Only a starving and wandering dog managed to cross the Qalandia checkpoint on Tuesday without waiting in line for two hours, at the nine-meter-high concrete Israeli wall, which, like a wound, separates East Jerusalem from the land that surrounds it. : West Bank. When three decades of the Oslo peace agreements were completed on September 13, those two pieces of Palestine, which should have been the capital and part of the territory of their State, had been torn apart by that wall for years. With that State yet to be born, the one who decides whether a Palestinian crosses Qalandia and transits the land of his ancestors is Israel, the “occupying power” of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in the words of the United Nations. Before Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 and this country responded by unleashing its war in Gaza; The “two-state solution”, which was believed to have been enshrined in Oslo, was sleeping in the drawer of forgotten causes. The political path of establishing a Palestinian State alongside Israel to end the conflict is what the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, is defending in the tour of Israel, the West Bank and Egypt that began this Thursday.
As if all those deaths in recent weeks had reminded to the international community that this conflict was still there, on October 25, the president of the United States, Joe Biden, advocated for the “two-state solution.” Since then, Biden has not stopped repeating it, the last time on a platform last Saturday in The Washington Post. On October 27, the European Council – which represents the EU member states – endorsed Sánchez’s proposal to hold an international conference to seek peace based on that formula. Even Pope Francis has joined that chorus, repeating an idea in which there are those who see a “smoke screen that hides the dispossession of the Palestinian people.” This is how the former director in New York of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Craig Mokhiber, defined it, who resigned in October due to “the failure of the UN in Gaza” in the face of “a textbook genocide.”
In Ramallah, the capital of the West Bank, an official from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), who requests anonymity, shares another of Mokhiber’s arguments: the one he defended when he accused the United States and Europe that, while they rescue the idea of the two States – whose application they have never imposed on Israel – are “complicit” in that country’s war in the Strip. President Sánchez did advocate this Thursday for a “viable” Palestinian State before Israeli President Isaac Herzog in Jerusalem, but the PLO official reminded him that “the easiest thing Spain can do to move towards that objective is to recognize the Palestinian State.
The West’s apparent change in position suffers of “lack of seriousness,” says the Palestinian politician, who emphasizes that Biden nor any of the other leaders who now allude to this path are referring to what in his opinion is the “indispensable condition” for a viable Palestinian State: “The end of the Israeli occupation.”
Conflict
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The history of the struggle between Israel and the Palestinian population has had a constant since 1948 that Edward Said defined as “the continuous low monotone of the alienation of lands” by Israel. That State, said the Palestinian philosopher, is the result of a “basically European ideology”: Zionism, a movement that for decades defined itself as colonialist. In 1947, a year before the creation of Israel, the UN adopted a plan for the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into two states that was “manifestly unjust” – recalls the PLO charge – in which 70% of the indigenous Arab population They were granted only 45% of the land while the 30% of the Jewish population was granted 55%, a distribution that the Arab countries rejected, which triggered the first Arab-Israeli war. In 1949, Israel won and seized more than 77% of the territory. Later, in 1967, after the Six-Day War, Israel fully occupied the territory assigned by the United Nations for the Palestinians.
By signing the Oslo agreements, between 1993 and 1995, The PLO was satisfied with negotiating only 22% of the territory for its State; the pre-1967 borders. In exchange, Israel accepted the establishment of a provisional autonomous administration in Gaza and the West Bank, managed by the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), which was to last five years and which still exists in the West Bank. Gaza has been there since 2007 in the hands of Hamas. The ANP only agreed to partial control of two of the three zones of the territory, A and B. The rest, 60% of its surface, is zone C, which continues to be under Israeli control despite the fact that the Oslo planned to hand it over to the Palestinian authority.
In the three decades since the signing of that framework, the “reality of Israel’s accomplished facts on the ground” demonstrates that these agreements, far from leading to a Palestinian State, “have served Israel to legitimize itself, covering up its occupation, a colonization that has reached stratospheric levels,” emphasizes Isaías Barreñada, professor of International Relations at the Complutense University of Madrid.
The main instrument of this policy to blur the two-state solution has been the illegal settler settlements in East Jerusalem and in the area of the West Bank that Israel completely controls. In 1993, when the first Oslo agreement was signed, those settlers numbered about 130,000. Today, according to the UN, they number almost 700,000. A plan frozen by the Government of Benjamin Netanyahu in July 2020 plans to incorporate these settler settlements and the roads built for them into the territory of Israel – Palestinians are prohibited from traveling on them – and thus annex at least 30% of the West Bank.
Ignacio Álvarez-Ossorio, professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at the Complutense University, points out that a future Palestinian state entity would not only have “physical space” but also “territorial continuity.” He refers to the fact that the two areas under Palestinian authority are not contiguous. They resemble islets surrounded by the area that Israel fully controls. The ANP also lacks several of the fundamental attributes of a State: control of the territory and its population, well-defined borders and the monopoly on the use of force, which remains in the hands of Israel.
To this reality, other obstacles to the “two-state solution” have now been added. Barreñada quote two. The first is that the “extreme violence with which Israel is acting in Gaza” ruins “any possibility of the parties sitting together for the next 50 years.” The second is that, “having ruled out the parties’ willingness to negotiate” after the war, the only alternative would be for “as happened in Oslo, the United States to force Israel to dialogue.”
A “remote” possibility. Barreñada recalls how, between 1972 and October 2023, Washington has used its veto power “on 34 occasions” in the UN Security Council to avoid condemnation of Israel for its occupation of Palestine. The Spanish proposal for a peace conference in the Middle East is “naive,” criticizes the expert, who only sees one possible solution to this conflict: an end to the “international impunity that Israel enjoys.”
A new paradigm
Nadav Tamir, head of international affairs at the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation, is more optimistic. “What on October 7 [cuando Hamás atacó Israel] “It showed us all that you cannot maintain the conflict, that it is necessary to resolve it,” explains this expert. Tamir trusts that “the moderates on both sides” will reach a new agreement and is convinced that one of the conditions for this is “a change of government in Israel, something that will definitely happen after this enormous failure, and Palestinian elections in which a legitimate leader is elected for both Gaza and the West Bank.”
The PLO official disagrees: “Israel has never recognized the two-state solution or the rights of the Palestinian people. It is as simple as asking an Israeli official if he believes in two states, they can say what they want, but the official policy is that there are not two states, there is only one: Israel. If you do not want two independent States and you do not want a democratic State for all, what option is left? Or a genocide, like the one that is taking place in Gaza, or what Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have denounced: a apartheid”.
Professor Barreñada clarifies that, despite the difficulties, the “idea of two states continues to be a reference, but it has lost relevance because it is perceived as increasingly difficult.” However, this specialist emphasizes, “a state of its own is an inalienable right of the Palestinians included in UN resolution 3236 of 1974.” The conditions on the ground that make it hardly viable “can change,” and he concludes: “Everything is reversible.”
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