Israel’s trilemma

The Economist created a graphic illustrating how Israel must choose between three objectives, without being able to achieve all three at once and with objectionable features arising from choosing one pair over the other options:

They need to make some choice between giving up occupied land, ceasing to have a Jewish electoral majority, and being a fully democratic state.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent comment that Israel is the homeland “only of the Jewish people” suggests that this government at least is willing to prioritize continued occupation and a Jewish majority over equal treatment of all citizens.

22 thoughts on “Israel’s trilemma”

  1. Israel’s determination to persist with racist policies will gradually cost it the support of the world, except the US which is controlled by evangelical Christians with delusions about the role Israel will play in the forthcoming end of the world.

  2. Besides, the growth of Jewish settlements makes a two-state deal ever harder. Establishing a Palestinian state would probably require the removal of settlers in its territory. Israel had trouble enough evicting 8,000 Jews from Gaza in 2005. There are more than fifty times as many in the West Bank. Even excluding East Jerusalem, annexed by Israel, the number of Jews east of the “green line” (the pre-1967 border) has risen from 110,000 in 1993 to 425,000. New home approvals nearly quadrupled from 5,000 in 2015-16 to 19,000 in 2017-18, according to Peace Now, a pressure group.

  3. Mr Netanyahu may do yet more lasting damage. In the final days of the campaign he vowed to annex parts of the West Bank beyond Jerusalem, something no previous leader has thought prudent. This risks killing any chance of peace based on a two-state solution—which involves the creation of a Palestinian state—and of thus turning Israel into a rogue nation.

    …

    In the end, Israel faces a stark choice. Jews and Arabs count roughly equal numbers between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river. So Israel cannot permanently hold on to all the land without sacrificing either its Jewish majority or the ideal of a proper democracy that does not discriminate against Arabs. The more Mr Netanyahu abandons land-for-peace, the more the choice will be annexation-for-apartheid. That dilemma is something even Bibi cannot conjure away.

  4. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu vows to annex ‘all the settlements’ in West Bank

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed Monday to annex “all the settlements” in the West Bank, including an enclave deep in the heart of the largest Palestinian city, in a last-ditch move that appeared aimed at shoring up nationalist support the day before a do-over election.

    Locked in a razor-tight race and with legal woes hanging over him, Mr. Netanyahu is fighting for his political survival. In the final weeks of his campaign, he has been doling out hard-line promises meant to draw more voters to his Likud-National Liberal Movement party and re-elect him in Tuesday’s unprecedented repeat vote.

    “I intend to extend sovereignty on all the settlements and the [settlement] blocs,” including “sites that have security importance or are important to Israel’s heritage,” Mr. Netanyahu said in an interview with Israeli Army Radio, part of an eleventh-hour media blitz.

    Asked if that included the hundreds of Jews who live under heavy military guard amid tens of thousands of Palestinians in the volatile city of Hebron, Mr. Netanyahu responded “of course.”

    Israelis head to the polls on Tuesday in the second election this year, after Mr. Netanyahu failed to cobble together a coalition after April’s vote, sparking the dissolution of parliament.

  5. ‘Israel is joining an ugly club,’ says rights group as director expelled

    Human Rights Watch’s Israel director Omar Shakir leaves for Jordan under 2017 law

    Israel has deported the local director of Human Rights Watch for his alleged support for a boycott campaign, a move the advocacy group said placed the country in an “ugly club” of authoritarian regimes.

    Omar Shakir, HRW’s Israel and Palestine representative, lost a landmark supreme court case this month that centred on Israel’s ability to expel its critics. The government had refused to renew Shakir’s visa, and Monday is the deadline for him to leave.

    At a press conference in Jerusalem hours before his flight, the researcher condemned the decision as an escalating assault on the human rights movement.

    “If the Israelis can deport somebody documenting rights abuse without facing consequence, how can we ever stop rights abuse?” said Shakir. Israel argues its objection is to Shakir alone, not human rights campaigners generally.

  6. America’s decision to recognise Israeli settlements makes peace less likely

    …

    Annexation could eat up so much land that what is left would not leave a coherent or functional Palestine. The resulting death of the two-state solution would present Israel with terrible options in the occupied territories. One path would be to give the Palestinians equal rights and watch as they matched or even outnumbered and outvoted the country’s Jewish population. Another would be to turn them into second-class citizens or corral them in Bantustans, both of which would turn Israel into a place with different laws for different peoples—an apartheid state.

  10. Israel’s high court struck down a law that sought to legalise Jewish settlements built on private Palestinian land as long as the Palestinians are compensated. The law would have retroactively legalised thousands of homes built in the occupied West Bank. Meanwhile, the Palestinian prime minister, Muhammad Shtayyeh, said the Palestinian Authority would declare an independent state if the Israeli government follows through on its plans to annex parts of the West Bank.

    https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/2020/06/13/politics-this-week

  15. A two-state solution means that Palestinians will ultimately receive their own homeland in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, removing them from Israeli control. The alternative would mean a single nation of Israel that includes Palestinian Arabs as citizens. Demographic trends, however, suggest that eventually, Palestinians could become a majority, placing the Jewish state in a position not unlike that of South Africa under apartheid — a minority group ruling a hostile and growing majority. And settlement creep threatens to shrink Palestinian territories bit by bit, leading to a toxic and potentially irrevocable status quo.

    https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/14/opinions/jared-kushner-peace-plan-israelis-palestinians-andelman/index.html

  16. Under Netanyahu, Israel consistently shifted to the right; the Social Democratic “Left,” which had once led the country and subsequently the opposition ­– vanished almost completely. The systematic violation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967 became normal routine; the number of Israeli settlers in the territories reached about half a million; the so-called “Two-State Solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict became obsolete.

    Netanyahu has rarely spoken about the future of Israel and Palestine. The son of an historian, he feels that he is carrying on the Zionist project that had started at the end of the 19th century. He obviously knows that the longer Israel continues to rule the Palestinians, the less it is likely to survive as a Jewish and democratic country.

    But similar to Ben-Gurion, Netanyahu does not believe in peace with the Palestinians. “There is an abyss, and nothing can fill that abyss,” Ben-Gurion declared as early as 1919. To the end of his days, he believed that the conflict could at best be managed, but not resolved. Netanyahu, too, regards the Palestinians primarily as a permanent threat.

    https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/bibi-s-last-act-a-look-back-at-israel-s-longest-serving-prime-minister-a-aefa085c-31ce-4eba-a6f7-0ed17cfaef1e

  17. How to turn this opportunity to Israel’s advantage? This crisis has been long in the making. Even before independence the country’s founders fell out over constitutional principles such as the role of religion in the state and the protection of minorities. Instead of facing up to these, David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister, left it to future parliaments to pass “basic” laws. A constitution was supposed to emerge from these gradually but it never has. Instead the courts eventually came to imbue these laws with special authority. Many right-wing and religious Israelis believe that today’s system is rigged against them, and that democracy is thwarted when judges overturn laws passed by elected politicians. The status quo is as unacceptable to them as Mr Netanyahu’s reform is to their opponents.

    https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/03/30/out-of-crisis-israel-has-the-chance-to-forge-a-new-constitution

  18. Fully one in four American Jews agreed with the statement that “Israel is an apartheid state”, according to a poll in 2021 by the Jewish Electorate Institute, and one in five supported settling the conflict by creating a single state. “We’re moving from being brothers to being cousins,” a top adviser to Sharon once mused of Israeli and American Jews. “And in the next generation we will be distant cousins, with some sense of shared history.” He made that remark roughly a generation ago.

    https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/04/27/why-israel-is-becoming-a-partisan-cause-in-the-united-states

  20. At Israel’s creation, in May 1948, its founders envisioned a country defined by humanist values and one that upheld international law. The Declaration of Independence, Israel’s founding document, insisted that the state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex” and that it would “be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” But from the very beginning, this vision was never fulfilled—after all, for nearly two decades after the signing of the declaration, Palestinians in Israel lived under martial law. Israeli society has never been able to resolve the contradiction between the universalist appeal of the declaration’s ideals and the narrower urgency of the founding of Israel as a Jewish state to protect the Jewish people.

    Over the decades, this intrinsic contradiction has surfaced again and again, creating political upheavals that have shaped and reshaped Israeli society and politics—without ever resolving the contradiction. But now the war in Gaza and the judicial crisis that preceded it have made it harder than ever to go on this way, pushing Israel to a breaking point.

    The country is on an increasingly illiberal, violent, and destructive path. Unless it changes course, the humanist ideals of its founding will disappear altogether as Israel careens into a darker future, one in which illiberal values define both state and society. Israel is on track to become increasingly authoritarian in its treatment not just of Palestinians but of its own citizens. It could fast lose many of the friends it still has and become a pariah. And isolated from the world, it could be consumed by turmoil at home as widening fissures threaten to break up the country itself. Such is the perilous state of affairs in Israel that these futures are not at all outlandish—but neither are they inevitable. Israel still has the capacity to pull itself back from the brink. The cost of not doing so may be too great to bear.

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/undoing-israel

  21. “On its current path, Israel is veering in a deeply illiberal direction. Its current hard-right turn, pushed by politicians as well as by many of their constituents, could see Israel become a kind of ethnonationalist theocracy, run by a Jewish judicial and legislative council and right-wing religious extremists, nothing less than a Jewish version of Iran’s theocratic state. Israel’s demographic and sociopolitical changes, including a rapid increase of the ultra-Orthodox population, the rightward tilt of young Israeli Jews, and a decline in the number of Israeli Jews who identify as secular, have produced a more devout body politic that perceives the continued existence of Israel as part of an irreconcilable struggle between Judaism and Islam.

    Ultra-Orthodox nationalist politicians who overtly call for a state in which religion plays a more definitive role include Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben Gvir, and Avi Maoz—all key players in Netanyahu’s coalition government. They represent a relatively new but increasingly influential segment of the religious Zionist movement known as the Hardal, which believes that God promised the entire biblical land of Israel to the Jews, rejects Western culture and values, and fundamentally opposes the accepted norms of Israeli liberalism, such as LGBTQ rights, some separation between synagogue and state, and gender equality. Figures associated with the Hardal currently serve as ministers in the Israeli government, occupy powerful positions in the Knesset, and are prominent leaders of yeshivas and pre-military preparatory academies known as mechinot. Political and demographic trends suggest that the far right in Israel will remain electorally influential, even dominant, for the foreseeable future.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *