There is a story of oil in the Middle East, and this one too has a conflict attached to it.
But it has nothing to do with the petro-dollar or the oil economy, this region isn’t in the Gulf. And even more tellingly, this region is referred to as a region or the occupied territories since it isn’t formally a country. This area is ensconced in the Levant, in the Occupied West Bank.
As the famed Egyptian comedian Bassem Yusuf writes, olive oil is squeezed from villages across the West Bank. “Olive oil is the healing remedy for all things in the West Bank. Oil is as old as the earth is there for you. They are not just olive trees. They are family. How can you uproot a member of the family and call this land yours? I have no idea.”
There is a reason why the Israel-Palestine debate is the most intractable conflict on the planet. As Tom Friedman in the New York Times writes, “I have always believed that you can reduce the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the early 1900s to one line: conflict, timeout, conflict, timeout, conflict, timeout”.
“Conflict” is a keyword, as some international scholars point out that conflict is an egregious and disingenuous term since conflict would involve two warring parties, not an asymmetrical situation, where one side has the most powerful sophisticated military with the latest tech weaponry and the other living under years of a what many experts have described as a settler-colonial apartheid-like situation.
I long believed that to understand the most intractable debate I needed to have a Ph.D. in Middle East studies or the origins of the Israeli state, but my visit to the West Bank in 2018, is summed by author and journalist Ta-Nahesi Coates who argues that in the ten days he spent in the Occupied Territories, what shocked him the most was the word complexity and complicated and it would be hard to discern right from wrong and go down the two sides of the story rabbit hole. But he said, “I immediately understood what was going on over there, the reality of the occupation became clear and very eerily redolent of the Jim Crow laws of the South” that precluded Black Americans from having the same liberties as their White counterparts.
The aftermath of the horrific October 7 attacks has mobilised masses, rallies, and protests the world over. A string of antisemitism and Islamophobic attacks are on the rise, as the larger conflict comes into view on campuses and elsewhere. Adam Sewer reminds us in this telling Atlantic article, that Judaism and Zionism are not to be conflated. The former is the oldest of the Abrahamic faiths, over 3,000 years old, while the other was a political movement codified by the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl in 1897 following the publication of his book Der Judenstaat or The Jewish State. Herzl believed in a homeland for the Jewish people in response to rampant antisemitism in Europe. Herzl, of course, never lived to see the creation of an Israeli State.
Sewer added, “It is not anti-Semitic to want equal rights for all in Jerusalem, in Tel Aviv, in Gaza, in Ramallah and to oppose a political arrangement that has resulted in what Israeli human-rights groups justifiably describe as a form of apartheid”. Sewer forcefully adds: “There is nothing anti-Semitic about those who believe that the existence of a religious or ethnically defined state is inherently racist. It is a cruel absurdity to demand of Palestinians that they not only acquiesce to Israel’s existence but also actively support the idea of an ethnically defined state that excludes them from equal citizenship”.
Talking Two-State, Abetting One-State
Meanwhile, Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has been busy with diplomatic trips to Israel and neighboring countries, in a quest to avoid the region lighting up like a tinderbox. The US State Department issued an anodyne homily stating “we are focused on setting the conditions for durable and sustainable peace and security. The United States continues to believe the best viable path – the only viable path – is through a two-state solution.”
The problem is that there has been no timeline and no definite action plan. Not since the Oslo Accords of 1993 and the Camp David Summit of 2000, both President Bill Clinton’s lasting legacy, have there been any overtures from the Israeli side. Since 1967, the global community has called for a two-state solution. But instead since Oslo 93, it’s been clever by half measures – more land grabs, more illegal settlements, an increased cycle of violence, all in the West Bank, an area sans Hamas, debunking the myth that it’s all about Hamas. Hence, Bassem Yusuf says, the best recruiter for Hamas is Israel, with such continued acts of settler violence and dehumanisation; as Gazans, many of whom count their final breaths before dying in Israeli missile strikes.
Hamas is deplorable, but such militant groups are not uncommon in FCV or fragile, conflict, violent zones, where dehumanisation and military occupation continues. Hamas came to fruition in 1987, before the first Intifada, four decades after the state of Israel was created. The group was a product of Israel seeking a counterweight to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as Yasser Arafat was then the bete-noire. Tel Aviv’s Taliban moment, akin to Washington funding the Mujahideen to fight the Soviets. We see how that chapter turned out.
It’s hard to believe Washington has been serious about a two-state solution while doing all it can to abet one-state. The Biden administration, as the Trump administration would have, has continued to add to the coffers of Israel’s war machinery.
Furthermore, the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who inked the Oslo Accords, was killed, not by Hamas, but by a Zionist extremist named Yigal Amir, in defiance of the Oslo Accords.
The sentiment is explained by this New Yorker interview with Daniella Weiss, one of the leaders of Israel’s settlement movement in the West Bank. Her interview chilling reveals, why the far-right government in the Knesset is disingenuous about a two-state solution. She reveals, "In Israel, there’s a lot of support for settlements, and this is why there have been right-wing governments for so many years. The world, especially the United States, thinks there is an option for a Palestinian state, and, if we continue to build communities, then we block the option for a Palestinian state. We want to close the option for a Palestinian state, and the world wants to leave the option open. It’s a very simple thing to understand."
“A ceasefire is the only way that any solution can be achieved,” says Ben-Artzi, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s niece and a political scientist. She explains why military actions will never resolve this conflict.
The bottom line remains that the global community needs to give Palestinians a reason to live for and not die for.
In a land that is their own but no longer their own, Palestinians can hardly be expected to raise an olive branch of peace when their olive farms are routinely taken by force.
Akshobh Giridharadas is a Washington DC-based former journalist. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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