Israeli PM Naftali Bennett’s axiom that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is unsolvable, and that at best it can only be managed, has been accepted by his coalition’s eight factions, from Yamina through Meretz, and all the way to the United Arab List (UAL). Yet managing this conflict is a multifaceted process, conducted with multiple players. It sometimes seems that instead of Israel managing the conflict, the conflict is managing it.

The first layer is international, conducted vis-à-vis the United States, which is considered a strategic ally and without whose backing the entire management process becomes impossible. But over the years, Israel has found another partner in the form of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin became a regional player after coming to the rescue of his fellow dictator Bashar Assad, trampling for him the citizens of Syria in their cities and villages. The war between these two strategic rivals, between Biden and Putin, presents Israel with an unsolvable dilemma.

At the regional level, Israel, after tremendous effort and with the aid of Donald Trump, has found a way around the conflict. It has attached itself to a “Sunni” alliance that spans the entire Middle East, from Morocco, Sudan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and to the Emirates and Bahrain. The primary characteristic of these countries is their dictatorial and corrupt nature. It is no coincidence that in the bloody war taking place today in Ukraine over the future character of the world – between democracy and autocracy – Israel’s partners stand as one with Putin. Their prisons, those of el-Sisi, Mohammed V and Mohammed bin Salman, are full of opposition activists demanding democracy. Israeli prisons are full of Palestinian political activists. It seems that the choice between autocracy and democracy is no less difficult for Israel than the choice between being Jewish and being democratic.

The third layer is what we’ll call the Palestinian layer. It includes three parties with wholly conflicting interests. Israel is dealing with two partners, the Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah, and Hamas, which controls Gaza. The hatred between the PA and Hamas appears to outweigh their shared hatred of Israel, which imposes its sovereignty over both the West Bank and Gaza. Conflict management requires constant maintenance of the conflict between the West Bank and Gaza, thus preventing formation of a single Palestinian address, which would undermine Israel’s excuse that there is no partner to negotiate with. Against Hamas, Israel operates according to stick-and-carrot, easing restrictions and providing permits for Gazans working in Israel—as long as there is quiet. Against the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah there is no stick and no carrot, but instead an odd, symbiotic game. The Palestinian Authority is both a security partner and a political rival. It is essential for maintaining a quiet security situation, yet is simultaneously presented as a hostile authority that funds the families of terrorists, the same terrorists that the PA itself helps Israel to catch.

The “divide and rule” method, as old as occupation itself, is flawed when discussing the Palestinian reality. The separation between the West Bank and Gaza, between Fatah and Hamas, serves only to undermine the foundations of Israel’s sovereign governance, as the struggle between them takes place over Israel’s head and at its expense. When Hamas wants to hit Abu Mazen of the PA and expose his nakedness, it simply sends a group of young people to the al-Aqsa compound to fight with Israeli police, or it fires a rocket at Israel, setting the area alight despite the subsequent cost of death and destruction to Gaza. Divide-and-rule plus stick-and-carrot are ineffective for two entities that see the fate of their citizens as less important than the preservation of their own rule.

The fourth layer is already within the territory of Israel itself. It turns out that while Israel is trying to separate between Gaza and the West Bank, it is unable to separate the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories from its Arab citizens, because al-Aqsa manages to unite them. The inventor of the “al-Aqsa is in danger” conspiracy theory is an Israeli Arab citizen, the former mayor of Umm al-Fahm and head of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement, Sheikh Raed Salah. His theory was also born of conflict: that between the southern faction of the Islamic Movement, which decided to run in the Knesset elections, and the northern faction, which radicalised and denied the legitimacy of these elections. We have before us another conflict within a conflict, one which the Israeli government cannot resolve. The outlawing of the northern faction did not prevent the flare-up around Al-Aqsa, and exactly one year ago such riots spilled over into Arab cities and villages within Israeli territory.

There is also another layer to this conflict, fifth in number, and that is the violence in Arab society, which the Israeli government has decided to uproot. But it turns out that the violence in Arab society cannot be resolved in isolation from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself. On the contrary, there is a close link between the conflict and violence in Arab society. Not only because of the free flow of arms throughout Arab communities that was ignored by all Israeli governments, but also because the Israeli government’s attitude toward its Arab citizens is not so very different from its treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. The Nationality Law enacted by the previous government, and the Citizenship Law recently enacted by the current government, demote Arab citizens to second class citizens. Violence in Arab society is the result of discrimination, neglect, and a lack of Israeli will to create an egalitarian society in practice. This violence is not limited to criminal gangs,  but has become a phenomenon that dominates all areas of life. It begins at home, with violence against women and children, flows to schools, from there to conflicts between families, to expansion of the grey market, and reaches the control of gangs over Arab public space. The police alone cannot provide an answer, so the government’s diagnosis is wrong, and the remedy is inappropriate.

The sixth and final layer deals with contradictions within the government. The agreement between its factions to manage the conflict, instead of resolving it, does not prevent the conflict from seeping into the government itself. Although the government tries to ignore the conflict with the Palestinians, the conflict does not ignore the government. This is how we reached the point where coalition chairperson Idit Silman resigned from Yamina, leaving the government without a majority, while UAL froze its activities in the Knesset following recent al-Aqsa events. The agreement between the right and the left in the government to put aside the main question that determines the fate of the state, its character, and the peace of its citizens, transforms the “government of change” into one that continues on Netanyahu’s path, while hatred of Netanyahu is the glue that keeps the government together.

Israel’s deterioration towards an apartheid regime and its joining of the regional and global autocratic camp, as well as the failure of the fabricated regional peace to bring about internal peace between Palestinians and Israelis, between Jews and Arabs, necessitate a new political recalculation aimed at resolving the conflict. The solution can apparently no longer be sustained on the basis of two-states, as 55 years of occupation have created a reality that does not allow this. A revolutionary change is needed within Palestinian society, on the one hand, and Israeli society on the other. We may hope that the war in Ukraine, and the defeat of Putin and his autocratic partners, will allow the formation of a large democratic camp in the world, including Israeli and Palestinian societies. Democracy is the key word. Without it, the humanity of all global citizens will be eroded.

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Defining Israel as an apartheid state has become trendy. In early 2021 B’Tselem used this term, moving the terrifying word from living room conversations to the world at large. And if B’Tselem says this—an Israeli organization, after all! —what will international human rights organizations say? In April 2021, Human Rights Watch published a report calling Israel an apartheid state. Amnesty International could not lag far behind.

True, it is impossible to disprove the reality reflected in Amnesty’s document. The Israeli legal system, from the Law of Return to the Nation-State Law, discriminates between Jewish and Arab citizens. And let’s not forget the occupied territories, where military law is the rule, although there is also a separation within it: Israeli law for settlers and military law for Palestinians. All of these create a distorted legal system that undermines Israel’s claim to be a democracy.

Unclear, however, is what these human rights organizations are trying to achieve: to dismantle Israel? End the occupation? Establish one state? Two states? Return Palestinian refugees to their homes and roll back the wheel of history? When Amnesty describes the political reality between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River as apartheid, the clear intention is to bring about Israel’s end as a Jewish nation-state.

There is also the question of timing. After all, the reality described in the report has existed since the State of Israel was founded 74 years ago, while in the territories beyond the Green Line, Israel has been conducting an occupation regime for 53 years. The answer to the question is political: as long as the occupation was presented as temporary and the two-state solution was ostensibly on the agenda, it was problematic to call Israel an apartheid state. But in the reality of 2022, when there exists no possibility of a political settlement to guarantee Palestinian rights, the question remains, “What then?” Moreover, after the Likud’s fall from power, a government was formed that includes a broad political spectrum, including the Settler-Right, the Center, the Zionist left, and the Islamic movement. To form this government, it was decided to avoid any “ideological” issues. That is to say, the political issue is not on the agenda; there is no one to talk to on the Palestinian side, nor anything to talk about. Let’s say openly that Israel’s current political system, in which the Right has a solid majority, opposes an independent Palestinian state. The Labor Party and Meretz, which ostensibly do not exclude the principle of peace negotiations, have essentially given them up.

In effect, Israel does indeed stretch from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, creating the reality documented in the Amnesty report. It does maintain a de facto apartheid regime, preferring to bury its head in the sand and affix the title “anti-Semitic” to anyone who holds up the mirror to what it has become.

Israel’s sins are visible to all, so in this respect, the Amnesty report does not say much that is new. As an organization with prestige and experience, however, we expected it to produce an objective report that would present the facts and their background in a way that would help people on the ground, here and throughout the world, to reach a balanced understanding and thereby lay the foundation for a progressive alternative to the existing regime. Instead, we received a biased report, which only partially describes the political background that led to apartheid. It states that since its founding in 1948, “Israel has pursued an explicit policy of establishing and maintaining a Jewish demographic hegemony.” Israel, whether we like it or not, was not just foisted on the world. It received international recognition from the UN, including the United States and the USSR, against the backdrop of the Holocaust. UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of November 1947 recognized the establishment of two states, one Jewish and one Arab, such that the definition of the state as Jewish received an international stamp of approval that exists to this day. Not only that, but recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish nation was recognized by all political parties in Israel, including the Communist Party with its Jewish and Arab members, who actively took part in the 1948 war.

Amnesty’s report is also guilty of distorting contemporary political reality. Although Israel is primarily responsible for apartheid, it is not the sole player in the arena. The existing system has a partner without which this reality could not exist. This partner is the Palestinian Authority (PA), which is the representative body of the Palestinian people.

Amnesty’s report also mentions the Oslo Accords, which it describes as arrangements that “divided the West Bank into three different administrative areas, with varying levels of Palestinian and Israeli military and civil jurisdiction, fragmenting and segregating Palestinians even further to Israel’s benefit.”  The problem is that the PA, which represents all Palestinian parties and factions including Hamas, was established under the auspices of the Oslo Accords. It continues to be committed to them, including close cooperation with Israel, on which its existence depends. The PA maintains security coordination with Israel, defined by none other than the head of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas, as “sacred.” The Israeli governments, headed by Binyamin Netanyahu and even more so now by Naftali Bennett, as well as the international community, do all they can to sustain the PA, precisely because it serves as subcontractor of the occupation.

In addition, the Amnesty report completely ignores the fact that alongside the apartheid regime, a corrupt Palestinian entity has been created that systematically violates the human and civil rights of its residents. The Palestinian citizen suffers not only from injustices of the occupation, but equally from the PA, which denies basic rights with the support of Israel and the international community.

This is the picture. The apartheid regime exists on the basis of an agreement between the PLO and Israel. The PA has received the status of a state at the UN. Its head is called the “president” of a state that does not exist. Had such a state indeed existed, apartheid would have been abolished. In other words, apartheid takes place with the consent of the PA and the authority conferred on Israel by the international community.

The best salespersons of apartheid, Rabin, Peres and Arafat, received the Nobel Peace Prize for signing the Oslo Accords. Now add to this a new tier, the Abraham Accords, which many in the Arab, Western, and Israeli leftist worlds support.

As long as the elected representative of the Palestinian people maintains peaceful relations with Israel, and accepts the arrangements made in the Oslo Accords, there is no chance that Amnesty’s call for a boycott of Israel will be accepted by the international community. The Amnesty report describes an imaginary reality according to which the Palestinians “have been advocating for an understanding of Israel’s rule as apartheid for over two decades…and have been at the forefront of advocacy in that regard at the UN.” But in practice the situation is completely different. It is impossible to demand “an understanding of Israel’s rule as apartheid” and at the same time maintain security and economic ties with it. The PA suffers from such schizophrenia and tries to convince the world that it is possible, but it is not at all clear why an important human rights organization like Amnesty should give backing and legitimacy to this lie.

The greatest weakness of the Amnesty report, and of all those organizations shouting “Apartheid! Apartheid!” lies in the fact that there exists no Palestinian leadership and movement today that presents an alternative to the PA and Hamas. Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian ‘Nelson Mandela,’ signed the Oslo Accords, and since then the two organizations that control the arena, Fatah and Hamas, have been at war with each other. They divide the Palestinians politically and geographically. The so-called liberal opposition is weak and cowardly, and—most importantly—the Palestinians shouting “Apartheid!” have not established a significant political force, nor have they created a coherent political platform as an alternative to the Oslo Accords and the illusion of two states.

An alternative leadership, if and when it arises, will have to know how to rise above the walls of narrow nationalism, appeal to the whole of Israeli society, and dare to offer one democratic state from the sea to the river with equal rights for all its citizens, regardless of nationality, religion or race. There is currently no significant Palestinian entity that will lead in such a direction. In its absence, Labor and Meretz members can join the Bennett government on the pretext that the political issue is not on the agenda, using the worn-out “two-states” card as a cover for their shame. True, apartheid has become a reality. Yet Amnesty’s demand that the international community recognize this and isolate Israel will not bear fruit until the Palestinians themselves rise up and remove the PA, which has acceded to the tragic folly for almost 30 years.

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