Kadima, which headed the last government and is now led by Tzipi Livni, who served as foreign affairs minister, has been negotiating with the Palestinian Authority for more than a year, during which time illegal Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank has continued and little discernible progress has been made toward establishing a Palestinian state. Likud, led by one-time prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has a party platform that flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian state “west of the Jordon River” (i.e., in the West Bank or Gaza) and advocates Jewish settlement of Palestinian territories. Yisrael Beiteinu Leader Avigdor Lieberman is not opposed to a Palestinian state, but he envisions one that would include Israeli Arab towns—something Israeli Arabs vehemently reject. He says that Israeli Arab MPs who have met with Hamas should be executed.
“Clearly, Israelis are looking for strong-arm solutions rather than negotiations at this point,” says Ottaway. She says that in the absence of frequent suicide bombings, many Israelis feel more secure than they did during the second intifada, which ended in 2006 with a truce between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. “There is this kind of illusion in my opinion that if they act decisively concerning the remaining threats, the rockets that are coming in, they can solve the problem militarily.”
Palestinians in the West Bank, which is governed by Fatah, are reacting with cynicism to the Israeli election results. “For the public, any Israeli government is the same,” says Walid Batrawi, a Palestinian journalist in the West Bank city of Ramallah. “They have seen Labour. They have experienced Likud. And they have experienced Kadima. And the recent war in Gaza has proved—at least from their point of view—that any Israeli government is a government of war, right-wing, and there is no hope for any peace process.” Batrawi adds that some Palestinians still hope new American President Barack Obama will pressure Israel to make concessions, but even these optimists think this won’t happen until a second Obama term, given America’s economic problems at home.
Palestinian cynicism has been heightened by both the war in Gaza and the unmet predictions of George W. Bush. The former American president said a Palestinian state was possible by the end of his time in office, and promised to work toward this goal. Mark Regev, a spokesman for Olmert, repeated this prediction when he met with a Maclean’s reporter last April. “People were skeptical of that even at the time, and now that skepticism has been born out and then some,” says Robert Belcher, a senior Jerusalem-based analyst at the International Crisis Group. “You got the date and it didn’t happen, and on top of that the Israeli people moved further to the right.”
The Gaza war, and the re-emergence of the Israeli policy of deterrence, was especially damaging to those Palestinians who favour a negotiated two-state solution, Belcher says. They point out that the same Israeli politicians with whom they are negotiating launched a war in Gaza that killed 1,300 Palestinians. “People are tremendously disillusioned,” he says.
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