The asymmetry extends to how much there is left for either side to concede.  Again, it is part of the basic difference between an occupier, who has the power to end an occupation, and the occupied, who does not.  For the Palestinians, the story of this conflict, and of the diplomacy surrounding it, has been a tale of successive reductions in what they expect, and what they are expected to expect.  From being what was still the large majority of residents of Palestine even at the time of Israel’s creation, they have seen their prospective home go down to 43 percent of Palestine under the UN partition plan, to 22 percent after the warfare of the 1940s.  And since the 1967 war, they have seen the 22 percent become not a floor but a ceiling in anything that is talked about as a future Palestinian state.  The discourse is about a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what had been their homeland.  Having been backed to a wall, there is very little room for still more backing up, at least in any way consistent with any Palestinian leader meeting the most basic nationalist aspirations and demand for respect for his people, failing which the leader himself forfeits respect and support.

On the Israeli side, one of the relevant pieces of background is the rightward trend in Israeli politics that has continued ever since Begin’s Likud displaced Labor as Israel’s dominant political party.    Some members of Netanyahu’s government have been more direct than he has been in calling for things such as immediate annexation by Israel of most of the West Bank. 

Israel and the Status Quo

Another relevant piece of background, consistent with the observation that the only significant movement in the position of either side has come when that side has been under pressure, is that the Israeli government simply does not feel sufficient motivation to end the occupation and reach an agreement with the Palestinians.  From that government’s viewpoint, the status quo is tolerable, even comfortable.  Israeli has its overwhelming regional military superiority.  It has its prosperity; it is among the richest one-fifth of the countries in the world in GDP per capita, according to figures from the International Monetary Fund.  As suggested by the previously mentioned casualty figures, the immediate physical and human costs of the conflict itself are sustainable and below levels that would make them a significant political liability for leaders.  The ugly aspects of occupation are walled off, literally, and beyond the line of sight of most Israelis, meaning that they do not represent any kind of political imperative to change the status quo.

Sure, there is international criticism, but that is something else that Israeli leaders have long experience living with, deflecting, and even turning to their domestic political advantage as protectors of the nation against what are described as unfair critics and even enemies of Israel.

Most important of all, there is the unquestioning backing of the United States, and the political lock that underlies it.  That backing takes the form of $3.8 billion in annual subsidies with no strings attached, no compensatory demands being made about Israeli policy, and a diplomatic posture that makes it news when, as once occurred late in the Obama administration, the United States merely abstained on, rather than vetoing, as it repeatedly has done, a UN Security Council resolution expressing the critical view that the overwhelming majority of the international community has of Israel’s colonization project in the territories.

Weigh all this against what the Israeli government would face internally if it were to move to end the occupation and help to create a Palestinian state.  This would immediately create a severe domestic political crisis within the dominant political right, featuring the resistance of a settler population that now constitutes about a tenth of Israel’s entire Jewish population.  It is easy to see why the current government is not attracted to a change of its current course.

It has been observed, correctly, that of three major possible attributes of the current, and future, State of Israel—namely, being Jewish, being democratic, and being in control of all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River—Israel can be any two of those things, but it is impossible for it to be all three.  It is impossible because of demographic facts about the peoples who live in that land.  Israeli leaders in power do not usually address that trilemma explicitly and publicly, but occasionally we get a more direct glimpse of the priorities.  The Israeli minister of justice, Ayelet Shaked, has made clear she considers the democracy part to be subordinate to the Jewishness part.  She has said that it was "not primarily Roman law or the democratic tradition of the Athenian polis that shaped and forged the modern democratic tradition in Europe or the United States, but Jewish tradition—joined, of course, by other traditions.  It is precisely when we wish to promote advanced processes of democratization in Israel that we must deepen its Jewish identity.”

As for the role of civil and political rights in general, Shaked says, “Zionism should not – and I’m saying here that it will not – bow its head to a system of individual rights interpreted in a universal manner.”

Obsolescence of Transitional Arrangements

Meanwhile, on the Palestinian side, political dysfunction persists that is partly a legacy of failed peace process efforts of the past.  The leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which is the recognized interlocutor for peace negotiations, is Mahmoud Abbas, who gets more attention for his other role as head of the Palestinian Authority.  The PA was established under the Oslo process in the 1990s to be only a transitional mechanism.  It was supposed to yield to something more permanent, like a real Palestinian state, in five or so years.  The PA long ago passed its sell-by date.  Many Palestinians now regard it, with good reason, as mostly an administrative auxiliary to the Israeli occupation.  Stasis has set in.  Abbas is now in the 13th year of what was supposed to have been a four-year term as PA president. 

The PA, and the Fatah-dominated PLO, also do not represent all of the Palestinian body politic.  They do not represent refugees, and they do not represent the stream of opinion embodied in Hamas, which won the last free and fair Palestinian parliamentary election, has made clear it is prepared to live in peace in a Palestinian state side-by-side with the State of Israel, and has tried to observe the cease-fires negotiated after the last two Gaza wars.  Israel and the United States refused to accept that election result, and Israel has done everything it can to sustain division between Hamas and Abbas’s PA, such as by withholding tax receipts owed to the Palestinians when the PA has made a move to resolve differences with Hamas.  We can expect the same Israeli reaction to an initiative announced by Hamas this week, in which it says it will dissolve its own administration of Gaza in favor of a new joint administration with the PA and participation in fresh Palestinian elections.

Recent internal developments on the Israeli side, and specifically Netanyahu’s legal and political problems stemming from multiple corruption cases, only make matters worse regarding any peace process.  The prime minister’s response has been to tie himself ever more closely to the right-wing coalition partners whose support he needs to stay in office.  That means more of an inflexible hard line on anything having to do with the Palestinians.  Netanyahu recently said to an audience of West Bank settlers, “We are here to stay forever. We will deepen our roots, build, strengthen and settle.”

Many informed observers believe that the two-state solution is dead.  I don’t believe it is dead in the sense of technical feasibility.  Despite how far the Israeli colonization of the West Bank has gone, it still would be possible to construct a peace agreement along lines that have been well known for quite some time, based on the 1967 borders with mutually agreed upon land swaps, and creative ways to deal with sticky issues such as right of return and control of holy places in Jerusalem. 

But what the pessimistic observers accurately note, besides the ever-narrowing bargaining space from construction of additional facts on the ground, is how much of the edifice on which the so-called peace process is based has been regarded by one side as a basis for avoiding an ultimate peace agreement rather than building one.  The Oslo formula that created the PA was based, on Israeli insistence, on the 1978 Camp David framework agreement, which in turn was based on an autonomy plan from Begin that was designed not to establish Palestinian self-determination but to prevent it.  This has been a matter of peace processing indefinitely while the side in control has created still more facts on the ground.  Begin’s successor Yitzhak Shamir was quite candid about this when he said, ”I would have carried on autonomy talks for ten years, and meanwhile we would have reached half a million people in Judea and Samaria.”