Nathan J Brown writes:

It is time to admit what most observers already know: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that diplomats have been dealing with for half a century is over. It is not that a solution has been found. Just the opposite: all the injustices and insecurities that afflict inhabitants of the region between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea are now so deeply ingrained in daily life that no diplomatic framework can address them now. This leaves some people far better off than others, of course—and it leaves many quite satisfied. But even the smug have cause for worry—less about their own lives and livelihood and more about the world to be inhabited by their children and grandchildren. And many others are left stateless, restricted in movement, harshly policed, and pondering how to provide for their family’s needs now rather than for future generations.

It no longer makes sense to talk about a “peace process” as though it might be fruitful to gather Israeli and Palestinian leaders one more time at Camp David or Taba. Instead, it is more useful to understand that the deep social and political divisions among the people of the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River have metastasized into intractable troubles akin to those of other times and places: the American South as the era of Reconstruction faded and Jim Crow laws were gradually imposed; the Indian subcontinent as the British Empire emerged too weak from World War II to sustain itself, giving way to violent conflicts and some outcomes that remain contentious today; and South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century with its racialized and ethnic divisions very deeply entrenched in law and practice but not yet formally systematized as apartheid.

Is this really the conclusion that most observers have come to? No, it is not a conclusion; instead, it is actually a starting point for most discussions—among Israelis and Palestinians, of course, who live these realities. But increasingly, scholars, analysts, and diplomats also frankly acknowledge the conflict’s transformation, at least behind closed doors. The extent of Israeli settlements in the West Bank is frequently cited as the reason for this change, and indeed, government-sponsored population movements contributed in an essential manner. But the one-state outcome has broad roots in the networks of internal and external control within the territory, the security regime, and the systems of laws and institutions that work in varying ways for different categories of inhabitants. Some of the practices are so deeply entrenched that they seem to be part of the natural landscape rather than political outcomes based on the accretion of decisions and policies, many of which are older than the people they govern. [Continue reading…]