Is a two-state solution feasible? (I)
How we got here (part one)
To begin these thoughts, which will be a series of entries necessarily divided into several parts, we must go back to 1989, when Arafat was elected by the PLO as president of the self-proclaimed Palestinian State and implicitly recognised the state of Israel. It was a bold step, when Hezbollah (founded in 1982) and Hamas (1987) were instead promoting total annihilation of the enemy.
This step was followed by slow progress steps at the Madrid conference (1991), the prelude to the Oslo I (1993) and Oslo II (1995) Accords.
In Oslo I, Mahmoud Abbas and Shimon Peres signed commitments establishing Palestinian autonomy in a gradual 5-year process, Israel's withdrawal from Gaza and (partial) withdrawal from the West Bank, and several others.
Subsequent to the accords, in 1994 the IDF began to withdraw from Gaza and Jericho (while maintaining settlements) as terrorist violence in Israel against the agreement intensified.
Oslo II (1995) involved the partition of the West Bank, with a division of territories (into Areas A, B and C) that left a significant part under Israeli control. Israel took advantage of this to maintain partial control of the West Bank while Arafat was never been very interested in governing, merely in increasing his wealth.
Two months later Yitzak Rabin was assassinated and everything blew up.
Arafat, if he had ever dreamed of becoming PNA president, was no longer interested. Rabin was replaced by Shimon Peres, who lost the following year's election to Benjamin Netanyahu. Hezbollah and Hamas power began to grow in power and the second intifada was brewing after Ariel Sharon (leader of the Likud opposition, prime minister was laborist Ehud Barak) visited the Esplanade of the Mosques (September 2000).
Up to this point we had a typical peace process, really complex after decades of war and terror, with ups and downs and - to be honest - gradually deteriorating. Many Israelis accepted it reluctantly and with one eye on their Palestinian neighbours. Others simply not. Many Palestinians did not accepted it directly and continued to pursue their goal of destroying the state of Israel.
I would not go so far as to say that at that time the two-state solution was dead and buried, although it was already extremely unlikely, at least in the short term.
But two weeks after Sharon's visit, something happened: the Ramallah lynching.
Vadim Nurzhitz and Yossi Avrahami, two unarmed soldiers who had mistakenly entered Ramallah (West Bank, capital of the PNA) were identified, arrested, brutally lynched by the crowd, their organs ripped out and their disembowelled corpses thrown out of the window.
The peace process was dead. No one can admit to having equal neighbours who cheer atrocities. The series of terror attacks between 2000 and 2005 and the violent response of the IDF only certified that the agreement was not possible.
That following years saw a process similar to that which had already taken place in other Arab countries in the past. Faced with the inability of governments (more or less marxist) to find solutions to the problems, and in addition to rampant corruption, islamist and in many cases jihadist movements (Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Hamas and others) expanded and took power. If already in the West Bank PNA was a hornet's nest, in Gaza Hamas took over in full view of everyone. It didn't matter what the investments were. Gaza even had an airport. Hamas only wanted, according to its founding charter, the destruction of the state of Israel.
We reached 2005. Israel (which had been expanding areas of the West Bank under its control) decided to withdraw completely from Gaza, including the settlements. In the following elections, Hamas takes over, assassinates as many Fatah members as it can (the rest flee to the West Bank) and destroys all the elements of wealth left behind by Israel, such as the kibbutz, plantations and the airport itself.
Food for thought:
As of today, cannot be a two-country solution … because there are no two countries. If such a thing can be called a country, there are three: Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.
Cannot talk about a two/three country solution when two of them bomb you on a non-stop basis, only admit your destruction and PNA pay a salary to all Palestinian terrorists arrested and imprisoned.
For there to be any talk of a two-country solution, a precondition is that one of the countries abandons its founding charter and that all those who have intervened step aside. And that would take decades ... if we were lucky enough to be still in 2005.
(to be continued)