Palestine/Israel: 2-state solution vs. 1 binational state?

Post Reply New Topic

THE ISRAELI VICTORY in the 1967 war created a new reality in the region. Gradually, the outlines of a possible Grand Compromise began to take shape: Israel would return the land it captured in that war and in return the Palestinians and the Arab world would acknowledge Israel’s sovereignty over the 78 percent of Palestine that constituted the state of Israel on the eve of that war. This Grand Compromise, often referred to as “Land for Peace,” was enshrined in U.N. Resolution 242, and it gradually obtained the support of solid majorities among Palestinians and Arabs as well as Israelis and their supporters abroad. The two-state solution became the acknowledged goal for all well-meaning people as the ideal formula for a peaceful solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Those who rejected it from either side were viewed as maximalist hardliners and enemies to peace.

But as soon as the guns were silent in 1967, the issue of Jewish settlements in the newly occupied territories became a central and defining feature of the conflict between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism. International law allowed neither annexation nor the demographic shifts required to fulfill the Zionist ideal in terms of ejecting the non-Jewish population and moving Jews into the newly occupied territories. All such Zionist activity, therefore, needed to be carefully camouflaged and justified in secular, non-Zionist terms. It had to be justified either as a security measure, a temporary arrangement, or the creation of bargaining chips for the peace negotiations that were to come.

Palestinians who happened to be out of the area at the end of the war, or who left because of the war, were promptly blocked from returning. Israel started taking property all over the West Bank and Gaza under a variety of excuses and legal machinations and making that land available for Jewish settlers. Jewish settlers started moving in and creating exclusive Jewish enclaves that gave every indication of permanence. It is noteworthy that these settlements were not Israeli per se (Israeli Arab citizens were barred from them) but specifically and exclusively Jewish.

The settlements totally, fully, and radically contradicted and undermined the possibility of a two-state solution. Any credible two-state solution required an “Arab” Palestine in 22 percent of historic Palestine, in return for abandoning Palestinian claims in Israel as it existed before the 1967 war. In this sense, settlements became the primary impediments for a two-state solution, and those dedicated to it necessarily saw the settlers as the spoilers of any possibility of implementing the Grand Compromise.

Facts on the ground

FROM THE BEGINNING, the goal of the settlement enterprise was to create “facts on the ground” that would be difficult, if not impossible, to change later. For example, some of the most immediate activities in the settlement realm were started as early as 1967 and centered on East Jerusalem. The entire Moghrabi Quarter in the Old City was razed to create a plaza in front of the Western Wall, and two rings of residential high-rise settlements were created in East Jerusalem, cutting it off from the rest of the West Bank. This policy eventually led to introducing enough Jews into the expanded East Jerusalem to create a Jewish majority there, thus making East Jerusalem a permanent part of the state of Israel.

Additional activities were undertaken in the rest of the occupied territories to create Jewish settlements there, complete with their own infrastructure and even a separate road system connecting them with each other and with Israel. These activities were in line with Zionist ideology that would eventually create irreversible new facts on the ground and preclude a two-state solution. Now, more than 50 years after the 1967 war, the “facts on the ground” have reached a level of solidity and permanence that makes them impossible to reverse.

Today there are more than 700,000 Jewish settlers who have moved into the occupied territories and made their homes there. They live in coherent communities, with homes, playgrounds, gardens, graveyards, swimming pools, neighbors, schools, a university, infrastructure, and all the fabric of civilian life. They are “at home” there as much as any Jewish Israeli is within the Green Line (the 1967 border). To even contemplate uprooting them at this time is to contemplate a major emotional and humanitarian disaster of monumental proportions. It is true that their presence was illegal in the first place and that they are actually living on stolen property. It is also true that the very structure of their communities is racist, discriminatory, and exclusivist, being closed to non-Jewish Israeli citizens. Furthermore, there is an international consensus on the illegality of these settlements.

However, all these factors are beside the point. To uproot them now would be so disruptive of the lives of the settlers, their children, and the entire fabric of Jewish Israeli society that it is difficult to contemplate. If an Israeli government were to attempt it, the effect would be so disruptive that it might well plunge the country into civil war. Even if such an outcome could be obtained by bribery (compensation), fear, or compulsion, there is no question as to its enormous cost in human terms alone, and that the political will to do it is beyond the capability of any Israeli government. The fact that tens of thousands of these settlers are also fundamentalists who have dedicated their lives to the settlement enterprise will further ensure that removing them could not be accomplished without the risk of starting a civil war. Settlers today constitute about 10 percent of the Jewish population of Israel, and they are well organized to resist any attempt to remove them.

In certain cases, the declared intent of the government was to locate some settlements in such a manner as to block the possibility of a future Palestinian state. At other times, the Israeli government would insist that such offending settlements were not authorized or legitimate and would be removed in an eventual peace agreement. Regardless, the result is that the location of settlements has become a factor that makes it impossible to establish a coherent and contiguous Palestinian state in the West Bank.

No one in Israel today seriously contemplates any substantial uprooting or removal of settlers in the West Bank. This means that the basic premise of the two-state solution cannot possibly be realized since a Palestinian state cannot exist without massive removal of Jewish settlers and dismantlement of a large number, if not all, of the settlements.

It has been argued that the bulk of the settlements (the settlement blocks) can be allowed to remain and annexed to Israel through an agreement for land swaps, whereby Israel would grant a new Palestinian state equivalent land from Israel itself. However, even under the most optimistic scenarios, at least 100,000 settlers would still have to be removed to provide any serious coherent contiguous territory to such a state. This is not a realistic possibility. The settlements and the settler outposts are so scattered throughout the West Bank, and so firmly rooted in Israeli psychology and political reality, that a contiguous Palestinian state is no longer physically possible.

But if that is the case, what is the alternative? What is the endgame for those on both sides, as well as their supporters outside and the international community itself? Some out-of-the box thinking is required: a new strategy by which we may pursue peace, justice, some measure of stability, and an end to the conflict. Such new thinking would require a radical reformulation of the language, assumptions, and orientation of people on all sides. How to achieve it is a totally different question.

New thinking is necessary—on both sides

TO THINK OUT of the box regarding a future for Israeli Jews and their supporters, and for Palestinian Arabs and their supporters, we must start by acknowledging that the ideologies of the two protagonists are basically incompatible: One ideology wanted to have a Jewish state in the land (whether by divine right, or historical connection, or existential need) which serves the interest of all Jews worldwide and is dedicated exclusively to their interests. This necessarily requires the elimination or subjugation and repression of the indigenous non-Jewish population. On the other hand, a different ideology insists on an Arab Palestine as part of the Arab world and treats all Jews—other than the original Palestinian Jews—as foreign invaders with no rights and connection to the land. Such an ideology logically requires the elimination or forced expulsion of most Israelis as recent immigrants and a denial of the Jewish religious and cultural aspirations and requirements.

New thinking, beyond the two-state solution, would require each group to sufficiently empathize with and understand the hopes, fears, interests, and aspirations of the other group. It would lead each group to sufficiently moderate and otherwise change its own ideology to accommodate the other group rather than vanquish and dominate it and deny it any legitimacy.

To achieve this outcome, we need to ask Zionists, “What is it that you really want? What are your rock bottom needs, and can those needs be accommodated in Palestine/Israel without thoroughly negating the interests and reality of the Palestinians?” We also need to ask the Palestinians, “What is it that you really want? What are your rock bottom needs, and can these needs be accomplished in a state where you are not dominant and where Israeli Jews are roughly equal in number to the Palestinian Arabs?”

Implicit in both questions is a belief that while an electoral democracy requires one-person, one-vote, a state that belongs to more than one major ethnic/religious group cannot afford to ignore the other. It must find a formula that accommodates all people and contains sufficient iron-clad legal and institutional guarantees to protect each group, particularly the minority against the caprice of the majority. This is especially true where historic differences and recent enmities shape present realities. New structures must be created, and iron-clad guarantees must be firmly established in constitutions and laws that cannot be altered or overturned by numerical majorities, or that require a supermajority of more than one house of representatives, so as to prevent them from being derailed by the group with a numerical majority.

In our situation, the system requires—in addition to internal legal and other controls—a high level of international support, guarantees, and legitimacy in light of the extensive interest of and involvement of significant outside actors. Specifically, the religious importance of the land—and particularly Jerusalem—to all three monotheistic religions gives the international community a significant stake. It is of interest to ensure the governance of the whole country in a manner that guarantees open access to it, and nonexclusive control over its destiny. Jewish or Muslim claims of exclusivity cannot be tolerated; thank God, since the times of the Crusaders, Christians have ceased to make such exclusive religious claims.

For a solution to commend itself to people of goodwill on both sides, and significant third parties as well, it must address the major needs of each community. These needs should be identified by each side as bottom-line irreducible requirements, as opposed to desired or demanded outcomes. These needs must be met and addressed by the new order regardless of whether either group is in the numeric majority or minority now or in the future.

This article is adapted with permission from Beyond the Two-State Solution, by Jonathan Kuttab.

[...]

Jonathan Kuttab, co-founder of Nonviolence International, is executive director of Friends of Sabeel North America.

Yes. Gaza was part of Egypt before the 1967 war. If Egypt were willing to take it back (might be too much of headache for them now) that might be a good idea.

My view is that a 2-state solution can still be done, even though geographical non-contiguousness makes it difficult.

No, it's just not physically possible for Palestine to function as an independent state this way.

See the maps of West Bank Areas A, B, and C on this page and at the bottom of this page. See also the Wikipedia article on Palestinian enclaves.

Areas A and B of the West Bank, currently under partial civil control of the Palestinian National Authority, consists of 165 isolated little "islands" in a sea of Israeli-controlled area C. Most of these "islands" are teeny tiny. And people have to go through Israeli checkpoints to leave or enter any of these teeny tiny areas.

As the Wikipedia article explains, "The enclaves are often compared to the nominally self-governing black homelands created in apartheid-era South Africa, and are thus referred to as bantustans."

And that's one of the big reasons why the conflict never really ends, although it sometimes dies down for a while.

WHAT MAKES SOMEONE A JEW—not just a Jew in name, but a Jew in good standing—today? In Haredi circles, being a real Jew means adhering to religious law. In leftist Jewish spaces, it means championing progressive causes. But these environments are the exceptions. In the broad center of Jewish life—where power and respectability lie—being a Jew means, above all, supporting the existence of a Jewish state. In most Jewish communities on earth, rejecting Israel is a greater heresy than rejecting God.

The reason is rarely spelled out, mostly because it’s considered obvious: Opposing a Jewish state means risking a second Holocaust. It puts the Jewish people in existential danger. In previous eras, excommunicated Jews were called apikorsim, unbelievers. Today, they are called kapos, Nazi collaborators. Through a historical sleight of hand that turns Palestinians into Nazis, fear of annihilation has come to define what it means to be an authentic Jew.

I grew up with these assumptions, and they still surround me. They pervade the communities in which I pray, send my children to school, and find many of my closest friends. Over the years, I’ve learned how to live in these spaces while publicly questioning Israel’s actions. But questioning Israel’s existence as a Jewish state is a different order of offense—akin to spitting in the face of people I love and betraying institutions that give my life meaning and joy. Besides, Jewish statehood has long been precious to me, too. So I’ve respected certain red lines.

Unfortunately, reality has not. With each passing year, it has become clearer that Jewish statehood includes permanent Israeli control of the West Bank. With each new election, irrespective of which parties enter the government, Israel has continued subsidizing Jewish settlement in a territory in which Palestinians lack citizenship, due process, free movement, and the right to vote for the government that dominates their lives. Israel has built highways for those Jewish settlers so they can travel easily across the Green Line—which rarely appears on Israeli maps—while their Palestinian neighbors languish at checkpoints. The West Bank is home to one of Israel’s most powerful politicians, two of its supreme court justices, and its newest medical school.

Now Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to annex parts of the land that Israel has brutally and undemocratically controlled for decades. And watching all this unfold, I have begun to wonder, for the first time in my life, whether the price of a state that favors Jews over Palestinians is too high. After all, it is human beings—all human beings—and not states that are created b’tselem Elohim, in the image of God.

The painful truth is that the project to which liberal Zionists like myself have devoted ourselves for decades—a state for Palestinians separated from a state for Jews—has failed. The traditional two-state solution no longer offers a compelling alternative to Israel’s current path. It risks becoming, instead, a way of camouflaging and enabling that path. It is time for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish–Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish–Palestinian equality.

This doesn’t require abandoning Zionism. It requires reviving an understanding of it that has largely been forgotten. It requires distinguishing between form and essence. The essence of Zionism is not a Jewish state in the land of Israel; it is a Jewish home in the land of Israel, a thriving Jewish society that both offers Jews refuge and enriches the entire Jewish world. It’s time to explore other ways to achieve that goal—from confederation to a democratic binational state—that don’t require subjugating another people. It’s time to envision a Jewish home that is a Palestinian home, too.

Jews have distinguished between form and essence at other critical junctures in our history. For roughly a thousand years, Jewish worship meant bringing sacrifices to the Temple in Jerusalem. Then, in 70 CE, with the Temple about to fall, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai imagined an alternative. He famously asked the Roman Emperor to “Give me Yavne and its Sages.” From the academies of Yavne came a new form of worship, based on prayer and study. Animal sacrifice, it turned out, was not essential to being a Jew. Neither is supporting a Jewish state. Our task in this moment is to imagine a new Jewish identity, one that no longer equates Palestinian equality with Jewish genocide. One that sees Palestinian liberation as integral to our own. That’s what Yavne means today.

UNDERSTANDING WHY the classic two-state solution is dead requires understanding how its current incarnation was born: from Palestinian defeat. For most of the 20th century, Palestinians pursued a state of their own in the entirety of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. But by the 1970s, Palestinian intellectuals began admitting publicly that this long struggle had failed. In a bitter concession to reality, they proposed that Palestinians instead pursue what they called a “mini-state” in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. In 1988, when the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) recognized Israel, this became its official position. Even the Islamist movement Hamas—which has not recognized Israel—has repeatedly embraced the “mini-state” as the basis for a long-term truce.

From the beginning, however, Palestinians were clear about what they needed in return for this historic compromise. “The cornerstone” of the concession, wrote the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi in his groundbreaking 1978 essay “Thinking the Unthinkable,” “is the concept of Palestinian sovereignty. Not half-sovereignty, or quasi-sovereignty or ersatz sovereignty. But a sovereign, independent Palestinian state.” (To this day, Palestinians overwhelmingly oppose restrictions on the sovereignty of a future Palestinian state.) A second requirement for accepting the “mini-state” was that Palestinian territorial ambitions not be whittled down further: Having settled for a country in 22% of the land between the river and the sea, Palestinians felt they had already settled enough.

Had Israel accepted these principles during its many peace negotiations, there’s no guarantee the Israeli–Palestinian conflict would have ended. Palestinian refugees would still have wanted the right to return to their homes in Israel proper. (Though, in recent years, PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas has reportedly accepted substantial limitations on that right.) The Palestinians who live inside Israel as citizens (sometimes called “Arab Israelis”) might still have chafed at living in a Jewish state. Still, two states might have been the beginning of a more lasting solution. We’ll likely never know because, in the decades since Palestinians accepted a state based in the West Bank, Israel has made one impossible.

Israel has redefined Palestinian “statehood” to include ever-less territory and ever-less sovereignty, thus violating the two core requirements for a mini-state. In 1982, former Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Meron Benvenisti warned that it was “five minutes to midnight” for the two-state solution because 100,000 Jewish settlers would soon inhabit the West Bank and East Jerusalem—a number he considered incompatible with Palestinian statehood near the 1967 lines. But as more Jews have settled in the West Bank, Israel has demanded that a Palestinian state include larger and larger Israeli carve-outs. By 2000, when the settler population in East Jerusalem and the West Bank exceeded 365,000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak proposed that Israel annex 9% of the West Bank, and compensate Palestinians with one-ninth as much land inside Israel proper. By 2020, with the number of settlers approaching 650,000, Donald Trump—in consultation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—proposed that Israel annex up to 30% of the West Bank, and compensate Palestinians with roughly half as much land inside Israel proper, much of which is desert.

At the same time, Israeli leaders have made it clear that a Palestinian state cannot possess anything resembling sovereign powers. Barak proposed that a Palestinian state accept Israeli troops along its eastern border with Jordan for 12 years. Netanyahu has gone further, declaring that to “have their own entity that Trump defines as a state,” Palestinians must “consent to complete Israeli security control everywhere.” In other words, Palestinians can create an entity that the United States calls a state so long as it isn’t actually one.

Commentators sometimes attribute these hardening Israeli attitudes to the disillusioning effects of Palestinian violence. But over the last 15 years, largely because of Palestinian security cooperation with Israel, the number of Israelis killed by Palestinians has decreased dramatically: from more than 450 in 2002, at the height of the Second Intifada, to an average of less than 30 per year since the Second Intifada ended in 2005. (The number of Palestinians killed by Israel is far higher.) Yet Israeli support for a Palestinian state has steadily declined nonetheless. Over the last decade, in an era of relative Palestinian quiescence, the pace of settlement growth has quickened, and Israeli voters have made Netanyahu, a lifelong opponent of Palestinian sovereignty, the longest serving prime minister in their country’s history. Economists speak of “revealed preference”—understanding what people want not by what they say but what they do. And, as the Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf has argued, the revealed preference of Israeli Jews is clear: one state in which millions of Palestinians lack basic rights.

As the prospect of a viable Palestinian state has receded, growing numbers of Palestinians have embraced the idea of one state in which they enjoy equal rights. In 2011, according to data shared with me by the Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki, twice as many Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza preferred two states to one state. This year, the two options were virtually tied. The prospect of one equal state is particularly popular among younger Palestinians. In 2019, according to Shikaki, Palestinians aged 18–22 preferred one state by a 5% margin. One state is the preference of Abbas’s own son.

Defenders of Jewish–Palestinian separation argue that one equal state is even less realistic than two because it is even more anathema to the population that wields the most power: Israeli Jews. But that misses the point. Today, two states and one equal state are both unrealistic. The right question is not which vision is more fanciful at this moment, but which can generate a movement powerful enough to bring fundamental change.

The two-state solution—which has come to mean a fragmented Palestine under de facto Israeli control—cannot do that. It no longer provides hope. And when oppression meets hopelessness, the result can be nihilistic rage. In 2015, a “stabbing intifada” erupted in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. These attacks, carried out by young Palestinians, were not coordinated; they expressed no political demands. The Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg called them “despair expressed with knives.”

If the two-state solution decomposes without a compelling alternative, this may be the future: spasms of terrifying but uncoordinated violence. The announcement of the Trump “peace plan”—with its implicit acceptance of Israeli annexation—has already produced a spike in Palestinian support for “armed struggle.” And if armed struggle breaks out, Israeli and diaspora Jews who already support policies that inflict violence on Palestinians will interpret a violent Palestinian response as a license for ever greater brutality.

Today, Israeli leaders find the status quo tolerable. But when Palestinian violence reveals that it is not, those leaders—having made separation impossible—could inch closer to policies of mass expulsion. That prospect is not as remote as it may seem. Prominent Israelis—from the author Tom Segev to the Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer to the Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass to the Palestinian Israeli writer Sayed Kashua—have been warning about it for years. Between one-third and one-half of Israeli Jews regularly tell pollsters that Palestinians should be encouraged or forced to leave the country. Last year, when the Israeli Democracy Institute asked Israeli Jews what should be done with Palestinians in Area C—which comprises more than half of the West Bank—if Israel annexes that territory, the most popular answer was that they should be physically removed. Already, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, Israeli policy in East Jerusalem—which revokes Palestinians’ residency if they leave the city for an extended period of time—“is geared toward pressuring Palestinians to leave.” Earlier this year, the Trump plan incorporated an idea long advocated by former Defense and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, in which Israel would redraw its border to deposit roughly 300,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel outside the country.

This is where Israel is headed as the two-state solution dies. Annexation is not the end of the line. It is a waystation on the road to hell.

AVERTING A FUTURE in which oppression degenerates into ethnic cleansing requires a vision that can inspire not just Palestinians, but the world. Equality offers it. Many of the political movements from the last century that spoke in the language of national independence—from Algeria’s National Liberation Front to the Vietcong—have faded as models. But the demand for equality—as manifested in the civil rights movement, the anti-apartheid movement, and the Black Lives Matter movement—retains enormous moral power. Israel’s own leaders recognize this. In 2003, future Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned that when Palestinians replaced the “struggle against ‘occupation’” with the “struggle for one-man-one-vote,” it would prove “a much more popular struggle—and ultimately a much more powerful one.”

A struggle for equality could elevate Palestinian leaders who possess the moral authority that Abbas and Hamas lack. The pursuit of separation trains observers to look for Palestinian leadership in Ramallah or Gaza City. But as Palestinian American businessman and writer Sam Bahour has noted, the Palestinian politicians who speak most effectively about equality reside within the Green Line: They are the legislators who comprise Israel’s Palestinian-dominated Joint List. When the Joint List’s leader, Ayman Odeh, gave his inaugural speech to the Knesset in 2015, he spoke about “Majid, an Arab student at Tel Aviv University who is unable to rent an apartment” because people hang up the phone when they “pick up on his accent, or hear his name,” and about “Imad and Amal, a young Arab couple looking for a home” in a country that has built “700 Jewish towns and not a single Arab town” since its founding. Odeh—who adorns his office with posters of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr.—also pledged to safeguard the rights of vulnerable Jews, “even those that were taught to hate us,” because “they too, as are we, are worthy of equality.”

Odeh officially supports two states. But the Joint List’s vision of equality inside the Green Line can be extended beyond it. And in the US and across the world, that vision carries all the emotional force that Olmert feared. In 2018, as the Knesset was on its way to passing a quasi-constitutional “Basic Law” declaring that only Jews have the right to national self-determination in Israel, several members of the Joint List proposed an alternative, which instead affirmed “the principle of equal citizenship for every citizen.” When a Palestinian rights advocate showed the competing laws to five Democratic members of Congress, they all sheepishly admitted that they preferred the latter. If an equality movement gathers momentum, that sheepishness will disappear as Democrats align their vision for Israel-Palestine with their egalitarian vision for the US. Although barely any prominent American politicians now back one equal state in Israel-Palestine, a 2018 University of Maryland poll found that Americans ages 18–34 already prefer the concept to any alternative by nine points.

A struggle for equality also makes possible new strategies. In 1994, the Oslo peace process created the Palestinian Authority (PA), which many Palestinians hoped would be the embryo of their state in the West Bank and Gaza. As the prospect of Palestinian statehood has faded, however, the PA has instead become Israel’s subcontractor in enforcing the occupation, performing tasks that Israel prefers not to perform on its own, from picking up garbage to running schools to catching thieves. Despite having lost its legitimacy, the PA persists because it provides jobs and a semblance of order. But it also persists because of a vision of separation that makes it, ever more farcically, the Palestinian government in waiting. Freed from that vision, an equality movement would see the PA as a barrier to Palestinian freedom and seek its abolition. That abolition would carry risks for ordinary Palestinians, but it would also dramatically increase the cost of occupation for Israel, which would have to deploy its own soldiers and bureaucrats to perform the tasks it now delegates to Palestinian underlings. And it would lay bare to the world that there is, in fact, only one country between the river and sea.

Powered by a movement for equality, Jerusalem could become a model for equal politics in Israel-Palestine as a whole. Currently, most Palestinians who live in the city are Jerusalem residents but not Israeli citizens. That means that while they can’t vote in Israel’s national elections, they can vote in Jerusalem’s local elections. In the past, they have overwhelmingly refused to, since doing so could be seen to legitimize Israel’s control over East Jerusalem, which the PLO claims as the future capital of its state. But as the University of Pennsylvania’s Ian Lustick has pointed out in his book Paradigm Lost, polling suggests that Palestinians in East Jerusalem would prefer equal citizenship in Israel to citizenship in a Palestinian state. Were Palestinians in East Jerusalem—who comprise almost 40% of the city’s population—to begin voting in city council and mayoral elections in large numbers, they could create something that has barely ever existed in Israel-Palestine: a model for Jews and Palestinians sharing political power.


WOULD ALL THIS bring an integrated, democratic Israel-Palestine anytime soon? Of course not. But progress often appears utopian before a movement for moral change gains traction. According to a North Carolina lawyer quoted in the historian Jason Sokol’s book There Goes My Everything, “[d]esegregation was absolutely incomprehensible to the average southerner” in the mid-20th century. In a speech following the Good Friday Agreement that made Catholics equal citizens in Northern Ireland, the Catholic politician John Hume observed, “What was the inconceivable is now the common place.” In both Israel and the diaspora, the more fundamental Jewish objection to Palestinian equality is not that it is impossible but that it is undesirable: that it would prove dysfunctional and endanger Jews.

The objection often begins with the observation that binational states—states that lack one overarching national identity—can be violent and unstable. But Israel is already a binational state: The territory under its control contains two nations, one Jewish and one Palestinian, of roughly equal populations. The Israeli government rules in different ways in different parts of the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, but everywhere, it rules. That includes the West Bank, where the Israeli army—and the army of no other state—can arrest anyone, anywhere, at any time, including top officials of the PA. It also includes Gaza, whose residents can’t import milk, export tomatoes, travel abroad, or receive foreign visitors without Israel’s (and to a lesser extent, Egypt’s) approval. Israel’s unspoken binationalism isn’t manifest in state policy only because Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza can’t vote for the leaders who rule them, and Palestinian citizens of Israel—who can vote—are generally excluded from Israel’s coalition governments. So when commentators say a binational Israel-Palestine would be violent and unstable, what they’re really saying is that it would be violent and unstable if everyone could vote.

The academic evidence, however, suggests otherwise. In a 2010 article in World Politics, based on a dataset of civil conflicts from 1946 to 2005, the political scientists Lars-Erik Cederman, Andreas Wimmer, and Brian Min found that “ethnic groups are more likely to initiate conflict with the government the more excluded from state power they are.” Similarly, in her unpublished dissertation, “Collective Equality,” the Israeli legal scholar Limor Yehuda notes that numerous studies “find strong correlations between political exclusion and structural discrimination of ethnonational groups, and civil wars.”

The reasoning is intuitive. In divided societies, people are more likely to rebel when they lack a nonviolent way to express their grievances. Between 1969 and 1994, when Protestants and the British government marginalized Catholics in Northern Ireland, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) killed more than 1,750 people. When the Good Friday Agreement enabled Catholics to fully participate in government, the IRA’s violence largely stopped.

During apartheid, Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) employed violence too—which most white South Africans assumed would increase if it gained power. In a 1987 poll, roughly 75% of white South Africans said “the physical safety of whites would be threatened by black government.” Particularly terrifying was the ANC’s practice of “necklacing,” in which militants wrapped tires filled with gasoline around the necks of suspected collaborators and set them on fire. But white South Africans misunderstood the relationship between violence and freedom. In his book One Country, the Palestinian American author Ali Abunimah quotes political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, who explains, “So long as there was no effective political alternative, it was difficult to discredit necklacing politically.” But “once a nonviolent way of ending apartheid appeared as an alternative . . . hardly anyone could be found to champion necklacing the day after.”

Were Palestinians not so dehumanized in public discourse, it would be obvious that they, too, prefer not to kill or be killed when they can achieve their rights in more peaceful ways. Just compare Palestinians who enjoy Israeli citizenship to those who don’t. Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who live in much closer proximity to Israeli Jews than Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, could, if they wished, terrorize Israeli Jews far more effectively. Yet terrorism by Palestinian citizens of Israel is extremely rare. The best explanation is the one offered by political science research. When Palestinians in Gaza want to protest Israeli policies, they have few options other than to cheer Hamas rocket fire or march toward the fence that encloses them, and risk being shot. By contrast, when Palestinian citizens want to protest Israeli policies—including the policies that discriminate against them—they can vote for the Joint List.

This dehumanization of Palestinians also underlies the widespread Jewish assumption that an equal Israel-Palestine could not be a functioning democracy. Hawkish Jewish commentators often claim (incorrectly) that the Arab world contains no democracies—the implication being that there is something inherent in Arabness that makes democracy impossible.

A similar argument was once made about Africans. “Everywhere in Africa, coups, insurrections and political violence have been endemic as ethnic groups have struggled for supremacy,” declared a South African cabinet minister in 1988. “Why would majority rule be any different in South Africa?” The answer is that South Africa—unlike many other African countries—contained key preconditions that make liberal democracy more likely. So does Israel-Palestine.

One of them is economic development. Liberal democracy correlates strongly with per capita income, and the combined per capita income of Israel and the occupied territories is more than three times as high as Lebanon’s, more than six times as high as Jordan’s, and more than ten times as high as Egypt’s. There is, to be sure, a vast gulf between the per capita income of Israelis and that of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza—a gulf that will pose challenges in one democratic state. But democracy also correlates strongly with education, and here, both Israel proper and the occupied territories are far better positioned than their neighbors. The adult literacy rate across the Middle East and North Africa is 79%. In both Israel and the occupied territories, it is 97%.

Israel-Palestine, like post-apartheid South Africa, would also inherit a democratic system that functions reasonably well for the privileged group. Israel boasts a competent bureaucracy, a military that largely defers to civilian leaders, and—despite Netanyahu’s efforts to undermine them—journalists and judges who retain significant independence. Jews inclined to think Palestinians are incapable of democracy might note that neither the PA in the West Bank nor Hamas in Gaza regularly hold free elections. But this ignores the fact that in both the West Bank and Gaza, in different ways, repression is a joint endeavor between self-interested Palestinian leaders and the Israeli state, which wields ultimate control. The best example of this authoritarian cooperation occurred in 2006: After Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem held free elections—which gave Hamas a parliamentary majority—Israel and the US encouraged Abbas to declare a state of emergency and disregard the results.

Here, too, the better evidence for how Palestinians would act as citizens is how they already act as citizens. Palestinian citizens of Israel do not merely participate in Israeli democracy. They are, by many measures, the Israelis most committed to liberal democratic principles. In 2019, a poll of young adults by Roby Nathanson, Dahlia Scheindlin, and Yanai Weiss found that Palestinian citizens of Israel valued freedom of expression and gender equality more than Israeli Jews. In two other recent surveys, the Israeli Democracy Institute found that Palestinian citizens were more likely than Israeli Jews to repudiate the use of violence for political ends, more likely to support integrated neighborhoods, and more likely to say that both Jewish and Arab perspectives about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict should be taught in schools. When asked which government institution they trusted most, Jews answered, “The Israeli Defense Forces.” Palestinian citizens of Israel replied: “The supreme court.”

All this suggests that the claim that a binational Israel-Palestine can’t be peaceful and democratic is misconceived. Israel-Palestine is already binational. The more equal it becomes, the more peaceful and democratic it is likely to be.

Is there a way that Israel and Fatah can work a deal regarding inter-enclave travel?

Hamas needs to be dismantled completely (which I kinda also feel about the GOP these days).

No, it's just not physically possible for Palestine to function as an independent state this way.

See the maps of West Bank Areas A, B, and C on this page and at the bottom of this page. See also the Wikipedia article on Palestinian enclaves.

Areas A and B of the West Bank, currently under partial civil control of the Palestinian National Authority, consists of 165 isolated little "islands" in a sea of Israeli-controlled area C. Most of these "islands" are teeny tiny. And people have to go through Israeli checkpoints to leave or enter any of these teeny tiny areas.

As the Wikipedia article explains, "The enclaves are often compared to the nominally self-governing black homelands created in apartheid-era South Africa, and are thus referred to as bantustans."

And that's one of the big reasons why the conflict never really ends, although it sometimes dies down for a while.

You're assuming that those enclaves would remain as the status quo under a two-state solution. Areas A, B and C were established under the Oslo accords as a temporary state of affairs until Israel could withdraw it's military and dismantle settlements in area C, subject to negotiations with respect to exact borders.

Of course, we all know that the Oslo peace process was derailed, which is why that status quo remains. If all the settlers were moved back into Israel proper and the armistice lines were the de-facto borders, then there won't be such enclaves, the whole of West Bank and Gaza would be considered the two territories of a Palestinian state.

As I said before, a one state solution cannot work, that's a recipe for mass pogroms to eradicate Israeli Jews

(especially with the demographic threat of the Palestinians having a higher fertility rate than Israelis).

If Palestinians and Israelis were content with co-existing in a federal bi-national state with Israel and Palestine being separate states within this federation, then maybe that kind bi-national state can work but it doesn't appear like that.

Would a secular or atheistic Palestine be possible?

Or an atheistic Saudi Arabia with no death penalty?

Yes, "if all the settlers were moved back into Israel proper." The problem is that there are just too many of these damned settlers, many of whom have been there for just too damned long. And many of them would fiercely resist, both at the ballot box and with their guns. So, at this point, any attempt to move all the settlers back into Israel proper would constitute a major ethnic cleansing in its own right.

Another problem, from Israel's point of view, is that the West Bank contains a militarily-strategic mountain range, whereas Israel proper is mostly a coastal plain -- a major vulnerability for Israel, if any hostilities were to break out between the two states. That's one of the reasons why Israel refuses to give up control of the West Bank -- or the Golan Heights, for the same reason.

Another problem is that the West Bank contains quite a few sites that are holy to all three of the major Abrahamic religions, and people of each religion are afraid (justifiably so, alas) of the possible desecration of their own holy sites, and afraid of being deprived of access to shared holy sites (such as Abraham's tomb in Hebron, and of course the Temple Mount in Jerusalem).

Whether and to what extent that would happen would depend on the details of how a bi-national state is implemented. It would need to have a very carefully constructed constitution. Many of the issues are discussed in the two articles I quoted (in part) and linked to earlier in this thread.

If Palestinians were allowed more means of economic development, their fertility rate would probably go down. Be that as it may, the state would need to have a very carefully constructed constitution to ensure that whoever is in the majority at any given time cannot abuse minorities.

A federation is one of the options that should be considered, but not necessarily the best option.