March 2, 2007
[Publication date unknown]
One state answers the requirements of true peace that were hardly addressed, let alone resolved, in the Oslo peace process. The differences over the Palestinian refugees, Jerusalem, the Palestinian minority in Israel, the settlers in Palestine, Israeli security, borders and water could all be resolved in the framework of one shared state based on citizenship and the constitutional protection of the religious and national identity of its inhabitants.
The Palestinian Authority was set up by the Oslo process as a pre-state entity, intended to establish by stages an independent Palestinian cabinet and parliament, as a prelude to sovereignty over (a disarmed, landlocked, dependent) Palestine. Most recently, a courageous coalition of Israeli and Palestinian professionals has tried to imbue the two-state solution with new energy by formulating a detailed agreement - the so-called Geneva Accords. All these efforts have referred, vaguely or specifically, to the withdrawal of Jewish settlements, without which a Palestinian state would make no territorial sense.
Yet at some point in the past decade, this foundational precept became an obfuscating fiction. The conditions for an independent Palestinian state have been killed off by the inexorable and irreversible advance of the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. The two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an idea and a possibility whose time has passed. Its death obscured (as was perhaps intended) by daily spectacles: the hoopla of a useless road map, the cycles of Israeli gunship assassinations and Palestinian suicide bombings, the dismal internal Palestinian power struggles, the house demolitions and death counts all the visible expressions of a conflict which has always been over control of land.
All the while and day by day, Israeli construction crews have been crunching and grinding through the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, laying roads and erecting thousands of new housing units in well planned communities. Settlement suggests a few hilltop caravans defended by zealots, but what we have is a massive grid of towns penetrating deep into the West Bank and Gaza.
Carved up by populous Jewish-Israeli settlements, neither the West Bank nor the Gaza Strip is a viable national territory. And it follows that if there can be no reversal of the settlement policy, a Palestinian state is not practicable.
The so-called one state solution to the Middle East crisis is seen as a serious threat by many Israelis, since demographic trends predict that by 2015 there will be an overall Arab majority in the combined Israeli and Arab territories. Until now it has also been rejected by the Palestinian mainstream, which wants its own state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Extremists demand nothing less than the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state.
I believe that the one-state solution is now the only option. Israel must confront its obsolete ethno-nationalism and face a post-Zionist vision for the country, however hard that might be. If Palestinians and Israelis are indeed to share a single state as equals, the post-Zionist vision also needs to clarify the non-ethnic character of the Palestinian component. A formally bi-national state, recognizing and reifying both Jewish and Palestinian ethno-nationalisms, could simply set up the bipolar rivalry which, given greater Palestinian demographic weight.
The challenge for the one-state solution is to find a political path through the transition from rival ethno-nationalisms to a democratic secular formula which would preserve Israels role as a Jewish haven while dismantling the apartheid-like privileges that presently assign second-class citizenship to non-Jews. Israel already faces that contradiction within its legal borders: even for the countrys present Arab population, the system of laws which safeguards the Jewish state are widely agreed to be unjust and in the long run unstable.
The problem for the Palestinians would be of a different order. Are their aspirations indeed for a democratic secular state based on territorial sovereignty - the model long proposed by Palestinian nationalists? Or would many now favor an ethnic or ethno-religious state based on notions of Arab and/or Muslim indignity of the kind taking hold in Gaza? Such a foundational debate is not unique, nor is it as hopeless as might be thought. Moreover, many Palestinians are so disillusioned with their national leadership that they might welcome the idea of its demise, provided equal rights as citizens of a single state were on offer to them.
The Palestinian leadership itself would probably resist such an outcome. In a one-state solution, the entire apparatus of the PLO and the PA would have to be subsumed into Israels domestic governance and party-political processes. Many of Arafats cronies - and his rivals - would lose major sources of economic power and political leverage in the transition. Fatah derives its economic strength from Palestinian businesses; its crony politics reflects its crucial devotion to the interests of affluent Palestinian families. Senior Fatah figures have long hoped for an independent Palestine in which, nicely positioned near the centre of power, they could flourish on the ballooning Israeli-Arab trade that peace would be expected to bring. They would sooner have a separate Palestinian state, however weak and co-opted it might be. Absorption is also a process that Israel is bound to manipulate, promoting some people and barring others from any role in the new domestic politics. Palestinians would be right to be on their guard.
The larger and longer-range impact of the one-state solution could transform regional tensions as well as local ones, by eliminating the military occupation, unifying the territory, and effectively restoring the Palestinians to sovereignty in their historical homeland. It would grant them long sought representation, property rights, a civil justice system, and press freedoms within the democratic system hitherto reserved for Jews but which many Palestinians have long admired and hoped to emulate.
The One-state solution would not solve all disputes: the al-Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount tensions, for example, would rumble on. But it would recast those disputes as ethnic arguments within a democratic polity rather than between polarized and mutually demonized others. It would also return Israel to respected standing in the family of nations, and remove the Palestinian problem as a source of outrage for offended Muslims, Arab nationalists, and extremist groups all over the world. Given that the two-state solution promises only more trouble and its failure will bring such dire consequences, the one-state solution is the only one that the international community can responsibly now entertain.
BASSEM EID is the founder and the Executive Director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG). The PHRMG is a Palestinian, independent, non-governmental organization working to end human rights violations committed against Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. PHRMG members believe that the strength of democracy and civil society in Palestinian society will be determined by the Palestinian people, through their defence or neglect of human rights.
Source: Friends of Al-Aqsa