Vision to Reality: The Reut Blog

In a Foreign Affairs essay, veteran Israeli political commentator Ehud Yaari suggests a policy alternative aimed at breaking the impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Yaari promotes the idea of abandoning an exclusive focus on achieving a final-status agreement in the short term. The pragmatic alternative, he elaborates in a complementary Foreign Affairs interview, is to change the reality on the ground “in a dramatic way which, first, establishes a Palestinian state, [and secondly] removes a big number of settlers and settlements from within the West Bank.”

Yaari’s basic approach shares a logic with the Reut Institute’s 2009 reassessment of the Israeli-Palestinian political process. Reut’s analysis similarly yields the conclusion that the optimal path forward would upgrade the political status of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank to a level of de-facto recognition as a state. The initial focus would seek to systematically upgrade the powers and responsibilities of the PA to the point that it can be recognized as a provisional state with provisional borders, with permanent status shaped thereafter on the basis of state-to-state relations and agreements between Israel and Palestine.

Yaari and Reut’s approaches are rooted in a two-fold recognition. First, conditions on the ground – including given such factors as the Palestinian political and constitutional crisis and the deep split between Gaza and the West Bank, as well as lessons from the recent history of PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s rejection of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s far-reaching proposals – render the likelihood of achieving resolutions on all outstanding issues highly improbable.

Second, another pronounced failure in a negotiating process or the perpetuation of the current stagnation may precipitate a full-fledged crisis.

 Yaari and Reut similarly characterize the inherent risks of failure or stagnation. Beyond, as Yaari writes, “discredit[ing] moderates and play[ing] into the hands of extremists on both sides that refuse to make the concessions that any viable peace treaty will require,” the threat is that of an existential blow to support for a Two-State Solution.

Ya’ari shares Reut’s assessment that this main threat appears in the form of a potential Palestinian inversion towards a One-State Solution (see the Reut Institute ‘Tipping Point of Palestinian Inversion towards the Two State Solution) as the desired outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian political process. Yaari estimates that in “two, three more years, the Palestinians will run away from the notion of a ’67 border statehood. They are running away already, and I think it’s in Israel’s interest to arrest their withdrawal from this objective…” Yaari concludes that reaching a viable agreement should be an urgent Israeli interest “before the Palestinian leadership grows even more skeptical of a two state solution.”

Related Links

From the Annapolis Process to Permanent Status

The International Inversion towards the Two State Solution

Inversion towards the Occupation: Challenge to Israel’s National Security Concept