Does Prime Minister Naftali Bennett imagine he can swap Palestinian statehood for stability in the West Bank and Gaza?
If so, he has spent too much time this August under the Middle East sun such that he has begun to see a mirage of calm in the midst of a hostile battlefield. What’s a rocket here or there if the sun burns yellow and dances across the Mediterranean’s gleaming blue waters?
Bennett is certainly not the only leader these days who has neglected to feel the rumbling earthquake under his feet.
Just two weeks ago US President Joe Biden similarly fantasized that he could ensure a mostly stable withdrawal from Afghanistan.
That miscalculation, burned into international consciousness through the chaotic scenes at Kabul’s airport, followed by a bombing that has killed scores of people, has already threatened to doom Biden’s presidency long before it completes its first year.
Some pundits have compared the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan to the Iranian hostage crisis which doomed president Jimmy Carter to one-term.
Bennett’s trip to Washington, in the shadow of the Afghan crisis, was intended to open a new page in Israeli-US relations that would heal some of the partisan vitriolic discourse that marked the end of former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s tenure.
After that Bennett hoped to find common ground with Biden on Iran.
But as the bombing in Afghanistan delayed the meeting and made Tehran’s nuclear threat seem like a sidebar event, the most significant information unveiled by the trip to date, had to do instead with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As the former director-general of the Yesha Council, Bennett’s views on the topic are well known. History, however, has shown that even the most ardent pro-settlement politician can change his political outlook once he becomes prime minister.
Former prime minister Ariel Sharon, originally known as the father of the settler movement, campaigned in 2002 on the preservation of the Gaza settlements only to evacuate them in 2005, explaining that, “what you see from here, you didn’t see from there.”
The question, therefore, has been, what would Bennett see from Washington that he did not see when he stood on a West Bank hilltop.
After all, he has already shown restraint on the issue of West Bank annexation. Yet, as Education Minister in 2013 he was the first high-level politician to speak openly about applying sovereignty to all of Area C.
At the time, he explained that Israel had to start planning for what happens should it fail to achieve a two-state resolution to the conflict.
Some eight years later, he has pledged not to move forward with annexation and to honor the deal Netanyahu made to suspend such activity in favor of the Abraham Accords that allowed Israel to normalize ties with four Arab countries.
It was a promise that he repeated this week in an interview with The New York Times where he underscored that he had not deviated from his right-wing ideology.
He had no intention of forming a Palestinian state and no intention of negotiating toward one. He would not resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and would instead seek a middle ground based on areas of common agreement.
An Israeli source said that “the prime minister’s line is to preserve stability, without taking reality-changing steps.”
In short, he would subscribe to the status quo philosophy that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be shelved until a more appropriate time, while the situation on the ground remains static.
But it’s a fallacy to imagine that the conflict is frozen because heads of state are distracted by other issues. Millions of Palestinians live in the West Bank and Gaza, and their lives are not static. The same is true of the Palestinian Authority, the IDF, the Civil Administration and Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria.
This year has been marked by a renewal of violence that threatens to explode at any moment. It is just waiting for a match.
There has already been one Gaza war and the possibility of another one remains very real. In the last month, Palestinians in Gaza have launched a rocket at Israel and incendiary balloons. Palestinians have resumed their violent border protests, seriously wounding a soldier.
The IDF in turn, has struck targets in Gaza. Momentum toward a permanent ceasefire or even an understanding to sustain calm appears to have faltered.
It has always been believed that a two-state resolution to the conflict is the best way to neutralize the Gaza threat. The removal of such a possibility along with no ceasefire, means that Israel remains on the verge of another war with Gaza.
This is particularly problematic given that Hamas has extended its reach beyond Gaza and has used events in the West Bank and Jerusalem as a rationale for attacking Israel.
The Temple Mount and Jerusalem itself remain a source of potential conflict, with Palestinians fearing that Israel its changing the status quo on the mosque compound where Jewish prayer is banned.
Bennett, like his predecessor Netanyahu, has not cracked down on the increasing number of Jews who do pray at the holiest site in Judaism. Meanwhile, hundreds of Palestinians in east Jerusalem still live under threat of eviction.
Both issues helped spark the 11-day Gaza war in May, and could do so again.
The Palestinian Authority is facing an acute financial crisis and has temporarily lost one of its more significant funders, the European Union. Protests against it have increased just as it finds itself struggling to fund civil servants’ salaries for August. The absence of those salaries could also fuel unrest.
There are almost nightly protests in the Nablus area which spark clashes with the IDF. More Palestinians are injured there than anywhere else in the West Bank and Gaza.
More than 11,000 Palestinians have been wounded by the IDF in the West Bank this year, according to United Nations data, far exceeding the 2,259 in 2020 and the 3,479 wounded in 2019.
It is hard to apply the word stability to the current situation. So if Bennett has no intention of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he needs a plan for stability that would address all these factors, and he needs one now.
its absence is particularly risky for Bennett because this issue, more than any other, creates division among his coalition partners, which includes an Arab party, Ra’am, and Meretz.
While he is in Washington, Bennett should take careful note of Afghanistan's impact on Biden. It would only take one small incident, in Gaza, Jerusalem or the West Bank, to send the Israeli-Palestinian conflict spiraling out of control and doom Bennett's political future.