Not long ago, the idea of a one-state solution for the conflict in Israel/Palestine was the preserve of a few intellectuals and activists on both sides. Over the last ten years, however, this vision has become an increasingly valid one for discussion and debate. Traditionally, the one-state idea has had its greatest appeal for Palestinians in the Diaspora, but even then amongst a small minority. Various Palestinian scholars and activists have written about the advantages of the one-state solution, as isolated works of interest mainly to similar enthusiasts. But today the situation has changed. A widening and positive debate in print and on the internet about the one-state solution has become commonplace.1
Israeli and Jewish scholars have also been converted to the same cause.2 In the last few years especially, a Jewish/Israeli surge in the debate on the one-state solution has become apparent.3 Meron Benvenisti’s major 5,000-word essay in Haaretz’s 22 January 2010 supplement is a striking indication of this surge. In addition, mainstream western publications now regularly carry articles on the one-state solution, unheard of just ten years ago. Examples include the Los Angeles Times (Saree Makdisi, “Forget the Two-state Solution,” 11 May 2008), Newsweek (Sari Nusseibeh “The One-state Solution”, 29 August 2008), the Irish Times (“Nudge Towards Alternatives in the Middle East”, 13 March 2010), Foreign Policy (Dmitry Reider, “Who’s Afraid of the One-state Solution?”, 31 March 2010), and the Washington Post (George Bisharat, “Israel and Palestine: A True One-state Solution”, 3 September 2010).
Since 2000 several US and European one-state groups have come and gone, but they have constantly been replaced by new ones,4 and an increasing number of conferences have been held on the one-state solution. In consequence, this solution is no longer seen as a novel or outlandish idea, and the fact that it is now part of the mainstream political discourse is reflected in the alarm expressed by many Israelis who fear it. Ehud Barak’s blunt warning to his fellow Israelis – that they either make peace with the Palestinians or face the reality that an Israel which includes the Palestinian territories will be either an Apartheid state or a non-Jewish state – (Guardian, 3 February 2010), is a case in point. A commentator in the popular Israeli daily, Yediot Ahronot (Gadi Toub, 31 January 2010), notes the increasing western discourse about Israel’s transformation into an Apartheid state, for which the best solution should be bi-nationalism. Hence, he concludes, partition of the land into two states is the only way to avoid this undesirable outcome. Another writer uses the failed (in his view) Bosnian bi-national model to warn against a similar arrangement happening in Israel; and yet another describes the two-state solution as “the salvation of Israel”, noting that its colonisation of the West Bank is leading to a one-state outcome.5 A Haaretz editorial (5 May 2011) went so far as to welcome the unity agreement between Fatah and Hamas, since it would make possible a Palestinian state and thus enable Israel to have good, neighbourly relations with it, by implication avoiding the possibility of ending up as one state.
At the beginning, one-state solution adherents tended to take that position on grounds of principle, international law and elemental justice. After all, they argued, a major sector of the Palestinian people was living in exile, and would need to be part of any proper solution to the conflict. In 2010 the Palestinian Central Statistical Bureau in Ramallah estimated the number of Palestinians in exile in Arab countries to be five million, with a further 600,000 living in other places.6 Of the total number of exiles, 4.7 million were UN registered refugees in 2008.7 All these have a right in international law to return to their homeland – for most, today’s Israel. It is self-evident that no just solution to the conflict can exclude the Right of Return of the refugees. As UNRWA’s commissioner general pointed out in an interview in 2010, no peace was possible without a just solution for the refugees in line with UN resolutions (al-Quds al-Arabi, 2 February, 2010). As if aware of this fact and keen to protect Israel from such an outcome, the US was said to have put forward a plan to solve the refugee problem without offering the Right of Return.8 This plan proposed a variety of solutions: the patriation of the refugees in their host countries; or moving some of them to a future Palestinian state and others to neighbouring countries, possibly Iraq, with a compensation fund to be set up for them using mainly money from the Gulf States.
There is nothing new here. Variations of these ideas had been circulating in western circles since the late 1990s. But their inherent flouting of international law and the rights of the refugees was a basic aspect of the case for one state amongst its adherents. However, in more recent times, it has been the apparent impossibility of a two-state outcome that has swelled the ranks of the one-staters. A glance at the map of the West Bank’s Israeli settlements dotted all over the landscape, with Israeli “security areas”, bypass roads and “closed military zones”, should convince even the most ardent supporter of the two-state solution of its impossibility.
Nevertheless, the assumption of two states has continued to animate the peace process and to inform the international debate. A poll conducted by Israel’s National Institute of Security Studies in 2009 found that 64 percent of Jewish Israelis supported a two-state solution (Haaretz, 17 June 2009). Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad made an address at Israel’s tenth major Herzilya conference, affirming the Palestinian aim of creating a Palestinian state beside Israel and outlining a strategy for achieving it.9
Most recently, these ideas have culminated in the Palestinian application for statehood submitted to the UN in September 2011. Although it was clear at the time that the application would not get through the UN Security Council – a necessary condition for its adoption by the General Assembly – the Palestinians nevertheless went ahead. No vote had been taken on this issue at the UN at the time of writing, and the project was in abeyance. Nevertheless, this initiative demonstrates the determination in some Palestinian quarters to pursue the two-state solution, irrespective of the facts on the ground – facts which an Israeli geographer, writing in Haaretz (6 May 2011), saw as insuperable obstacles to the establishment of a Palestinian state that could include Gaza and the West Bank in one entity. The only result of such an attempt, he felt, would be the creation of two separate Gaza and West Bank states, divided from each other but connected to Egypt on the one hand and Jordan on the other.
The previous section discussed the increasing popularity of the one-state idea in recent years, and how it has garnered more supporters than at any time before. Indeed, both common sense and the logic of the situation point to this solution as the best and fairest option. Who could morally argue that a people who had been robbed of its country and made stateless exiles and refugees does not have an absolute right to have those injustices redressed? Or that the perpetrators should have to make reparations for what they had done? Or, on a more practical level, that the victims, if not properly compensated for their wrongs, would continue to seek justice and so perpetuate the conflict?
The fact that something is right and sensible, however, says nothing about its actual feasibility on the ground. And in this case there are formidable obstacles to its realisation.
Not least is the international consensus on the two-state solution. This concept as the only possible way to a resolution of the conflict has acquired an extraordinary hold on the public discourse. Many ordinary people, who wish the Palestinians well, find it easier to sympathise with their struggle for a state than support the dismantling of Israel and its replacement by something new. The Palestinian statehood request to the UN has only served to seal this perception in the public mind. At the same time, there is nowhere near an equivalent body of opinion supporting the one-state alternative which could have challenged this. With a few small exceptions, no major institution or mass movement has adopted any variant of the one-state solution. Indeed, endorsements at any official level have stemmed only from marginal groups or states outside the “western club”: in 2004 the US Green Party adopted the one-state solution at its national convention; former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani once called for a united government of Israel and the Palestinian territories; and Libya’s former and discredited head of state, Colonel Qaddafi, proposed in 2003 that a unitary Israel/Palestine (which he named “Isratine”) be created in place of the current arrangement.
The reality that must be faced is that opponents of the one-state solution far outnumber its supporters, and much of that is based on what they see as the enormous obstacles to its implementation. This has led to the view that the one-state solution is very good in principle but it can never happen, and the dearth of ideas for its implementation has only strengthened this perception. Beyond saying that the endpoint – a situation of equality between the citizens of a unitary state irrespective of religion or race – is “a good thing”, no one has come up with a blueprint for the new state, or produced a roadmap of how to get there.
The first problem is that there is no consensus amongst Palestinians, or Israelis, or anyone else that the one-state solution is the best option.10 Indeed, a 2009 Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre opinion poll found that only 20 percent of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians and just 9 percent of Jewish Israelis favoured a bi-national solution. A 2003 Peace Index poll of Israelis found that 73 percent feared the emergence of a bi-national state, with only 6 percent in favour of one; in 2007, 70 percent still backed a two-state solution.11 Furthermore, the one-state solution is at odds with the current formal political position of both Israel and the PLO (such as it is), not to speak of the Palestinian Authority. Hamas is likewise on record as having accepted the two-state solution, at least for now. The western support that exists for this solution has led many to believe that it offers the best hope for progress in the Palestinian situation. Hence, according to this view, abandoning the struggle for an independent state with strong international backing for the untried, unplanned one-state option would be pure folly.
It is inescapably the case that both sides identify themselves as national communities with a right to self-determination. The Palestinians under occupation would not willingly abandon their struggle for independence from Israeli rule in order to struggle anew for equality in a joint state where Israel would be likely to have the upper hand. Given the greater development of Israelis, Palestinians would fear becoming a permanent underclass. As for the Israelis, although they do not want Palestinians in their midst, they fear even more the loss of the unfettered exploitation of Palestinian land and resources they have become accustomed to, and would fight to keep these advantages. More generally, the level of distrust, grievance and ill will between the parties is such that the very idea of sharing the land would be anathema to both.
But perhaps more serious than any of this is the way that Israelis and Jews would view the threat a unitary state poses to Zionism, which has become an integral part of the Jewish world view. The state of Israel, which would have to be dismantled in its present form if a unitary state were to be created, has become essential to the identity not just of Jewish Israelis, but of many Jews throughout the world. Its importance as a point of reference for such Jews and as a bulwark against Jewish insecurity, real or imagined, can hardly be overestimated. Keeping a Jewish state in existence is thus a priority, as Alexander Jacobson argues in Haaretz (29 January 2010). If a unitary state came into being, bi-national or not, it would rapidly become Arab and Islamic through the implementation of the Palestinian Right of Return, and no Jewish state would exist. Why, he asks, is the right of the Jewish people to national independence any less legitimate than that of other peoples?
The list of obstacles to the one-state solution is daunting, but has not deterred some of its adherents from thinking about its implementation. For example, Israeli academic and activist Jeff Halper advocates a South African-style anti-Apartheid struggle against Zionism.12 Others endorse the same strategy in the struggle to end the occupation, without explicitly calling for a unitary state.13 While such a movement could be a way forward, there is nothing comparable at the popular level calling for a one-state solution. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel may be one such pathway towards the goal, but it is as yet still too diffuse and ineffective. In any case, as the veteran peace activist, Uri Avnery, points out, the two situations are so different that such an approach is doomed.14 The South African regime had few international supporters, whereas Israel commands the unstinting support of Jewish communities worldwide and the near unconditional support of the world’s only superpower, the United States. It is the Arabs, he says, not the Jews, who are seen as “the world’s bogeymen”.
An Israeli writer and self-described Zionist, Yoram Avnak has taken a different approach. He has set out his detailed vision of how the single state, however arrived at, would be constituted (Haaretz, 7 February 2010). His imagined structure of the “secular state of Israel/Palestine” attempts to put some flesh on a hitherto skeletal concept, ”the new Israel/Palestine”. To be established by the international community, the proposed state would, in Avnak’s view, entail total separation of “church and state”, with a ban on religious parties. Education would be strictly secular, and any religious teaching would be funded by parents. In order to maintain the desired demographic balance between Jews and Palestinians (45 percent each), the Israeli law of return would be cancelled, and the Palestinian Right of Return would be restricted to that level. Hebrew, Arabic and English would be the official languages. The state parliament would be made up of 45 percent representation for each side, with 10 percent for others. The Old City of Jerusalem would become a separate body like the Vatican, administered by non-citizen Jews, Muslims, and Christians appointed by the UN. Although Avnak believes his plan represents the last chance to build a healthy society, he provides no strategy to get there.
The broad consensus is that a public education about the one-state concept and the need to understand it in the context of the Palestinian Right of Return and Israel’s Zionist ideology is necessary. It is evident that the one-state option needs discussion and promotion in the way that the two-state solution has been promoted. Twenty years ago, the two-state solution was by no means as generally accepted as it is now; that campaign of education and dissemination needs to be replicated for the one-state solution. Those who advocate this course believe that it is a necessary prelude to the implementation of this solution.
Given the range of obstacles in the way of the one-state solution, one could be forgiven for giving up at this point. It is indeed a difficult problem, not least because Israel has attained a position of considerable stability in relation to the Palestinians, whom it controls in their enclaves and can afford to forget. Their leadership is pliant and intimidated, and causes Israel no sleepless nights. This comfortable status quo could continue for a long time. In order to change it, a quite different strategy will be required. Key to this new strategy is the idea of a voluntary annexation of the Occupied Territories to Israel, thus transforming the struggle against occupation into one for equal civil rights within an expanded Israeli state. This is based on recognition that Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories form one unit, and in effect make up what is one state. However, the difference between such a state and the one-state solution as advocated is that the former deals unfairly with its Palestinian members and subjects them to an Apartheid regime. The Palestinian demand should therefore be for equal status with Israeli citizens, since they are in effect disenfranchised citizens of the same state.
A call to this effect came from the imprisoned Fatah leader, Marwan Barghouti, in 2004,15 and is in line with similar calls for the dissolution of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and a direct struggle for equal rights with Israelis.16 More recently, denials by Palestinian officials that such a possibility has been on the Palestinian agenda have served only to enhance the likelihood that such ideas are being indeed discussed.17 Palestinian calls for the annexation of the Occupied Territories should not, however, be confused with those of Right-wing Israelis (such as Knesset member Tzipi Hotovely, Knesset speaker Reuben Rivlin, and former Israeli defence minister Moshe Arens), who have been calling for the incorporation of “Judea and Samaria” (the official Israeli administrative term for the West Bank) into a Greater Israel. Though such proposals envisage citizenship for the Palestinian inhabitants, the goal is not to create an egalitarian unity state. Rather, they stem from an assertion of Jewish ownership of the whole of the West Bank, no part of which should be “given away”.18
If the Palestinians adopted the strategy of a struggle for civic rights, and removed their layer of government, the PA, which currently acts as a buffer between them and Israel, they would be seen for what they are, an occupied people, and the question of the Israeli occupation would return to the political stage. They would have all the rights under the Geneva Conventions which apply to an occupied people, and the game that has gone on since the Oslo Agreement, with a pretend state-in-waiting and a pretend government, would come to an end. Faced with such a situation, it is difficult to see what Israel could do. At one stroke, the Palestinians would call Israel’s bluff over the peace process and its unrelenting colonisation, which has benefited so well from the protracted and futile peace talks to date. Their struggle for equal rights would find an echo in the western world, and, as potential citizens of Israel, the Palestinians would explode the demographic argument that has been used to maintain Israel as a Jewish-majority state. This could then be the first building-block of the one-state solution.
It will not be an easy strategy. Its first enemies and possibly its fiercest will be those Palestinian officials who have become accustomed to a different way of running Palestinian affairs, with the two-state solution as an endpoint. And Israel, aware of the potential of this move to change its character and ideology, will try to find ways of defeating it. In addition, there are the practical problems of how international aid, which might be suspended, will reach the Palestinians who are currently so dependent on it. Yet what is the alternative? The two-state solution is defunct and the status quo is not sustainable. As a strategy, if intelligently organised and accompanied by a wide public relations campaign, the citizenship idea will turn the tables on the other side and overthrow the failed assumptions of the past that have so hindered the possibility of a lasting solution.
The one-state solution has seen increasing levels of support in recent years, but there are many obstacles to its implementation. Not least among these has been the dearth of ideas or work on creating a blueprint for the new state and devising a road map for its realisation. The most promising way to attain the single state will be through dissolving the Palestinian Authority and campaigning for equal rights in an expanded Israeli state. That entails recognition of the current reality, that Israel is in fact one state, but one containing an oppressed Palestinian minority. The struggle must be to change that into a situation of equality. In this way, the ground will be laid for the egalitarian one-state solution supported by a growing number of people throughout the world.