Login / RegisterGwynne Dyer: The one-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
“Everybody knows how this will end,” wrote Nahum Barnea, one of Israel’s best-known journalists, in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot recently. “There will be a bi-national [state].” The “two-state solution” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is dead; long live the “one-state solution”.
The two-state solution, promised by the Oslo Accords of 1993, was the goal of the “peace process” of the past 20 years. It envisaged the creation of a Palestinian state in the one-fifth of the former colony of Palestine that did not end up under Israeli rule after the war of 1948. That Palestinian mini-state, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, would live alongside Israel in peace, and the long, bitter struggle over Palestine would end happily.
That Palestinian state is no longer a viable possibility, mainly because there are now half a million Jewish settlers living amongst the two million Palestinians in the West Bank and former East Jerusalem. “I do not give up on the two-state solution on ideological grounds,” wrote Haaretz columnist Carlo Strenger in September. “I give up on it because it will not happen.”
The greatest triumph of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his predecessor, Ariel Sharon, has been to make the two-state solution impossible. Both men pretended to accept the Oslo Accords in order to ward off foreign pressure on Israel, but both worked hard and successfully to sabotage them by more than tripling the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank in only 20 years.
Now the job is done, and it is not only Israelis who can read the writing on the wall. Moderate Palestinians, never all that enthralled with the prospect of a tiny “independent” country completely surrounded by the Israeli army, are also giving up on the two-state idea. As Ahmed Qurei, who led the Palestinian delegation that negotiated the Oslo Accords, wrote recently: “We must seriously think about closing the book on the two-state solution.”
So the one-state solution is creeping back onto the agenda, if only tentatively. The current Israeli government will have nothing to do with it, since endless, futile talk about an independent Palestinian state serves Netanyahu’s purposes so well. But one day there will be a different government in Israel, and the Palestinians will still be there. What are the odds that the one-state solution might then get real traction?
In a sense, the single state already exists: Israel has controlled the West Bank militarily since the conquest of 1967, and until recently it occupied the Gaza Strip as well. Almost 40 percent of Israelis already support a solution that would simply incorporate the West Bank into Israel permanently.
But what would Israel do with those two million extra Palestinians who would then live within the country’s expanded borders? Combine them with the million and a half Palestinians in Israel, the descendants of those who were not driven out in 1948, and there would be 3.5 million Palestinians in a one-state Israel that included almost all the land west of the Jordan River.
Add the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, who will number another two million in five years’ time, and there would be 5.5 million Palestinians in Israel. That would mean there would be almost as many Palestinians in Israel as there were Jews.
That unwelcome prospect is probably why Ariel Sharon unilaterally withdrew all Israeli troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip and sealed the border in 2005: if there were ever a one-state solution, he didn’t want those extra two million Palestinians to be part of it. He did want to keep the West Bank, on the other hand—but even without the Gaza Strip, the one-state solution would produce an Israel whose population was more than one-third Palestinian.
This is precisely why an increasing number of Palestinians favour the one-state solution. They have tried guerrilla war to get their lands and their political rights back, to no avail. They have tried terrorism, which didn’t work either. They tried negotiation for 20 years, and that didn’t work. So maybe the best tactic would be to change the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from an international problem to a civil rights problem.
So the Palestinians should just accept the permanent annexation of the West Bank by Israel, argue the one-staters. Indeed, they should actively seek it. They are already Israeli subjects, by every objective measure of their condition. If they become Israeli citizens instead, then the question of their status becomes a civil rights issue, to be pursued non-violently—and perhaps with a greater chance of success.
That is the logic of the pro-one-state argument among the Palestinians, and it is flawless if you assume that Palestinians would enjoy full rights of citizenship once the West Bank was legally part of Israel. But that is rather unlikely, as the status of Israel’s existing Palestinian citizens already demonstrates. They are much poorer and less influential politically than their Jewish fellow citizens.
A new public opinion poll in Israel by the Dialog polling group reveals that almost 70 percent of Israeli Jews would object to giving West Bank Palestinians the vote even if Israel annexed the territory they live in. The only alternative is an apartheid-style state where only the Jewish residents have rights, but most Israelis seem quite relaxed about that. The Palestinians are probably heading up another blind alley.
But then, all the alleys are blind.
Israel is not going away. As we have seen in South Africa and, let's face it, Canada, developing a micro-nation of racially segregated Others within the border of the larger country, while politically correct to some, maximizes unhappiness and social unrest.
Tens of thousands of Muslims serve in Israeli the military. Bedouins, Druze, Arabs even Christians.There are high ranking officers, from captains to colonels, sometimes comanding units of Jews and others.
Please do your home work!!
True enough, Arabs are not compelled to serve, but many do!!
RU Kiddingme is not wrong; he (and you) are just not up to speed.
The law exempting Arab-Israelis and certain Orthodox Jews from serving in the military expired on August 1 this year. The Israeli government has been testing public opinion about compelling those parties to serve, with mixed responses.
As far as the "tens of thousands" that you refer to serving in the military, the only records I could find said 400 signed up in a recent two-year period for the 170,000-member IDF out of a 1.5-million Arab population.
What does Canada have to do in this? Canada is not S.Africa under apartheid or Israel! And for your info, surveys show that Canadians are among tbe happiest people in the world - look it up.
In this case though, there is another side to the coin: the Palestinian side. Imagine that the Israeli side came around: Arab-Israeli rights were better protected, a majority supported full democratic rights, etc. You are still left two related big hurdles: the Palestinian/Arab political culture, the near impossibility of running a democracy in a state that isn't a single "nation".
I don't think its radical at this point to suggest that Arab political culture in 2012 is not very conducive to democracy, even under far better conditions. Combine that with the fact that this would require running a country consisting of peoples very strongly identifying as nations with the strongest possible political connotations of that term and you are left with a democracy that will immediately collapse.
Jewish Israelis are also staring down a blind alley. Apartheid with democracy & a functioning state for Jews (and more or less for 1948 Arabs) or a non functioning democratic-with-provisions-on-paper state like Lebanon.
Blame is also on both sides. The suicide bombings of the mid-90s were coordinated by Hamas & JI specifically to derail the two state solution. The reason it was so hopeless even though it was the only sane choice was that it was being attacked from both sides. Both sides wanted the other side to just go away and marched towards that impossible goal burning the bridges to compromise on the way.
The dead end point where we are now is the result of both parties being led willingly into a wall.
The Israelis are smart they have used media in the US and elsewhere to paint the Palestinians as savages. Even though many Palestinians are white and or Christian. Some Jewish Israelis are Arabs and brown or even white.
So they demonize when Mel Gibson says Israel starts alot of wars. Or they demonize Iran for not enriching weapons grade uranium, while Israel has 200 nukes.
The bottom line of all the media bs Dyer is right this shameful Apartheid of the Palestinians is a ongoing crime.
The Israeli settlers kill Palestinians, burn their orchards and not one media in Canada talks about it.
Dyer you are a marvelous journalist and the Straight great media that doesnt generate fear but ideas.
Why? Because the government of Israel, any conceivable government, is and would be composed of Zionists. The basic premise of Zionism is to have a Jewish state, meaning a state where people of Jewish ethnicity are the bosses. That, from the Zionist point of view, in not negotiable, That is the basic raison d'etre of Israel. That is not negotiable. Territory is.
Most of the Palestinians who live in the occupied territory are descended from Arabs who lived in what is now Israel (formally Mandatory Palestine) and would have the right to return there as citizens if decades old UN resolutions where followed. It's not like the West Bank is such a great place that people would sneak in there from other counties.