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Behind the glare of anxious optimism hides the question of how to prevent this all from happening again.

The effort to transform last week’s fragile agreement into a lasting ceasefire suffers from the conviction on both sides that there can be no shared future: cynicism that the international community has stoked over three decades by insisting on a two-state solution while demonstrating a complete unwillingness to stop Israel’s unceasing settlement construction and dispossession of Palestinians. The peace process consequently became just another front in the conflict instead of being a forum for its resolution. The parties didn’t develop their ability to overcome disputes; they mastered how to maximize future optionality. We should therefore expect that the Palestinians and Israelis now negotiating in Sharm al-Sheikh are not laying a foundation for peace, but seeking an advantaged position in yet another episode of war.

Despite this long-running policy failure, Western powers continue calling for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. They must stop.

The U.S. and Europe should declare themselves agnostic to the exact structure of the final outcome and focus instead on taking continued colonization of Palestine off the table. They should force Israel—under threat of economic sanctions—to begin removing all settlements built in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. They should pursue this policy irrespective of the behavior of either party, and independently of security matters.

What didn’t work

In 1978, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin resolved their countries’ differences in a landmark agreement based on a “Land-for-Peace” framework: Israel returned much of the land it had occupied in the 1973 war with Egypt in exchange for formal recognition and an end to hostilities. The United States, which served as mediator, sweetened the deal with billions in ongoing military aid to both countries.

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. mediators approaching Israel and the Palestinians reached for exactly this mechanism in the late 1980s, after the First Intifada proved that ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories was unsustainable.⁰ In this new context, Land-for-Peace meant that Israel would gradually withdraw from occupied territories as Palestinian leadership demonstrated its ability to prevent militants from attacking Israelis.

But the Israel-Egypt and Israel-Palestinian structures were divergent in critical ways. First, Anwar Sadat’s Egypt was a centrally controlled nation-state with a firm monopoly on use of force. Palestine was not. When talks first began in the early ‘90s, its de facto heads of state lived in exile and Palestinian armed groups operated with a great deal of independence. Sadat could provide security assurances that the Palestinian leadership could not. Second, Begin’s Israel had little interest in keeping control of the Sinai peninsula, with its vast, notoriously difficult-to-police territory. The West Bank, by contrast, was both strategically significant and deeply connected to Israel’s national myth. The Sinai was a negotiating chip. The West Bank was a prize.

These differences inverted the Land-for-Peace dynamic. Israel prioritized territorial expansion, so linking settlement growth to the peace process in fact discouraged Israel from allowing those talks to succeed. Palestinians, by signing onto this approach, gave Israel the ability to renege on its own commitments in response to Palestinian violence–over which Palestinian leadership had limited control– legitimating further land acquisition.

This fundamental misalignment cascaded through the diplomatic process. Palestinian leadership had to build out an entire civil government and security apparatus just to meet its obligations under the various agreements. State-building is a gargantuan challenge in the best of times, but it’s especially difficult under occupation, when power struggles inevitably involve confrontation with the occupier. Negotiators pushed issues at the crux of the conflict—borders, the Palestinian right of return, and sharing Jerusalem—into the future, and convinced themselves that they could address settlements as part of a final status agreement,⁰ thereby delaying confrontation with the powerful pro-settlement interest groups.

Jewish extremists and Palestinian militant groups who opposed the two-state model had ample opportunity to disrupt the peace process using violence. Meanwhile, the growth of the settlers’ political power consistently outpaced peacemaking, encouraging conservative Israeli leaders to continue slow-walking the peace effort.

A framework for progress

What should we do instead? An effective policy must be built on the four following principles: 1) it must be grounded in the contemporary reality of the conflict, 2) it must obstruct initiatives that are fundamentally incompatible with the minimum viable solution, 3) it must be extremely robust to disruption, and 4) it must leave the determination of final status to the parties.

We know the following to be true:

Palestinians, like every human population in history, will continue to resist, often violently, if they don’t see a credible alternative path to a free and secure future. Any successful policy must substantially and visibly remove the obstacles to their eventual freedom and security.
The continued growth of Israeli settlements is inherently incompatible with that future. Israeli neighborhoods spread throughout Palestinian-controlled territories require Israel to maintain the occupation, and therefore to ensure apartheid at best and settler colonialism at worst. As I explain in the previous essay: "Permanent control requires permanent military occupation. There isn’t any other paradigm under which nearly a million Israeli citizens could live in cities and towns connected by Israeli highways, served by Israeli utilities, and governed by Israeli law without actually living within Israel. The occupation is apartheid because the settlements require it to be permanent." ⁰
Israel will not end the occupation until they trust that Palestinians won’t attack them. The traditional approach to addressing this problem has consisted of highly fraught security cooperation arrangements⁰ and insistence on ever-more ludicrous diplomatic declarations.⁰ The reality is that it’s impossible for Palestinians to provide sufficient assurances to Israel because it is impossible to guarantee the absence of a future attack. Any viable approach therefore needs to allow for the occupation to wind down gradually.
Occupation can only be understood as temporary, and therefore compatible with a viable future for Palestinians, if Israel begins executing a plan to remove the settlements. As long as the settlements remain, Israel’s security activity is indistinguishable from an effort to cow the population into accepting dispossession. Unconditionally reversing that dispossession–removing the settlements–would therefore fundamentally change the nature of the occupation without requiring an immediate change to Israel’s security posture.
The settlements provide Israel negligible security benefit and create a significant security cost. Settlements are civilian infrastructure. Israel commits significant resources to providing security for the 700,000 people distributed around the West Bank and all the roads and utilities that connect them. Israeli politicians have historically argued that the settlements create a security buffer between Jordan and Israel Proper, but Israel’s contemporary relationship with Jordan has proven extremely robust.⁰ Furthermore, Israel’s failure to establish a lasting peace with Palestinians is the single biggest obstacle to deepening relations with every one of its neighbors.⁰
The parties hate each other. Both populations are at least a generation away from being able to trust anything the other says. Any approach that relies on near-term cooperation will fail.

This reality offers a straight-forward formulation:

Palestinians will not accept apartheid (or worse) and Israelis will not tolerate insecurity → The settlements necessitate apartheid, and they don’t keep Israelis safe → Forcing Israel to remove the settlements rolls back apartheid without demanding changes to Israel’s security posture.

Eliminating the settlement movement, and with it the question of territorial control, forces the parties to engage each other purely on the basis of security. Under these conditions, Israel can justify the costs of occupation only by the degree to which it keeps its citizens safe from attack, and Palestinians can restrict armed resistance without accepting creeping dispossession. This transition from the Land-for-Peace paradigm towards what we might call a “Security-for-Security” paradigm would reconfigure incentives such that pursuing a sustainable negotiated agreement becomes the path of least resistance.

Ensuring robustness

No process dependent on trust can function where trust does not exist. A robust approach will therefore be one that reliably addresses each party’s central insecurity independent of the other party’s behavior, so that progress proceeds regardless. The desired state is as follows:

Security

Land

Palestinians

Violent resistance is not necessary to prevent further dispossession, nor does it offer opportunity to disrupt progress towards a negotiated agreement.

Territories occupied in 1967 return to them by default, ending the threat of further dispossession whether or not negotiations proceed (zero trust required).

Israelis

Retain control of their own security (zero trust required)

They evacuate the territories occupied in 1967. Israel loses its primary reason to sustain the occupation.

Removing the need for trust between the primary parties does not eliminate the role of trust entirely. The U.S. and the E.U. will need to sustain their demands for the removal of Israeli settlements for decades, meaning that Palestinians will have to place their faith in a coalition of countries they have much reason to doubt.

Here again, we see a reason to separate territory from security. When these elements are connected, militant attacks on Israel weaken the resolve of foreign policymakers to maintain pressure on Israel. When decoupled, security violations can be addressed directly through security-oriented actions, while the anti-settlement policy remains off-limits.

Decoupling also limits diplomatic wiggle room. Agreements with a high degree of interdependency among components provide opportunity to renege on obligations. Separation ensures that any meaningful reduction of pressure on Israel’s settlement activity becomes highly visible, and therefore scrutable.

This approach does not directly address matters of security and use of force, it merely isolates them. Under the Land-for-Peace paradigm, setbacks in the security domain (terrorist attacks and state violence) effectively justified setbacks in the land domain (e.g. more settlement) making progress progressively harder to achieve. The security-for-security paradigm narrows the conflict to a more tractable balance-of-power matter, while the contemporaneous anti-settlement policy prevents one party’s power from accumulating in the form of apartheid or settler colonialism. Put more simply: Temporary checkpoints can be added and removed, hostages can be taken and returned, use of force can be titrated. New neighborhoods on occupied land, by contrast, become indelible facts.

Prescription

Disclaimer: the approach outlined below focuses on a long-term framework, and therefore does not address the immediate question of how to hold accountable the parties to the war crimes committed in the past two years. That is important, but not the subject of this essay.

The United States exclusively has the necessary influence to force Israel to retreat from its settlement policy. It should lead international partners in mandating and enforcing the following:

Territory

The Israeli government must present and begin executing a plan to remove all the settlements in the West Bank and the Golan Heights (and may not build any in Gaza) within a twenty-year timeframe. Jerusalem, which Israel has officially but illegally annexed, may be subject to an extended timeline given the difficulty of separating the city. Israel may negotiate an alternative to partition directly with the Palestinians, but the 1967 border should serve as the default, perhaps with guaranteed international access to the holy sites.

UN Resolution 242⁰ must be the international point of reference and the legal basis for U.S. policy. It is imperfect, but in the anarchy and relativism inherent to geopolitics, it is the closest approximation of a neutral position.

Security

The removal of the settlements largely transforms the occupation from a tool of colonialism to one of security. That being the case, the international community should treat it as part of separate security negotiations between Israel and Palestinian leadership. More broadly, the U.S. and Europe can support Israel’s security, but must condition any arms sales or transfers on the same human rights requirements to which it subjects every other country.

Sanctions

Israel is highly integrated into the global economy and its government is subject to the judgment of a voting electorate. Sanctions are therefore likely to be an extremely effective, non-kinetic way to force compliance with the above-stated policy on territory. These sanctions should have a pre-determined escalation schedule tied to Israel’s progress in removing settlements. The principle of decoupling land from security dictates that these sanctions should focus on Israel’s civilian economy, not its military. The goal is to give the broader Israeli population, not just the settlers themselves, a political stake in the fate of the settlements.

Negotiations and Final Status

The international community must remain strictly agnostic to the specific outcome of any political resolution. However, it should set certain requirements for whatever agreement the parties eventually sign in order to ensure that neither threat of force nor collusion among the parties results in an unsustainable final status.

Any agreement must respect the right of all residents to equal treatment under a sovereign government accountable to them. No party should be permitted to agree to terms that leave a portion of the population under foreign occupation or subject to second-class citizenship.
In the event of partition, Israel and the Palestinian leadership may negotiate land exchanges of up to 10% of the landmass of occupied territories as defined in Resolution 242.
While some amount of internal relocation may be necessary, no group of residents may be relocated out of Historic Palestine as part of a final status agreement.

Challenges

There are reasonable challenges to the proposal outlined above. I will address some of them here.

“This is just the two-state solution by another name!”

It is not. First, the proposal hold the parties accountable for the territorial changes made since 1967, but that it does not pre-define an outcome. Doing so, returns diplomatic leverage to the Palestinians, who can use it to negotiate any number of solutions.

Second, this approach reverses the impact of time. Rolling back the settlements deescalates the conflict even in the absence of an agreement, allowing for intermediate stages. It may, for example, be productive to begin with the establishment of separate states before moving to an E.U.-like federation model.

“This plan is unrealistic. The U.S. will never impose sanctions on Israel.”

First, to accept the premise of this challenge is to surrender any constructive influence on the conflict at all. Sanctions are the most measured, least destructive way to apply sufficient pressure to Israel. If we can’t do that, we can’t do anything.

Second, the significant changes in American and European public sentiment towards Israel suggest that sanctions, particularly paired with a continued security guarantee, may soon become politically acceptable. This essay is an effort to advocate for exactly that.

“Israel fully removed settlements from Gaza in 2005, only to see a deterioration in the security situation. Why should we expect withdrawal from the West Bank to be different?”

Israel didn’t only remove the settlers in 2005, it also withdrew its occupying force to the border, where it imposed strict controls on the import and export of goods, helping to impoverish the Strip. The policy proposed above, by contrast, separates the removal of the settlers from the question of how and when to end the occupation, allowing for a gradual adjustment of security measures.

Furthermore, the 2005 withdrawal was by no means a step to ending the colonization. More settlers moved into the West Bank that year than were removed from Gaza.⁰ Palestinians had no reason to see this as progress.

“The occupation, even without the settlements, is still apartheid, but this plan does not explicitly end it. What if the Israelis remove the settlements but maintain the occupation?”

I have previously argued that sustaining the settlements is the primary motivation for continuing the occupation, and that without them, Israel would have little reason to continue committing massive resources to controlling Palestinians. I may yet be wrong, but removing the settlers remains a necessary step to making the conflict more tractable. Changing Israel’s security policy is easier than both changing Israel’s security policy and relocating 700,000 people. If more pressure is needed to end the occupation, that pressure can be applied.

“This plan does not include provisions that would force Palestinians to stop attacking Israel. What happens if the violence simply continues?”

The proposal accounts for this possibility by separating matters of security from matters of territory. If attacks persist, so would the security apparatus that defends against them. It also assumes that Palestinians, like most humans, will gravitate towards a peaceful and prosperous future if given a believable chance to do so. Evidence supports this. Ami Ayalon, a former director of Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, explained that the number of attempted terrorist attacks plummeted in the late 90s, attributing the phenomenon to widespread Palestinian support for a negotiated solution with Israel.⁰

Conclusion

Calls for a Palestinian state represent–after three decades of diplomatic deterioration–the naivety and perfidy of the West. It may ultimately be the optimal solution, but insisting on it is destructive. Mediators will only be helpful if they focus on rolling back colonization both to demonstrate commitment to their stated principles and to allow time for deescalation.

The international community can set and enforce the rules, but the resolution itself must be organic. Israelis and Palestinians must be allowed to probe their various possible futures and to discover the limits and tradeoffs of each possibility. The international community can facilitate this process by using sanctions to force Israel to remove the settlements and assigning security matters to a separate process. Palestinians, no longer threatened with dispossession, will experience significantly less of the desperation that drives armed resistance. Israelis, no longer able to continue colonizing the Occupied Territories, will have little incentive to maintain the occupation beyond what is strictly necessary for security. Under this paradigm, gravity pulls both parties toward sustainable way to live together.

The parties can of course negotiate alternative borders—or no borders at all—if they so choose, but setting a firm default territorial outcome is the necessary precondition. It ensures that Palestinians maintain access to a sustainable free future, and in doing so, allows time for the generational change that will likely be required for progress towards anything negotiated.

Self-determination is as fundamental to compromise as it is to freedom. A prescribed solution, however designed, shifts the focus of the parties towards lobbying the mediator and away from the constraints that will proscribe any outcome: Israelis will not prematurely loosen their grip on security. Palestinians will not accept domination.

Call for sanctions, not a Palestinian state

The West continues insisting on the two state solution. It should stop. Instead, it should focus on context and accountability.

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