by CHEMI SHALEV
“Israel has pursued a policy of building settlements on the West Bank for security and religious reasons. Settlements and their adjoining territory cover large parts of the West Bank.
“Currently 59% of the West bank is officially under Israeli civil and security control. Another 23% of it is under Palestinian civil control, but Israeli security control. The remainder of the territory is governed by the Palestinian National Authority.” MAP/BBC
Q. Let’s talk about the Palestinians. Why has the Arab Spring passed them by? And do you think the two-state solution is still possible? Your detractors say that you would not be unhappy about such a development
A. Anyone who is an advocate of the two state solution has to tell me how a forty plus year old process can be reversed. That process, even since Meron Benvenisti starting talking about it in the late eighties, hasn’t changed one bit. No Israeli government has ever stopped it. I mean Rabin did a little bit, but that’s it. It’s inexorable – the bulldozers never stop.
Explain to me how a two state solution is compatible with the continuation of that dynamic. Your newspaper chronicles better than most the rise of that ideology and how it has taken over institutions of the state, one by one, including the army, how the imperatives of this movement, which used to be Harav Kook and a few people in the Revisionist movement who had never been in power – you could count them on the fingers of your hand in 1967 – are now sitting on top of a bulldozer that will never stop, unless somebody stops it. Anyone who’s interested in a two state solution – an Israeli, an American, a Palestinian or an Arab – has to explain to me how that process can be reversed, or how the continuation of that process indefinitely into the future is compatible with what anyone would call a “state” can come about in the occupied territories. This is a value-free assessment.
Q. Well people will tell you that with a five per cent swap, with a ten percent swap – it is still feasible. But obviously they are not going to stop it while…you know there was an attempt by the Obama administration..
A. I’m not talking about a settlement freeze. That’s not what’s at issue. I’m talking about how you uproot what I call “the settlement-industrial complex”, which is not 500 or 600 hundred thousand in the occupied West Bank and in Occupied Arab East Jerusalem, it’s the hundreds of thousands in government and in the private sector whose livelihoods and bureaucratic interests are linked to the maintenance of control over the Palestinians, in the finance ministry, collecting taxes, the people who work for these companies that control these data bases, every Palestinian is on these multiple data bases, four million people, how many entries, how many highly paid software engineers, how many programmers, how many consultants, how many executives – we’re talking hundreds of thousands of people. Most of them live prosperous lives right near the Mediterranean and wouldn’t go near the occupied territories if their lives depended on it. But their lives and their livelihoods are utterly bound up with the people who live on the West Bank and, to the extent possible, with those who live in Gaza.
I’d love to see an Israeli politician with the courage to deal with those issues. I haven’t seen one. So I’m not saying it can’t happen – the late Tony Judt once said “anything that one politician has done another politician can undo” – I can see it’s conceivable to have a two state solution, but I also see a dynamic…this is not a dynamic that depends on this American president, this is a wider dynamic.
Q. Do you personally support a two state solution?
A. If it was possible? I think it would be a real way station towards a just resolution of this conflict.
Haaretz for more
(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)