Palestinian Support for Two-State Solution Seen Declining
Among the Palestinians in recent years there has been growing interest in the idea of a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is in part linked to the growing connection between Palestinians in the West Bank and the Arab sector in Israel.
It is also related to the collective sense that the Palestinian national movement is currently at an all-time low, with growing alienation between the public and the Palestinian leaderships in the West Bank and Gaza, the lack of public belief in their ability to achieve the goal of independence, and the sidelining of the Palestinian issue from the focus of the regional and international agenda.
Consequently, there is a growing argument in the Palestinian discourse that all other strategies for realizing national objectives have been tried and failed.
Moreover, the growing support for the idea of one state is fed by internal trends. Above all, there is the collective desire to retain a relatively stable standard of living in the West Bank, together with a widespread trend toward de-ideologization and depoliticization, reflecting exhaustion after many years of violent conflict driven by revolutionary fighting slogans, which ultimately failed to achieve any Palestinian national objectives.
The lessons from the severe decline that engulfed Arab societies in the region following the Arab Spring revolutions has led to increased fear of sharing this fate.
In addition, most of the younger Palestinian generation are concerned with personal fulfillment and development, and harbor suspicion and even alienation toward the sources of authority around them, including the Palestinian leadership.
Benjamin Netanyahu and the “Strongmen”: Another Myth in the Making
In the past few months, numerous articles have appeared in the Western press about Prime Minister Netanyahu’s diplomatic outreach to “strongmen” and proponents of “illiberal nationalism.” Some have even accused him of abetting some of these leaders’ alleged anti-Semitism. Lahav Harkov explains how this narrative migrated from left-leaning Israeli publications to the diaspora press and from there to mainstream publications like the New York Times, and notes that it has been used to justify not just criticism of Netanyahu but forthright anti-Zionism. As she observes, such analyses recognize no distinctions among very different sorts of leaders, and pay little attention to diplomatic realities:
There are two elements at play in the claims of a nefarious new direction in Israel’s foreign policy: one is a pearl-clutching disgust at Netanyahu’s supposed embrace of illiberal regimes; the other concerns relations with leaders whose policies specifically impact Jews and . . . distort the memory of the Holocaust. . . . The new talk of Netanyahu and strongmen . . . conflates these two categories, [lumping] the necessary compromises of conducting international relations . . . with troubling assaults on the legacy of the Holocaust [by such figures as Hungary’s Viktor Orban].
Moreover, many analysts who lament Israel’s cozying up to strongmen ignore research showing that East European Jews feel safer from anti-Semitism than do those in the West, which may be because they perceive the greatest threat to their lives coming from Islamist violence rather than the populist right. . . . In general, it appears that East European Jews may not view their situation in the dire terms used by some of their self-appointed advocates in Israel and the West. . . .
It is, [furthermore], no defense of human-rights violators to say that Israel must sometimes hold its nose and keep up ties with [them]. As the Knesset member Avi Dichter—a Likudnik and former Shin Bet chief who could never be accused of being a bleeding heart—said before [the Philippines’ President Rodrigo] Duterte visited: “We may have to take a pill against nausea to receive him.”
But there are some too pure for such distasteful compromises. The leader of [the hard-left] Meretz party, Tamar Zandberg, wrote a letter to Netanyahu telling him not to strengthen relations with Brazil, one of the largest economies in the world, because it elected a president from the far right, months before Jair Bolsonaro even began his term. Yet Zandberg has also been photographed visiting the grave of Yasir Arafat, not a leader known for his exemplary human-rights record. And neither she, nor anyone else on the left, has called on Israel to cut ties with the Palestinian Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas, who wrote his dissertation denying the Holocaust, and whose regime jails people for criticizing him online or, God forbid, selling land to Jews.






















