By Amir Nour

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Israel/Palestine: One State, or Two States?

So, if the two-state solution proposed by the Oslo Accords has failed and seems more remote than ever, if not definitely dead 30 years on, isn’t it about time to consider alternatives to the prevailing untenable status quo, or even worse, to endless war? All the more so since the illusion that the conflict can be ignored or “managed” has been shattered in a resounding manner in October 2023. The current bout of fighting is forcing the U.S., the EU and regional powers to reassess their old approaches and reappraise the wrong and costly assumption that they can safely ignore the conflict.

Nowadays, it appears that the old/new idea of a “one-state” between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River – a democratic state, with full and equal rights for the populations residing in Israel, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, as citizens – is the best workable option and, most importantly, the only durable solution to an intractable conflict that has lasted too long and cost too much blood and treasure.

After all, if we properly take stock of past experiences, can’t we justifiably ask what if self-determination for both Palestinians and Israelis is not necessarily based on territory but on citizen’s rights?

This idea of a single state is not new. Back in 1930 already, rabbi, scholar and political activist Judah Leon Magnes wrote an essay[11] in which, in contradistinction to the then Zionist leadership, he expressed his strong preference for the establishment of a bi-national, Jewish and Arab state through an agreement with Palestine’s Arab population[12]. And when the Peel Commission made its 1937 recommendations about partition and population transfer for Palestine, Magnes sounded the alarm by saying:

“With the permission of the Arabs we will be able to receive hundreds of thousands of persecuted Jews in Arab lands […] Without the permission of the Arabs even the four hundred thousand [Jews] that now are in Palestine will remain in danger, in spite of the temporary protection of British bayonets. With partition a new Balkan is made”[13].

And in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine in January 1942, he suggested a joint British-American initiative to prevent the division of mandatory Palestine. This move was followed, pursuant to the Biltmore Conference[14], by the foundation – with Henrietta Szold[15] – of a small bi-nationalist party called “Ihud” (Unity).

In 1946, Magnes again opposed the partition plan before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in Jerusalem and submitted 11 objections to partition to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine[16]. Finally, by mid-1948, when the conflict between the Jews and Arabs of Palestine was in full swing, Magnes expressed the hope that if a Jewish state were declared, the United States would impose economic sanctions; and also supported a 1948 U.S. trusteeship proposal, in which the UN would freeze the partition decision and force both sides into a trusteeship with a temporary government ruling Palestine, until conditions suited another arrangement. During the 1948 War, he lobbied for an armistice, and proposed a plan for a federation between Israel and a Palestinian state which he called the “United States of Palestine”, under which the two states would be which he called the “United States of Palestine”, under which the two states would be independent, but operate joint foreign and defense policies, with Jerusalem as the shared capital. Magnes predicted that even if a Jewish state was established and defeated the Arabs, it would experience a never-ending series of wars with the Arabs[17].

The notion of a one state in all of historic Palestine was espoused by Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in its original charter[18] in 1964, which called for the establishment of a single, democratic, and secular state for Jews, Muslims and Christians. The PLO only abandoned the idea in the context of the diplomatic negotiations within the framework of the Oslo Accords; hence fundamentally swinging its ideological compass and reorienting its political struggle and efforts toward the realization of the two-state path to peace.

With the benefit of hindsight, one can say that the PLO’s historic choice was a huge sacrifice, incommensurate with the petty initial “rewards” of a peace process which eventually led nowhere but to an equally historic, and furthermore tragic, impasse.

As the peace process started to show signs of fraying at the edges in the late 1990s, an increasing number of analysts started to suggest acknowledging a “one-state reality”[19] – an ambiguous reference to the continued entanglement of Israelis and Palestinians on the ground – as the starting point for negotiating a workable solution.

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Making or Breaking Hope for Peace in the City of Peace

It is against this bleak backdrop that, on 1 March 2018, a new initiative based on the old idea emerged when the “One-State Foundation” was launched.[26] The initiative holds:

“first, that the current situation in Palestine and Israel is untenable; second, that the negotiating process that emanated from the Madrid Peace Conference and Oslo Accords on the basis of a two-state solution has reached a dead end as the final status issues degraded to become effectively non-negotiable; third, that this obstructs the realization of the hopes and aspirations of the Palestinian and Israeli peoples; fourth, that the time has come to rethink the question in its entirety; and, fifth, that any new thinking has to reflect realities on the ground and, above all, the reality that more than fifty years after the Israeli occupation of the whole of Palestine, a form of unity over political, economic, and security matters already exists.”[27]

In recent years, and particularly since the resurgence of the polemical issue of annexation, beginning in the fall of 2019, a substantial debate over the One-State reality has raged between proponents of the two-state “international consensus” and those of the one-state “alternative”, both among and between Palestinians and Israelis, and on the global stage. In the West, the one-state alternative has been boosted over the years by quite knowledgeable academics and militants such as Edward Said, Tony Judt, John Mearsheimer, Ian Lustick, Virginia Tilley, Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim, Shlomo Sand, and Ali Abunimah, the Palestinian-American co-founder of Electronic Intifada.

A significant milestone in this regard was registered when four well-known professors published an article in Foreign Affairs magazine entitled “Israel’s One-State Reality.”[28] In this essay, the authors argue that the two-state solution is dead because there is already a one-state reality, no matter what anyone thinks. In other words, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, only one state, namely Israel, controls the entry and exit of people and goods, oversees security, and has the capacity to impose its decisions, laws, and policies on millions of people without their consent. A one-state reality, the academics go on to say, could, in principle, be based on democratic rule and equal citizenship, but such an arrangement is not on offer at the moment.

Forced to choose between Israel’s Jewish identity and liberal democracy, Israel has chosen the former; it has locked in a system of Jewish supremacy, wherein non-Jews are structurally discriminated against or excluded in a tiered scheme: some non-Jews have most of, but not all, the rights that Jews have, while most non-Jews live under severe segregation, separation, and domination. They, therefore, see no real prospect of negotiating a Palestinian state, and are of the opinion that the United States should acknowledge this reality, denounce it, impose sanctions on Israel, while putting an end to its efforts against BDS movement and refraining from leading those aiming at normalization of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

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On the other hand, Israeli opponents, who are more numerous, hold that the Zionist project was and remains the establishment of a state with a Jewish majority – something that could not be sustained given current Palestinian population growth rates, which would reduce Jewish Israelis in the future to a minority status.

As a matter of fact, the feeling that another day of conflict will ultimately bring victory continues to prevail on both sides. Still, the many objections do not diminish the fact that the status quo and ongoing occupation create a volatile situation with all the conditions for uprisings, resistance, and at times full-scale war.

On account of the above, if the two-state alternative to the status quo is unreachable, then the one-state alternative could be laid out with solutions for the different objectors on both sides. This would involve a broad restructuring of the existing political system, whether beginning with the Israeli government’s conferral of citizenship on Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip or beginning with the creation of a new state altogether. Moreover, mechanisms such as subjecting legislation on vital or constitutional issues to a two-thirds majority vote, or to a minority veto, or some combinations thereof, have been floated to prevent a majoritarian state in which the demographic majority, whether Jewish or Arab, would govern unilaterally.

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While confederation reflects the existing realities of a multifaceted interdependence between the two sides, it also resolves the citizenship crux of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the Israelis would always have majority status in their own state and its security, and the Palestinians would have their state with a legitimate place in the Council of Jerusalem, which would be the capital of the confederation. Both the Israeli and Palestinian states would be in a position to interact with their Arab neighbors without animosity for Israel or dependency for the Palestinians. Both would have all symbols of the state from the flag to the seat in the UN, and above all their chosen identities along with the privileges of peace and space throughout historic Palestine.[32]

In the conclusion of her powerfully argued recent book[33], Palestinian-born Academic Ghada Karmi says that the tremendous obstacles facing the “one democratic state solution” may be daunting to some of those who support it in theory, but the fact that something is difficult to realize does not make it any less the right thing to do; nor does the attainment of this solution hinge solely on the wishes of Israel and its supporters.

Other factors, she believes, “though now unforeseen or thought improbable”, could intervene and alter the situation dramatically. If and when they do, such events “will merely dictate the pace and timing of the one democratic state solution. But the concept itself must have been established long before, not as an immediately attainable goal perhaps, but as a vision, an aspiration and a belief in the ultimate humanity of Palestinians and Jews and all who wish them to prosper”.

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All in all, if History is any guide – and it is indeed – we must retain its most overarching principle, which is highlighted in the epigraph: “Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.” And if we do remember history – and we must indeed – then the following key considerations should always be duly taken into account in any reflection or negotiation about peace in the Middle East. They all stand in opposition to partition and division of the Holy Land, and point in the direction of the one democratic state from the river to the sea as the only genuinely durable solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

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Via https://www.globalresearch.ca/war-gaza-only-durable-solution-one-democratic-state-river-sea/5869536