Obama in the Middle East

President Barack Obama’s first trip to Israel since he arrived in the White House creates high expectations; the highest of them, which may reestablish negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, has very few possibilities. Iran and Syria are the other items on the agenda on which the greatest agreements could be achieved.

Obama will assure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he can count on the total support of the United States if the war in Syria threatens to hit Israel. The Israeli government shares Washington’s precautions of handing out weapons to groups that combat Bashar al-Assad today and could put Israel at risk tomorrow. Washington and Jerusalem would prefer that negotiations arise between Damascus and the opposing groups.

With respect to Iran, Obama insists Netanyahu not attack nuclear installations. The president believes that Tehran will not be able to develop nuclear weapons for a whole year. Without setting aside the option of force, he wants to give the negotiations a chance.

Netanyahu is playing the Iranian card so that Washington does not put pressure on the Palestinian problem and is trying to present himself as the politician that will save Israel from a second Holocaust. The prime minister does not want Iran to count on the nuclear capacity to make weapons of this type. Obama is flexible as long as Tehran obeys international controls that would prevent them from arming themselves. The Iranian government insists that its nuclear development has only civil ends.

Despite the fact that it has created confrontations between Obama and Netanyahu, the Palestinian matter will not be a priority on the agenda. The American president pressured the Israeli prime minister unsuccessfully between 2009 and 2011, but Netanyahu objects to the existence of a Palestine state. During his term, he has strengthened the expansion of settlements in the West Bank; he is laying the supposedly legal foundations for combating resolutions 242 and 476 of the United Nations, among others, and establishing the fact that it is the Palestinians, not the Jewish settlers, who are illegally occupying Israel’s land.

The Israeli government, commentators and governmental commissions are trying to change the conflict’s terminology, going from the term “military occupation” — recognized by international law as an illegal practice — to simply a “territorial dispute.” Resorting to nationalist and religious reasons, Netanyahu is the main protector of the settlers that progressively occupy the West Bank — half a million that live in Palestinian territories occupied in 1967 while they take Palestinian property house by house in East Jerusalem.

The occupation of the West Bank is a complicated system of roads, tunnels and controls (check-points) that connect the settlers amongst themselves and with the main cities. The “security barrier” or wall snakes through, dividing, isolating or capturing lands and villages. The Palestinians have serious problems with being misplaced from work, education centers and hospitals or with visiting relatives. Protests will cost them imprisonment.

The coalition of the new Israeli government represents the nationalist religious settlers, due to the pact that Netanyahu has made with the party Habayit Hayehudi, led by the millionaire settler Naftali Bennett. This denies any agreement with the Palestinians and proposes to annex 60 percent of the West Bank. The remaining 40 percent — fragmented and divided — would be run municipally by the Palestinian Authority.

Netanyahu’s government has authorized settlements to be built in the zone called E-1. This means that Jerusalem will be united with the gigantic settlement of Maale Adumim, making the geographic continuity of an eventual Palestinian state impossible. 196,000 Jewish people live in East Jerusalem, making it impossible to politically divide the city.

The solution from both states seems more nonviable each time. For some Palestinians, the next political fight will be for equal rights within a single state. In Israel, voices from the right proclaim that they must integrate the Palestinians, but without the same rights of citizenship as the Israelis; it may be a system of segregation.

Presently, around 12 million people inhabit Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Bennett’s proposal, which is Netanyahu’s, supposes that if Gaza is left isolated, Israel will control the Palestinian population by means of a repressive economic and administrative system that will be similar to South African apartheid. Together 6 million Israelis and 5.8 million (Palestinian) Arabs will live in Israel, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. At the end of this decade, the Arab population will be greater than the Jewish one. Within Israel, the religious nationalists and Orthodox Jews will soon exceed the secular ones in number.

Aluf Benn, director of the liberal Israeli newspaper Maaretz, wrote on March 11: “Netanyahu’s third government has a clear goal: to expand the settlements and achieve the vision of a million Jewish people living in Judea and Samaria. This magic number will wipe out the division of the territory and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state once and for all.”

A few days ago, in discussions with favorable Israeli activists and politicians on the solution from the two states, they showed their clear opposition to Obama’s demands that negotiations start again. They say Netanyahu’s government will accept but later tack on conditions and obstacles until everything would fail in a year. Negotiations with no sincere foundation will only create expectations that could create violence once frustrated.

Besides, people fear that President Obama will pressure the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to return to the dialogue even though Israel does not stop the settlements. The West Bank’s opinion is of skepticism toward a “peace process” that has not succeeded. The violence against the occupation is not an option due to the repressive Israeli capacity, but it is evident that Israel and the United States pay attention to the Palestinian matter when missiles are launched from Gaza. Non-violent resistance movements in the West Bank challenge the settlements and the Israeli security forces, but the violence is a ghost that is impossible to keep away.

Obama proposed the starting point of a pact in 2009 and 2011: Two states based on the green line of 1967 and an end to the colonization of the West Bank. The next step would be that West Jerusalem becomes the capital of the Palestinian state. From there, territorial exchanges could be negotiated, security with a peace force in the West Bank could be guaranteed and compensations for Palestinian refugees from 1948 and 1967 could also be guaranteed. The alternative is that the occupation, the inertia, the repression and the demography may worsen the conflict, making it irresolvable and dangerously violent.