One of the influential bodies in the international arena is the European Union. This body has the power to play an important role in the process of transitioning from the present paradigm for solving the conflict in Israel/Palestine, which is based on a partition into two nation states, towards an alternative peace paradigm based on partnership and on equality between the two national groups.
The claim that the EU can play an important and unique role in this process rests on two principal foundations. First, Europe has extensive experience with governing-arrangements and constitutional-arrangements that are based on power-sharing and on a division of power between different ethnic-national groups, and with advancing political solutions to ethnic conflicts. Examples include the political arrangements in Belgium, Switzerland, Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and indeed the EU itself, which is the successful product of an historic reconciliation process between France and Germany. The process of European integration started after World War II, as early as 1950, beginning first with the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). This was a relatively narrow economic agreement between the political leaderships led by France and Germany, which subordinated the coal and steel production of the six founding members of the EU – France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg – to supra-national joint institutions. But the reconciliation process that began as a mutual dependency in the production of coal and steel expanded gradually to many other areas and even trickled down to the general public. Peace in the blood-soaked continent of Europe was based not on separation but rather on the cultivation of an economic partnership, on the creation of a mutual dependency, on open borders and on the establishment of joint political institutions that trump the nation states. Israel/Palestine can learn from this process and draw inspiration from it.
Second, the EU has deep economic and political ties to Israel. The links between Israel and the European economic community are several-decades long and, in many fields, rather extensive. In addition, the EU is a significant donor to the Palestinian Authority and to civil society organizations both in Israel and in the occupied Palestinian territories, especially to organizations that advance an agenda of peace, democracy and respect for human rights.
At the same time, in the context of the complex national and political conflict with which we are concerned here, it is important to remember that the EU is an economic giant but a political dwarf. It is an organization that is essentially a common market that deals with setting regulations and developing trade relations with countries outside the EU bloc. Attempts made in the 1990s to transform the EU into a central political player in the international arena, that would advance a joint policy on foreign affairs and security, were a failure, all told. In what concerns foreign and security policy, the EU’s Foreign Affairs Council decides on issues by unanimity and not by vote, requiring the agreement of all 27 member governments. With respect to the situation in Israel/Palestine, the EU member states are significantly divided. Given these disagreements and indeed the paralysis among the ranks of the EU with regard to the question of Israel/Palestine, every official decision by the EU is based on the lowest common denominator of the members, and in recent years no new decisions were taken on this matter. The decisions automatically repeat, word-for-word, the EU’s official line: support for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel based on the 1967 borders, and a call for both sides to strive for negotiations toward this solution. The EU continues in principle to adhere to the position, based on international law and UN resolutions, that the borders of the state of Israel are the 1967 borders; but it does little to translate this position into a de-facto impact on the Israeli policy of annexation.
The official European policy regarding the conflict and its resolution is largely symbolic and declarative, and its effect on the reality on the ground is marginal. The EU’s differentiation policy, which distinguishes between sovereign Israel of the 1948 borders and the territories of the West Bank, amounts to a denial of the existing reality of a de-facto annexation of large parts of the West Bank and the deepening of a Jewish apartheid regime between the Jordan River and the sea. This denial of reality allows Europe to behave as if there is no occupation and to continue to deepen its extensive ties with Israel, mostly in the framework of the Association Agreement signed between Israel and the EU in 1995. In short, Europe is deadlocked.
The process of transitioning from a peace paradigm based on separation to an alternative peace paradigm based on partnership and equality entails a deep shift in the European attitude toward the conflict. The process needs to start with recognizing the binational reality on the ground, without ignoring or denying it. The reality is that, for several decades, Israel has been erasing the Green Line with its policy and actions. The basic European stance of not recognizing Israel’s sovereignty beyond the 1967 lines, though grounded in the international law and UN resolutions, is becoming less and less relevant in the face of the materializing reality of a single regime of Jewish supremacy in the space between the Jordan and the sea. How can Europe nonetheless break free of the conceptual fixation on the paradigm of separation and shift to a different approach that stands to make a substantial contribution to the advancement of Israeli-Palestinian peace? And how can it do this without recognizing the Israeli annexation?
First, in the Venice Declaration of 1980 the European Community officially recognized the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and declared its support of a just solution to the Palestinian problem. In the name of this universal principle of the right to self-determination, Europe supports the Palestinian demand that took shape in the 1980s to establish an independent state along the 1967 lines. But as we have seen, since the 1990s, the European approach to the resolution of national and ethnic conflicts has not necessarily been one of separating populations along ethnic or national lines and establishing more and more tiny, homogenous nation states. In the peace process in Northern Ireland, in the establishment of the federation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and also in Iraq and Sri Lanka, the European peace model has actually been to allow different national groups to fulfill their right to self-determination within binational or multinational political frameworks, which offer constitutional arrangements for the division and sharing of power. Europe certainly has the ability to contribute to the advancement of a similar solution in Israel/Palestine, a solution based on partnership and mutual dependency, and not on separation – for example, a federation or a confederation.
Second, abandoning the separation paradigm and adopting the position that the future of peace in the area is based on an Israeli-Palestinian partnership will enable Europe to see the Palestinians who are citizens of Israel as an inseparable part of the national conflict and as an important component of its solution. For example, the European Commission might advance equality and partnership between Jewish-Israelis and Palestinian Israeli citizens through a systematic demand that the latter be included in EU-Israel joint projects. In practice, with every project the EU carries out with Israel, it must not only verify that the Israeli entities do not operate beyond the Green Line (in accordance with the differentiation policy), but also demand a minimum number of participants from among the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up roughly a fifth of the country’s population. A shift in policy along these lines could be advanced through the EU Commission – and not necessarily as a change of foreign and security policy, which requires a unanimous decision. For example, the OECD has already pressured the Israeli government in the past to act to reduce the gaps between Jews and Arabs and to integrate the Palestinian society in Israel into the Israeli labor market. Europe can act in a similar way.
To sum up: It seems that Europe does not want to dictate to Israel what to do with the territories it has been occupying since 1967, and it cannot dictate to the Palestinian people how to realize its right to self-determination. But what Europe can do, as it has done rather successfully in other national-ethnic conflicts, is to propose to the political leaderships of both national groups alternative ways of dealing with the existing binational reality, and to help them develop a shared political vision that will be relevant to the reality in the Israeli-Palestinian space.
