Zaha Hassan & Daniel Levy
Foreign Policy / July 7, 2023
Western experts are putting forward failed policies rather than reckoning with the damage Israeli apartheid has caused.
Israel has apparently concluded its latest reinvasion of the Jenin refugee camp and the surrounding city in the occupied West Bank. Those watching the situation from the United States or elsewhere in the global north will have been told by policymakers and experts that these military operations are an unfortunate necessity to keep Palestinian violence in check and Israelis safe.
With a few confidence-building measures and economic initiatives offered to the Palestinian Authority (PA), some policymakers may still erroneously believe that the corner can be turned on violent escalations in the occupied territories and the course set for a return to peace-processing and a two-state outcome.
Strengthening PA capacity and thereby minimizing large-scale Israeli military interventions is the well-worn, go-to “solution” after events like those in Jenin. It sounds fair, reasonable, even pro-Palestinian to some. It just fails to address a key issue—namely that the PA is weak by design.
A truly Palestinian national authority that served the interests of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories, however, would be mobilizing economic, societal, and defensive resilience in ways to effectively undermine and challenge Israel’s military and settler presence. It would be leading the resistance to Israel’s occupation and de facto annexation.
In contrast, what Israel wants, what the United States and others have been supporting financially, diplomatically, and militarily—and what bolstering the capacities of the PA means—is to have a more effective subcontractor to the Israeli occupation: a Palestinian authority that is willing to subdue its own people. Indeed, the way in which the Palestinian security services were conceived was to lock in a Bantustan-like Palestinian security appendage to the Israeli military, thus becoming part of the broader apartheid reality.
But the PA cannot both do Israel’s bidding and be a legitimate and credible representative and servant of its own people. It is an impossible square to be circled, as has been proved for the past two and a half decades, since the five-year tenure agreed for limited interim self-governance expired in 1999.
Successive Israeli governments have worked with Western allies to prevent the PA from collapsing precisely so that it could play this subcontractor role. And now, because the PA is still seen as holding some kernel (however hollowed out) of a proto-national body in the eyes of Israel’s ultranationalist right-wing coalition government, prolonging it may no longer be politically sustainable.
The fact that a PA with these characteristics and which aligns with Israel’s interests (and has the backing of much of the Israeli security establishment) is now deemed an enemy by many in Israel’s government speaks to the degree of hostility in Israeli political discourse to anything labeled Palestinian.
What happened in Jenin is more a story of continuity than it is one of change in the history of Israeli policies against Palestinians. The previous, supposedly more liberal government led by Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, and Benny Gantz actually began this round of intensifying Israeli military incursions into Palestinian population centers, resuming extrajudicial killings and even launching an unprecedented assault on Palestinian civil society in which leading Palestinian human rights organizations and defenders were criminalized and designated “terrorists.”
Core policies—including illegal settlements, collective punishment, blockading Gaza, demographic engineering, and a system of separate and unequal treatment for Palestinians—are a feature of the Israeli regime, not a bug of the current coalition. Indeed, the leaders of all Zionist parties currently sitting on the Knesset opposition benches have come out in support of the Jenin attack.
In an environment so defined by hostility and the relentless narrowing of Palestinian political horizons, it is ludicrous to sign up to the mantra of economic peace.
Not all problems can be solved with money—development and economic assistance—whether from the United States or the Gulf states. Even setting aside whether huge investments will flow to Palestinians from the Gulf or elsewhere, it does not follow that disenfranchised Palestinians living under occupation, facing daily denial of fundamental freedoms and rights, can be subdued with an agenda exclusively focused on economic improvements.
That was the premise of the Trump administration’s approach, which crashed and burned.
It has been tried periodically for the last quarter century and often under more propitious circumstances than today. The jury is in. Economic peace is at best a pipe dream and at worst an intentional distraction from addressing an apartheid reality.
During the period of the PA premiership of Salam Fayyad, an unprecedented level of international donor funding went into Palestinian economic development and state-building. Fayyadism attempted to demonstrate that a more smooth-functioning, economically competent, and trustworthy Palestinian governing authority would prove Palestinian bona fides and unlock progress towards Israel’s withdrawal. It proved the opposite. Fayyadism ultimately made for a more cost-free and convenient Israeli occupation in which Israel could also focus on developing Palestinian natural resources in the West Bank for the benefit of Israelis.
Perhaps the giddiest hopes among those seeking microwavable solutions to Middle East peace center on expectations generated by the Abraham Accords normalization and the prospect of Saudi Arabia joining the party. As most will now agree, the Trump administration-sponsored Abraham Accords were categorically not designed with advancing Palestinian rights or peace in mind. What has happened, not coincidentally, is that Israel has concluded that its own impunity has reached new levels. And Israel has taken this lesson to heart.
There has been no benefit to the Palestinians, and while it would be an exaggeration to say the normalizing countries have buyer’s remorse, it is the case that a certain embarrassment prevails, as demonstrated by the fact that for months the Abraham Accords countries (plus Egypt) have been unable to meet at the ministerial level, in what is known as the Negev Forum.
It’s unclear that Saudi Arabia will exact a meaningful price for signing on. Even the most ardent advocates of a Saudi normalization-inspired on-ramp to peace progress are not suggesting that the condition be a withdrawal of Israel’s occupation, its settlers, or its military. Any such deal would, in other words, be squarely back in the zone of the kinds of economic inducements, tinkering with minor territorial designations, and recalibrating of the terms of occupation that have been tried and demonstrably led the world nowhere. Saudi leaders themselves would be well advised to steer clear of this house of cards.
One problem is that the foreign-policy community is hard-wired to look for quick-fix solutions. Honesty also demands that one acknowledge the tendency in Western circles to indulge Israel and to desperately reheat bad and failed ideas as a way of avoiding having to deal with the inconvenient truths of Israel’s commitment to its permanent regime of occupation, disenfranchisement, and denial of rights to Palestinians. Acknowledging this reality is not a recipe for hopelessness. It is not to say the world can do nothing. But accurately understanding reality allows policymakers to advance a course that can change that reality.
But it requires time and an open mind.
If one understands the reality as apartheid, then it allows Palestinians to reassess their strategic alliances and to set different terms for their relationships with the United States and the West, including how campaigns can be built to mobilize Western public support for a change in governmental policy. It’s worth recalling that Western governments and in particular the United States were latecomers to opposing South African apartheid.
This is not a story about moderates on both sides joining hands to defeat those bad apples who have inexplicably seized the levers of power. Unless and until the United States shifts the aperture and reframes the cognitive lens through which the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians is viewed, then it will have nothing to offer the parties. And guaranteeing that Israel faces no accountability, cost, or consequence for its actions only makes the West complicit in an appalling affront to human dignity.
It is on solid ground that in recent years the leading international human rights gatekeepers (Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch) and the blue-chip Israeli human rights organizations (including B’Tselem and Yesh Din) have joined Palestinian human rights groups in designating Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians as meeting the legal definition of the crime of apartheid.
While there is certainly a long-overdue need to rein in settler violence and provocations, which often operate under the protective watch of the Israel Defense Forces and are increasingly encouraged by government ministers, it is the structural violence of the military occupation and apartheid system that is the primary and proximate cause of Palestinian insecurity, repression, and despair. Apartheid regimes are by definition illegitimate, rendering them inherently violent.
Leading actors in Israel’s current government make no apologies for this apartheid arrangement; they have been transparent from the start. They wish to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the occupied territories in a second “Nakba,” referring to Israel’s forced displacement of three-quarters of the Palestinian population from present-day Israel between 1947 and 1951. In that context, the attack on Jenin and the scenes of thousands of Palestinians fleeing the devastation and destruction of lives and livelihoods should have alarm bells ringing.
Though the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin is often referred to by Israeli and U.S. officials as a hotbed of militancy, less discussed is why a refugee camp is there in the first place. Why are more than half of Palestinians refugees 75 years after Israel was established? Having been driven from their homes and prevented from returning as Israel unilaterally reengineered the proposed U.N. partition lines of 1947, Palestinians today take note as the Nakba in Israeli discourse transitions from being a history denied to a cautionary warning.
For its part, the PLO, the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinian people both inside and outside historic Palestine and Israel’s counterpart in the Oslo Accords, is also finally naming Israel’s regime over Palestinians as one of apartheid. Despite the weakness and co-optation of the PLO’s agent, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority, it will be increasingly difficult over time for the PA to continue cooperation with a regime that is thus defined by its principal.
While this particular attack on Jenin has concluded, what is becoming clear is that the windows of relative quiet between rounds of more intense Israeli military assault are becoming shorter. The logic of the Israeli regime appears to be one locked in its own spiraling cycle of accelerating displacement of Palestinians. That, in turn, will inevitably generate more intense Palestinian resistance from a new generation.
With no peace process to hide behind anymore, what is offered up as Western expertise and policy prescriptions is demonstrably unsustainable. It is a bluff ever more exposed in a global environment in which the West is out on a limb in claiming to champion the rule of law while multi-polarity and a new form of nonalignment gain steam. In such a context, ending apartheid and building a just peace in Palestine-Israel is perhaps not such a fantastical notion after all.
Israel will need to be held accountable and sanctioned for its policies and illegal actions. The Palestinians should be supported in defending themselves against this illegal occupation. And the reframing in the current strategic environment must go beyond the Palestine-Israel question. The so-called Western-ordained rules-based order never delivered for the Palestinians. Its assumptions are now in a wider state of decomposition.
Zaha Hassan is a human rights lawyer and a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Daniel Levy is President of the U.S./Middle East Project and served as an Israeli peace negotiator at the Oslo-B talks under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Taba negotiations under Prime Minister Ehud Barak
