The two-state solution has been the sacred cow of the Arab-Israeli peace process for the past 40 years. The effectively moribund Palestinian Authority (PA) continues, knowingly or otherwise, to count on the US, to eventually force intransigent Israel to end its 55-year-old military occupation of the Occupied territories.
PA efforts to that effect are drawing ridicule from most Palestinians and apathy from Israel.
But counting on the US in no way implies that the PA has any genuine hopes that the US would manage to extract real concessions from Israel’s parsimonious hands. It only means that the fragile entity has no choice, other than placing all its eggs in the American basket.
Indeed, many observers view the PA current posture as merely regurgitating the same failed old-Oslo era policies which proved to be disastrous for the Palestinian cause.
Meanwhile, the impoverished PLO-PA Fatah leadership continues to lament the nearly total paralysis of international legitimacy and rule of international law, which allowed an insolent Israel to gang up on the Palestinians with much of the world, including the Arab-Muslim world, looking on.
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Indeed. the almost total disregard by Israel of international law in the occupied territories, including the sweeping seizure of Palestinian lands, aggrandizement of Jewish-only colonies, along with the quasi-daily murder and maiming of mostly innocent Palestinians, have made the demoralized PA leadership more frustrated and disillusioned than ever.
A few months ago, a nervous-looking Abbas publicly lashed out at the Chinese Communist Party, using a four-letter word, when senior Fatah figure Abbas Zaki asked the president whether it was appropriate to congratulate the party on its foundation anniversary.
What would Abbas tell Biden?
Most Palestinians don’t pin any hope whatsoever on Biden’s upcoming visit to Ramallah.
“We have no illusions that the visit will achieve a political breakthrough. We will be listening to more pledges and promises,” an unnamed senior Palestinian official was quoted as saying by the pro-Netanyahu i42 news on 2 July .”This visit is about normalizing ties between Israel and Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia.”
Biden is due to meet with Abbas in mid-July. The main purpose of the mostly symbolic visit to the West Bank is to demonstrate to the Palestinians that the US is not forgetting or ignoring them. This might be true to some extent.
But the Biden administration is ignoring or at least sidestepping the Palestinian cause, while frantically accelerating efforts to get the Saudis to normalize relations with Israel.
The US is unlikely though to take pro-active steps to reopen its consulate in East Jerusalem, closed by former Israel-firster, President Trump, despite some loosely-worded promises made by Secretary of State Blinken that it would.
As to the week, ailing and increasingly-abandoned Abbas, he is absolutely in no position to make demands of or issue warnings to a US president who is thoroughly plagued and preoccupied by the nightmarish and still ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.
True, as a solace to comfort Abbas and enable him to keep face and retain his political composure, Biden may give the PA leader some verbal assurances, but nothing more.
The legitimate Palestinian grievances Abbas will communicate to Biden are no news for the US president that would prompt him to even nudge a notoriously recalcitrant Israel, where a care-taker government is bracing for yet a new round of elections following the collapse of the Naftali Bennet’s cacophonic coalition two weeks ago.
Interestingly, the elections, Slated to take place four months from now, will be a fierce competition between the likud, the jingoistic nationalist bloc, and the extreme-national-religious right. Both camps vehemently reject the Oslo process, the erstwhile two-state solution proposal as well as the establishment of any completely-sovereign Palestinian political entity west of the river Jordan.
Will Netanyahu make a comeback?
Hence, awaiting the elections is really a non-viable option for Abbas and Biden, who may be affronted with the political comeback of Trump’s prodigal son, Benyamin Netanyahu. Last week, Trump reportedly said he would back Netanyahu in the coming Israeli elections.
While Bennet treated Abbas with a combination of non-attention and even not a small modicum of contempt, Netanyahu is known for employing a lot of coaxing, cajoling and red-herring tactics with the aging PA leader, while working diligently, often behind the scenes, to dismantle the very last vestiges of official Arab support for the Palestinians.
Netanyahu is also the number-1 ally of Saudi Arabia’s de facto king MBS, who is reportedly impatiently awaiting his old father’s death to open up Saudi Arabia to Israel and bid a final “Good by” to the Palestinians and their “annoying cause.”
Now, as we all know, Biden is trying to do the job for MBS and Netanyahu even before King Salman’s death, a mission he may or may not succeed in accomplishing.
Biden’s effort to consummate what would be a historical breakthrough in the relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel doesn’t mean at all that Israel would offer any meaningful concessions to the Palestinians in return, or even relax her tight and harsh grip on them. In fact, the opposite might happen, which wouldn’t even make MBS bat an eyelash, given his disenchantment with and even aversion to the Palestinians.
One-state Solution
A few weeks ago, Abbas warned that if the international community, particularly the US and EU, didn’t move to compel Israel to end its occupation and colonization of the West Bank, he would take “decisive and dangerous” decisions.
Abbas didn’t disclose what these decisions would be. But some of his aides speculated that the aging and ailing PA leader might freeze at least some Palestinian commitments under the Oslo Accords such as the security coordination regime with Israel. Moreover, Abbas may well decide to revoke PLO recognition of Israel, which was unconditional and not contingent on reciprocal Israeli recognition of a Palestinian state.
But the most important decision Abbas might possibly take is the renouncement by the PLO of the two-state solution strategy in favor of one unitary state from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean, where Jews and Arabs would live together in peace and equality.
This would mean that the Palestinians would start a fresh struggle for equal rights in a democratic, non-apartheid state.
But a bi-national democratic state, while it would be widely welcomed by the bulk of the international community, would be anathema for Israel and many Zionist Jews.
A few weeks ago, former Middle East envoy Dennis Ross warned that the destruction by Israel of the two-state solution would eventually force the Palestinian leadership to opt for a unitary, democratic state where Palestinians and Israeli Jews live as equal citizens.
The idea of a bi-national Jewish-Arab state west of the River Jordan will not be readily accepted by a sizeable determined segment of Palestinians as well, particularly Hamas and other religious groups. However, it is the only truly viable solution under existing circumstances. The other alternative is perpetual, open-ended conflict between the Islamic world on the one hand and Israel and its guardian-ally, the US, on the other, which could eventually evolve into a nuclear Armageddon. With the two-state solution reaching real dead-end, the only alternative would be the continuation and escalation of the conflict. The Palestinian Authority is unlikely to survive the recalcitrance of the upcoming Israeli government, especially if the recently-approved settlement projects are implemented.
