British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband has said the United Kingdom will sanction illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, describing the move as “overdue” and necessary to “salvage” a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
He made the comments on Tuesday as 11 nations joined the UK in supporting or considering curbs on trade in goods with settlements that are a barrier to a future Palestinian state.
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But analysts say the step is far from enough to drive momentum for Palestinian statehood, threatened by ever-expanding settlements in the West Bank and an increasingly hostile Israeli political environment.
Tahani Mustafa, a lecturer in international relations at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera the latest anti-settlement measures are “modest” and unlikely to have a significant impact on ambitions for Palestinian statehood.
“After three decades of breakneck settlement expansion, Palestinian territory is only being held together by its sinews,” said Mustafa. “If what remains is still territorially viable as a state, it is only barely so. Much more decisive action is needed to salvage the two-state solution and a durable lasting solution to the conflict.”
Settlements dividing Palestinian territory
More than 30 years after the Oslo Accords set out a negotiating process aimed at resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel has remained the foundation of international efforts to forge peace.
But since the Oslo process began in 1993, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, has ballooned from about 260,000 to more than 700,000, according to the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics, posing a glaring roadblock to the plan.
The challenge is not just the raw number of settlers, but their geographic spread. Today, many Israeli settlements are embedded deep inside West Bank areas that would be needed for a contiguous Palestinian state, including near major Palestinian urban centres such as Nablus, Salfit and Hebron.
Israel’s recent E1 settlement plan, which would build thousands of illegal housing units between the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim and East Jerusalem, is a case in point. The plan would effectively split the West Bank in two and fully sever it from East Jerusalem, which Palestinians seek as their future capital.
Experts have long said Israel will need to dismantle some of its West Bank settlements, as it did in the Gaza Strip in 2005, to make room for a cohesive Palestinian state. But many Israeli settlements, especially those closer to Israel’s pre-war 1967 borders, would likely need to be addressed through land swaps.
“A complete withdrawal from some of the deeply embedded settlements is highly unlikely,” so land swaps would be the only way to create some form of Palestinian “territorial integrity”, Andreas Krieg, associate professor at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera.
However, such an arrangement – under which Israeli settlements close to the pre-1967 borders would become part of Israel and some “northern Arab-Israeli communities would be integrated into a Palestinian state” – would be “highly controversial” and face blowback from multiple communities, said Krieg.
He argued that Israelis would be certain to oppose any forced withdrawal from West Bank settlements, while some “Arab-Israelis may not want to live within a Palestinian state”.
Palestinian citizens of Israel make up approximately 21 percent of Israel’s overall population but are treated as second- or third-class citizens at the institutional level. According to rights groups, several dozen Israeli laws actively discriminate against Palestinian citizens across a number of issues, including education and housing.
Israeli ‘consensus’ against Palestinian state
Beyond the physical obstacle created by settlements is the Israeli political landscape, in which the idea of a Palestinian state has become toxic.
The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be among the most hardline in Israel’s history on the issue. Netanyahu has emphatically ruled out the prospect of a Palestinian state, while his far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also oversees Israeli settlements in the West Bank, has celebrated blocking Palestinian statehood as a badge of honour.
The views of Netanyahu’s most influential domestic critics do not deviate much. His top rival in elections slated for October, former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, has promised not to allow the establishment of a Palestinian state. And Naftali Bennett, a Netanyahu rival from the far right, fervently opposes Palestinian statehood.
As for the Israeli public, a June poll by the Council for a Secure America found that only 22 percent of Jewish Israelis favour a two-state solution, while 63 percent oppose it.
“The consensus within Israel, socially and politically, does not allow for any party to make any steps towards a Palestinian state,” said Krieg.
Meanwhile, Israel’s closest ally, the United States, is unlikely to apply significant pressure over Israel’s settlement policy so long as President Donald Trump remains in office for the next two and a half years, he added.
Krieg said a “best-case scenario” is for Israel’s next elected government to reverse some of the country’s recent settlement advances.
John Strawson, professor at the University of East London, said that any new Israeli government is “unlikely to support a Palestinian state”, but that a more moderate Israeli government may at least “stop the ethnic cleansing and other moves which are aimed at making that impossible”.
“Removing Netanyahu is the first step towards a two-state solution,” said Strawson.
Two states are the ‘only alternative to violence’
If the two-state model is still alive at all, it is largely due to pressure from the international community.
More than 150 countries, including the majority of European Union nations, have recognised Palestinian statehood. And several Arab states with whom Israel seeks better ties have indicated Palestinian statehood is a precondition for normalisation with Israel.
Krieg said Tuesday’s move by the UK and the 11 other mostly European nations is an “overdue step in the right direction”, but also “shows the laziness and lack of creativity on the part of the international community to actually think outside the box in terms of a two-state solution”.
Anders Persson, a political scientist specialising in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said that while the settlement sanctions are concerning to Israel, other previous anti-settlement measures, such as 2013 EU restrictions on funds for Israeli entities operating in occupied Palestinian territory, “changed little on the ground”.
He said the latest sanctions may be “too late” and “too limited … to save the two-state solution”.
Strawson said that while a two-state solution may “seem optimistic”, it is the only alternative to “permanent war and violence”.