Two Questionable States

RISHON LEZION, Israel — Thomas Fried­man is rightly pes­simistic about the future of the Mid­dle East peace process:

We’re get­ting per­ilously close to clos­ing the win­dow on a two-state solu­tion, because the two chief window-closers — Hamas in Gaza and the fanat­i­cal Jew­ish set­tlers in the West Bank — have been in the driver’s seats. Hamas is busy mak­ing a two-state solu­tion incon­ceiv­able, while the set­tlers have steadily worked to make it impossible…

So, just to recap: It’s five to mid­night and before the clock strikes 12 all we need to do is rebuild Fatah, merge it with Hamas, elect an Israeli gov­ern­ment that can freeze set­tle­ments, court Syria and engage Iran — while pre­vent­ing it from going nuclear — just so we can get the par­ties to start talk­ing. Who­ever lines up all the pieces of this diplo­matic Rubik’s Cube deserves two Nobel Prizes.

In gen­eral, there are two large seg­ments of the Israeli peo­ple who oppose the cur­rent peace process aimed at keep­ing the Jew­ish state within its cur­rent bound­ries and cre­at­ing a Pales­tin­ian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip: Ortho­dox Jews who will never sur­ren­der the two areas, which they call Judea and Samaria and are the holy loca­tions of many events that occurred in the Bible, and sec­u­lar nation­al­ists who hate Arabs and believe that sur­ren­der­ing the occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries will leave a small Israel that is very vul­ner­a­ble to attack.

The first cat­e­gory has remained some­what sta­ble over time, but the higher birth-rates of reli­gious Jews in gen­eral will increase their num­bers over time. How­ever, the size of the sec­ond cat­e­gory has increased greatly since the two intifadas and their sui­cide bomb­ings and specif­i­cally since the recent war against Hamas in Gaza.

When I lived in Jerusalem, most of the oppo­si­tion to a Pales­tin­ian state that I heard was from reli­gious Jews. When I moved to the cen­ter of the coun­try, I expected a com­plete rever­sal of polit­i­cal views since the “sec­u­lar, Tel Aviv” part of Israel is gen­er­ally more lib­eral. But I was wrong. In cov­er­sa­tions I have had over the past sev­eral months, I have heard more right-wing, anti-Arab, nation­al­ist rhetoric from Israelis than I had ever encoun­tered in Jerusalem.

When I ask Israelis here which party they will sup­port in the upcom­ing elec­tions, the left-wingers, a minor­ity, say either Labor or Meretz. But every­one else, to the per­son, has said that they will sup­port Israel Beit­einu, the sec­u­lar, right-wing, nation­al­ist party that has his­tor­i­cally rep­re­sented the Russ­ian com­mu­nity in the Jew­ish state. (No one has even said that he will vote for cen­trist Kadima or center-right Likud.) And the polls reflect this.

As a friend of mine who sup­ports the right-wing party put it:

The last two years proved, to a cer­tain extent, that again we’re in a state of war. Peo­ple for­got. Civil­ians are in the line of fire. Likud, Labor, Kadima… they are all basi­cally the same. [Likud leader Ben­jamin Netanyahu] basically did not do any­thing [when he was] prime min­is­ter. [Labor leader Ehud] Barak with­draw from Lebanon [when he was prime min­is­ter], which resulted in the Sec­ond Lebanon War. [Kadima leader Tzipi] Livni is the for­eign min­ster, and we have had a bad rep­u­ta­tion in the world. The U.S. failed to veto that U.N. res­o­lu­tion [that Israeli sup­port­ers believe unfairly blamed the Jew­ish state and Hamas equally for the recent war].

But he added another good point: In the 2008 elec­tion in the United States, sup­port­ers of Barack Obama were wor­ried peo­ple were telling poll­sters that they sup­ported him so they would not appear racist, and then they would vote from some­one else. My friend said that many peo­ple may be say­ing they they sup­port Israel Beit­einu but will actu­ally vote for center-right Likud so they will be on the “win­ning team.”

Still, I think the issue is far deeper. As I wrote in a prior Let­ter from Israel, Israelis are tired and frus­trated after years of war and ter­ror. Many of them are sick of the Pales­tini­ans, who, in their opin­ion, will never cease fight­ing Israel. So I think Fried­man may be right: The two-state solu­tion may be dying. And the only other option that Israel may con­sider may be the trans­fer — vol­un­tary or forced — of the Pales­tini­ans in the West Bank into Jor­dan and those in Gaza to Egypt. And this is a cen­tral tenet of the plat­form of Israel Beiteinu.