Illegitimate criticism on Israel:

On the other hand, activists for Palestinian rights who call for the state of Israel
to be destroyed, for example, by referring to a free Palestine “from the river to
the sea,” engage in illegitimate criticism.

Regardless of the circumstances of its creation, Israel is a sovereign state that

enjoys the right to exist. All sovereign states enjoy this right. Like any other
state, Israel also has the right to defend itself against attack.

To suggest that Jews have no right to live in Israel is also to engage in illegitimate
criticism. All states are permitted to determine who will live within their borders.
And suggesting that Jews should not live in Israel means advocating the creation
of a huge refugee population based on religio-ethnic criteria.

Some critics call Israel a colonial power. They assume that it is illegitimate for
any Jewish “settler” to live in Israel proper. This assumption is based in part on
the belief that Jews are not indigenous to the Middle East. But Jews have lived in
the Middle East for thousands of years.

Israel was created in 1948. An estimated 600,000 to 760,000 Palestinians fled or

were expelled in the subsequent Arab-Israeli war.

In later years, about 800,000 Jews left Arab countries. About two-thirds of them
settled in Israel, and the other third elsewhere. Many of these Jews had been
forcibly expelled.

Many Jews settled in Israel from Europe. It is important to remember the

context of European pogroms and Nazi genocide that obliged many of them to
flee.

This does not justify Israeli violations of the human rights of either Israeli Arabs
or of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. It merely provides some context as
to why so many Jews have settled in Israel.

Sanctions against Israel are legitimate:

Having said this, I agree with the opinion of the International Holocaust
Remembrance Alliance that it’s legitimate to criticize Israel as one might criticize
any other state. Thus the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against
Israel is legitimate, as long as it does not simultaneously question the right of
Israel to exist as a state. Many Jewish people both within and outside Israel who
are concerned about Palestinian rights support this movement.
Similarly, although it is not strictly accurate to call Israel an apartheid state, it is
within the realm of acceptable political rhetoric. Legally speaking, apartheid can
only occur within a state. So calling Israel an apartheid state suggests that it has
legal sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza.

A better way to judge Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank is through
universal standards. One such standard is international humanitarian law,
especially the fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. This convention prohibits
transfers of population, either from or into conquered territories. That means
Jewish settlements in the West Bank are illegal.

The International Court of Justice also adheres to universal standards. It ruled in

2004 that the wall separating Israel from the West Bank is illegal, because part of
it is built outside Israel’s territory. This wall frequently separates Palestinians
from their land, work opportunities and family members.

International human rights law is another universal standard that protects

Palestinians. Israel definitely denies some human rights to people in the West
Bank and Gaza. But so do Palestinians’ own political leaders, Hamas in Gaza and
Fatah in the West Bank. Both these political groups deny their subjects civil
liberties. They also use torture and arbitrary arrest, prohibited by international
human rights law.

Universal rules and responsibilities:

Serious concern for the human rights of Palestinians requires consideration of

all the states that violate their rights under international human rights and
humanitarian law.

These legal standards are universal. As long as they do not advocate eradication
of the state of Israel and/or expulsion of Israeli Jews, states and activists that
adhere to these standards are engaged in legitimate criticism.

Activists should respect Israel’s rights as a sovereign state. But Israel should
respect Palestinians’ rights under universal human rights and humanitarian law.
Israel is the most important of all the states in the Palestinian crisis.

Unfortunately, the government of Israel in 2019 was nationalist and

expansionist. There’s little hope as we head into 2020 that Israel will negotiate in
good faith with Palestinian leaders. Yet Israel will never be safe from attack until
it negotiates a peaceful settlement that gives Palestinians their own state.
Why is ownership of the West Bank so contested?

In May 1967, not a single Israeli lived in the West Bank, a hilly region about the
size of Delaware. It was home to roughly a million Palestinians, who had been
living under contested Jordanian control for two decades.

Israel conquered the West Bank during the Six-Day War in June 1967. Soon
afterwards, Israeli civilians began moving to the region, initially to areas like Kfar
Etzion that had been home to Jewish communities before Israel’s founding in
1948.

In 1968, a rabbi named Moshe Levinger and a small group of followers who

embraced a messianic version of religious Zionism moved into the ancient city
of Hebron, in the heartland of the West Bank. Hebron is a holy city for Jews
because it is believed to be the burial place of the Jewish patriarchs and
matriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah.

The population of Israelis living in the West Bank has mushroomed over the
years. An estimated 430,000 Israeli Jews now live in 132 officially recognized
“settlements” and in 121 unofficial “outposts” that require, but haven’t yet
received, government approval. Constituting about 15% of the West Bank’s total
population, these “settlers” live in their own communities, separate from the
area’s approximately 3 million Palestinian residents.

Are Israel’s West Bank settlements legal or not?

Most legal experts and the United Nations agree that Israeli settlements in the
West Bank violate international law.

The 1949 Geneva Convention, which Israel signed, prohibits an occupying state

from moving its own civilians into the territory it occupies. According to the
International Court of Justice, the UN’s main judicial body, the West Bank is
considered occupied territory because it was not part of Israel before the Israeli
army conquered it in 1967. Territorial conquest is also forbidden by
international law.

The Israeli government says that the Geneva Convention is not applicable to the

West Bank because it only refers to a state occupying another state’s land. Israel
considers the West Bank “disputed territory,” not occupied territory.
Further, Israel’s government has argued, even if the Geneva Convention did
apply, it would only prohibit forcible population transfers, like the mass
deportations carried out by Nazi Germany – not the voluntarily movement of
people into occupied territories.

The Trump administration’s new position that Israeli settlements are not illegal
boosts Israel’s claims about the West Bank. But it’s unlikely to legitimize Israeli
settlements in the eyes of the international community.

What is the two-state solution?

It helps to start with the problem the solution is meant to address: the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict. At its most basic level, the conflict is about how or whether to
divide territory between two peoples.

The territory question is also wrapped up in other overlapping but distinct issues:
whether the Palestinian territories can become an independent state and how to
resolve years of violence that include the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the
partial Israeli blockade of Gaza and Palestinian violence against Israelis.

The two-state solution would establish an independent Palestinian state alongside

Israel — two states for two peoples. In theory, this would win Israel security and
allow it to retain a Jewish demographic majority (letting the country remain
Jewish and democratic) while granting the Palestinians a state.

Most governments and world bodies have set achievement of the two-state
solution as official policy, including the United States, the United Nations, the
Palestinian Authority and Israel. This goal has been the basis of peace talks for
decades.

Why is the solution so difficult to achieve?

There are four issues that have proved most challenging. Each comes down to a set
of bedrock demands between the two sides that, in execution, often appear to be
mutually exclusive.

1. Borders: There is no consensus about precisely where to draw the line.

Generally, most believe the border would follow the lines before the Arab-Israeli
war of 1967, but with Israel keeping some of the land where it has built settlements
and in exchange providing other land to the Palestinians to compensate. Israel has
constructed barriers along and within the West Bank that many analysts worry
create a de facto border, and it has built settlements in the West Bank that will
make it difficult to establish that land as part of an independent Palestine. As time
goes on, settlements grow, theoretically making any future Palestinian state
smaller and possibly breaking it up into noncontiguous pieces.
2. Jerusalem: Both sides claim Jerusalem as their capital and consider it a center
of religious worship and cultural heritage. The two-state solution typically calls for
dividing it into an Israeli West and a Palestinian East, but it is not easy to draw the
line — Jewish, Muslim and Christian holy sites are on top of one another. Israel
has declared Jerusalem its “undivided capital,” effectively annexing its eastern
half, and has built up construction that entrenches Israeli control of the city.

3. Refugees: Large numbers of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes

in what is now Israel, primarily during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that came after
Israel’s creation. They and their descendants now number five million and believe
they deserve the right to return. This is a nonstarter for Israel: Too many
returnees would end Jews’ demographic majority and therefore Israel’s status as
both a Jewish and a democratic state.

4. Security: For Palestinians, security means an end to foreign military occupation.

For Israelis, this means avoiding a takeover of the West Bank by a group like
Hamas that would threaten Israelis (as happened in Gaza after Israel’s 2005
withdrawal). It also means keeping Israel defensible against foreign armies, which
often means requiring a continued Israeli military presence in parts of the West
Bank.

Why do some consider the two-state solution dead?

There is plenty of blame to go around. The Palestinian leadership is divided
between two governments that cannot come to terms. The leadership in the West
Bank lacks the political legitimacy to make far-reaching but necessary concessions,
and the leadership in Gaza does not even recognize Israel, whose citizens it
frequently attacks. The United States, which has brokered talks for years, has
taken more than a few missteps.

And most important, the current Israeli leadership, though it nominally supports
a two-state solution, appears to oppose it in practice.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister since 2009, endorsed the two-
state solution in a speech that year. But he continued to expand West Bank
settlements and, in 2015, said there would be “no withdrawals” and “no
concessions.”

Mr. Netanyahu appears personally skeptical of Palestinian independence. His

fragile governing coalition also relies on right-wing parties that are skeptical of or
outright oppose the two-state solution.

Israeli public pressure for a peace deal has declined. The reasons are complex:
demographic changes, an increasingly powerful settler movement, outrage at
Palestinian attacks such as a recent spate of stabbings, and bitter memories of the
Second Intifada in the early 2000s, which saw frequent bus and cafe bombings.
And the status quo has, for most Israelis, become relatively peaceful and bearable.
Many see little incentive for adopting a risky and uncertain two-state solution,
leaving Mr. Netanyahu with scant reason to risk his political career on one.

Are there other solutions?

There are, but they involve such drastic costs that the United States and many
other governments consider all but the two-state solution unacceptable.

There are multiple versions of the so-called one-state solution, which would join
all territories as one nation. One version would grant equal rights to all in a state
that would be neither Jewish nor Palestinian in character, because neither group
would have a clear majority. Skeptics fear this would risk internal instability or
even a return to war.

Another, advocated by some on the Israeli far right, would establish one state but
preserve Israel’s Jewish character by denying full rights to Palestinians. Under
this version, Israel would no longer be a democratic state.

With few viable or popular alternatives, the most likely choice may be to simply
maintain the status quo — though few believe that is possible in the long term.

What happens if there is no solution?

A common prediction, as Mr. Kerry stated, is that Israel will be forced to choose
between the two core components of its national identity: Jewish and democratic.

This choice, rather than coming in one decisive moment, would probably play out
in many small choices over a process of years. For instance, a 2015 poll by the
Israel Democracy Institute found that 74 percent of Jewish Israelis agreed that
“decisions crucial to the state on issues of peace and security should be made by a
Jewish majority.” That pollster also found that, from 2010 to 2014, Jewish Israelis
became much less likely to say that Israel should be “Jewish and democratic,” with
growing factions saying that it should be democratic first or, slightly more
popular, Jewish first.

Many analysts also worry that the West Bank government, whose scant remaining
legitimacy rests on delivering a peace deal, will collapse. This would force Israel to
either tolerate chaos in the West Bank and a possible Hamas takeover or enforce a
more direct form of occupation that would be costlier to both parties.

This risk of increased suffering, along with perhaps permanent setbacks in the
national ambitions of both Palestinians and Israelis, is why Nathan Thrall, a
Jerusalem-based analyst with the International Crisis Group, told me last year,
“Perpetuating the status quo is the most frightening of the possibilities.”