Mark A. LeVine
The Scary Alternative to a 2-State Solution
Lost in the international uproar over Russia's Olympic-eve invasion and occupation of Georgia and now the political and meteorological storms sweeping across the United States is a seismic shift in the dynamics of another conflict, one which offers a similarly vexing challenge to the core policy goals of the United States, Europe and many Middle Eastern governments to that posed by a newly belligerent Russia.
Largely unreported in the American and Western media, on August 10, two days after the start of both the Russian invasion and the Olympics, Palestinian lead negotiator Ahmed Qurie declared that if the peace process did not advance towards a final settlement soon, Palestinians would stop pursuing a two-state solution demand the establishment of a bi-national state with Israel.
As Qurie, better known as Abu Alaa', explained it, “The Palestinian leadership has been working on establishing a Palestinian state within the '67 borders... If Israel continues to oppose making this a reality, then the Palestinian demand for the Palestinian people and its leadership (would be) one state, a binational state.”
Less than two weeks earlier, PA President Mahmoud Abbas similarly argued that he might dissolve the PA and demand a binational state if progress was not made soon.
The threat to call for a binational state represents a sea change in Palestinian attitudes towards the peace process. Even at its lowest ebb Yasser Arafat threatened merely to declare a state within the West Bank and Gaza.
Today the mere possibility of a binational solution so frightens Israel's leaders that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert equated it with apartheid, warning that if the two-state process failed, Israel would “face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.”
The reason Israel would be “finished” is clear: Given the current state of relations between Jews and Palestinians it is difficult to envision Jews maintaining control over the territory, holy places, military, economy, and immigration of Israel/Palestine in a binational state, especially after the demographic balance shifts in favor of Palestinians, as many experts believe it is close to doing.
In such a situation Israel as a Jewish state would either “vanish from the pages of time,” as Iranian President Ahmedinejad has infamously advocated, or an all-out civil war would erupt that would likely result in the exile of the vast majority of Palestinians from both Israel and the Occupied Territories.
Despite these apocalyptic possibilities, the peace process today stands close to the binational abyss. The more Palestinians feel they have nothing left to lose, the more likely it becomes that they will press for “one person-one vote,” returning in essence if not rhetoric to the PLO's pre-1988 advocacy of a “secular democratic state” in all of pre-1948 Palestine.
In reality, this turn of events should not surprise anyone. Already a generation ago, Israeli geographer Meron Benvenisti argued in his 1987 West Bank Data Base Project that by the mid-1980s the Occupied Territories had become so integrated into Israel that it was no longer possible to separate them. By the time Palestinians and Israelis were ready to negotiate a “divorce” in the early 1990s it was too late to do so.
Israelis certainly wanted peace, but they weren't prepared to make the huge territorial, political and economic sacrifices that was necessary to allow for the creation of a viable Palestinian state. Instead, under the guise of a “New Middle East” Oslo reinforced rather than ameliorated the most basic dynamics of the occupation.
Benvenisti described the conglomeration of Israel and the Occupied Territories “a bi-national entity with a rigid, hierarchical social structure based on ethnicity... The only reason this has not been universally acknowledged is that the territories have not been formally annexed.”
In the decade and a half after Benvenisti wrote these words the number of settlers doubled, land confiscations continued apace, and the ties between the settlements and Israel proper grew ever more deep, a phenomenon that continued during the eight-year long al-Aqsa intifada. The Palestinian Authority became increasingly corrupt and paralyzed during Oslo, while Hamas failed to move beyond terrorism even though it reinforced the occupation.
With Palestinians wielding binationalism as a threat and Israelis imagining it as a curse, it's not surprising that the idea still has relatively few supporters. But what if a binational state was reimagined as a positive development, one that allows for the greatest possible realization of both Jewish and Palestinian aspirations? Indeed, the idea had this connotation for progressive Zionists such as the Brit Shalom movement during the pre-1948 period, and an increasing number of Israeli academics and activists are giving the idea a second look today.
Even Theodor Herzl, in Zionism's ur-text, Altneuland (Old-New Land), describes the future Jewish state as one where Jews and Palestinians have equal rights and responsibilities in the civic and economic life of the country.
Of course, Herzl also imagined “spiriting” Palestinians “across the border” to ensure the creation of a Jewish state. And it is precisely such paradoxical sentiments towards Palestinians—wanting to live with them as good neighbors and wanting to get rid of them in order to ensure unfettered possession of the land—that has defined the serpentine trajectory of Zionism during the last century.
Today it seems we are back to Herzl's Old-New Land, with no one sure which path will lead to a peaceful future. One thing is sure, in the interregnum between the death of the two-state solution and emergence of a workable alternative solution much blood will be shed. with increasingly dangerous consequences for the stability of the Middle East at large, and with it, for the security of the United States.
- LeVine's Looney Tunes Views by Bob Martin (September 1, 2008 at 2:06 AM)
- Re: LeVine's Looney Tunes Views by Per Fagereng (September 1, 2008 at 3:11 AM)
- Scary? by yaman salahi (September 3, 2008 at 9:21 PM)
- Re: Scary? by Mark A. LeVine (UC Irvine History Professor) (October 28, 2008 at 12:34 AM)
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