ABSTRACT
Israel and Palestine are sliding down a slippery slope toward a one-state reality: apartheid, a binational entity or, more likely, something in-between. Negative Israeli and Palestinian attitudes toward one another are growing even as productive contact between the two peoples decreases. Israelis are still traumatized by the Second Intifada suicide bombings and the outcome of the 2005 Gaza withdrawal. They see no prospects for a two-state solution due to their perception of a fragmented PA, a divisive Palestinian leadership struggle, and PLO insistence on adhering to core narrative demands on narrative issues that deny Israel’s integrity as a Jewish state. The most recent attempt at a peace process, by John Kerry in 2013–2014, failed to perceive that the Oslo formula was no longer relevant and that the two sides’ leaders are incapable of – or not interested in – making the necessary compromises. Any first step toward a renewed process should distinguish between intractable pre-1967 narrative issues like the right of return, and manageable post-1967 issues like borders and security, and confine efforts strictly to the latter. Neither side appears interested. Instead, given the surrounding regional chaos, the West Bank Palestinian leadership pursues international steps to delegitimize Israel while Jerusalem expands settlements. In parallel, Gaza’s economic and humanitarian decline bespeaks disaster. Yet Israel continues to founder without a viable strategy for dealing with Gaza-based Hamas. In these sorry circumstances, Israel’s dominant pro-settler mainstream has produced a wide variety of formulae for facilitating or managing the one-state slide. None is strategically capable of preventing an eventual highly conflicted situation. Only a quantum leap of Middle East history, the kind the region is famous for, could conceivably do that. Banning such an unpredictable event, the outlook is grim.
