The diplomatic history collectively referred to as the Israel-Palestine peace process is universally recognised as a case of failure. Not only has the peace process failed to achieve its stated objective, but the constitutive elements of the crisis – occupation, apartheid, and dispossession – persist in their most heightened form. The Gaza genocide and escalating settler bellicosity in the West Bank are but the most recent manifestations of this. The purported failure of the peace process has, over the years, manifested itself in the restructuring of the conditions of Palestinian oppression. In hindsight, thus, the material function of the peace process appears as an inversion of its purported intent. What, then, accounts for the death of the peace process?  

While its inability to achieve a lasting resolution to the conflict is a matter of consensus, analyses of the causes of this failure are in much dispute. In this regard, orthodox opinion ranges from blaming Palestinian intransigence, or the Palestinian rejectionism thesis, to the liberal Zionist critique that reduces the subject to diplomatic mismanagement. The most representative exponent of the former, Dennis Ross, served as the chief American negotiator under President Bill Clinton, and is the primary intellectual source of much conventional wisdom on the subject. In The Missing Peace, Ross contrasts Palestinian “generalities” with Israel’s “practicalities,” arguing that the primary cause of the failure of the peace process lies with Arafat’s intransigence, who “was not up to peacemaking” nor to “ending the conflict.” For Ross, the “one unmistakable insight” gained from the history of the peace process is as follows: “No Israeli concession can ever be too big.”¹ While the myth of Palestinian rejectionism will be dealt with more directly later, Ross’s preference toward personalising and moralising the conflict over structural analysis is worth noting. 

The technocratic thesis occupies the opposite side of the orthodox spectrum, the intellectual exemplar of which is Aaron David Miller, Ross’s deputy negotiator.  For Miller, the collapse of the peace process owes itself to a dual cause: first, the existence of intractable differences between the two sides; and second, their failure to negotiate effectively. The differences were so immense that President Bill Clinton’s “empathy, intellect, and commitment” were unable to compensate for the administration’s lack of “capacity to understand what was required to reach an agreement.” Much like Ross, Miller’s interpretation offers little in the way of a structural analysis of the conflict. As far as the interlocutors are concerned, the Palestinians and Israel were “not ready to [close a deal].” Rather than Palestinian intransigence, however, Miller’s liberal Zionist analysis reduces the history of the peace process to ineffective negotiation and diplomatic mismanagement. Furthermore, while Miller’s allusion to the insurmountable differences between the Palestinians and the Israelis is not without merit, it fails to offer a structural account for why they exist. Thus, the mainstream view least sympathetic to Israel’s position amounts to a conglomeration of Orientalist musings about the “troubled corner of the world” that is the Middle East, with the addition of individual psychoanalysis and critiques of diplomatic faux pas.² 

Moreover, in the context of the peace process, what do references to “failure” or “success” imply? In terms of the intended outcomes of the peace process, two may be outlined as follows: first, the inhibition of violence as such and, thus, the generation of stability; and second, the achievement of a just solution to the conflict. While both outcomes are mutually independent and often contradictory, failure appears prima facie as the most apt descriptor. However, viewed in toto, the peace process is typically seen as having yielded instances of both success and failure. Widely regarded as diplomatic breakthroughs are Camp David I, the Egypt-Israel peace agreement of 1979, and the Oslo Accords of 1993, which purported to establish mutual recognition between the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Israel. The Camp David II negotiations in 2000-01, however, are considered the paradigmatic case of failure. This raises a crucial question: success for whom? One measure of success, therefore, concerns itself less with the victims of Zionism and more with normalisation between Israel and other U.S. client states in the region, even as it leaves the question of Palestine unresolved. A careful evaluation of the successes and failures of the peace process ought to situate itself within the potential contradictions between the two intended outcomes of justice and stability, which in turn requires an analysis of the historical-structural function of the peace process. 

How, then, might we theorise an interpretive framework for the peace process and its demise? In the first instance, the nature – and eventual collapse – of the peace process ought to be analysed as an outgrowth of its historical-material peculiarities. In this regard, the guiding conceptual schema is the settler-colonial nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which produces a perpetual condition of asymmetry, of both power and interest. In the concrete, the peace process ineluctably emerges as a colonial diktat, functioning as a means of stabilising and expanding the Zionist project. If the success of the peace process is defined by the interests of Zionism, its collapse represents Israel’s failure to legitimise and institutionalise conditions of apartheid and occupation. The rupture in the peace process thus functions less as a consequence of moral or technocratic failure on either side, as much as a structural necessity arising out of the basic settler-colonial dialectic of the Israel-Palestine conflict. A major implication of this is the affirmation of Miller’s allusion to the intractable differences that exist between Palestine liberation and Zionism. However, this contradiction, contrary to Miller’s liberalism, can only be resolved by overcoming the logic of Zionism and its settler-colonial regime. 

I

Zionism’s position as an essential arm of imperialism in West Asia contributes greatly to the asymmetry of power that exists between Israel and the Palestinians.³ This materially manifests itself in the diplomatic, political, and economic protection that allows Israel to act with impunity toward the Palestinian population. The Zionist project’s value to London’s colonial exploits in the region was the precondition for British support.⁴ Furthermore, Zionism’s self-identification with European settler-colonialism facilitated a degree of ideological affinity with Western imperialism.⁵ The confluence of these elements remains the basis for the “special relationship” between Israel and the United States, which replaced Britain as global hegemon in the postwar era.⁶ Israel is by far the largest recipient of American military aid, with the former’s status as an important anti-communist ally explaining the origins of the relationship. Thus, while the U.S. remains at present Israel’s principal guarantor, the junior imperialist partners of Washington, including Britain, continue to provide diplomatic and military support to the Zionist project.⁷ Out of this imperial context emerges the material scaffolding that ensures Israel’s politico-military dominance in the region, and thus an enduring power imbalance. 

The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is typified as settler-colonialism.⁸ At the eve of the twentieth century, the Zionist movement entered its incipient stage in Palestine. In contrast to ideological references to terra nullius, the contradiction between founding a Jewish state in a land with a sizeable indigenous population was not unclear to Zionist leaders. This forms the foundation for the longstanding Zionist policy of “transfer,” the culmination of which was the Nakba in 1947-48.⁹ The question of Palestine, therefore, is “the contest between an affirmation and a denial” of indigeneity.¹⁰ Having failed to achieve total expulsion, apartheid and military occupation became the primary modes of expression of Zionism’s attitude toward Palestinians. The survival of the Zionist project as a political and material reality holds as its precondition the perpetual subjugation of the indigenous population, a state of affairs whose abolition is the raison d’être of the Palestinian national movement. Thus, any attempt at analysing the peace process ought to foreground the settler-colonial dialectic. 

II

The Peel Commission in 1936 was the first comprehensive attempt at resolving the conflict. The stated aim of the commission of inquiry was “to ascertain the underlying causes of the disturbances which broke out in Palestine in the middle of April,” referring to the anti-colonial revolt that began in 1936.¹¹ The commission recommended a partition of Palestine, dividing the mandate into a majority Arab and a majority Jewish state. Benny Morris summarises the orthodox interpretation of the conclusion of the proposal as follows: 

But while resisting Arab violence, the Jews and the international community intermittently extended olive branches. The British Peel Commission in 1937, in the middle of the Palestine Arab Revolt, proposed partitioning the land into two states, one for the Jews, on 18% of the land, and one for the Arabs on most of the remainder. But Palestine’s Arabs, headed by the antisemitic cleric Haj Amin al Husseini, along with the neighboring Arab states, said “no” and resumed shooting.¹²     

The Peel Commission’s dual function was to maintain British commitment to the Zionist cause, as well as to neutralise indigenous resistance. Both components are conjoined but contradictory since, among the precipitants of the revolt, opposition to a British-sponsored settler state was greatly influential. Indeed, as the commission admitted, the presence of a large indigenous population poses “the major problem” to the creation of a Jewish state and thus “clearly constitutes the most serious hindrance to the smooth and successful operation of Partition.” Population transfer, “voluntary or otherwise,” was envisaged as the solution to this problem.¹³ With a resounding endorsement of ethnic cleansing, the Peel proposal eliminated the major obstacle to the Zionist project. Indeed, “the necessity of this [population] transfer,” for David Ben-Gurion, was “a historic chance that will not return.”¹⁴ 

The Peel proposal serves as the progenitor of the two-state solution. The convergence of the origins of the idea of partition and the institutionalisation of Palestinian dispossession is instructive. While the idea of transfer had always been central to Zionist thought, it secured an embryonic diplomatic endorsement in the Peel Commission; as Morris writes, “It is reasonable to assume that Zionist leaders played a role in persuading the Peel Commission to adopt the transfer solution.”¹⁵ The diplomatic ancestor to the peace process was thus conceived with two fundamental components: the legitimation of a settler colonial state in Palestine, and secondly, the invalidity of Palestinian indigeneity. Thus, an enforcement mechanism for settler colonialism inheres within the inception of diplomatic efforts to resolve the question of Palestine.        

The diplomatic framework of Peel assumes the form of international legitimacy with the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption of Resolution 181 in 1947, which partitioned the Mandate of Palestine. Britain’s increasingly untenable position led London to hand over the issue to the newly created United Nations. Thus, one can observe the transformation of the enforcement mechanism of a resolution from individual colonial intervention to the newly established politico-legal international framework. The contradiction between the illegality of the partition resolution and its source of legitimation as a legal decree is aptly described by Noura Erakat: 

[UN] Resolution 181 did not consider the will of the local population, nor the legality of the UN’s authority to propose partition, nor the legality of partition itself. It was, unabashedly, a political solution.¹⁶

If Peel hinted at it, Resolution 181 canonised the two-state solution as the paradigm for a settlement. With Arabs making up nearly half of the population of the proposed Jewish state, the conundrum gestured at by the Peel Commission reappears. How does a viable Jewish state, an inherently exclusionary idea, overcome, in Morris’ words, the “basic, insurmountable minority problem that had the potential to subvert any peace settlement”?¹⁷ As Walid Khalidi writes, “To succeed the Zionists had to revolutionise the status quo, and action, initiative, and offense were therefore the sine qua non for the realization of the Zionist objectives.”¹⁸ While the partition plan offered no answers, the practical application of the Zionist idea of population transfer was the most appropriate solution.       

Resolution 181 produced the conditions that allowed the Zionist movement to finally resolve the “minority problem.” By the end of the 1948 war, around two-thirds of the Palestinian population had been expelled from what became the borders of Israel.¹⁹ The ethnic cleansing campaign was carried out under the cloak of an international legitimation regime in the form of Resolution 181. Far from being an unintended consequence, the Zionist policy of depopulation during the Nakba is incomprehensible without the partition plan: the former is necessitated by the creation of an ethnostate. 

III

After the June 1967 war, the constitutive elements of what would become known as the peace process were clear. Aiming to foster “respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area,” UN Security Council Resolution 242 called for the “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” Thenceforth, an international consensus, as evidenced by the outcomes of numerous UN General Assembly resolutions, emerged around a framework for a peaceful settlement of the conflict, namely a two-state solution based on the June 1967 borders. While this framework has formed the basis of much international solidarity with the Palestinian cause, two points are worth mentioning. First, Resolution 242 is the most developed form of legal legitimation of the settler-colonial borders of Israel. Concomitantly, the resolution precludes any reference to a Palestinian state. Thus, the legal framework that underpins much of the peace process contains within it a tacit endorsement of settler-colonial ideology.²⁰

The primary heuristic model that was developed in the post-1967 era is the land-for-peace formula. It presupposes that the determinant cause of the conflict is the opposition between Israel’s desire for security and Arab aggression; the land-for-peace formula entails that Tel Aviv cede occupied land in exchange for peace. The first practical manifestation of this formula took place at Camp David in 1979, when Israel gave up the Sinai Peninsula in exchange for normalisation with Egypt. Multiple analytical issues arise from this framework. Firstly, the precondition for the land-for-peace formula is an inversion of the causal dynamic at play: Sinai was occupied through an act of Israeli aggression.²¹ This inversion reappears when the Camp David formula is favourably cited in Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians, the root of which is the imposition on the latter of conditions of dispossession and occupation.      

Secondly, and most pertinently, the role of the Palestinian question in Camp David I is instructive; the closest the Accords came to a discussion of the subject was Begin’s offer of pseudo-autonomy, which “was premised on continued Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as the assertion of a right to build settlements.” In the final analysis, the pursuit of a separate deal with Egypt was a “means to avoid peace with the Palestinians.”²² The Egypt-Israeli accords, considered to be a major success by mainstream opinion, essentially functioned as a means of neutralising a major Arab antagonist to Israel by entrenching the former’s role in the broader architecture of American hegemony in West Asia, with the conspicuous omission of the Palestinians. In this sense, Camp David I established a pattern that persists to this day: normalisation agreements that stabilise the positions of the U.S. and its West Asian allies are celebrated as successes, even as the question of Palestine remains unaffected. The contemporary Board of Peace, established by the perpetrators of the Gaza genocide, takes the logic of regional normalisation further, defining the outright colonisation of Palestinian land by Israel, the U.S., and allied Arab states as a viable peace plan.²³

IV

The historical antecedents to Oslo demand a reconsideration of the rejectionist thesis. The following question immediately arises: was it in the perceived interest of the Palestine Liberation Organisation to accept the international consensus based on a two-state settlement? The answer lies in the affirmative, not least due to international law’s perceived ability to “counteract the conflict’s inherent power symmetry.”²⁴ While formal acquiescence did not occur until the 1982 Arab summit, the documentary record reveals “the PLO’s striking decision to support a January 1976 draft United Nations [UN] Security Council resolution explicitly calling for a two-state settlement along June 1967 borders, an initiative ultimately killed by an American veto.”²⁵ Indeed, the principal motive behind Israel’s invasion of Southern Lebanon in 1982 was to stymie the PLO’s “peace offensive” by blocking “Arafat from gaining PLO support for qualified acceptance of U.N. Resolution 242.”²⁶ In this sense, the precursor to Oslo was a direct inversion of the rejectionist thesis: the increasingly compromising tendency of the PLO and Israel’s opposition to any form of Palestinian state.     

The Madrid Conference of 1991, the progenitor of the Oslo Accords, is marked by multiple relevant tensional dimensions. First, it is symptomatic that Israel agreed to the conference only with the proviso that Palestinian representation be confined to a joint delegation with Jordan. Second, a major outgrowth of Madrid was the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace agreement, a development that evokes the Egypt case. Normalisation between Israel and Jordan, homologous to Camp David I, took place under codicils reminiscent of the former, namely the opening “floodgates of U.S. economic and military assistance to Jordan,” while eliding the Palestinian question.²⁷ Thus, the elaboration of a separate Israeli-Jordanian track of normalisation, while being a major success of Madrid, was simultaneously an echo of Said’s dichotomy of “affirmation and denial,” with the latter placed firmly in the ascendant position.     

The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, fully articulate the asymmetrical relation between Israel and the Palestinians. The breakthrough transpired in the form of the concept of mutual recognition:  The PLO formally accepted Resolution 242 in exchange for Israel’s recognition of the former as “the representative of the Palestinian people.” The precondition to, in Arafat’s language, this “historic event, inaugurating a new epoch of peaceful coexistence” was a formal recognition by the Palestinian leadership of “the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security.”²⁸ On the other hand, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin firmly enunciated the Israeli government’s opposition to the international consensus by vowing to “not return to the 4 June 1967 lines”; the Palestinian “entity” would remain “less than a state.”²⁹      

The Oslo process contains indices of both success and failure. The former manifests in the ability of the Accords to reorganise the mechanism of Israel’s occupation. The first Intifada – and international condemnation over Israel’s response to it – engendered a potent realisation in the latter’s ruling class, namely, that violence was too unstable a means of managing the occupation.      By creating the Palestinian Authority to preserve Israeli “security,” Oslo finalised the transformation of Fatah from the perceived vanguard of Palestinian liberation to the principal enforcers of Israel’s occupation. In terms of moving closer to the achievement of Palestinian rights and statehood, however, Edward Said describes Oslo as the “Palestinian Versailles.” It is worth problematizing the use of the term “failure” to describe the relationship between Oslo and Palestinian statehood, the explicit denial of which is immanent within the logic of the Accords. Consequently, the abstract ideologemes of success and failure ought to be concretised in the context of contradictory interests. 

While the logic of Oslo inherently entailed a less-than-favourable outcome for the Palestinians, successive Israeli governments rigorously committed themselves to establishing faits accomplis that were “contrary to the spirit of the accord.” As Morris writes, “[Israel] continued to expand settlements and increased construction in and around East Jerusalem, in an effort to establish facts on the ground in advance of the permanent status negotiations, in which Jerusalem was expected to figure large.”³⁰ Israel’s policy in the immediate post-Oslo period was aimed at foreclosing any potential of contiguity in a future Palestinian state by dividing the West Bank into, in Said’s terms, “Bantustans.”³¹ This is in stark contrast to the picture Ross paints of the intentions of Oslo as a “process of living together” by building “a web of cooperative relations.”³² Said encapsulates the effect of Oslo as having “fulfilled the Zionist dream of giving Palestinians rule over municipal services for their own people but not land.”³³

V

The final status negotiations, beginning in July 2000 at Camp David, represent the fullest expression of the peace process. Unfolding within the structural and ideological constraints established by Oslo, Camp David II crystallises the commitment to peace and compromise that Israel had displayed at Oslo. The bulk of orthodox analysis of the negotiations indicates the rise of a collective phantasm surrounding Israel’s willingness to compromise. Dennis Ross contrasts Israel’s “big moves” with the Palestinian strategy of “rejecting compromise on the permanent status issues.”³⁴ It follows that the cause of failure at Camp David was Palestinian intransigence on the major issues, namely, borders, settlements, refugees, security, and the status of Jerusalem. In the same vein as the concepts of success and failure, concession emerges as yet another potent ideological signifier which fails to lay bare the necessary contradiction of interests between Israel and the Palestinians. A migration from the abstract to the concrete requires an answer to the following question: concessions relative to what?     

From the standpoint of Israel’s maximal interests, Barak’s offer at Camp David certainly suggests concessions. Pundak summarises the contours of the progression of the negotiations:

The Israeli offer at Camp David was based on a map which included an annexation of approximately 12% of the West Bank without territorial compensation. Unlike Rabin, who had agreed, in the October 1994 peace agreement with Jordan, to exchange territory in a 1:1 ratio, Barak tried to impose an unbalanced agreement. Towards the end of the talks, the Americans made clear to the Palestinians that the maximal Israeli offer included an annexation of 9% and a compensation of 1%.³⁵

On the other hand, as Pundak asserts, “The Palestinian leadership and a majority of the public were willing to strike a deal and to make the necessary concessions, but they needed from Israel clear negotiating positions and evidence that the relationship of the occupier to the occupied would actually change.”³⁶ Consequently, measured against international law, the Palestinian delegation conceded on each of the final-status issues: June 1967 border arrangements; dissolution of all settlements in occupied territory; a full right of return for all refugees; and accepting an Israeli security presence in the Palestinian state. The dichotomy between Israeli concessions and Palestinian intransigence emerges less as an empirical descriptor but more as an ideological configuration that is a result of presuming the legitimacy of Israel’s maximal interests. A logical outgrowth of this framework is that the perpetuation of the basic elements of settler-colonialism, namely, settlements, territorial control, and limits on the right of return, is interpreted as “an Israeli government ready for a far-reaching compromise facing obstinate Palestinian rejectionism.”³⁷     

While it is acceptable, even for liberal Zionists, to acknowledge the Camp David II offer as inequitable toward the Palestinians, the Clinton Parameters occupy a different position. Shlomo Ben Ami, former acting Israeli foreign minister and negotiator, admitted that Camp David “might not have been the deal the Palestinians could have accepted,” but maintained that the Taba negotiations over the parameters represented “the real lost opportunities.”³⁸ Insofar as the parameters entailed, in Pundak’s words, “dramatic progress on almost all the most important issues,” On its face, Ben-Ami’s assessment rings true.³⁹ According to Ben-Ami, the parameters represented “the outer limits of our capacity for compromise” for Israel, which intensifies the tragic nature of Arafat’s “brinkmanship.” That the parameters marked Israel’s limits is instructive but incomprehensible without a necessary qualification: what defines Israel’s acceptable limits? The answer, of course, is maximal Israeli interests, which are synonymous with settler-colonial interests. Ben-Ami correctly juxtaposes demands of “justice” with those of “stability,” the latter forming the basis of Israel’s primary objective during the peace process. However, vacuous references to the desirability of stability obscure the following reality: stability in an environment marked by the settler-indigenous dialectic is little more than a mechanism for the perpetuation of the status quo. That the outcome of the Taba negotiations was acceptance, with reservations, by both sides introduces a further obstacle against the rejectionist thesis. The final status negotiations were finally dissolved by the newly elected Israeli government of Ariel Sharon.  

How can one interpret a hypothetical “success” of the Clinton plan? An implementation of the parameters would have resulted in such continuities as the permanence of colonial settlements, an incontiguous Palestinian state – a fait accompli guaranteed by Israel’s expansion of the settler regime in the immediate post-Oslo period, curtailment of the right of return, and the presence of the Israeli security apparatus in a “non-militarised” Palestinian entity.⁴⁰ Though Clinton’s plan certainly entailed a yet farther distance from Israel’s maximal interests, basic elements of incommensurability remained inherent within the parameters. A transformation of “the relationship of the occupier to the occupied,” the precondition to a settlement, Pundak emphasised, was evidently not in the works. That Arafat accepted the proposal suggests the degree to which Fatah’s credibility had disintegrated, retaining little to no leverage. Simultaneously, the Clinton Parameters represent the pinnacle of Israel’s propensity to compromise, as well as a great opportunity missed by Sharon to stabilise the Zionist project. By aiming to institutionalise the asymmetrical reality of the conflict, the Clinton Parameters represent a logical extension of Oslo as a mechanism of integrating the Palestinian subaltern.

VI

While Sharon decisively terminated the peace process, an array of its rearticulations merits consideration. The first of these is the negotiations that took place between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas. Triggered by the Annapolis Conference in November 2007, this round of talks featured key continuities. Much like earlier iterations of the peace process, the dimension of asymmetry reappears in full force. Olmert’s introductory remarks are an emblematic display of self-congratulation, having overcome “many good reasons” against coming to the table. Israel’s willingness to accept “painful compromise” is indicative of this generosity. The interpretation of compromise as a genuine concession, and not as a setback against maximal colonial interest, evokes much of the language surrounding Camp David. Simultaneously, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni affirmed “the Jewish nation’s right to all of the Land of Israel.” A direct inversion of an acknowledgement of the effects of Zionism on the indigenous population, Livni instead conditions the creation of a Palestinian state on the prerequisite “that upon its establishment the word ‘Nakba’ be deleted from the Arabic lexicon in referring to Israel.”⁴¹ In terms of the content of the negotiations, the basic elements of the Clinton agreements remained the principal starting point; little development was seen apart from the worsening of popular support and legitimacy for Abbas and Fatah, contributing further to the futility of the negotiations. The negotiations continued until December 2008 with the launch of Operation Cast Lead, also known as the First Gaza War, when, during a three-week siege, Israel reportedly killed around 1,400 Palestinians, including hundreds of children.⁴²  

In September 2020, in the form of the Abraham Accords, the Trump administration revealed a major reappearance of the framework of the peace process. The U.S. government announced, in what is essentially the Gulf variant of the Egypt and Jordan agreements, full diplomatic and economic normalisation between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, with Saudi Arabia to join later. While the stated purpose of the Accords was to “realize the vision of a Middle East region that is stable, peaceful and prosperous, for the benefit of all States and peoples in the region,” the scarce mention of Palestinians is, again, revelatory.⁴³ The function of the Accords was to solidify American imperialism in the Middle East by ameliorating the contradictions between various U.S. client states in West Asia, consigning the Palestinians as a triviality to be dealt with later. Contrary to their intended goal of a “prosperous” Middle East, the Abraham Accords prefigured the October 7^th attacks by forestalling a diplomatic solution to the Palestinian question. In essence, the Abraham Accords were an attempt to superimpose – under U.S. hegemony – a matrix of regional stability without dealing with the relevant internal contradictions, which ultimately caused their collapse.      

Orthodox wisdom surrounding the Israel-Palestine peace process is marked by a glaring lacuna, namely, a lack of emphasis on the settler-colonial nature of the conflict. There exists a fundamental opposition of interests between the settler tendency to dispossess and dominate, and the indigenous one to resist. Since its inception, the primary obstacle to the Zionist project has been the reconciliation of stability with the creation of an ethnostate, a situation marked by perpetual instability. The various iterations of the peace process, from the Peel Commission through the Abraham Accords, serve the historical function of managing and reformulating mechanisms of the dispossession and occupation of Palestinians. Insofar as they effectively achieved this function, various manifestations of the peace process were hugely successful. With the collapse of the peace process, brute violence, and consequently genocide, remain the principal enforcement mechanism of the Zionist project. The genocide, therefore, is not an aberration but the logical conclusion of the historical trajectory of Zionism. Once diplomacy could no longer provide a veneer of legitimacy over settler-colonial violence, Zionism’s logic appears in its most naked form, namely direct annihilation. 

The fundamental presuppositions of the peace process, namely partition and compromise, remain afflicted with profound contradictions. As Edward Said states, “The effort to separate has occurred simultaneously and paradoxically with the effort to take more and more land,” the latter being the precise fait accompli that renders untenable the practical implementation of the two-state solution. More than two decades after its collapse, invocations of the two-state solution fail to atrophy, persisting less as a practical remedium and more as expressions of liberal mythos seeking to preserve the Zionist project. The peace process, thus, emerges as the diplomatic organ of the Zionist project, ensuring that its regime of settler violence, indigenous dispossession, and colonial genocide proceeds unabated. If the failure of the peace process shows anything, it is that indigenous liberation cannot be negotiated with a settler-colonial movement whose existence depends on the negation of the people it colonises.

1. Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004) ↩︎
2.  Aaron David Miller, The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace (Bantam Books, 2008) ↩︎
3.  For a critique of Israel’s perception as David against Goliath, see Simha Flapan, “Defenseless Israel Faced Destruction by the Arab Goliath,” in The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (Pantheon Books, 1987), pp. 187–200. The only time such an argument was tenable was during the war of 1948, and Flapan’s work, among the other New Historians, thoroughly demonstrates that Israel’s position as the supposed weaker party has little relation to facts on the ground.  ↩︎
4.  For an examination of the Balfour Declaration as a function of British imperial interests in the region, see Mayir Vereté. “The Balfour Declaration and Its Makers.” Middle Eastern Studies 6, no. 1 (1970): pp. 48–76. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4282307. “Had there been no Zionists in those days,” Vereté asserts, “the British would have had to invent them.” Nonetheless, the influence of Zionist lobbying at the time cannot be understated: For an exhaustive treatment of the subject, see Ilan Pappé, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic (Oneworld Publications, 2024).  ↩︎
5.  Halbrook, Stephen. “The Class Origins of Zionist Ideology.” Journal of Palestine Studies 2, no. 1 (1972): pp. 86–110. https://doi.org/10.2307/2535975. To demonstrate Zionism’s “willingness to identify Zionism with the cause of white settlerdom,” Halbrook quotes Theodore Herzl’s direct appeal to Cecil Rhodes, the architect of the settler colony of Rhodesia, to support the Zionist project, describing it as “something colonial.”  ↩︎
6.  For an exhaustive analysis of the imperial relationship between the U.S. and Israel, see Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, updated ed. (Pluto Press, 1999). Chomsky analyses the confluence of the determinants of this “special relationship”: first, domestic lobbying groups; second, Israel’s value to the U.S. as a protector of the latter’s oil and security interests in West Asia; and finally, and most curiously, the “immense popularity [with American liberalism] that Israel won by demonstrating its military efficiency.” ↩︎
7.  British Palestinian Committee, *British Military Collaboration with Israel* (January 2025), [https://static1.squarespace.com/static/611a64c35baa3f33556d5454/t/6798b1604694e819057b4184/1738060146895/British+Military+Collaboration+Report]. ↩︎
8.  See Patrick Wolfe, “New Jews for Old: Racialising the Jewish State,” in Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (Verso, 2016). Wolfe is widely credited with pioneering the academic field of settler-colonial studies. For a broader examination of settler-colonialism as a process, see also Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409. doi:10.1080/14623520601056240. ↩︎
9.  Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992). Masalha remains the leading source on the role played by population transfer in Zionist thinking. ↩︎
10.  Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 8.  ↩︎
11.  Great Britain, Palestine Royal Commission Report [Peel Commission Report], Cmd. 5479 (His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1937), accessed via PalQuest, https://www.palquest.org/en/historictext/6719/peel-commission-report. ↩︎
12.  Benny Morris, “The Gaza Story,” Benny Morris’s Corner (Substack), August 21, 2025, https://bennymorris.substack.com/p/the-gaza-story.  ↩︎
13.  Peel Commission Report, Cmd. 5479. ↩︎
14.  David Ben-Gurion, quoted in Oren Kessler, Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), p. 97. ↩︎
15.  Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 (Vintage Books, 2001), p. 142. ↩︎
16.  Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), p. 54. ↩︎
17.  Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 39. ↩︎
18.  Walid Khalidi, “Plan Dalet: The Zionist Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies 18, no. 1 (Autumn 1988): 4. ↩︎
19.  For a comprehensive account of the depopulation campaign in 1947-48, see Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications, 2006). As opposed to being an aberration or accident, Pappé situates the Nakba as a systematic policy, necessarily arising from decades of Zionist theory and practice. See also Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Though Birth remains an indispensable piece of scholarship, Morris concludes that the Palestinian refugee exodus was “born of war, not by design.” For a critique of this conclusion and its distance from Morris’ own evidence, see Norman G. Finkelstein, “Myths, Old and New,” Journal of Palestine Studies 21, no. 1 (Autumn 1991). ↩︎
20.  UN Security Council, Resolution 242 (1967), S/RES/242 (22 November 1967), https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/90717. ↩︎
21.  Norman G. Finkelstein, “To Live or Perish: Abba Eban ‘Reconstructs’ the June 1967 War,” in Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, 2nd ed. (Verso, 2003) ↩︎
22.  Seth Anziska, Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo (Princeton University Press, 2018), p. 115 & p 125. ↩︎
23.  Cate Brown and Aram Roston, “Trump’s Board of Peace Plans to Grant Itself Sweeping Immunity, Documents Show,” The Guardian, June 27, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/law/2026/jun/27/board-of-peace-legal-immunity-un. ↩︎
24.  Colter Louwerse, “‘Tyranny of the Veto’: PLO Diplomacy and the January 1976 United Nations Security Council Resolution,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 33, no. 2 (2022): 303, https://doi.org/10.1080/09592296.2022.2062127. For a critique of the rejectionist thesis in the pre-Oslo period, the Louwerse paper is essential.  ↩︎
25.  Louwerse, “‘Tyranny of the Veto’: PLO Diplomacy and the January 1976 United Nations Security Council Resolution.” ↩︎
26.  Noam Chomsky, “The ‘Peace Process’ in the Real World,” in Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies (South End Press, 1989), accessed via ZNetwork, https://znetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/zbooks/www/chomsky/ni/ni-c06-s14.html. ↩︎
27.  David Makovsky, “Twenty Years of Israeli-Jordanian Peace: A Brief Assessment,” Washington Institute for Near East Policy, October 23, 2014, https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/twenty-years-israeli-jordanian-peace-brief-assessment. ↩︎
28.  Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, “Letters of Mutual Recognition,” September 9–10, 1993, accessed via UN Peacemaker, https://peacemaker.un.org/sites/default/files/document/files/2024/05/israel-plo20mutual20recognition.pdf. Yasser Arafat, quoted in Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 (Vintage Books, 2001), p. 621. ↩︎
29.  Yitzhak Rabin, “Address to the Knesset on the Israeli-Palestinian Agreement,” October 5, 1995, Palestinian History Tapestry (PalQuest), accessed May 10, 2026, https://www.palquest.org/en/historictext/24965/yitzhaq-rabin%E2%80%99s-address-knesset-after-israeli-palestinian-agreement. ↩︎
30.  Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 627. ↩︎
31.  Edward W. Said, “Palestinians under Siege,” London Review of Books 22, no. 24 (December 14, 2000), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n24/edward-said/palestinians-under-siege. ↩︎
32.  Ross, The Missing Peace, p. 764 ↩︎
33.  Edward W. Said, “Where Negotiations Have Led,” in The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (Vintage Books, 2001), p. 13. ↩︎
34.  Ross, The Missing Peace, p. 808 ↩︎
35.  Ron Pundak, “From Oslo to Taba: What Went Wrong?,” in Speculating on the Edge of the Abyss, ed. Ian S. Lustick and Ann M. Lesch (Sussex Academic Press, 2007). Considered a key architect of the Oslo process on the Israeli side, Pundak’s historical review of the peace process effectively debunks several mythologies perpetrated by the mainstream narrative. ↩︎
36.  Pundak, “From Oslo to Taba.” ↩︎
37.  Shlomo Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 267. ↩︎
38.  Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy, p. 270.  ↩︎
39.  Pundak, “From Oslo to Taba.” On the progress made at Taba, Pundak writes, “On the delicate issue of Palestinian refugees and the right of return, the negotiators achieved a draft determining the parameters and procedures for a solution, along with a clear emphasis that its implementation would not threaten the Jewish character of the State of Israel. In the territorial dimension – which constitutes the main basis for any agreement – the new maps presented by the two sides were closer than ever before to an agreed border line. Israel reduced its demands to 6% but still insisted on merely symbolic and minimal territorial compensation, while the Palestinians agreed to an Israeli annexation of approximately 3% along with a territorial compensation of the same amount.”  ↩︎
40.  Bill Clinton, “The Clinton Parameters,” December 23, 2000, Palestinian Refugee ResearchNet (PRRN), McGill University, accessed May 10, 2026, https://prrn.mcgill.ca/prrn/docs/clinton.htm. ↩︎
41.  “The Annapolis Conference,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Spring 2008), pp. 74-92 ↩︎
42.  Amnesty International, *Israel/Gaza: Operation “Cast Lead”: 22 Days of Death and Destruction* (London: Amnesty International Publications, July 2009), [https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/mde150152009en.pdf](https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/mde150152009en.pdf). ↩︎
43.  Israel and United Arab Emirates, Abraham Accords Peace Agreement: Treaty of Peace, Diplomatic Relations and Full Normalization Between the United Arab Emirates and the State of Israel, September 15, 2020, White House Archives, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/abraham-accords-peace-agreement-treaty-of-peace-diplomatic-relations-and-full-normalization-between-the-united-arab-emirates-and-the-state-of-israel/. ↩︎