has been the right-wing prime minister's tectonic power struggle with Israel's security establishment. One after the other, Israel's top security chiefs and military leaders have criticized Netanyahu's flagship policies and warned about the direction in which he is leading the country, typically over his refusal to engage in talks with the Palestinians and his push for military action against Iran. [...]

The Jewish state's top generals, spymasters and intelligence chiefs have been the fiercest and most outspoken critics of Netanyahu’s policies over the years; unlike in most Western democracies, where the military is usually considered more hawkish than the civilian leadership, in Netanyahu's Israel, it's usually been the other way around. Out of the 17 most senior security and intelligence chiefs who have worked directly with Netanyahu during his time in office, no fewer than 13 have strongly criticized his flagship policies or the direction in which he is leading the country (of the four that haven't, two are currently still in office). [...]

The roots of the disagreements between Netanyahu and the security establishment can be found in the prime minister’s dismal and pessimistic view of the world. Netanyahu sees military might as the only possible tool to keep his country safe. Most of Israel's security chiefs, on the other hand, envision Israel as a country that derives its strength from arms, but also seeks benefits from diplomacy and peacemaking, when possible. As Ehud Barak explained in his speech, “If you put in one room all the living former heads of the Mossad, the Shin Bet, and the Israel Defense Forces, more than 90 percent of them would say that it's simpler to protect Israel from a border that assures our security interests next to a Palestinian state, than to protect a ‘greater Israel’ with millions of Palestinians living under its control. [...]

The Israeli public was exposed to the security establishment's frustration in early November 1996, when the country commemorated the first anniversary of Rabin's murder. The military held its main memorial event at a large concert hall in Tel Aviv, and Lipkin-Shahak was the prime speaker. Standing before thousands of officers and soldiers, he stated that he will “speak directly to Yitzhak today,” and then unloaded. “Yitzhak, it’s been a very hard year since you left us,” he said. “Polarization, hedonism, sectarianism and opportunism have reached the heart of our national consensus, while the IDF has been turned into a punching bag.” Lipkin-Shahak didn't mention Netanyahu by name—there was no need to. Everyone understood exactly what he was talking about. As one senior Mossad operative who was in the crowd recalls, "the air had the smell of a military coup.

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