U.S. Recognition of West Bank Settlements Will Harm Israel
▻https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/21/us-recognition-israel-settlements-palestine
The Trump administration’s disdain for international consensus on the West Bank will encourage previously cautious governments to support BDS and Palestinian statehood.
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Israeli diplomatic efforts with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have in many respects been designed to prevent unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state and have included pressure campaigns against international bodies that accept Palestine as a member, relying on a U.S. veto in the Security Council to prevent the U.N. from admitting Palestine as a full member state, and even advocating the curtailment of foreign aid to the Palestinians if they seek to use international law as a way to gain statehood.
One of the reasons this approach has been tacitly accepted by the international community is because it has been widely understood that Israel’s de facto control in much of the West Bank is temporary. The more that Israel fully rejects this notion and seeks to cement a de jure presence through some form of annexation, the harder it is for Israel to continue arguing successfully that the world community should stick to its guns when it comes to the Palestinian approach to unilaterally declaring statehood.
This would be a diplomatic nightmare of unprecedented proportions for Israel and has largely been avoided until now, because Israel has successfully argued for an international consensus that the only path to a permanent resolution is direct negotiations between the two parties. If the new Israeli position is to declare that any policies that it or the Trump administration advances are all that matters, irrespective of what anyone else thinks, and that the fundamental realities that the rest of the world accepts can be unilaterally reversed or ignored, it will be very difficult to argue that countries that want to recognize Palestine should hold off.
Similarly, Israel has successfully relegated the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign to the fringes of far-left politics and activism. But moves intended to shatter a consensus on some issues or demonstrate that it should not exist will have unintended consequences on other issues, and BDS is one of them. Israel has rightly argued that the policy of targeting Israel with boycotts and other such actions holds Israel to a fundamentally unfair and one-sided standard, and governments outside of the Arab world have largely agreed. The more that Israel argues that its own extreme positions should be adopted by everyone, the more it opens the door for adoption of extreme positions that do not benefit Israel, including BDS.