In a rare and sharp split with Israeli government policy, a group of Jewish community leaders wants to get a proposal for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the desk of the next U.S. president.
The group, the Israel Policy Forum, is set to launch a pair of complementary working papers next week in the United States and Israel.
Elements of the proposals — including relocating settlers and preparing for Palestinian sovereignty in Jerusalem — are radical departures from the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current government.
The papers will propose not only what immediate actions Israel can take to prepare the ground for two states, but also will consider what kind of long-term security structure will satisfy both Palestinian sovereignty and Israeli safety needs.
Another part of the proposals will be getting the next U.S. president to kick-start new talks — also anathema to Netanyahu, who regards outside pressure as counterproductive.
The organization behind the push is not new to such initiatives. The Israel Policy Forum was established in the early 1990s at the behest of then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who went over the head of a hawkish pro-Israel establishment to seek U.S. Jewish backing for his peace talks with the Palestinians.
This time, however, the party doing the reaching over is not a prime minister but Jewish community heavyweights who have led major Jewish organizations, from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to the Anti-Defamation League.
In the last 18 months or so, the Israel Policy Forum has signed to its board Alan Solow and Robert Sugarman, past chairs of the Presidents Conference, the Jewish community’s foreign policy umbrella group. Sugarman also is a past president of the ADL.
On board, too, are Robert Elman and Robert Goodkind, past presidents of the American Jewish Committee, and Susie Gelman, daughter of the late San Francisco philanthropists Richard and Rhoda Goldman and a past president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington.
The initiative will formally launch on May 31 at a Washington, D.C., conference showcasing proposals for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Veterans of the Israeli and U.S. diplomatic establishments will attend.
Mainstream Jewish groups have long been resistant to openly challenging Israel on security issues. Solow said that was less of a consideration in Israel’s volatile political climate.
“One doesn’t know what Israel’s government is going to look like in a week,” he said.
Solow also noted the stasis following the collapse of the last round of Israeli-Palestinian talks in 2014 that has driven Democrats to criticize Israel more freely as they see the prospects of two states diminish.
“Taking on the perspective from those in the pro-Israel community, the only reasonable Zionist solution is to have two states for two people,” Solow said.
Both likely presidential nominees, Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, have said they would like to address Israeli-Palestinian peace.
While Trump says he is eager to see if he can bring about a two-state solution, most of the Republicans he defeated had all but abandoned the idea in the near term — a skepticism that still prevails among congressional Republicans.
David Halperin, the Israel Policy Forum’s director, said he had secured meetings with Republicans to discuss the project, but with more difficulty than he had with Democrats.
“In the current political climate, we would like to make this more bipartisan,” he said.
Solow said the polling demonstrates that the “overwhelming number of American Jews support the position we’re taking.” Much of Israel’s right rejects the two-state solution.
Sugarman said the plan for two states would couple with a robust and detailed effort to keep Israel secure, a commonplace posture in Israel he said was missing from the American Jewish conversation.
“It’s never been pushed [in the U.S.] the way IPF is pushing it,” he said.
AIPAC in principle is in favor of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, but the prominent pro-Israel lobbying group would never consider getting ahead of the Israeli government in advancing how to define two states as these plans do. For J Street, the organizing principle is two states, but its often tough criticisms of Israel have alienated the same Jewish institutions that the IPF board members have on their resumes.
The emphasis of the proposals is on preparing Israel psychologically, politically and militarily for two states while countering what the authors of the Israeli plan describe as “fear mongering” from those who oppose Palestinian statehood.
Israel “must seize the initiative to determine its destiny and shape a better future for our and our neighbors’ children,” says the 67-page plan crafted by Commanders for Israel’s Security, a coalition of senior security officials in Israel that is taking part in next week’s D.C. conference. “There is no exclusively military solution to the conflict or to waves of terror.”
The Israeli team’s proposals include a settlement freeze, encouraging settlers who live outside the West Bank security fence to move back inside its perimeter and setting up a precursor for Palestinian sovereignty in predominantly Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem.