On Tuesday the United Kingdom announced a series of sanctions against Israeli settlements in the West Bank. They were joined in this by Canada and France. The sanctions include a ban on imports on goods produced in the West Bank as well as those who provide services including “construction, infrastructure, financing or real estate for settlement expansion.” That sounds like it involves sanctions on banks funding settlements. The Times refers to this as a “symbolic step.” But I’m not sure that’s the case. The devil is really in the details of that clause I quoted, how it is interpreted and enforced; just what counts as services, direct or incidental; and what counts as expansion. It also, of course, matters a great deal whether other countries adopt the same policy.
This is a wise, judicious and necessary policy. If Barack Obama had put measures like this at least on the table back in 2009 when he tried to force a resumption of final settlement talks we might be living in a much better and very different reality today. When the then-newly elected Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Obama’s overtures Obama mostly walked away and gave up. In his semi-defense he wasn’t elected to bring about a final settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict and it would have required an immense amount of political capital simply to set the stage for it, let alone accomplish it. The key feature of this new British policy is that it distinguishes between what is legitimate (Israel within its internationally recognized 1967 borders) and what is not (its settlements on the West Bank).
We hear a lot about sanctions against Israel today. Some is from voices that want to delegitimize or destroy Israel. From others it’s over legitimate anger and outrage at the violence they see in Gaza and the West Bank. But the real measure of any sanctions, I would argue, is the degree to which they have a chance of shifting the trajectory of the region toward some possibility of a just settlement for both peoples. And the settlements are the key to that. Are they the sole cause of the conflict? Will eliminating them automatically bring a stable peace? Of course not. The point is that their existence and especially their continued growth makes any possible settlement in the future vastly harder and likely more bloody. Critically, the expansion of settlements provides zero security benefits to Israel. You can argue that control of the highlands of the West Bank provides a buffer to protect the rest of Israel, the majority of which is more coastal and low-lying. Settlements have nothing to do with that. They just create more outlying settlements the IDF has to defend.
Many Israelis will tell you that lots of the “settlements” are actually just bedroom communities around Jerusalem. Many of their residents aren’t ideologues but, at least originally, young families drawn there by subsidized home loans. Only a small number of settlers are the rabid and feral “hilltop youth” we’ve been seeing laying siege to that home in the village of Qusra and involved in various other attacks on Palestinian communities in the West Bank. That’s mostly accurate but beside the point. The violent settlers in the outlying outposts should all be under sanctions. For the rest, the issue isn’t who’s good or bad. It’s the settlement themselves. The key is at least to arrest their growth — and that’s what the current violence is about, accelerating the settlement process and pressing the Palestinian population into smaller and smaller enclaves.
The standard line for many is that the growth of the settlements since collapse of the original “peace process” in the 90s has been so great that all of this is moot. (Roughly 150,000 in 1995 to just over 500,000 today, excluding East Jerusalem.) Partition/two states is an illusion, no longer feasible. We need to deal with the current single state reality. On paper it seems like a strong argument. But this casual dismissal manages to be both too cynical and too naive. The argument is that continuing to argue for partition/two states is either pointless or a dodge because, whatever the Palestinians might think, the Israeli public simply no longer supports the idea. (A high point of upwards of 60% in support as recently as 2012 has seen a steady decline ever since.) Meanwhile, the right-wing or “nationalist” bloc is totally committed to perpetual control of the entire land between the river and the sea and at best an ongoing settlement process which presses the Palestinian population into ever smaller enclaves.
That makes it seem pretty bleak. And it is pretty bleak.
But there’s a basic breakdown in elemental logic. The argument is that this is impossible because Israelis range from skeptical/against to absolutely dead-set against the creation of a Palestinian state. But somehow they’re going to be more amenable to the creation of a single state in which there ceases to be a Jewish majority, all the Jewish character of the state is lost and, depending on your point of view, either the possibility of Jewish self-determination or Jewish privilege is lost in what would probably quickly degenerate into a failed state in any case? Put the matter squarely and the whole idea is laughable. That’s an infinitely heavier lift. The scale of opposition to a single state is like orders of magnitude greater. The answer is that opposition can be overcome: you press the matter with coercion, mostly through economic sanctions, arms embargo and general isolation. Fine. But if that’s your strategy why not just compel partition which would be vastly easier? Opposition to partition/two states is born of frustration rather than logic.
None of this is easy. It’s hard to imagine just how you get from here to there. But you have to start somewhere. For decades the approach of Israel’s allies in North America and Europe has been to plead, cajole, propose. More than that is clearly necessary, especially as the situation in the West Bank is slipping out of control, in a symbiotic relationship between outlaw hooliganism and the settler extremist factions who are central to Netanyahu’s coalition. As I mentioned above, the immediate critical need is simply to stop the growth of settlements — and what amounts to the hooligans-cum-gang violence that is the forward claw of the process.
None of what I say above assumes or anticipates any rapid move toward a final settlement. The main opposition candidate in the October elections recently ruled out that any Palestinian state would be created during his anticipated government. There’s close to zero trust between the two sides, fairly merited in each case. But you have to start somewhere, shifting the trajectory away from the worst possibilities if not necessarily ensuring the best ones. When you’re in a hole, at some point, you simply have to stop digging. Once you do that you can think about next steps. And if not now, when?