Quo Vadis Palestine?

Abstract

Having received fairly little attention during the height of the Arab Spring, the Palestinian issue has once again become a focal point of Middle Eastern politics due to recent events in Palestine - namely, the failure of another round of US-promoted bilateral negotiations in May 2014, the Gaza War in summer 2014, several terrorist attacks, and Palestine's membership in the International Criminal Court, which commenced on 1 April 2015. Current events related to the Palestinian issue appear to be contradictory and have left observers rather puzzled about what the future holds for Palestine. This issue of the GIGA Focus outlines and critically discusses three possible scenarios: a two-state settlement, a one-state solution, and prolonged occupation. A two-state solution, which is based on the dominant paradigm that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict will be "solved" sooner or later, could result either from a (bilateral) negotiation process - as favoured by the leading Western powers - or from a successful unilateral state-building process in Palestine. A one-state solution (which is also a solution-based scenario) covering the territory of what is today Israel plus the occupied Palestinian territories (East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip) could take two forms: a binational democratic state of Israel/Palestine or a Jewish Israeli state. An alternative to these two solution-oriented scenarios is that, for the time being, occupation remains the form of government in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. This is based on the idea that, some adaptations to changing environments notwithstanding, occupation has proven to be robust since it was introduced following the June War of 1967.