A seventy resists the greed of the occupation to displace him and confiscate his land
The current Israeli government seeks to reduce, not resolve, its conflict with the Palestinians
Peace oscillated between the two parties between confrontation and calm.
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There is no Israeli consensus on the solution.
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Bennett espoused the conflict reduction thesis.
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The new Israeli government that ousted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this summer is full of contradictions, comprising of leftists pro-peace, pro-settler rightists, pragmatic mediators and even, for the first time, an Arab Islamic party. All of these all sit together in one governing coalition. On the most divisive issue - the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - there is almost no consensus, and that is exactly what the Israeli philosopher, Micah Goodman, whose advice Prime Minister Naftali Bennett listens to, likes it.
Goodman, a political philosopher, has risen to public prominence in Israel and abroad for his contradictory thesis on how to reduce, not resolve, a long-running conflict.
Many used to describe him as the court philosopher Bennett, the former ultra-nationalist settler leader, who publicly embraced Goodman's model of "conflict reduction."
He was followed by other center and left ministers, until the administration of US President Joe Biden apparently adopted what Goodman calls a less ideological, pragmatic approach.
While the White House remains committed to a two-state solution, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said in May that the immediate priority was "rebuilding some trust" between Israelis and Palestinians.
Goodman himself is stunned by all the recent interest from politicians, diplomats and generals to his approaches.
Earlier in his career, he wrote books analyzing ancient Jewish texts, which he says were the right training for him to tackle a controversial issue such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Goodman published this approach in his 2017 book, The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-Day War, which interacted with the internal Israeli debate over the conflict with the Palestinians and the fate of the region occupied by Israel during the 1967 war. The areas - as the right wants - threaten its future as a Jewish and democratic state, and if it leaves these areas - as the left wants - it threatens its future because of security concerns. Goodman says his book "Light the Fire" became a best-selling book in Israel and was soon translated into English.
For Goodman, the old approaches of the Israeli left and right offered only ideologically pure ideas about how to end the conflict with the Palestinians.
He adds that this "false dichotomy" has led to paralysis and the continuation of the status quo in the occupied West Bank.
According to Goodman - who himself lives in a settlement in the West Bank, and describes it as irrelevant to his work - the left wants an immediate end to the military occupation of the area, while the right wants to continue building Israeli settlements and simple "management" of the conflict forever.
“We can make things much better [in the West Bank] even if the conflict is not over" — and thus we can "reduce" the conflict, Goodman says.
Goodman focuses only on the West Bank in his analysis and ignores the thorny issue of the Gaza Strip, from which Israel unilaterally withdrew in 2005 - and has fought four wars with it since then against the militant group that controls it.
"It's a much more complicated situation," he said wistfully.
“We need to quantify and reduce the scale of the conflict — that's the paradigm shift," Goodman adds.
Look at the (Covid-19) pandemic, we are no longer talking about (Covid zero), we are talking about a certain level of Covid, about reducing Covid, so that it does not lead to the collapse of the health system.”
In practical terms, Goodman's approach includes a range of steps that Israel can take to improve Palestinian economic life, security, and self-government in the West Bank.
They range from more conservative moves — such as increasing work permits for Palestinians inside Israel, improving Palestinian commercial access or building roads and bridges that enhance geographic contiguity between Palestinian cities — to more domestically controversial measures, such as freezing settlement building outside Israel and major Israeli population centers in West Bank, giving the Palestinians more land for their own building.
In recent weeks, Israel has begun to adopt some of these measures, including issuing 15,000 new work permits inside Israel to Palestinians, floating the $500 million PA loan, re-establishing joint economic committees to discuss future projects, and allowing family unification (i.e. legal status). ) for Palestinian spouses in the West Bank, and the initial approval for 2,000 new housing units for Palestinians in the part of the West Bank under full Israeli control.
As a senior Israeli official told CNN last week, echoing Goodman, "We have to do everything we can to reduce the conflict and start shaping the solution, starting with infrastructure and the economy."
However, the far-reaching actions described above are highly unlikely, given the formation of the current Israeli alliance.
However, this does not deter Goodman - it only strengthens his thesis in theory.
“There is no consensus in the government about the end game, but they can agree on the game,” he says.
This is the entire approach of this government on all issues.” He continues, “The important thing is to agree on the action, not the narrative around it.”
For Goodman, "conflict reduction" could easily fit into a left-wing narrative about a two-state solution, as most of the proposed initiatives could be seen as important steps toward building a Palestinian state.
Goodman stresses that right-wingers can feel the same way, because the approach - for now - only enhances Palestinian autonomy and does not imply statehood or prevent Israel from annexing the rest of the West Bank, as Bennett has argued for years.
But Goodman's critics on both the right and the left are not optimistic.
For the right, the steps Goodman is promoting likely carry a higher security risk than he estimates.
"He thinks he can reduce the conflict, but for the other side - the Palestinians - it's just a lull between two rounds of fighting during which they can improve their position," said Ran Baratz, director of public diplomacy for former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The left does not see, at best, much new in Goodman's thesis, and at worst doubts that "conflict reduction" is the same approach adopted in the past by the Israeli right - "conflict management" or "economic peace" - which means rebranding. Just.
According to Dalia Sheindlin, a political analyst at the Century Foundation think-tank, Goodman's approach "appears to perpetuate the Israel model that Israel proposes and withdraws from, and it is unclear whether it is sincere about Palestinian real self-determination."
She adds that the new Israeli government "clung to a certain slogan, but I do not know what is the content behind the slogan that they will actually implement, and what their intention is behind it."
Palestinians also seem confused by this Israeli debate over their future.
"I would prefer if an Israeli and a Palestinian talked about what 80% of the Israelis and the Palestinians could agree on," said Samer Singwali, an activist and internal dissident from the ruling Palestinian party, Fatah.
Goodman, for his part, argues that increasing Palestinian autonomy will improve the lives of Palestinians and increase Israel's options in the future.
The old methods will not work.
"We will not achieve peace through a major diplomatic push, but only through small steps until the Palestinians achieve a critical mass of autonomy, at which point the positions of many Israelis and Palestinians are likely to change, and for the time being our perceptions are very limited."
In practical terms, Goodman's approach includes a range of steps that Israel can take to improve Palestinian economic life, security, and self-government in the West Bank.
Goodman: “We need to quantify and reduce the scale of the conflict -- that's the paradigm shift. Look at the (Covid-19) pandemic, we are no longer talking about (Covid zero), we are talking about a certain level of Covid, about reducing Covid, so that it does not lead to the collapse of the health system.”
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