Beyond Business as Usual in Israel-Palestine

This publication is part of a joint initiative between the International Crisis Group and the U.S./Middle East Project (USMEP) to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The views represented in this report do not necessarily reflect the views of the members of the USMEP's International Board and Senior Advisors.

What’s new? The Israeli-Palestinian conflict experienced a new outburst in April-May 2021, spreading from East Jerusalem to the occupied West Bank and Israel’s mixed cities, and also to Gaza, where Israel and Hamas fought an eleven-day war, their fourth in fourteen years, exacting a high human and physical toll.

Why did it happen? The absence of a viable peace process and a growing loss of hope in a workable settlement lulled Israeli leaders into believing they had secured the Palestinians’ acquiescence in their oppressive reality, while Palestinians felt there was increasingly little to lose from confronting Israel directly.

Why does it matter? The scale of the unrest, involving Palestinians throughout the territory of Israel-Palestine, and the ferocity of the violence have driven home the notion that the situation has become unsustainable. A new approach is needed. But in the meantime, urgent steps are required to stop the bleeding.

What should be done? International stakeholders should pursue a long-term truce in Gaza; call on Israel to halt evictions of East Jerusalem Palestinians; encourage respect for existing arrangements at Jerusalem holy sites; and support Palestinians in renewing their political leadership – all as part of opening a path toward a rights-based approach to solving the conflict.

Executive Summary

For those feeling the full impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the situation has long been unbearable, but it took major unrest in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Israeli cities, as well as yet another war in Gaza, to drive home to all that the status quo is creaking. It is no longer possible to hope that negotiations will yield peace, nor even, for the cynical, that attempts to reactivate the peace process will obscure the irrelevance thereof. A succession of right-wing Israeli governments has long abandoned talks in all but name, while many Palestinians have lost faith in the possibility of a vanishing two-state solution. True progress requires a paradigm shift that centres the need to equally respect the rights of both peoples, but that change will take time. For now, steps are needed to lower the temperature and perhaps explore new avenues toward addressing the conflict. External stakeholders must create the space for Palestinian elections and reconciliation, while pressing for a long-term truce in Gaza, and for Israel to halt expulsions of Palestinians in East Jerusalem and return to pre-existing arrangements on the Holy Esplanade.

The latest flare-up in the conflict brought an important shift in the status quo. It exposed the futility of a military solution and underlined the absolute and urgent necessity of a political approach. It also laid bare the bankruptcy both of the peace process as it existed before former U.S. President Donald Trump assumed power and of his administration’s attempt at foisting a one-sided, Israel-dictated peace on the Palestinians. It pierced the complacency of Israel, many of whose leaders thought they had brought the Palestinians to heel and removed them as an obstacle to their state’s development and expansion. It unmasked the fiction of peaceful Arab-Jewish coexistence in Israel, laying bare its highly imbalanced underlying dynamic. Perhaps most consequentially, it highlighted the notion that Palestinians, despite their imposed geographic fragmentation and obvious diversity, remain as one – a people aspiring to secure their collective rights.

Triggered by a series of incidents in East Jerusalem, the latest confrontation spread to all parts of the territory of Israel-Palestine and catalysed the heaviest sustained fighting between Israel and Palestinian factions in Gaza since 2014. After eleven days, both sides agreed to a ceasefire and declared victory. Israel said its Operation Guardian of the Walls had achieved its objectives: it had greatly weakened its adversaries’ offensive capabilities and put them back in the proverbial box. Hamas had survived the onslaught, startled Israel with its rocket launches and, by making the need for a change in Israel’s conduct in East Jerusalem its central demand, laid claim to leadership of the Palestinian national movement.

The truth lay somewhere else. Even in the Israeli security establishment, some declared Hamas the winner, citing the same factors that gave that group its post-ceasefire swagger: Israel had been caught by surprise, its vulnerabilities exposed with an Iron Dome anti-missile defence system that worked well but could not stop all rockets from getting through. Yet Hamas’s victory was hollow, given not just the hammering its own capabilities received but the human and physical toll the war took upon ordinary Gazans. Its decision to go to war was controversial within the movement, even if many Palestinians cheered it on. At the same time, the established Palestinian leadership suffered a grave blow to its standing among Palestinians, having been a spectator during the conflict. Many also saw it as a contributor to Israel’s repressive apparatus in the West Bank. As for Palestinians broadly speaking, their unified yet amorphous voice arose loudly and clearly across the entire territory between the river and the sea, stressing historical themes of dispossession and repression, with Jerusalem at the core.

What must come next? Israel’s defence system, the Iron Dome, has in many ways provided it with an insurance policy that afforded the luxury of not coming up with a better way to deal with Hamas. Israeli leaders tried to sustain a shaky deterrence, contenting themselves with what they call “mowing the lawn” every few years. Yet this approach has led, not to Hamas’s containment, but to a growing, ever more lethal challenge that is no longer limited to Hamas and kindred groups. That a regional military superpower has a hard time providing basic defence and security for its citizens is due primarily to the bankruptcy of a political strategy that entails fragmenting the West Bank, encircling East Jerusalem from without and settling it with Jews from within, and fighting Hamas in Gaza every few years when necessary. The alternative – a return to the old peace process – no longer exists, certainly not with an Israel whose centre of gravity, even with a post-Netanyahu government, has drifted so far to the right as to have dismantled its own diplomatic exit ramp.

While the occasion requires a paradigm shift, the first priority must be to stop the bleeding. The war in Gaza may have ended but, as brief subsequent flare-ups highlight, the ceasefire remains fragile, and elsewhere – in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and inside Israel – the state continues to repress Palestinians.

Thus far, nothing Israel’s new government has said or done suggests it is likely to veer from its longstanding approach. Yet it has lesser options that could at least reduce prospects of another flare-up it can ill afford, as more fighting would strain an already fractious coalition. In Gaza, Israel should forge a long-term truce, lifting the blockade in exchange for a halt to all rocket fire from the territory. At the Holy Esplanade, it should revert to the existing framework known as the Status Quo, to which it has subscribed since 1967 and which has largely kept the peace there, albeit increasingly less so of late. In East Jerusalem, Israeli authorities should rescind the orders to evict Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah and generally refrain from expelling Palestinians from that part of the city. Israel also needs to grapple with deep rifts within its own society caused by institutionalised discrimination against Palestinian citizens.

For Palestinians, the latest events show how desperately they need a leadership that can effectively negotiate and coordinate efforts on their behalf. Elections, which Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas cancelled in April – due in part to Israeli restrictions on voting in East Jerusalem – should happen, as imperfect as their administration may be under current conditions: political renewal is critical, and people have made clear they want a vote. The broader goal should be internal dialogue and political reconciliation, and a return to representative national institutions embodied in the Palestine Liberation Organisation and accountable governance by the Palestinian Authority.

None of these measures are likely absent a firmer international line. Beyond pressing for a long-term truce in Gaza, a return to the Status Quo in the Holy Esplanade and a halt to eviction orders in East Jerusalem, foreign powers could take other steps. They should support Palestinian elections under the freest and fairest conditions attainable, including with East Jerusalem Palestinians’ participation. They should also revise the conditions the Quartet (the U.S., UN, European Union and Russia) has imposed on Hamas for the past fifteen years – recognising Israel, renouncing violence and accepting all previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements – in a manner that at least allows the group to participate in a unity government, for example by nominating ministers who are not card-carrying Hamas members. Western politicians may be loath to change tack now that Hamas has grown stronger in the wake of the April-May crisis. But the current policy is inherently misguided and has long since scored an own goal: empowering Hamas, while obstructing the Palestinian reconciliation and political renewal that international actors claim they support.

Ideally, foreign powers would go further still. They would recognise that the conflict’s current manifestation is becoming increasingly unsustainable; that depriving the Palestinian people of a unified national voice by dividing them will lead to neither peace nor surrender; that neither Jews nor Palestinians have a unique claim on self-determination; and that the way forward should be based on the overriding principles of respect for international law and protecting people’s rights in Israel-Palestine (notably those whose rights are least respected, the Palestinians, including those living as refugees outside the territory), regardless of whatever form a political solution takes. They also need to do more to hold the sides accountable – Hamas for its indiscriminate attacks; Israel for its policies of systematic discrimination, dispossession and de facto annexation; and the Palestinian Authority for its repressive measures targeting individuals and groups that are critical of it. Interim measures are urgently needed, but the latest bout of fighting offers still more evidence that a rethink of the entire edifice of the peace process is long overdue.

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