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Do Israelis want a real Palestinian state? The polls say no

Ariel
The settlement of Ariel (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

It’s peace process time again–and with it comes the trope that Israelis are ready for a two-state solution. That sentiment is accompanied by polls showing the same: that Israelis support the principle of two states for two peoples. But an examination of Israeli polls shows that nothing like a viable Palestinian state that would be acceptable to the Palestinian population is on the table.

With the peace process in overdrive, media consumers have been treated to a lot of hopeful thinking. In the past month, journalists and analysts have lined up to say that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has the support of the Israeli people to make a peace deal–if he would just go ahead and buck his right-wing coalition.

Writing in Foreign Policy, Brent Sasley says that there is “majority support, including among Jewish-Israelis, for talks and for a final settlement. One recent poll found that 62 percent of Israelis support a two-state solution.”

In a piece on why there’s hope for a two-state deal, The New Republic’s Ben Birnbaum writes that “two-thirds of Israelis—including a majority of Likud and Jewish Home (!) voters—would support a peace deal that gave the Palestinians a state on 100 percent of the West Bank (with land swaps) with its capital in East Jerusalem.”

The Guardian’s Michael Cohen similarly writes that “Israelis strongly support a two-state solution.”

All three of those analysts link to articles in Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post that provide details on the same poll: a December 2012 study conducted by the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace showing that right-wing Israelis would support a Palestinian state. The polls–there were two in total commissioned by the center–surveyed Habayit Hayehudi and Likud voters, and found that the majority of them would support a Palestinian state. Conflict solved!

Not so fast. The devil is in the details when it comes to a Palestinian state.

As Haaretz’s Barak Ravid reports, the Palestinian state accepted by these right-wingers would be demilitarized–and the kicker is that Israel keeps all of the settlement blocs in this imagined deal. That means the settlements of Ma’ale Adumim and Ariel–two settlement “blocs” that are considered “consensus” settlements, or settlements that Israelis believe they will keep in a permanent peace agreement. Both Ma’ale Adumim and Ariel slice and dice the West Bank into pieces that take a viable Palestinian state off the table. And that’s just talking territory. Never mind the discussion about a demilitarized state.

“Ma’aleh Adumim was established to break Palestinian contiguity,” Benny Kashriel, the mayor of the settlement, said in 2004.

And even the leaders of the Palestinian Authority, who have shown themselves willing to give Israel a lot, were resistant to a deal that would keep Ariel in the hands of the Israelis, as the Palestine Papers showed. The same goes for the Palestinian population at large–especially since Ariel sits on top of major water resources that were once in Palestinian hands.

A more recent poll conducted in June 2013 and cited by Sasley found that 62% of Israelis would support a two-state solution. But the same poll states that about 54% oppose dismantling most of the West Bank settlements, though the specifics of which settlements Israelis oppose dismantling are missing from the polling data.

It may be, as Sasley wrote, that “public opinion in Israel has historically followed leaders’ efforts when they’ve pushed major decisions on war and peace.” But when you have a leader like Benjamin Netanyahu, who has vowed that Ariel and Ma’ale Adumim will remain in Israeli hands forever, there isn’t much cause for optimism.

And a brand new poll concludes that 63% of Israeli Jews are opposed to withdrawing to the 1967 borders. The poll also shows 58% of Israelis opposing a peace agreement in which Israel has to dismantle some of its settlements but gets to retain Ariel and Ma’ale Adumim. 

Taken together, the polling data shows that Israelis are decidedly not interested in a peace deal that would give Palestinians a viable state of their own. It’s a depressing fact that steadfast believers in the peace process refuse to acknowledge. If they did, they’d have to concede that Israeli society is too wedded to the continuing colonization of Palestine for a Palestinian state to come into being. 

This piece has been updated to correct the numbers on the brand new poll on Israeli views of a peace agreement.

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Ma’aleh Adumim and Ariel, before any other settlements that should follow, MUST go.

Thank you, Alex, for bringing the truth.

The fact is that the Zionists do not want peace nor justice with their brothers and sisters.

They want the expulsion and erasure of the indigenous Palestinians by continued Occupation or any other means necessary & available to them, including theft of land and all other resources.

Until and unless the US government stops its enabling and unconditional support for Zionist Israel, nothing approximating justice and peace will happen. The status quo will continue with one side benefiting and the other side being horribly repressed, oppressed and punished for daring to breathe and survive.

Now there’s a surprise. (Yawn.)

62% are for peace as long as it means ratifying the status quo.

Interesting perspective by George Friedman at Stratfor from 4 years ago:

The foundation of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process for years has been the assumption that there would be a two-state solution. Such a solution has not materialized for a host of reasons. First, at present there are two Palestinian entities, Gaza and the West Bank, which are hostile to each other. Second, the geography and economy of any Palestinian state would be so reliant on Israel that independence would be meaningless; geography simply makes the two-state proposal almost impossible to implement. Third, no Palestinian government would have the power to guarantee that rogue elements would not launch rockets at Israel, potentially striking at the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem corridor, Israel’s heartland. And fourth, neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis have the domestic political coherence to allow any negotiator to operate from a position of confidence. Whatever the two sides negotiated would be revised and destroyed by their political opponents, and even their friends.

For this reason, the entire peace process — including the two-state solution — is a chimera. Neither side can live with what the other can offer. But if it is a fiction, it is a fiction that serves U.S. purposes. The United States has interests that go well beyond Israeli interests and sometimes go in a different direction altogether. Like Israel, the United States understands that one of the major obstacles to any serious evolution toward a two-state solution is Arab hostility to such an outcome.

The Jordanians have feared and loathed Fatah in the West Bank ever since the Black September uprisings of 1970. The ruling Hashemites are ethnically different from the Palestinians (who constitute an overwhelming majority of the Jordanian population), and they fear that a Palestinian state under Fatah would threaten the Jordanian monarchy. For their part, the Egyptians see Hamas as a descendent of the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks the Mubarak government’s ouster — meaning Cairo would hate to see a Hamas-led state. Meanwhile, the Saudis and the other Arab states do not wish to see a radical altering of the status quo, which would likely come about with the rise of a Palestinian polity.

At the same time, whatever the basic strategic interests of the Arab regimes, all pay lip service to the principle of Palestinian statehood. This is hardly a unique situation. States frequently claim to favor various things they actually are either indifferent to or have no intention of doing anything about. Complicating matters for the Arab states is the fact that they have substantial populations that do care about the fate of the Palestinians. These states thus are caught between public passion on behalf of Palestinians and the regimes’ interests that are threatened by the Palestinian cause. The states’ challenge, accordingly, is to appear to be doing something on behalf of the Palestinians while in fact doing nothing.

The United States has a vested interest in the preservation of these states. The futures of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are of vital importance to Washington.

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20090518_israeli_prime_minister_comes_washington_again