Israel and Palestinians: Gulf between hope and reality of peace

Israeli police outside the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem

Tensions between Israel and the Palestinians are on the rise once more, with hopes of peace and a two-state solution as far away as ever.

Jerusalem is a holy city of true believers. The atmosphere here crackles loudest when the faithful celebrate their religious holidays, especially in the walled Old City where the Christian, Jewish and Islamic holy sites are minutes away from each other.

Religion has a significance and power here that is hard to exaggerate. That is because it is about more than just faith. In Jerusalem it is linked inextricably with Palestinian and Israeli nationalism. Religion, politics and identity feed off each other. The rivals venerate the sanctity of Jerusalem and claim it as their capital.

This month Ramadan, Passover and Easter have fallen at the same time. They have also coincided with accelerating danger and despair.

Two years ago, heavy-handed policing by Israel of Palestinians during Ramadan was one of the sparks for a short and deadly war in and around Gaza between the Israelis and Hamas, the Palestinian group whose name is an acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement.

It looked as if it might happen again this month when Israeli security forces broke into the al-Aqsa Mosque, where Muslims believe the prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven. Police used brutal tactics to eject Palestinians who had locked themselves into a prayer hall.

Video of heavily armed police beating Palestinians caused outrage across the Middle East and beyond, including in the Arab states that have normalised relations with Israel. A volley of rockets came into Israel from Lebanon, most likely from Palestinian groups, causing the most dangerous moment on the heavily armed border since the Lebanese militia Hezbollah fought Israel to a standstill in 2006.

In the days since that raid on al-Aqsa all sides have pulled back from the brink of another explosive confrontation, but the reasons why they reached that point still exist.

It has been more than 10 years since a meaningful attempt was made to get Palestinians and Israelis to discuss the future, together or apart. Long periods of uneasy calm persuaded Israeli leaders, especially the long-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that the conflict could be managed, not settled. Two years of growing tension and violence since the last Gaza war have shown that to be an illusion.

The UN Security Council and the European Union, among many others, still repeat their belief that the only real chance for peace is the "two-state solution". A generation ago it looked like a realistic way to end more than a century of conflict between Jews and Arabs for control of the land that lies between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. The two-state solution was the idea that establishing an independent Palestine alongside Israel would create a way for the two peoples to co-exist peacefully.

But "two states" has become an empty slogan. Its supporters wring their hands but have given up trying to make it into a reality.

I went for a drive from Jerusalem to Hebron to remind myself of some of the reasons why.

View from the Damascus Gate towards East Jerusalem

Getting into a car and driving down that road, as I've done many times since the 1990s, showed yet again that the size of the gulf between international aspirations about the future of this land and the reality for the people who live here.

My drive was an unscientific project during an unseasonable storm that was battering the West Bank with wind sheeting rain. Pockets of thick fog along the road could not obscure the latest advances in Israel's massive and single-minded project to settle Jews on land Palestinians want for a state. I could just as easily have seen the same kind of evidence if I had driven north or east from Jerusalem rather than south.

In the years since first I travelled between Jerusalem and Hebron, the journey and the land either side of it has been transformed. Early in the 1990s it was a country road. A few Jewish settlements were noticeably spilling down from the hills, especially south of Bethlehem, the first Palestinian town the road passes as it leaves Jerusalem. But most of the land along the road was open fields that had been terraced and cultivated by generations of Palestinian farmers. Some of them used to travel to work riding on donkeys that plodded along the verges of the road.

Farmers still grow crops, but their fields have been reduced and sliced up by a huge expansion of settlements. Swathes of Palestinian land have been confiscated to widen and straighten the road, and to connect it to an ever-growing network of bypasses linking settlements with each other and Jerusalem. Cuttings for the new roads have been gouged out of the hills. This week the Jerusalem-Hebron road was jammed with traffic. Many of the cars had Israeli number plates, reflecting the big increase in the Jewish population in the area's settlements.

As the rain lashed down, about a dozen saturated Israeli soldiers in full combat gear were milling around their jeeps on yet another military operation in the occupation of the West Bank that has so far lasted 56 years, with no sign of ending. They were close to the Israeli army watchtower that looms over the entrance to Beit Ummar, a small Palestinian town whose inhabitants mostly rely on agriculture to make a living. Beit Ummar, like many other towns and villages on the West Bank, has lost a lot of land to settlements and roads. The occupation, and the desire to resist it, have generated repeated violence over the years.

Most of the world regards Israel's settlement of occupied land as illegal. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are among a series of campaign groups that say Israel's activities in the occupied territories amount to apartheid.

Israel denies this charge. It insists that international laws prohibiting a country from settling its own people on the land it occupies do not apply in the territories.

An Israeli soldier stands guard at the entrance to a Jewish settlers zone in Hebron, 2016

The billions of dollars invested over decades by Israel in roads, housing and the security needed to protect Jewish settlers, have created a new reality, intended to make sure Israel will be able to keep as much as possible of the land it captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

Some Israeli governments expanded settlements while they talked about a two-state solution. The current governing coalition's guidelines are much more straightforward. They reflect the fact that the government, led once again by Benjamin Netanyahu, is the most nationalistic right-wing government in Israel's history. The government states that it will "promote and develop settlement" on lands to which "the Jewish people has an exclusive and unassailable right".

Supporters of the two-state solution keep warning that the growth of Jewish settlements are making it a proposition that is physically as well as politically impossible. One of the latest came from the United Nations on 20 February this year. The Security Council reaffirmed "its unwavering commitment" to the two-state solution and said "continuing Israeli settlement activities are dangerously imperilling the viability of the two-state solution based on the 1967 lines".

Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel

Settlement expansion is not the only reason why a dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis is impossible.

The United States, which sponsored talks in the past, has other preoccupations. It is much more concerned with its rivalry with China and the war in Ukraine.

The Palestinian political leadership is deeply divided between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank. They are not capable, as things stand, of making or delivering any sort of deal. The Palestinian Authority is barely capable of exercising its own limited powers.

Israel is deep in its own internal political crisis about the nature of its own democracy.

Peace between Palestinians and Israelis is as far away as ever. Neither side trusts each other. This year a serious upsurge in violence and death is a serious warning of even worse trouble ahead. Everyone here knows the risks they're running. No-one has a realistic plan to head off the deadly trouble that lies ahead.