The year 2017 was important for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, commemorating both the centennial of the Balfour Declaration and the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 war.Footnote ¹ That war, which resulted in Israel's defeat of three Arab armies and its occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights, transformed the politics of the Middle East. According to UN Security Council Resolution 242, issued in November 1967, the occupation was illegal: Israel would have to withdraw from the territories it occupied if it were to achieve peace with its neighbors. In international law, military occupations are temporary by definition. Israel, however, only returned the Sinai to Egypt in 1982. (One year prior, it unilaterally annexed the Golan Heights from Syria.) Despite a twenty-five-year-long political process initiated in 1993, Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has continued unabated.

Gershon Shafir, a sociologist at UC San Diego, and Mehran Kamrava, a political scientist at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Qatar, have each produced a book that seeks to explain this persistence. Shafir wants to explain “the world's most intractable conflict” by contextualizing it within what he describes as Israel's ongoing debate since the end of the Six Day War over how to settle “the proper relationship between the pre- and post-1967 territories” (2). His central argument is that the occupation has been “dragged out by the Israeli desire to continue its state building by colonizing and subsequently annexing parts of the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territories]” (84). This desire, his book maintains, was fueled largely by the rise of religious parties who oppose any compromise over the land. Nonetheless, Shafir believes that the two-state solution can still be rescued. Kamrava, by contrast, focuses on the demise of this option and its implications for the Palestinian state-building project. This project is impossible, he argues, not only because of Israeli policies, but also because of the Palestinian national movement's own political failings.

If Shafir and Kamrava disagree on who is most responsible for the failure to end the occupation, they share two premises. First, they agree that the occupation has constituted an extension of Israel's colonial legacy rather than a radical rupture from the state's pre-1967 past. Second, they agree that the occupation, as a structure of domination, has evolved through a series of contradictory policies adopted in response to changing circumstances, such as the rise of Gush Emunim in early 1970s and Hamas after 1987.

This is where the commonalities end. Shafir sets his sights on exposing the legalistic dimensions of the occupation, drawing selectively on the extensive literature available on the subject. Channeling the memory of the late theorist of settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe, he details the ways in which the occupation has been a process – not an event, but an evolution full of contortions rather than emanating from a clear, or linear, plan. He avoids discussing any clear Zionist intentionality toward the West Bank and Gaza Strip, preferring instead to spell out what he identifies as the four key elements that have shaped the character of the occupation: land expropriation; the daily practice of overt and withheld violence (what others have described as a “carceral enterprise”Footnote ²); Palestinian resistance; and above all a legal structure that draws on International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and that the Israeli authorities manipulated to create an eclectic “legal autonomy” for the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). Israel is “the most legalistic [rather than democratic] country in the Middle East” (23), Shafir observes, one whose “sui generis…interpretation of IHL…allows the colonization of the OPT” (82). Yet for all the ways that Israel's manipulation of international law has helped to prolong the occupation, it has also created legal inconsistencies that have allowed Palestinians to reclaim some of their rights, whether by using the Israeli court system to resist land expropriation, as in the case of the Elon Moreh settlement in 1978, or by mounting legal challenges at the international level, as they did with their case against the construction of the separation barrier at the International Court of Justice in 2004.

Like other studies of the occupation, A Half Century devotes substantial attention to the settlement enterprise. Shafir emphasizes the central role of the settlements in the occupation's longevity while exposing what he considers to be their inherent contradictions. Central to his analysis is the idea that the term “‘[s]ettlements’ carries within its structure all the diverse and conflicting interests of Israeli society and in many respects remains a hollow undertaking” (82). Given that the colonization of the West Bank began under a Labor-led government, readers may be puzzled by the extent to which Shafir downplays the role of the Zionist left in transforming the geography of the West Bank after the war. Instead, he places overwhelming responsibility for the ongoing occupation on Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), the messianic political movement founded in 1974. While he acknowledges the diversity of the settler population today, which includes everyone from zealous ideologues to rational instrumentalists, his account stresses how religious Zionists rose through the echelons of the state and military establishments, came to dominate key ministries like education and housing, and ultimately hijacked Israeli political discourse around the occupation. The story that unfolds is one of settlers using the state, or whichever political party is in power, to prevent the end of the occupation, rather than those parties using zealous and non-zealous settlers alike to advance agreed upon, if not always clearly defined, Zionist objectives, namely Jewish control over the maximum amount of Palestinian land possible, without its people.

Whichever way one sees the causality flowing, what is clear for Shafir is that religious Zionism is the single most important factor that explains the continuation of Zionist colonization, despite the Oslo peace process and Palestinian moderation, which Shafir makes sure to highlight as he reiterates the compromises that the Palestinian Authority made to keep Israel in negotiations. While few might dispute such an assessment, many will find the emphasis on Gush Emunim overstated and the analogy he goes on to make between Gush Emunim and Hamas problematic. Although Shafir acknowledges that Hamas emerged as a product of the occupation and of Israel's attempt to weaken the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the West Bank and Gaza, he emphasizes the two movements’ shared role in weakening more moderate or leftist parties within their respective societies. Despite their unequal access to state power, Shafir writes, the popularity of the two movements has made any compromise more difficult, even if at times each has shown evidence of political pragmatism. This suggestion of parity allows him to distribute equal blame on Israelis and Palestinians for the failure to end the occupation. Echoing mainstream wisdom, for example, he recounts how the failure of Hamas to distinguish in its suicide operations between Israeli citizens living inside the 1949 armistice lines and those in the occupied territories further hardened Israel's position by weakening the Israeli left and thus spoiling the peace process and making a retreat from the Green Line more difficult. This narrative is misleading because it conflates cause with effect, undermining the extent to which Hamas's violent tactics emerged as a specific result of the occupation that Gush Emunim – and the Israeli state – helped create. Shafir's analysis also overlooks the two groups’ different organizational structure and political objectives.

Shafir argues that these developments do not definitively bury the two-state solution. This comes across in his final chapter, on the two decades of the Oslo diplomatic process from January 1993 to April 2014. Since the late 1990s, a sizable body of work has analyzed the negotiations between Israel and the PLO (and, subsequently, the Palestinian National Authority, or PNA) as structurally doomed from the outset. Shafir does not engage with this literature, focusing instead on the little-known Olmert-Abbas deliberations in 2008 and the ceiling of concessions that each party was willing to offer in order to reach an agreement. These included an Israeli acknowledgment of the Palestinian right to a state and a land swap offer that would incorporate most of the settlement blocs into Israel. Palestinian negotiators, for their part, acquiesced to Israel's definition of “sharing” Jerusalem, which entailed the annexation of large parts of East Jerusalem and its settlements. They also accepted that Israel would offer only a symbolic gesture towards the right of return. Shafir maintains that the Olmert-Abbas talks provided a genuine opportunity for Israel to end its colonization and finalize its borders, an opportunity it squandered with its intransigence and failure to accommodate Palestinian moderation. Countering prevailing wisdom, he argues that this intransigence was not over the question of Jerusalem or refugees, but over the size of settlements to be evacuated, and Netanyahu's new demand that the PNA officially recognize Israel as a Jewish state. In Shafir's view, though, even these obstacles were not insurmountable. He argues that negotiators could have found a vague enough formula recognizing Israel as the home of the Jewish people that would assuage Israeli as much as Palestinian concerns, and that settlers living outside the major settlements bloc, estimated to comprise between 85,000 and 105,000 people (178), would move back to Israel if given the right incentives to do so. Shafir maintains that this subset of settlers, unlike those around Jerusalem and in the major settlement blocks, lack the political and economic clout to prevent their removal from the heart of the West Bank by Israeli authorities. As further evidence, he calls upon historical precedents to show that settlers can be moved, as happened in Sinai in 1982 and Gaza in 2005. Shafir thus leaves the reader with the impression that the occupation is still reversible. After all, settlements, in Shafir's view, have neither solved the Palestinian “demographic problem” that Zionism has sought to eliminate nor provided security for Israeli Jews. This impression underscores his vision of the occupation as an “opportunistic project” and how “[t]he mosaic-like geography, the legal contortions, the administrative maze, even the blatant illegality of considerable part of settlement construction all demonstrate that Israeli colonialism is not a single or single-minded project and is vulnerable to challenges and pressures” (82).

The problem with these claims is not that settlers have not shown pragmatism in the past or that their ultimate loyalty to a Jewish-majority state will supersede their religious fervor for annexation. Nor is it the unreliability of polls suggesting that sustained political pressure from other Israeli Jews, combined with government incentives and compensation, could still compel West Bank settlers to return to Israel “proper.” Rather, what weakens A Half Century’s key intervention is the author's failure to engage new scholarship that has drawn structural links between the occupation and Israel's four-month occupation of Gaza after the 1956 war and, more crucially, its pre-1967 imposition of military rule over the state's Palestinian citizens.Footnote ³ The book also ignores the growing body of work on the 1967 war itself, and the extent to which it was premeditated.Footnote ⁴ His failure to engage this genealogy weakens his analysis of why the occupation has not ended or how its persistence is not simply the result of the influence of religious Zionists. Indeed, Shafir's assertion that it was the absence of Israeli will (rather than a workable formula) that foreclosed a resolution to the conflict begs the question of when Israel has demonstrated its will to compromise on the West Bank and why it has never been on offer.

To his credit, Shafir's desire to convince his readers that the two-state solution can be salvaged does not stop him from offering a review of the one-state idea and its re-emergence over the past two decades as part of a Palestinian non-violent strategy to restitute the Palestinian struggle within a discourse of rights rather than statehood. While he agrees with proponents of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement that recourse to international law remains the only tool left to undermine the occupation, he disputes the validity of the increasingly popular analogy between BDS and the South African anti-apartheid struggle: the BDS movement lacks the organizational structure and the political power within Palestinian society that the ANC enjoyed in South Africa, for instance, and BDS leaders and activists have declined to articulate an explicit political vision for the future the way the ANC defined its aim as the attainment of a democratic state for all inhabitants of the land. Shafir also maintains that the one-state debate has remained utopian, as neither the Palestinians nor Israelis have developed the necessary institutional arrangements to support a single democratic state, and neither society contains a meaningful constituency that wishes to coexist with the other. Having dismissed the one-state option as unrealistic politically and organizationally, Shafir concludes that the two-state solution remains the only option available. It is also the best placed to protect Israel's future as a democratic and Jewish state.

Kamrava takes up where Shafir leaves off by reflecting on the consequences of fifty years of occupation for the Palestinian state project. He also highlights how the 1948 Nakba, which led to Palestine's ethnic cleansing, remains a national trauma from which Palestinians have sought to recover by demanding their own state. Today, the United States, the international community with its endorsement of the Road Map to Peace in 2003, and the parties to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative all consider the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel to be the only way to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. First declared (rhetorically) by the PLO in 1988, Palestine has now been recognized by over 80 other states. It gained admission into the United Nations as a non-member state in 2012. Kamrava's book complements Shafir's capable analysis of the occupation's “legalist” edifice by detailing the major factors that have compromised Palestine's territorial foundation: the severing of Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, the construction of the Separation Wall, and the disarticulation of the Palestinian economy, among others. This being said, Kamrava wants also to emphasize that the Palestinian nation, as opposed to a Palestinian state, is alive and cannot be destroyed. It endures in its people and despite their fragmentation, thanks to their literature, their memories and commemorative practices, and the steadfastness of those in the West Bank and Gaza.

Unfortunately, Kamrava does not elaborate on the theoretical and practical underpinnings of this distinction between Palestinian nation and state in the rest of his book. Instead, he is more concerned with identifying the roots of the Palestinians’ own political failings: “State-building in Palestine…is today only a distant dream,” he tells us, “a process hijacked by the avarice of political competition and personal ambition, derailed by cold realities of occupation and territorial loss, stalled by the decay and atrophy of institutions” (200).

The first of these roots of failure is what Kamrava defines as the national movement's historic inability to work through its internal differences, one that predates Oslo and the occupation and can been traced back to pre-1948 Palestinian political divisions. The second is the movement's failure to create politically consolidated and accountable state institutions during the Oslo years, thanks to the leadership's “selfish” and authoritarian vision of politics. This vision is best manifested in the PNA's refusal to hold regular elections, its discouragement of grassroots political engagement, and its failure to create a transparent judiciary. The political elite's partnership with a new “monopolistic comprador class,” composed of Palestinian returnees and some local business moguls, has exacerbated the problem (136-139). A third factor hampering the Palestinian state project is the growth and professionalization of the Palestinian NGO sector in the Oslo years, a phenomenon observed by other scholars. At times led by former PLO party members who “left” politics, these organizations have not always fostered a culture of democratic transparency and accountability, thus inadvertently sustaining the PNA's authoritarian rule. Their reliance on both international aid and the PNA has meant that their activities are geared toward meeting donors’ demands rather than addressing Palestinian political priorities. While Kamrava's grim diagnosis of the Palestinian predicament builds on some of the literature available on Palestinians’ own failings, his critiques are not always accurate or well explained. In particular, his historical understanding of the Palestinian national movement's internal divisions and the regional and international challenges it faced for the entirety of it pre-Oslo history is alternately thin and clichéd.

Kamrava concludes that the Palestinian people face one of three options: to disappear given the impossibility of their state; to reaffirm their political right to self-determination; or to remain in a purgatory of the status quo. Like Shafir, he maintains that the one-state option is utopian and unrealistic as he maintains that Palestinians and the Israelis do not want to live together. His assessment is that the Palestinians are condemned to purgatory. Kamrava thus reaches a more pessimistic conclusion than Shafir. Since the one-state alternative is unrealistic and the two-state solution is dead, there is no way out of the present conundrum.

Shafir and Kamrava's books complement each other insofar as they address how the occupation impacted the two sides of the conflict, i.e. Israelis and Palestinians. They provide the readers with an analysis of how Israel's colonial structure in the West Bank and Gaza allowed Israelis to continue their state-building project while denying the Palestinian their own. Shafir is more interested in exposing the contradictions of the Israeli endeavor in an attempt to show the dialectic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as much as to reveal why the two-state solution – including the preservation of Israel as a Jewish-majority state – remains the only available option. He wants to be comprehensive in his enumeration of the factors that shaped the colonial character of the occupation since 1967, but his failure to engage the question of Zionist ideology while overemphasizing the role of Israel's religious right undercuts his aim. This failure weakens his analysis, and with it the potential role of international law, the last battlefield as Shafir would argue – to end of the occupation. Like Kamrava, his review of the role of outside actors, especially of the United States and of Arab countries furthers his thesis for why the United States did not put more pressure on Israel, but it leaves readers wanting to know about what can be done today.

Symptomatically, perhaps, what is missing the most from both books is a substantial analysis of Palestinian resistance over the past fifty years. While neither author denies that Palestinian resistance has itself shaped elements of the occupation, both are myopic in their definition of its agents and its dynamics. Kamrava considers the 1987 Intifada the high point of Palestinian resistance, but his explanatory account of the uprising, confined to a conflict between elites and counter-elites, provides a narrow angle by which to understand Palestinian popular resistance and engagement, both within the PLO and outside it. Meanwhile, Shafir overemphasizes the role of Hamas to the detriment of other parties inside and outside the West Bank and Gaza, and without explaining Israel's role in perpetuating the Palestinian political crisis since 2006. He also overlooks, if not altogether dismisses, the historical and political links between the PLO and different forms of Palestinian resistance in the occupied territories over the past fifty years. Moreover, he does not take into consideration how the PLO's growing regional and international clout in the 1970s and 1980s influenced Israel's settlement strategy and the decision to forestall the possibility of a Palestinian state, long before the Oslo agreements were signed.Footnote ⁵ Intentionally or not, Shafir, as much as Kamrava, perpetuates a fragmented analysis of the Palestinians – one that accepts, rather than challenges, the demographic and territorial fragmentation that fifty years of Occupation has left them with.

Ultimately the value of these two books lies in their distillation of the record of fifty years of Israeli occupation and how it transformed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What they remain silent about is how the dialectics of the conflict are changing the terms of the debate well beyond the purgatory, the two-state solution, and the possibility of rescuing Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.