It’s too late for a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine

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The role of these rabbis in controlling the army raises the question: if a two-state agreement miraculously emerged out of the current rampant violence, what are the realities of putting it into place?

In a survey, 40 percent of national religious respondents said that IDF units should refuse to evacuate settlers if their rabbis ordered them to.

Could the IDF be relied upon to evacuate Jerusalem and West Bank settlements — as they did in Gaza in 2005 — with battalion commanders who are increasingly religious?

Best estimates are that about 100,000 settlers would have to be evacuated from the West Bank under any such agreement.

There are no firm estimates of the number of armed settlers who are likely to resist evacuation. However, between 30 percent and 40 percent of West Bank settlers can be considered “ideological.”

“Ideological settlers,” according to Oded Eran, who served as head of Israel’s negotiating team from 1999 to 2000, “are the toughest.“ In an interview for my book, Eran pointed out that this group tends to live deeper inside the West Bank. And, for ideological reasons, a small number may take the law into their own hands.

A call for evacuation could lead to violence between the settlers and the IDF and violence between settlers and the Palestinian population. “This is going to be a long, painful and expensive operation,” Eran said.

In 2010, Amos Harel, a military correspondent for Haaretz, the liberal Israeli newspaper, asked, “Has the IDF become an army of settlers?”

Harel noted the potential for mass disobedience in the face of such orders was making many Israeli politicians and senior officers have second thoughts before ordering soldiers to take actions against settlers. In the succeeding five years, with the continuing disproportionate influx of settler recruits to the IDF, the question is more pertinent.

Would an Israeli prime minister risk giving such an order, unsure whether it would be implemented? Such an order could tear apart the cohesiveness of Israel, already rife with multiple fault lines.

Right now, the weight of uncertainties surrounding a two-state solution seems to outweigh the benefits.

The future? There will be no mitigation of present trends. With every passing year using the IDF to evacuate settlers will become more problematic, and evacuation less likely.

Padraig O’Malley is John Joseph Moakley Distinguished Professor of Peace and Reconciliation, University of Massachusetts Boston. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation (under Creative Commons-Attribution/No derivative).