Chapter 1: The Reemergence of One-Statism
"But over the past few years, Palestinian Arab intellectuals linked to the mainstream Fatah Party and living in the West have also begun talking openly about the desirability, or at least the inevitability, of a one-state solution—one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, inhabited by both Arabs and Jews. This marks a break from their at least superficial espousal during the1990s of a two-state solution and a reversion to the openly enunciated policy of the Fatah and Palestinian Liberation Organization in the 1960s and 1970s
...For many of these “Western” Palestinians, this represents nothing more than an emergence from the closet. In fact, these current one-staters never really identified with the Fatah’s professed advocacy in the 1990s of a two-state solution, with a partitioned Palestine divided into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab, living side by side in peaceful coexistence. Like their cousins in Palestine, both inside Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and in the main concentrations of the Palestinian diaspora—Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria—they had always believed, and continue to believe, that all of Palestine belongs to them, the Palestinian Arabs; that a Jewish state in any part of Palestine is illegitimate and immoral; and that, in the fullness of time, the whole country will eventually revert to Arab sovereignty. But the Western—American and European—governmental two-state mantra and the PLO’s apparent adoption of two-statism in the late 1980s and early 1990s forced them underground or into a duplicitous advocacy of, or reluctant acquiescence in, the two-state formula."
"A last group of one-staters, according to Khalidi’s definitions, are those who advocate “a binational approach . . . [that] would take into account . . . [the] two national realities within the framework of one state.” Khalidi acknowledges that all the one-state approaches have not taken real account of the “stone wall” of Israeli and American rejection of the dismantling of the Jewish state and run counter to the international warrant of legitimacy for Jewish statehood (and Palestinian Arab statehood) issued by the UN General Assembly partition resolution (number 181) of November 1947.2
The precipitants to this newfound candor about the desirability, or at least the inevitability, of a single state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River (and often the assertion of “inevitability” is mere camouflage for the propagation of its “desirability”) are three: PLO chairman Yasser Arafat’s rejection of the two-state solution proposed in July and again in December 2000 by Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and US president Bill Clinton, his rejection providing political impetus and cover for the in-principle subversion of two-statism; the rise of the openly rejectionist, one-statist Hamas to primacy in Palestinian Arab politics, as epitomized in the movement’s general election victory of January 2006 and its violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in 5"
Judt's article and criticism
"In 2003 Judt, who has never worked academically on the Middle East, published “Israel: The Alternative” in the New York Review of Books.
...Judt’s arguments were fairly simple: the idea of Israel, as of ethnic nationalism in general, had (partly due to the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s) lost traction and was no longer adequate to underpin the continued existence of, and support for, a Jewish state.
...The only other alternative was for Israel to withdraw from the territories and facilitate the emergence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip of a Palestinian Arab state, which would allow Israel to remain both (largely) Jewish and democratic. But this could not and would not happen, said Judt; it is “too late for that.” There were “too many settlements [and] too many Jewish settlers.” The 400,000 Israeli settlers implanted in the territories since 1967 will not agree to live in a Palestinian Arab state, and no Israeli leader will have the guts, or political power, to forcibly 8 uproot, abandon, or crush them, as David Ben-Gurion back in 1948 had crushed the dissident right-wing Jewish militias
... So what was the solution? According to Judt, it was “a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians.”"
"Omer Bartov, a historian of Israeli origin at Brown University, wrote that the author was “strangely wrong-headed” and seemed to be writing from the perspective of “a café in Paris or London.” Compared to which nation state was “Israel an anachronism”? Compared to Syria or Saudi Arabia or Iran? And if the comparison was to modern Europe, surely Poland and Serbia were equally anachronistic because they, too, are “based on a unity . . . of nation and state.” Judt seemed to prefer, for Israel/Palestine, the model of interwar Poland, with its diverse populations, “rife with ethnic conflict and anti-Semitism.” Or 10 Yugoslavia, “which [recently] broke up in a sea of blood.” For Judt, these (unsuccessful) multiethnic models apparently were preferable to (peaceful) uniethnic nation-states.
In any event, according to Bartov, the binational model for Israel/Palestine is “absurd” because neither Israeli Jews nor Palestinian Arabs want it. Both groups seek to live in a country inhabited and governed by their own. On the Arab side, the Islamic fundamentalists regard shared sovereignty with the Jews as “anathema,” and the moderates know that “a binational state . . . would spell civil war and bloodshed on an unprecedented scale.”"
"Michael Walzer, a political thinker at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, took the ideological bull by the horns when he wrote: “Ridding the world of the nation-state is an interesting, if not a new, idea. But why start with Israel? Why not with France? . . . The French led the way into this parochial political structure that, in violation of all the tenets of advanced opinion, privileged a particular people, history, and language . . . Or [with] the Germans, or the Swedes, or the Bulgarians . . . all of whom have enjoyed these ‘privileges’ much longer than the Jews.”
But “the real problem” with Judt’s proposal, wrote Walzer, was that he was not really pointing the way to a binational state at all but “would simply replace one nation-state with another,” for in “a decade or so” there would be more Arabs than Jews between 11 the Jordan and Mediterranean, so what would emerge from Judt’s “binational” polity would be another Arab nation-state. “This is the explicit goal of Palestinian nationalists, and the recent history of the movement hardly suggests that they have given it up.”
Walzer wrote that Judt would have the citizens of his binational state rely on “international forces” for their security. But what people in their right mind would rely on such forces for their security?"
"Wieseltier pointed out that Judt failed to describe the character of his desired polity, which would quickly devolve into an Arab-majority state with a diminishing Jewish minority. It would be a terrorist state, not a democracy (look at the other Arab states, look at Gaza), in which an ethnic cleansing of the Jews would be more than likely. “Why is Greater Palestine preferable to Israel?” asked Wieseltier. “The moral calculus of Judt’s proposal is 12 baffling . . . Is the restoration of Jewish homelessness, and the vindication of Palestinian radicalism, and the intensification of inter-communal violence, really preferable to the creation of two states for two nations? Only if good people, thoughtful people, liberal people, do not keep their heads. But these are deranging days.”"
Aftermath**
"Judt’s response to these criticisms was at once provocative and faltering. He kicked off by postulating that “the solution to the crisis in the Middle East lies in Washington. On this there is widespread agreement.” (I would say that, on the contrary—and on this there really is “widespread agreement,” at least among those who know something about the Middle East—the United States is completely powerless to effect a change in the rejectionist position of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian majority that supports them, and it is only marginally influential with regard to Israeli policies on the basic issues. American [and European] aid cut-offs during the past two years have left no impression at all on the policy of the Islamic fundamentalists, and Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in summer 2005 had almost nothing to do with American pressure and almost everything to do with Ariel Sharon’s character and calculations and Israeli self-interest.)"
"The Judt article, the telling ripostes notwithstanding, spawned a host of articles and books advocating the one-state solution. Clearly he had opened the floodgates, tapping into a strong current in the Arab world and in the Left and Right in the West that sought, simply, not Israel’s reform or the reform of its policies, but its disappearance, however affected and however camouflaged. As to be expected, most of these publications were written by anti-Zionist, not to say anti-Semitic, Arabs and their Western supporters, though some professed to be doing this also for the sake of Israel’s Jews."
"Daniel Lazar, a constitutional scholar and journalist, argued in the Nation in November 2003 that, contrary to Theodor Herzl’s founding vision, Israel is beset by war; is, with “what little democracy it still has,” “increasingly abnormal” among the democracies, which are steadily becoming multiethnic; is losing its Jewish population to emigration while Diaspora Jewry is flourishing; and is “one of the more dangerous places on earth in which to be Jewish” (apparently a reference to the actions and intentions of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran). And the world’s “Jewish problem” has only been ag-gravated by Israel, as anti-Semitism burgeons in the Islamic world and, it would seem, in Europe and the United States as well wholly or partly in reaction to Israeli actions. Lazar favored a binational state “based on internationalism, secularism, and democracy.” How exactly Palestine’s Arabs would be persuaded to adopt “internationalism, secularism, and democracy”—for which they, like their brothers and sisters outside Palestine, are not famous—was not explained."
Omar Barghouti
"Omar Barghouti published a piece entitled “Relative Humanity: The Fundamental Obstacle to a One-State Solution in Historic Palestine.” Barghouti, an independent Palestinian analyst and doctoral student, asserted that “the two-state solution . . . is really dead. Good riddance!” and that “we are witnessing the rapid demise of Zionism, and nothing can be done to save it.” What remains is a one-state solution or, as he put it, “a secular democratic state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, anchored in equal humanity and, accordingly, equal rights.” But to this rosy outcome he quickly added a corollary: “the new Palestine” “first and foremost” must “facilitate the return of . . . all the Palestinian refugees.”5 Thus, at a stroke, he assured that the “binational” state he was proposing would instantly become a state with an overwhelming Arab majority."
Virginia Tilley
"The rest of the article follows the selfsame logic. “The two-state solution . . . is an idea, and a possibility, whose time has passed.” This is so because Israel’s unrelenting settlement drive has made the unraveling of Palestine/Israel into two states impracticable—and “there can be no reversal of the settlement policy,” much as the expulsion of the country’s Arab population is unthinkable. So only a one-state solution, with Jews and Arabs coexisting, remains.
But Tilley admitted that for the Jews, “the obstacles” of converting their country into a binational entity were “clearly massive [and] . . . profound.” Moreover, many Palestinian Arabs might have a problem with a “democratic secular state”—after all, “many now favor” an “ethno-religious state based on notions of Arab and/or Muslim indigeneity of the kind taking hold in Gaza” (a polite way of describing a totalitarian fundamentalist Islamic Arab polity). Still, a one-state solution it must be because of irreversible Jewish Israeli expansionist and racist actions. Israel’s complete and successful pullout from the Gaza Strip in summer 2005, despite stiff opposition from Israel’s settler movement— concretely and loudly demonstrating the settlement enterprise’s reversibility—must have come as a rude shock to Tilley."
Ali Abunimah - Cocreator of Electronic Intifada
"Giving history a series of mighty, distorting twists, Abunimah implied, ostensibly on the basis of his refugee grandparents’ and parents’ recollections, that there had been “peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs in Palestine before the creation of Israel”—and, if men and women of goodwill got together, this peaceful coexistence could be re-created.7
This recollected idyll is a whopper of truly gargantuan dimensions. Of course, on the individual plane, there were, here and there—in Jerusalem, in Haifa, perhaps in Jaffa—Arabs and Jews who interacted commercially and, in small numbers and on some level, even socially. But in general, British Mandate Palestine, 18 between 1918 and 1948, was characterized by two separate societies that did not interact or live “together,” except in the sense of sharing the same air and complaining about the same, or different, British officials.
And the truth is that since the fin de siècle, Palestine Arabs had been murdering Jews on a regular basis for ethnic or quasinationalist reasons. In 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1936–1939, Arab mobs had assaulted Jewish settlements and neighborhoods in a succession of ever-larger pogroms. Had the presence and actions of the occupying British army not contained them, such bouts of violence would no doubt have been more frequent, widespread, and lethal.
At one point Abunimah casually mentioned one problematic incident—the unprovoked murder by an “Arab mob” of sixty-seven defenseless Orthodox Jews in Hebron in 1929. But he then dismissed the implications by arguing that, ever since, Israelis have made too much of the matter and would do better to focus on the fact that “most of the city’s [seven-hundred-strong] Jewish community were saved because Muslim neighbors protected them.”8 In fact, most were rescued by British police intervention and by the fact that many Jews successfully fended off their assailants for long hours—though, to be sure, Arab neighbors did save several families."
Moral and practical question/solution
"On one level, the debate is simply about Israel—whether it should or should not exist. This is both a moral and a practical question. The first, moral part, can be subdivided: Should a Jewish state have been established in the first place? And, once coming into existence, should it—now sixty years old and with some 20 5.4 million Jewish inhabitants—be dissolved or disestablished, at whatever cost that will entail (first to Israel’s Jews and the Jewish people, and then to anyone else)?
With regard to the establishment of the state in 1947–1949, a prominent component in the moral equation inevitably will be at what cost this establishment was affected in terms of Palestinian Arab displacement and suffering. A subcomponent will also have to be: Who was to blame for this displacement and suffering, the Zionist movement and the Jews, the Palestinian Arabs themselves, or some combination of the two?
The moral questions, regarding both the rectitude of what happened in 1947–1949 and the proposed dissolution of the Jewish state in our time, are complex and ultimately insoluble; the “answers” inevitably will be subjective in the extreme. But the problem of Palestine/Israel and its solution, in present circumstances, is also a practical question. It is a political science question relating to the best possible ordering of human society or two human societies in a given space, taking account of demographics, geography, politics, economic realities, cultural matters, and so on. The question boils down to the best possible con-catenation of demography and politics for the peoples living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean."
"More saliently, there are three realistic basic formulas for a one-state solution: a state with joint Arab-Jewish sovereignty, based on some form of power-sharing by the two ethnic collectives ( à la Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland) or on individual rights without any collective ethnic entities and entitlements (à la postapartheid South Africa), both of which can be defined as forms of binationalism; a state ruled by Jews, with or without a large or small Arab minority; and a state ruled by Muslim Arabs, with or without a large or small Jewish minority. I write Muslim Arabs because the proportion of Christians among Palestine’s Arabs has been declining steadily since 1947, when they were close to 10 percent of the population. Today less than 5 percent of Palestinian Arabs are Christians, and their numbers continue to diminish through emigration to the West (mainly from the West Bank—Bethlehem is now a Muslim-majority town). The proportion of Christians among Israel’s Arab citizens is higher, but given far higher Muslim birthrates and a measure of Christian emigration, the proportion of Christians in Israel’s Arab minority is also declining. So the Christian element in Israel/Palestine is negligible and politically irrelevant.
Palestinian Arab nationalists, of both the Fatah and Hamas 24 varieties, like to speak of Palestine’s “Muslims and Christians” when selling their case in the West—but this is a propagandistic device, wholly lacking in substance and sincerity (after all, the main reason Christian Arabs have been leaving the Holy Land has been fear of the Muslims and of future Muslim excesses, which is also the cause of the emigration of Iraq’s Christians). Many Christian Arabs from the 1920s through the 1940s would have been happy had British rule continued indefinitely, and some may have preferred Jewish to Muslim rule following the Mandate.
I will look at this more extensively later, but for now let me point out that the two simplest and most logical variants of a one-state solution are an Arab state without any troublesome Jews and a Jewish state without any troublesome Arabs. We are talking here about expulsion. The idea of an ethnically cleansed Palestine was raised consistently by the Palestinian Arab national movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, and there are good grounds to believe that that was the aim of the Arab onslaught on the Yishuv—the Jewish community in Palestine—in 1947–1948 (or, at least, that that would have been its outcome had the onslaught been successful). From the other side, the idea of a partial or full expulsion of Palestine’s Arabs by the Jews was discussed and supported by much of the Zionist leadership in the late 1930s and the 1940s, against the backdrop of the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939 and the Holocaust, and in some way this thinking contributed to the creation of the Arab refugee problem in 1948
So much, for the moment, for possible one-state solutions. Let us turn to two-state solutions. One two-state solution, hark-ing back to the Jewish Agency–Transjordanian agreement of 1946–1947, would see a two-state partition of Palestine between the Jews and the Kingdom of Jordan, based on a Jewish-Israeli state in western Palestine and a Jordan–West Bank state—a “Greater Jordan”—ruled from Amman to its east.11 Thus the partition—as also envisaged in the Israeli Allon Plan of the late 1960s—would see a two-state solution based on an Israeli-Jordanian division of the country, with no Palestinian Arab state and with most Palestinian Arabs living in the Jordanian-incorporated part of Palestine."