Israeli troops opened fire on Sunday on Palestinian protesters marching on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, as part of a series of demonstrations marking the outbreak of the June 1967 war that left the Golan, the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem in Israeli hands. Further clashes were reported in the West Bank, and Israeli TV reported that at least 44 people were wounded in the day's events. Syrian TV claimed that as many as 14 Palestinians were killed, but those reports could not be verified.
Just two weeks earlier, on May 15, "Nakba Day' demonstrations had seen
Palestinian refugees trying to breach Israel's boundaries in protest against the
confiscation of their families' homes in 1948 after the war that accompanied
Israel's creation. As many as 16 Palestinians were killed in that day's
protests, and the Israeli security forces had hoped to avoid a repeat in the
latest round of protests, mindful of the political damage they suffer by firing
on unarmed challengers.
The new wave of protests are a symptom of a post-peace process:
Israelis and Palestinians both know that U.S.-led negotiations won't for the
foreseeable future produce an agreement to end their conflict. Palestinians and
much of the international community read Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's
recent Washington
speech as confirmation that Israel won't accept the international consensus
on terms for a two-state solution, and they have abandoned hope that Washington
will compensate for the Palestinians' own surfeit of leverage at the negotiating
table by pressuring Israel to concede. Although France
is making a new effort to revive negotiations by hosting new talks in Paris,
each side may respond by simply going through the motions in order to get
maximum European backing for their own stance.
As Robert
Malley and Hussein Agha, two veterans of the Oslo process and among its most
astute observers, wrote in January: "Almost two decades after the peace process
was launched, little remains of the foundational principle that each side has
something of value to which the other aspires and thus something it can offer in
exchange for what it wants." While it continues to occupy Palestinian land and
control Palestinian lives, there's little downside for the Israelis in a status
quo that "although not as satisfactory as Israelis would like ... is not as
unpleasant as their adversaries would wish".
While there's little impetus currently for a return to a strategy centered on
violence in the Palestinian mainstream, President Mahmoud Abbas' mantra that
"our choice is negotiation, negotiation and nothing but negotiation" has also
exhausted its credibility in the eyes of his own people.
Thus the emerging motifs of a post-peace process Palestinian politics:
- a newfound independence from (and even defiance of) the restraints that
Washington had imposed on Palestinian actions;
- a search for new strategies of leverage and pressure that create a downside
for the Israelis maintaining the status quo, while avoiding the trap of
repeating the disastrous terror campaign of the Second Intifada that
immeasurably strengthened Israel's political and diplomatic position; and
- a generational and institutional shift, in line with the Arab democracy
movement, that not only sees Abbas and his leadership circle gradually eased
out, but also the eclipse of the Arafat model of national leadership that Abbas
inherited.
The Fatah-Hamas
rapprochement is a symptom of the first two elements, but it is unlikely to
be the last word on the third -- actions such as the refugee protest and
whatever transpires on Sunday are not reliant on the traditional central
leadership of Fatah or Hamas; they are organized at grassroots level by new
structures that sometimes involve local leaders of both movements, but also
bring new actors into play.
The Palestinian leadership also demonstrated their independence from
Washington by pressing
ahead in February with a U.N. Security Council vote demanding a halt to
Israeli settlements, which left the U.S. isolated when it vetoed a resolution
deemed uncontroversial even by Washington's closest allies. And, of course, the
U.N. may be the setting for a second major Palestinian act of diplomatic
defiance of Washington's will, when the Palestinians seek
recognition of their claim to statehood on the 1967 borders in
September.
Washington has lost much of its ability to confine Palestinian actions to
Israel's comfort zone, at the same time as its regional influence has plummeted
-- most visibly in the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, the mainstay of Arab
support for the U.S.-Israeli position. Cairo's role in brokering the Fatah-Hamas
reconciliation, and its moves to ease the siege of Gaza portend a growing
divergence in which an Egyptian government more responsive to its own citizenry
than Mubarak ever was is more supportive of the Palestinians and independent of
Washington.
It's not only on the Palestinian side of the equation that the foundation of
the "peace process" as we've known it has crumbled. As former Israeli peace
negotiator Daniel
Levy noted last week, Netanyahu who in the mid 1990s represented the
right-wing opposition to the Oslo peace process has remained constant, but
Israeli society has moved closer to his position rather than vice versa.
"Israel's parliament, its politics, and its public discourse have all shifted to
the right, in the direction of Netanyahu's Likud party," Levy wrote in
Foreign Affairs. "The rump Zionist left-of-center in Israel's Knesset
[the traditional 'peace camp'] has shriveled from 43 members in 1996 to just 11
today. The leaders of Israel's three largest political parties today -- Tzipi
Livni of Kadima, Avigdor Lieberman of Yisrael Beiteinu, and Netanyahu himself,
the leader of Likud -- are all descendants of the revisionist or right-Zionist
ideological tradition."
So, Netanyahu is on solid ground domestically in pushing back against the
U.S. Levy also points out that the right-wing settlers who've always opposed a
two-state solution are now a major force in Israel's government, and even more
important, in its armed forces. The traditional assumption that the military
could be relied on to evacuate settlements by force if necessary in the event of
a peace treaty is questionable today. And just as the settlers have asserted
their claims on the Israeli side, so have the refugees who still seek a return
to lost homes and land inside Israel begun to press their own demands on the
Palestinian leadership, making compromises on the refugee issue -- to which they
had previously been amenable -- suddenly a far tougher sell.
We're into a new game, now, whose rules are undefined. The relative stability
of the West Bank, for example, has been maintained by Palestinian security
forces willing to suppress not only terrorism but also peaceful political
protest dissent from challenging either Israel or the Palestinian Authority. But
the U.S. officer in charge of standing up the Palestinian security forces, Gen.
Keith Dayton, warned in 2009 that his men were willing to act against other
Palestinians only because they understood themselves to be the security nucleus
of a nascent Palestinian state. If no such state emerged within two years, he
warned, their willingness to maintain security on Israel's behalf should not be
assumed.
The failure of the peace process has pushed both sides into uncharted waters,
carried by tides that are beyond their control. Sunday's demonstrations are not
an isolated event, but part of an emerging trend in what promises to be a rough
ride for the established leadership on both sides of the divide.