‘The alternatives are simple and cruel. Either one people controls the other, dooming them both to eternal violence, or else a way must be found to live in a partnership based on shared sovereignty.’
Meron Benvenisti1
ONE STATE, TWO STATES, NO STATE SOLUTIONS
Ever since the late 1980s there had been broad agreement internationally that the Middle East’s most enduring conflict could only be resolved by creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel – a return to the old idea of partition that had first been proposed by the British Peel Commission in 1937 and adopted by the UN a decade later. This always had opponents, including Palestinians who rejected the legitimacy of Zionism or a Jewish state, believed that partition ignored the Nakba and the right of return and saw an endless ‘peace process’ between vastly unequal parties as a smokescreen for continued Israeli expansion, entrenchment and control. It was also opposed by Israelis who claimed all of Eretz-Yisrael and rejected Palestinian independence, insisting it already existed in Jordan. The long failure of Oslo – whose interim arrangements never led to a final agreement – badly damaged the chances that a solution could be found. The numbers of people on both sides who backed two states were still substantial but shrinking. Polling in December 2016 showed support from 55 per cent of Israelis and 44 per cent of Palestinians, down from 59 per cent and 51 per cent six months earlier. In addition, however, support for a detailed permanent agreement, based on what had been on the table in previous rounds of negotiations, was lower than the support for the principle of a two-state solution.2
Oslo’s last agreed stage, during Binyamin Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister, had been the partial Israeli withdrawal from Hebron in 1997. Two decades since then, apart from Ariel Sharon’s unilateral Gaza disengagement, the status quo was frozen. From the failure of the Camp David summit in 2000, the bloody interregnum of the second intifada and the halting revival of a peace process under Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas, to John Kerry’s final effort in 2014, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements and borders remained the core issues. The single most significant change over the years was the number of Israelis living beyond the green line – 630,000 by 2016, close to 10 per cent of Israel’s Jewish population, in some 230 settlements, whether ‘authorized’ by the government or not. Psychologically, the passage of time had eroded any sense, especially for Palestinians, that occupation was a temporary situation pending a peace agreement.
‘In spite of the fact that the majority of the Jews claim to accept (in a very general and unspecified way) the notion of two states for two peoples as a kind of slogan … they do not accept a division on the basis of the 1967 lines and other conditions necessary in order to bring peace’, the Israeli political scientist Daniel Bar-Tal concluded in 2014.3 The concept had been emptied of content and lost all credibility, many believed. ‘The “two states” conversation has been kidnapped by the Israeli centre-right after eviscerating the concept of statehood of any of its commonly associated connotations and implications’, argued the Palestinian-Israeli philosopher Raef Zreik.4
Netanyahu, by 2017 Israel’s longest-serving prime minister since David Ben-Gurion, never explained how a Palestinian state worthy of the name could be created. ‘When Netanyahu is up against those who are more hawkish, he will say, “It will not happen on my watch”,’ observed Yossi Beilin, the Labour politician and architect of Oslo. ‘When he speaks with those who are more moderate, he says, “I am ready to talk to the Palestinians, and I am committed to the idea of a two-state solution.”’5 The bottom line was that the Likud leader was not prepared to make the concessions needed to make such a solution possible. An undefined Palestinian ‘state-minus … not exactly a state with full authority’, as Netanyahu put it, was the most he was prepared to consider.6 Whatever that was, it meant demilitarization and effective Israeli control of the area west of the Jordan. And that was far from what any Palestinian leader, including the accommodating Mahmoud Abbas, could accept. The West Bank and Gaza, after all, as Abbas and others constantly reiterated, constituted just 22 per cent of Mandatory Palestine, leaving Israel with 78 per cent.
‘It is no longer necessary to ask whether the Israeli government supports the two-state solution’, commented the veteran journalist Akiva Eldar.
The answer is clear for all to see in the laws it passes and the edicts it imposes. The answer is to be found in the language it propagates and the funds it disburses. One state for two peoples – first-class citizens and second-class citizens – is gradually being established on the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. On Netanyahu’s watch, the term ‘apartheid state’ has gone from being a label to becoming substance.7
Nor did it seem likely that any future Israeli prime minister would go far enough beyond Netanyahu’s position to make a significant difference.
Palestinian attitudes had also changed since the intoxicating David-stands-up-to-Goliath empowerment of the first intifada, Yasser Arafat’s declaration of independence in 1988, the Madrid peace conference and the high hopes of the early post-Oslo years – but especially since the al-Aqsa intifada, Israel’s reoccupation of the West Bank and the rise of Hamas. The Palestinian Authority’s failure to obtain anything by negotiating with Israel and continuing security co-operation while settlement activity increased had undermined its authority and credibility. That boosted the appeal of armed resistance favoured by the Islamists and others while simultaneously undermining the nationalist quest for independent statehood alongside Israel. The Sulta, in the words of one critic, was a ‘failed project’.8 In March 2015 49 per cent of Palestinians felt it had ‘become a burden on the Palestinian people’.9
Moreover, its failure was on constant and humiliating display. Over the preceding decade the PA security sector had grown faster than any other, by 2013 – when Salam Fayyad resigned as prime minister – employing 44 per cent of 145,000 civil servants and eating up 26 per cent of the entire budget.10 In April 2017, when Israel announced the first brand-new West Bank settlement in twenty years – the grandly named Geulat Zion (‘Redemption of Zion’), near Nablus, to rehouse settlers who had recently been evacuated from the ‘illegal outpost’ of Amona – the PLO expressed outrage: ‘Netanyahu and his extremist, racist coalition government continue to persist with their systematic policies of settler colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing, showing a total and blatant disregard for Palestinian human rights, independence and dignity’, it protested.11 The language was fierce and uncompromising. But it was still business as usual in terms of the PA’s co-operation with Israel.
Even so, Abbas’s pursuit of a strategy of international recognition was a clear admission that negotiations with Israel were unlikely to succeed. Independent Palestinian legal experts now opposed land swaps – discussed at Camp David and afterwards – which would allow Israel to keep its big settlement blocs and were deemed crucial to the implementation of any two-state deal.12 And civil society activists argued that BDS was a far better strategy to end occupation even if it required a long-term effort. Campaigns to improve Palestinian self-reliance – including promoting organic baladi food and handicrafts by grass-roots organization – seemed more effective than conventional political activity. These combined sumoud with non-violent resistance.13 Israel’s nervousness about the boycott movement and the official efforts it devoted to fighting it – gathering intelligence about supporters, banning their entry into the country and mounting organized ‘counter-delegitimization’ campaigns – showed that it took this approach very seriously.14
BI-NATIONAL OR BUST?
The growing belief that a two-state solution was defunct, dead or dying, or simply not feasible, had led since the second intifada to intensifying discussion of the alternative: a single, bi-national state in which Jews, Muslims and Christians would enjoy equal rights irrespective of their ethnicity or religion. In early 2017, according to a joint Israeli–Palestinian poll, that was supported by 36 per cent of Palestinians and 19 per cent of Israeli Jews (but by 56 per cent of Israel’s Arab citizens).15
Bi-nationalism had a respectable pedigree on the dovish wing of the Zionist movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Brit Shalom, Judah Magnes and Hashomer Hatzair (the predecessor of Mapam) had all argued that it was essential to secure Arab agreement to the Jewish presence in Palestine.16 Internationally respected Jewish intellectuals like Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt concurred. But the idea had been marginal then and all but disappeared after the Holocaust and the watershed of 1948. In the light of the violent history of the conflict, bi-nationalism was an extremely radical aspiration. It would require Israel to give up its raison d’être as the nation state of the Jewish people, which it was unlikely to do voluntarily. Zionism was in its DNA. No Israeli government had recognized the right of return of Palestinian refugees while Jews had fretted endlessly about the ‘demographic threat’ posed by higher Arab birthrates both in Israel and the occupied territories. Scaremongering about this had been part of public discourse for years, but by 2014 there were indeed roughly equal numbers of Jews and Arabs – 6.3 million of each – living in the area of Mandatory Palestine. Demography, in this context, was synonymous with security.
In this spirit a group of two hundred senior former IDF officers and security officials, calling themselves Commanders for Peace and Security, returned to a familiar theme in 2015 and launched a campaign for ‘separation at once’ – complete with lurid graphics about a rapidly growing Palestinian population. Annexation of the West Bank, they stated, would begin with a Jewish majority of about 60 per cent, but within fifteen years the country would have an Arab majority.17 Arguments like these inspired a sketch by the satirical TV show Eretz Nehederet (It’s a Wonderful Country), which poked gentle fun at obsessive ethnic head-counting. It featured a Jewish man at Ben-Gurion Airport being informed in 2048 (the date presumably chosen for its historic anniversary) that he would not be allowed to fly out on holiday because his absence abroad would ‘tip the demographic balance’ and create an Arab majority between the Mediterranean and the Jordan – the exactly deadlocked population figures recorded in columns flashing alarmingly on a giant digital screen. ‘Jenin [in the West Bank] is lovely at this time of year,’ says the passport control officer, consolingly. ‘And it’s ours.’18
Israeli right-wingers had their own variant of the one-state solution: annexation of part or all of the West Bank, with ‘autonomy on steroids’, in Naftali Bennett’s catchy formulation, rather than citizenship for its Palestinian residents. President Reuven Rivlin occasionally called for Israeli annexation with citizenship for Palestinians – a striking variation on the traditional Zionist aspiration for more territory but with the minimum number of Arabs living on it. Rivlin had previously called for mass Jewish immigration in order to maintain a Jewish majority.19 Gaza’s fate was simply ignored, along with its now 2 millionstrong population. In Israel, in any event, the idea was widely condemned. The risk was of sectarian or inter-communal strife, as experienced in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, or, more recently, in Syria. That kind of one-state solution ‘could drag both peoples here into an endless civil war’, Haaretz warned.20 ‘Marketing the one-state idea requires the systematic understatement of the ferocity of the conflict between Jews and Arabs, Palestinian and others’, noted the Israeli Middle East scholar Asher Susser, making the case for what he called ‘the two-state imperative’.21 Other Israelis – scientists, artists and public intellectuals – and Diaspora Jews who agreed with that imperative, prepared for the jubilee of the 1967 war by setting up an organization they named SISO: Save Israel and Stop the Occupation.
Israeli-Jews who supported a single state were mostly confined to the tiny anti-Zionist left. The green line, they argued, was a temporary irrelevance. It was a nostalgic fixation for those who refused to recognize what Zionism had done to the Palestinians, long before the ‘cursed blessing’ of the 1967 victory had destroyed what they perceived as their ‘little’ or ‘beautiful’ country (‘Eretz Yisrael haktana/hayafa’). ‘Liberal Israeli Zionists need the green line so as to render all that lies beyond it as temporary conquest’, suggested Dan Rabinowitz and Khawla Abu-Baker in their study of the Palestinian minority. ‘This exempts them from having to confront the historic legacy and lingering guilt associated with the military conquests and the ethnic cleansing Israel perpetrated in 1948.’22
Palestinian advocates of a one-state solution – the most prominent of them living in Western countries – used the language not of demographics, security and majorities but of universal human rights. Justice and equality required the replacement of the Zionist state (sustained in their view by racial discrimination and military occupation) by a shared democratic one of all its citizens. It was, they argued, the only way to address deeply rooted historical grievances and pave the way for reconciliation. Models included a confederation or unitary state, with examples taken from South Africa, Northern Ireland, Switzerland and Belgium. Supporters emphasized justice over viability. Their starting point was the illegitimacy not just of the 1967 occupation but the one that began with Israel’s independence and the Nakba in 1948, the culmination of an ongoing settler-colonial project that had driven out, dispossessed and continued to oppress the native Palestinians. The way forward was to abandon Oslo and the ‘defunct pseudo-state’ that was the PA and demand full rights for ‘all inhabitants … between the river and the sea’.23
The one-state vision, however, was not accompanied by any coherent plan or time-frame. Critics on both sides found it wanting on both political and psychological grounds: in a single state Palestinians would have to live with a large Jewish population and accept the presence of Jewish settlements in the heart of densely populated Arab areas. Economic disparities between the two peoples were enormous: GDP per capita in Israel in 2015 was $37,700, in the West Bank $3,700 and in Gaza $1,700.24 Without a massive redistribution of wealth and resources, gaps on that scale would condemn Palestinians to be a permanent underclass. One state was ‘a slogan, not a programme’, argued Bir Zeit University’s Salim Tamari.25 ‘No one has articulated what people are talking about in coffee shops into a political programme’, complained businessman Sam Bahour. The idea was born of frustration, not practical politics.26 Israeli Jews who were prepared to consider the idea fretted about the issue of Jewish self-determination; Israel had, after all, been recognized internationally since 1948 and 75 per cent of its Jewish population had been born there and spoke Hebrew. Now that the ‘settlers’ had also become ‘natives’, and had no imperial ‘mother country’ to return to, that was an issue that could clearly not be ignored.27 Yet details about constitutional and institutional arrangements for one state were conspicuously absent.
No one in the Palestinian leadership endorsed the idea. Nor did any joint Palestinian-Israeli effort promote it. What Ali Abunimah, a keen supporter, called a ‘bold proposal’28 was dismissed by many others as naïve, utopian and unattainable. Meron Benvenisti had described the choice succinctly: ‘The alternatives are simple and cruel’, he wrote. ‘Either one people controls the other, dooming them both to eternal violence, or else a way must be found to live in a partnership based on shared sovereignty.’29 Two states were accurately described as ‘the least unachievable option’. But if that solution was now a ‘delusion’, obsolete or simply no longer possible, it did not mean there was any chance that a single state could be created by mutual agreement.30
The far more likely scenario for the foreseeable future was what was variously described as an irreversible one-state reality, condition or outcome, a ‘no-state solution’, or, in the words of Rashid Khalidi, ‘an imposed reality of one-state’.31 That meant the indefinite continuation of the status quo, maintained by force by Israel, and the subjugation of the Palestinians, still occupied, fragmented and dependent, even if somehow partially autonomous, with or without the PA’s help. Nevertheless, perhaps, in decades to come – and in the absence of any other alternative – a struggle for equal rights for both peoples would make advances and create new and hitherto unimaginable opportunities for change.
TRUMP-PROOFING PEACE?
The future of Israeli–Palestinian relations attracted intense attention as the world held its breath for Donald Trump’s inauguration as US president in January 2017. Trump’s views delighted the Israeli right – especially his long-standing pledge to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which breached the widely held view that the city’s status had yet to be agreed. In addition, his choice of ambassador was his Jewish bankruptcy lawyer, David Friedman, with close links to the settler camp. Naftali Bennett, repeating his call for the annexation of part of the West Bank, hailed Trump’s victory as marking the end of the Palestinian state.
But Barack Obama had a parting shot. On 23 December 2016, UN Resolution 2334 reaffirmed the commitment of the Security Council to a two-state solution and reiterated its condemnation of settlements as a ‘flagrant violation’ of international law.32 The US had vetoed a similar resolution in February 2011 but this time it abstained – so the vote passed by fourteen votes to zero. The Israeli government was furious at this ‘shameful’ move, although it was made not long after Obama had authorized a ten-year, $38 billion military aid package to Israel. That was hardly a sign of a strategic rupture between the two countries despite the poor relations between president and prime minister, and was a vivid reminder of the contradiction at the heart of US policy.
John Kerry then attacked Netanyahu’s government as ‘the most rightwing in Israeli history, with an agenda driven by the most extreme elements’ and warned that Israel could not remain a Jewish and democratic state if it continued to rule over millions of Palestinians against their will in a situation that was ‘separate but unequal’ – a phrase deliberately redolent of the American civil rights movement. Kerry’s was an undiplomatic outburst of rare public candour and it was backed up by an unusually detailed account of what the status quo really meant: the fragmentation of the West Bank, the systematic denial of building permits for Palestinians in Area C, the crippling effect of Israeli checkpoints and the ruin and hopelessness of besieged Gaza waiting for the next war. ‘Netanyahu lulls his public with the implicit notion that the two-state solution will wait until Israel deems the conditions ripe’, commented one Bibi-watcher. ‘Kerry illustrated that in reality it is almost already gone.’33
Opinions were divided as to the significance of Obama’s eleventh-hour UN move. Palestinians generally saw it as a futile gesture that was too little and too late and motivated by frustration and perhaps guilt that the outgoing American president had so dismally failed to realize his own pledge to advance the peace process. Others saw it more positively as a cunning effort to ‘Trump-proof’ US Middle East policy by reiterating the only workable basis for Israeli–Palestinian agreement. ‘Santa Obama delivered a wonderful Christmas present to Israel when the United States opted not to veto [the] United Nations security council vote condemning settlement policy’, argued the Israeli commentator Amir Oren. ‘The passage of the resolution won’t result in the immediate dismantling of any West Bank settlements, but the world is beginning to come to the rescue and try to save Israel from itself.’ Israeli ministers were not impressed by an effort whose altruism they refused to recognize. Shortly afterwards, when France (also deeply dismayed by Trump’s victory) convened a one-day international conference on the Israel–Palestine conflict – though without the participation of the two protagonists – Avigdor Lieberman condemned ‘a new Dreyfus trial’.
Netanyahu, relieved at Obama’s departure, was all smiles when he met the new president in the White House in February 2017. Trump, simplistic and apparently ill-informed, pronounced himself indifferent as to what Israelis and Palestinians decided to do. ‘I’m looking at two-state and one-state, and I like the one that both parties like,’ he declared. In a few ill-chosen words he appeared to have jettisoned decades of US policy. In fact it was far from clear what he meant, especially as the American ambassador to the UN quickly reiterated continued backing for the traditional two-state approach. For some, the president was being creatively disruptive of preconceived ideas.34 Ali Abunimah, editor of the Electronic Intifada and an influential advocate of a one-state solution, leaped on Trump’s words, interpreting them – perhaps thinking wishfully – to mean that the two-state ‘delusion’ was now finally buried, and urged ‘a rights-based national struggle’ instead.35 Yet how one state was to be achieved remained as unclear as ever. The big question, posed succinctly by Nadia Hijab of the al-Shabaka policy network, was this: ‘If a sovereign Palestinian state in the occupied territory has not been possible, how can a democratic state of Israel/Palestine be achievable, one in which all citizens enjoy all human rights – individual and collective, political, social, and economic?’36 Or, to take one or two crucial issues: how, in one state, would it be possible to reconcile Israel’s granting of automatic citizenship to Jews under the Law of Return with the Palestinian demand for the right of refugees to return to their former homes? And how would land, so central to the history of the conflict, be fairly distributed? Israeli Jews found it difficult enough to live with an Arab minority of 20 per cent, it was pointed out; how would they manage with 50 per cent, never mind more? Shaul Arieli of Commanders for Peace and Security warned that one state would mean ‘perpetual civil war, apartheid and socioeconomic implosion’. ‘Would Israeli Arabs be allowed to volunteer for the army?’ he asked plaintively. ‘Would we let them have guns?’37
Hopes for any kind of positive change were still largely pinned on outside pressure on Israel. ‘Without international intervention’, predicted the PLO’s Saeb Erakat, a veteran of long years of failed diplomacy, ‘it will be very difficult to save the prospects of a sovereign and independent State of Palestine.’38 Many liberal Israelis agreed. Unilateral annexation of more occupied territory would certainly generate resistance from Palestinians, perhaps a new intifada, and put at risk Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan – vital achievements in shrinking the circle of Arab hostility. European or wider international punitive measures might well also follow. UN Resolution 2334 had, after all, urged member states ‘to distinguish, in their relevant dealings’ between Israel and the occupied territories – a clear pointer to the possibility of imposing sanctions in the future, though not in the comprehensive way advocated by BDS. It was an unmistakable reminder that although the green line had disappeared from official Israeli discourse, it still mattered to Palestinians and others as an important relic of a now-distant past that could, perhaps, one day demarcate a more just future for two peoples doomed to live in the same land.
By 2017, the year that marked the centenary of the Balfour Declaration – that still-resounding act of a distant, European-dominated colonial era and a giant leap forward for the nascent Zionist project – much of the world ‘viewed with favour’ the establishment of an independent state for the Palestinian people alongside a secure and recognized Israel. For it to gain regional and international acceptance it would need to be on or close to the 1967 border – even though that had been all but erased over the preceding fifty years. Yet the prospect of an equitable two-state solution being agreed voluntarily by both sides was extremely dim. The impasse remained. Palestinians – divided, scattered, occupied and dispossessed, and by far the weaker of these unequal enemies and neighbours – faced a profoundly uncertain future. And because of that, in different ways, so did Israelis, despite their overwhelming advantages. Violence was never far away. No end to their conflict was in sight.