British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband has said the United Kingdom will sanction illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, describing the move as “overdue” and necessary to “salvage” a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He made the comments on Tuesday as 11 nations joined the UK in supporting or considering curbs on trade in goods with settlements that are a barrier to a future Palestinian state. But analysts say the step is far from enough to drive momentum for Palestinian statehood, threatened by ever-expanding settlements in the West Bank and an increasingly hostile Israeli political environment.
Tahani Mustafa, a lecturer in international relations at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera the latest anti-settlement measures are “modest” and unlikely to have a significant impact on ambitions for Palestinian statehood. Much more decisive action is needed to salvage the two-state solution and a durable lasting solution to the conflict.” More than 30 years after the Oslo Accords set out a negotiating process aimed at resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel has remained the foundation of international efforts to forge peace. But since the Oslo process began in 1993, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, has ballooned from about 260,000 to more than 700,000, according to the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics, posing a glaring roadblock to the plan.
The challenge is not just the raw number of settlers, but their geographic spread. Today, many Israeli settlements are embedded deep inside West Bank areas that would be needed for a contiguous Palestinian state, including near major Palestinian urban centres such as Nablus, Salfit and Hebron. Israel’s recent E1 settlement plan, which would build thousands of illegal housing units between the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim and East Jerusalem, is a case in point.
The plan would effectively split the West Bank in two and fully sever it from East Jerusalem, which Palestinians seek as their future capital. Experts have long said Israel will need to dismantle some of its West Bank settlements, as it did in the Gaza Strip in 2005, to make room for a cohesive Palestinian state. But many Israeli settlements, especially those closer to Israel’s pre-war 1967 borders, would likely need to be addressed through land swaps.
However, such an arrangement – under which Israeli settlements close to the pre-1967 borders would become part of Israel and some “northern Arab-Israeli communities would be integrated into a Palestinian state” – would be “highly controversial” and face blowback from multiple communities, said Krieg. He argued that Israelis would be certain to oppose any forced withdrawal from West Bank settlements, while some “Arab-Israelis may not want to live within a Palestinian state”. Palestinian citizens of Israel make up approximately 21 percent of Israel’s overall population but are treated as second- or third-class citizens at the institutional level.
According to rights groups, several dozen Israeli laws actively discriminate against Palestinian citizens across a number of issues, including education and housing. Beyond the physical obstacle created by settlements is the Israeli political landscape, in which the idea of a Palestinian state has become toxic. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be among the most hardline in Israel’s history on the issue.
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