Only hours before U.S. president Barack Obama’s March 3, 2014 White House meeting with Israel prime minster Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) reported that the number of construction starts in West Bank settlements had more than doubled in 2013 to 2,534 units, which is more construction than took place in Tel Aviv. Close to 6 percent of all new construction last year was located in West Bank settlements. In absolute terms, the number was the highest in a decade. In addition, there were more housing starts in Jerusalem in 2013 than anyplace in Israel. Most of this new construction is located in the settlement areas of East Jerusalem, almost doubling the settlements’ share of national construction.
U.S. efforts to end the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians are now focused on the presentation by Secretary of State John Kerry of a U.S.-drafted “framework for negotiations.” This will be an American document, but Kerry has said both sides may offer reservations. Kerry told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius on February 7 that a framework is the only way to “be able to keep the negotiations moving.” PLO president Mahmoud Abbas has threatened to initiate action in the UN if the current bilateral talks, which Kerry announced July 20, 2013, fail to produce a comprehensive peace agreement by April 2014. This goal now seems impossible.
The government of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced wide-ranging increases in settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem just as talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) commenced. This latest wave of settlement construction and planning advancements represents not only opportunistic measures by the Netanyahu government to reward coalition partners and others intent upon pre-empting the possibility of Palestinian sovereignty west of the Jordan River. These actions also offer fresh evidence of Israel’s single-minded intent to settle anywhere and everywhere in the territories it has controlled for almost half a century in a manner unencumbered, and in some respects encouraged, by an uncertain diplomatic engagement sponsored by Washington.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is continuing his efforts with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to begin negotiations in earnest to end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and to establish a Palestinian state at peace with Israel. Such negotiations will necessarily address competing Israeli and Palestinian demands for territory. The idea of a “swap” of territory between Israel and Palestine—according to which Israel annexes territory in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Palestine annexes Israeli territory as part of a final status peace agreement—has featured in every negotiating forum conducted since 2000.
Secretary of State John Kerry has revived U.S. interest in a diplomatic solution to the conflict between Israel and Palestinians. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu, for its part, has temporarily reduced certain elements of its settlement expansion program, suspending tenders for a number of weeks for new construction in some of the largest settlements. More broadly, however, the main components of the program proceed unhindered.
Benjamin Netanyahu will lead Israel’s next government, offering the Likud Party leader the chance to become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister since Israel’s founder David Ben Gurion. Under his unchallenged leadership, the Likud Party, however, emerged from the 2013 election much diminished from the 27 seats it won in 2009, when it was able to construct a stable coalition between the religious and ideological right that withstood the U.S.-led international effort to contain Israel’s long-term program of settlement expansion and occupation.
Israel rules the West Bank like an obedient province, while it views the Gaza Strip as a hostile state. The result, as Barack Obama administration embarks on the second term, is not the contest framed by Obama’s predecessor between a strong, successful model of nation-building in Ramallah and a weak one confined to Gaza, but rather the divide and conquer model established by Israel, defined by a besieged mini-state under Hamas’ rule in Gaza and an even more fragile Palestinian Authority in Ramallah.
Today, policymakers and the public alike have surrendered in the face of dysfunctional domestic politics and the passions that drive the conflict. They are bored with its grinding hopelessness, distracted by the more hopeful and dramatic narratives of the Arab Spring, strangely complacent about the strategic costs to be paid by all for failure to end the occupation and settlement, and all but resigned to the victory of the settlers.
In June, the top-level Commission to Examine the Status of Building in Judea and Samaria hand-picked by Netanyahu in March rejected the international consensus, and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s own statements supporting an end to occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state. The committee’s recommendations illustrate the extent to which the demands of Israel’s growing West Bank settler population are supported by critical sectors of Israel’s judicial, political, and administrative institutions.
Israel’s ruling institutions—the Knesset and the courts—are the instruments for imparting a stamp of legality on an extraordinary system that has all but emptied the essential protections afforded by the rule of law—equal treatment, a presumption of innocence, the sanctity of private property, and clear and transparent administration—to Palestinians living under occupation.