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The embattled and weary Two-State Solution is still the only game in town

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By: Charles P. Kirchofer

The West Bank barrier near Bethlehem. Photo by Marc Venezia, creative commons license, 2007
The West Bank barrier near Bethlehem. Photo by Marc Venezia, creative commons license, 2007

With the Oslo Accords all but dead and support for a two-state solution declining among both Israelis and Palestinians, it is tempting to abandon the idea altogether. There is no conceivable alternative, however. The longer two states are not a reality in Israel/Palestine, the worse things will become—especially for Israel.

In a book whose very title accepted that it would be controversial, the Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld argues: ‘History shows that walls, provided people are prepared to do what is necessary to defend them and prevent other people from crossing them, by using lethal force if necessary, work.’ This is controversial because, as the photo above suggests, people tend to associate walls with oppression and, above all, Cold War Berlin. Yet the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, as promulgated by the Oslo Accords signed between Israel and the PLO in the 1990s, implies separation. Given the tensions between Israelis and Palestinians, such a separation would almost certainly involve additional wall and fence building, unless more creative, but unlikely, solutions are found. Wall or not, the Oslo Accords were a reaction to the recognition that the status quo in Israel/Palestine had become untenable. Recent violence shows that the status quo is once again, or more accurately still, untenable. It also shows that the two-state solution is still the only game in town.

The arguments against the two-state solution sometimes come from ideology, but more often from shear exasperation. There was great hope for two states in the 1990s. But as the former head of Israel’s internal security service puts it: ‘There was no good faith. […] We wanted security and we got more terrorism. They wanted a state and got more settlements.’ Gaza is now controlled by a group that Israel, the United States, and most European governments consider to be a terrorist group and that launches rockets on Israeli communities. With this in mind, many Israelis have concluded that ‘land for peace’ does not work. After all, the West Bank is much closer to the bulk of Israel’s population. If a group like Hamas took over there and decided to attack Israelis, their ability to do so would be much greater than it is from Gaza.

Palestinians, meanwhile, hear platitudes about two states but see little change since the 1990s, except for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. Furthermore, As Kobi Michael, former Deputy Director and head of the Palestinian desk at Israel’s Ministry for Strategic Affairs points out, many Palestinians have concluded that that withdrawal came about as a result of the violence of the Second Intifada.[1] Some therefore question the wisdom of ‘peace for land’, as little seems to have come from it. Finally, on a purely technical basis, the spread of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the growth in the number of settlers there has made agreeing on borders devilishly difficult.

All of these arguments are true, and yet they are essentially irrelevant without an alternative. The only other possibility would be a one-state solution. This would lead Israel to become either a state with a minority Jewish population, the very situation Israel was founded to avoid, or an apartheid state, with Palestinians as second-class citizens. As difficult as a two-state solution seems, both of those alternatives are worse for Israelis (though arguably not for Palestinians). A binational state with fewer rights for Palestinians would also be unacceptable to Israel’s European and US allies because they could not be seen presiding over a slide to an overtly racist form of government. As US Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman warned in April: If Israel ‘is seen to be stepping back from its commitment to a two-state solution that will make our job in the international arena much tougher… it will be harder for us to prevent internationalizing the conflict’. Israel’s very survival and legitimacy are therefore predicated on an eventual two-state solution.

All is not lost. Israelis and Palestinians have come close to agreement before, including on what is perhaps the most contentious issue: Jerusalem. They came closest in 2000, when US President Clinton presented them with the so-called ‘Clinton Parameters’, which called for the partition of Jerusalem, including its holy sites, between Israelis and Palestinians. Most Israelis do not live in settlements and most (still) support a two-state solution in principle, as is the case with Palestinians. Palestinians’ faith in ‘peace for land’ would increase if they saw progress on gaining sovereignty over more of it. Israelis’ faith in ‘land for peace’ would increase if they saw less violence. Unfortunately, violence is currently riding high, with 11 Israelis and 62 Palestinians killed since September, and shows no sign of abating. Israelis will rightly be concerned that picking up negotiations again now will reward violence.

The time to move would ideally have been during a period of relative calm. Israel is now building a wall to separate two sections of Jerusalem from each other, one Jewish, one Arab. If van Creveld is right and such measures eventually bring down tensions, such a calm could return. Both parties would be wise to seize upon the opportunity to settle the issue once and for all. As hard as it would be all involved, the alternatives are either horrid or the products of wishful thinking. ‘Two states for two peoples’ is the only way.

Charles Kirchofer is finishing up his PhD on Israel’s deterrence policies towards Hamas at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He can be found on Twitter @CPKirchofer and his blog: www.charles-kirchofer.com

Ideas are bulletproof; why we should still be expecting Anonymous

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By Ben Collins:

ADYlOhh
Anonymous November 5th protests [photo by Ben Collins; published by permission]
In 2013 the FBI declared that the hacker activist network Anonymous had been dismantled due to the arrests of ‘major players in the Anonymous movement.’[1] Others have decried the dilution of causes and foci among those who consider themselves Anonymous,[2] as well as the allegedly hypocritical use of personal information on heavily monitored social media platforms.[3]

However, among the widespread outcries against Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, Anonymous has once again been making headlines. On July 25th 2014 22 year-old Tayeb Abu Shehada was shot and killed in the West Bank in a clash between Israeli soldiers and stone-throwing protesters. Reports and alleged pictures of Tayeb show that he was wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, unifying common symbol of those who consider themselves as part of Anonymous.[iv] In response to both Tayeb’s death and the wider context of Operation Protective Edge, the ‘AnonGhost’ hacker group interrupted access to Israeli government and military websites and claim to have hacked some of Israel’s banking systems.[v] Without understanding Anonymous’ history and development, it is difficult to determine whether these events are part of an overall reawakening and remobilisation of Anonymous, or whether they are simply ‘business as usual’ for a largely ephemeral and intangible actor.

Anonymous emerged from the image-board website 4chan.org which was created in 2003. Initially conducting limited raids on other web communities for both the entertainment value and to document for posterity, these attacks escalated in scale and sophistication over the next four years. Anonymous’ breakthrough moment was a protest campaign in early 2008 against the Church of Scientology, dubbed ‘Project Chanology’ after the Church removed a video from YouTube showing Tom Cruise talking about Scientology for breach of copyright. Anonymous subsequently campaigned worldwide to raise awareness of the Church’s habitual censoring of information online, their litigious pursuit of detractors and the numerous suspicious deaths that are allegedly attributed to Church activities and members.

Project Chanology boosted Anonymous’ support and popularity beyond their original constituency, starting an upward trajectory of actions and campaigns. In 2010 Anonymous struck again, this time against the entertainment industry for the removal of several file-sharing websites, which in turn snowballed into ‘Operation Avenge Assange’, attacking Mastercard, Amazon and Paypal for freezing Wikileaks’ financial services.

This momentum continued into 2011 thanks to the Arab Spring. Anonymous worked to help activists circumvent internet censorship and attack government websites in Tunisia and Egypt. From these events the hacker splinter group LulzSec emerged, who in the first half of 2011 went on a 50-day hacking spree against governments, security services and corporations around the world. As one would expect, this campaign gave LulzSec, and vicariously Anonymous, a long list of powerful enemies. During this period Hector Monsegur aka ‘Sabu’, one of LulzSec’s members, was caught by the FBI and turned into an informant. Information he supplied helped authorities in the UK and US arrest the rest of LulzSec and a number of other prominent activists such as Jeremy Hammond.

The combination of the events surrounding LulzSec and the widening spectrum of causes being championed by those considering themselves Anonymous meant that many of their activities moved towards the path of least resistance. These were either humanitarian causes such as Operation Safe Winter which sought to raise money and awareness for the homeless during the winter months, or attacking targets who were unlikely to respond with the levels of legal reciprocity as were faced by LulzSec and their predecessors. These targets have included the government websites of Syria, North Korea, Russia, as well as the ‘500 plus’ Israeli websites hit by the AnonGhost team.[vi]

The arrests of individuals or small groups may have impacted overall morale, but they fail to stop the spread of the ideas behind the mask. The ubiquity of the internet means that protest and resistance movements can organise and communicate instantaneously on a global scale, connecting disparate movements and groups that otherwise would have had a much harder time finding others sympathetic to their cause.

This cellular and largely independent nature, coupled with the digital Matryoshka doll of IRC internet chatrooms and networks makes Anonymous very resilient – they should not be viewed of as a conventionally organised movement or group. The idea of Anonymous is more akin to a brand or franchise; a patron collective nomenclature which is invoked to strengthen solidarity and create an identifiable in-group among widely disparate causes and beliefs. This unifying common denominator brings ‘concerned citizens’ together against a system they deem unfair and impossible to change through traditional political channels. As such, individuals and groups adopt the common visual language of Anonymous as a tool of solidarity and recognition with other activists: Tayeb fought and died while wearing the Guy Fawkes mask, but it is highly unlikely that he was involved in Chanology, Operation Payback or LulzSec, for example.

Ultimately, the AnonGhost attacks are not a precursor to some new galvanisation of all the widely disparate cells, nodes and individuals who consider themselves Anonymous. Tayeb’s death will fade from collective memory and at best become a brief mention on Anonymous’ Wikipedia page. It is highly unlikely that the attacks carried out by the AnonGhost hackers will have any long-term effect on Israel’s military or political policy. However Anonymous is an actor with a completely different political agenda and language; reducing complex arguments to sticky, violent images which dominate and subvert conventionally written and spoken political discourse. These images diffuse through social networks and the wider media, resulting in self-generating feedback loops of outrage and opposition to perceived injustices. If indeed ‘the screen is our generation’s North German Plain’,7 then this ability to wield and deploy such images and information to the wider public, outmanoeuvring states and governments on the way is a significant capability that we would do well to continue to expect.

 

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Ben Collins is a 2nd year PhD student looking at hacker activists in comparison to 19th century Anarchism. Other focus includes how war and conflict are portrayed in videogames, as well as how players interact and question both the events in them and the relevant analogous real-world wars, conflicts and insurgencies we see in comparison.

 

NOTES

[1] Smith, G., FBI Agent: We’ve Dismantled The Leaders Of Anonymous, The Huffington Post 21/08/13, accessed 06/08/14 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/21/anonymous-arrests-fbi_n_3780980.html
[2] Anonymous, Anonymous R.I.P., AnonUKRadio 21/08/13, accessed 21/08/14 http://anonukradio.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/anonymous-rip.html
[3] The pages of at least two Anonymous Facebook groups have been verified by Facebook, a process normally reserved for celebrities or brands/products as, ironically in the case of Anonymous, ‘having an authentic identity’.
[iv] Gilbert, D., Hacktivists Hit Back at Israel After Death of Anonymous Member in West Bank, International Business Times 28/07/14, accessed 06//08/14 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/hacktivists-hits-back-israel-after-death-anonymous-member-west-bank-1458623
[v] AnonGhost Team, BREAKING NEWS: #OpSaveGaza The Biggest Bank System in Israel Has Been Hacked By AnonGhost Team الحمد لله, Twitter 23/07/14, accessed 06/08/14https://twitter.com/AnonGhostTeam/status/491836637761245184/photo/1
[vi] Ridley, R., Gaza Anonymous Hacking Attack Shuts Down ‘Hundreds’ Of Israeli Government Websites. The Huffington Post 05/08/14, accessed 06/08/14http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/08/05/gaza-anonymous-hacking-at_n_5650652.html

Israel vs. Hamas: Undermining deterrence

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By Charles Kirchofer:

Israeli soldiers in Hebron [Photograph taken by the author, 5 June 2014.]
 

Israel’s military response to the abduction and murder of three teenaged Israeli citizens, which has included a massive deployment of Israeli soldiers in the Palestinian territories, is understandable. But, this response has threatened to undermine what had been a relatively stable deterrence relationship with Hamas, however. The border with Gaza had been reasonably quiet, but recent days have seen increased rocket fire that has now hit homes in southern Israel. Israel’s military is now shifting troops to the Gaza border. Together, these actions threaten to be the start of another round of escalation between the two sides. Was this deterioration of the situation inevitable? If a ceasefire soon comes into effect, what does this say about Israel’s deterrence relationship with Hamas?

Despite Hamas’s anti-Israel Charter and its unrelenting stance against recognising Israel or even accepting the idea of a permanent peace with it, Hamas has avoided provoking active conflict with Israel since 2012. There has been a trickle of rockets from the Gaza Strip, but this has long been the case. What’s more, it does not appear that Hamas itself was responsible for any of these attacks until just recently. In fact, Hamas has long arrested militants launching rockets from within Gaza to prevent Israeli retaliation. The fact that the number of rockets launched in 2014 has at times risen above 20 per month may, in truth, be more a sign of Hamas’s weakness than of its strength: Egypt has tightened its control over Gaza’s southern border, closing smuggling tunnels that Hamas relied upon for much of its revenue, and Hamas’s relations with its sponsor Iran have been strained since it declared itself opposed to Iran’s close ally and Syria’s leader, Bashar al-Assad, and moved its headquarters out of Damascus. Even now, Hamas’s leadership has said it does not desire escalation, despite recently launching its first rockets on Israel since 2012.

If Hamas activists are proved responsible for the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens, this in itself would already indicate a massive escalation, justifying a retaliatory response from Israel. Hamas internal chief Ismail Haniyeh allegedly said as recently as this April that abducting Israeli soldiers was a ‘top priority’ to use as ‘bargaining chips’ to free Palestinian prisoners. When three Israeli teens were reported kidnapped, justified suspicion quickly fell on Hamas. Hamas’s leaders denied all knowledge of the kidnapping even as Israeli security claimed to have found solid evidence of the group’s involvement. Reports have now come to light that suggest that both are ‘correct’. It seems the kidnappers are a ‘rogue Hamas branch’ that was not acting on orders when it abducted the teens. The fact that the teens were quickly murdered rather than held for ransom and that Hamas from the start denied responsibility and was unable to reap any political or strategic gain from the incident lends credibility to this claim. It thus seems that the attack was a criminal act motivated by sectarian hatred rather than a terror tactic used as part of a plan to improve Hamas’s bargaining position with Israel or the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Israel’s military response, named ‘Operation Brother’s Keeper’, has been calibrated on the assumption of the latter rather than the former. Israel detained over 300 Hamas members and some other Palestinians not associated with the group, also raiding Hamas institutions. A report noted that ‘soldiers entered Palestinian cities and towns in numbers not seen there in years, which led to frequent violent clashes with Palestinian youths. Five Palestinians [were] killed by soldiers’ fire during the clashes. Only a few of those detained are suspected of actually participating in terrorist activity.’ A Palestinian academic commented to this author and asked “Don’t you think Israel is using the disappearance [of the three teens] as a pretext to go after Hamas?” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated openly that attacking Hamas’s infrastructure in the West Bank was a central aim of ‘Operation Brother’s Keeper’.

From a deterrence perspective, this could be an appropriate response if Hamas as an organisation were indeed behind the murders of the three Israeli youths. It would help to reinforce clear ‘red lines’ that Hamas may not cross without inflicting significant damage on itself. If Hamas is already deterred and did not commit the murders, however, such a broad attack on it is not necessary to maintain or re-establish deterrence. What’s more, unnecessarily forceful responses are risky. The operation has stirred up anger among the Palestinian population, for example in several clashes with Israeli troops, which resulted in the death of five Palestinian youths. These deaths have naturally intensified anger and threaten to escalate the situation further. Israel’s air force also struck targets in Gaza. In response, Hamas then launched its first rockets since 2012 at Israel on 30 June. Further violence is possible.

The recent escalation was not inevitable. If Hamas as an organisation was not behind the abduction and murder of the three Israeli teens that sparked this latest round of violence, the escalation also does not appear necessary. There have been discussions today of a possible ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, but at the time of writing, one had not yet taken effect. Both sides appear willing to de-escalate, however, with an Israeli official saying that ‘quiet will be met with quiet’.

If things do quiet down, this will be evidence that Hamas is weak and deterred. If they do not, we will look back on Operation Brother’s Keeper as understandable, but we may also view it as a mistake that led to further unnecessary bloodshed.

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Charles Kirchofer is a PhD candidate at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He is currently researching the use of deterrence against non-state actors using the case of Israel’s conflict with Hamas and has recently conducted field research in Israel and Palestine. You can follow him on Twitter @CPKirchofer