FORWARD TO THE PAST: THE FALL AND RISE OF THE "ONE-STATE SOLUTION" Part II

by Jonathan Spyer

 

2nd part of 2

 

THE RETURN OF THE ONE STATE IDEA

In the period since the collapse of the peace process in late 2000, the "one-state solution" has begun to re-emerge to prominence in Palestinian nationalist thinking.

The one state idea did not disappear during the peace process years of the 1990s. During that period, organizations committed to various versions of it (Hamas, the PFLP, and others) were instrumental in attempts to undermine moves toward a two-state "solution." It also remained the solution of choice among large sections of Fatah.[22] In its earlier incarnation, however, the one-state solution had found little echo in the West. To some degree this changed in the post-2000 period, with the one state idea becoming the preferred outcome of a section of intellectuals in Western Europe and to a lesser extent in North America.[23] The more recent advocacy of the one-state idea appears to differ from earlier examples in a number of other important ways.

In the past, the idea was presented as representing a just outcome, regardless of the difficulty in achieving it, because of what its advocates regarded as the inherently unjust and illegitimate nature of Israeli nationhood. The more recent advocacy on behalf of the "one-state solution," however, has characterized it as a reluctant response to reality rather than an ideal position. According to this view, which is repeated frequently in literature promoting this option, the Palestinian national movement is being forced to abandon a sincere and long-held commitment to a two-state outcome to the conflict because of Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank and Gaza (or the West Bank alone after 2005). The idea promoted is that Israel's desire to retain settlements in the West Bank, or the cost — financial and political — of removing them renders any realistic possibility of Israeli withdrawal unfeasible.[24]

The advocates of the one-state solution then maintain that since Israel has chosen to sabotage the possibility of partition, there is no longer any possibility for the realization of this, and since Israeli settlement activity has de facto created a single entity west of the Jordan River, the appropriate — or perhaps sole possible — response of the Palestinian national movement is to accept this fait accompli and to begin a campaign for integration of the entire population of this area into a single state framework. This case has been made in myriad publications in a variety of languages over the previous half decade.[25] It is hard to find mention of the fact that this position was in fact the PLO's official stance until 1988. Rather, the impression given is that after a long period of commitment to partition, the Palestinians and the international community must now abandon this position, because Israel's actions have made it an impossibility.
 

ASSUMPTIONS BEHIND THE ONE-STATE SOLUTION

The one-state solution, as has been shown, is a return to the policy advocated by the PLO from the late 1960s, once it moved beyond openly politicidal ambitions regarding the Israeli Jews. As with the original idea of the "non-sectarian, democratic" state, there is a certain, rather obvious discrepancy between the slogan and the very probable reality that its realization would usher in. That is, while the slogan may appear to be advocating the creation of a state such as the United States or post-apartheid South Africa, this advocacy is being made on behalf of an Arab nationalist movement, steeped in a specifically Arab and Muslim cultural context,[26] in an area in which the creation of democratic, non-ethnic, and non-religious state has not been the norm.

In order to answer in advance the claim that the foundation of such a single state framework would surely usher in disaster for the remaining Israeli Jewish minority, advocates of the "one-state solution" have been concerned to restate the older Palestinian and broader Arab claims as to why Israel should not be included in the normal category of nations and states deserving of existence. In this regard, arguments have been raised regarding the supposedly unique (and uniquely harmful) nature of the state of Israel and of Israeli nationhood. Thus, Virginia Tilley, an advocate of the "one-state solution," writes that the existence of Israel has been "flawed from the start, resting on the discredited idea, on which political Zionism stakes all its moral authority, that any ethnic group can legitimately claim permanent formal dominion over a territorial state."[27]

This argument requires the listener to accept that there is a single state in the world that is based on the idea of the nation state as the realization of the national rights of a particular ethnic national group, and that state is Israel, and such a unique anomaly can therefore not claim the normal, unambiguous right to survival that is usually afforded states.[28] The claim, however, that Israel is an anomaly in this regard is unsustainable. Both Egypt and Syria describe themselves as "Arab republics". The Egyptian Constitution stipulates in Article 2, Chapter 1 that "Islam is the State religion, Arabic is the official language and the principles of Islamic Shari'a is the principal source of legislation."[29] Both Egypt and Syria require that their president be a Muslim. The Syrian Constitution of 1973 also cites Islamic jurisprudence as the main source of legislation.[30] Saudi Arabia and Pakistan base their entire legitimacy and identity on their Muslim nature. The Palestinian Authority also in its constitution describes the Palestinian people in ethnic and religious terms as "part of the Arab and Islamic nations," declares Islam as the official religion of the Palestinian state, and cites Islamic Shari'a law as a "major source for legislation."[31] The world is filled with states that derive their legitimacy and identity from the idea of themselves as the expression of the tradition and national rights of the group that makes up the majority of the population. This type of argument, therefore, cannot coherently explain why "one-state" advocates believe that the disappearance of Israel and the nullification of the right of Israelis to self-determination are acceptable and even preferable outcomes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
 

THE "ONE-STATE" IDEA AND THE NOTION OF THE ARTIFICIALITY OF ISRAELI AND JEWISH NATIONHOOD

If the conflict between Israeli Jews and their Palestinian/Arab enemies is seen as a clash between two authentic, historically and culturally rooted national groups, then it is intuitive that a solution to it must rest on the partial realization of the claims of each side, and subsequent coexistence between them. There are two reasons for this: The first reason is because it is a general axiom that the destruction of the sovereignty of a legitimate national entity would be an event of tragic proportions that ought to be prevented. The second, more pragmatic reason is because historic evidence suggests that when a multiplicity of historically hostile national entities are forced to live together in a single state framework, the almost inevitable result will be strife.

Advocates of the "one-state solution" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, assume that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is or ought to be exempt from these considerations. They assume that Israeli Jews either will not, or ought not, resist attempts to strip them of statehood. Why is this assumption made when it seems to contradict both available historical evidence and international norms?

Long embedded in Arab and Palestinian nationalism has been the notion that Zionist and Israeli Jewish identity is analogous not to that of other "legitimate" nations — such as Palestinian Arabs, British, French, and so on — but rather to illegitimate communities born of European colonialism, who have not in the post-1945 period generally been seen as laying legitimate claim to the self-determination to be afforded to genuine "nations." Examples of this kind of community would be the British settlers of "Rhodesia" in southern Africa, and the French settlers (known as "pieds noirs") in Algeria. In both these cases, the settlers, once faced down by the reality of local, indigenous resistance, made a rational accounting of their own interests and either acquiesced to rule by the indigenous people or departed whence they came. Palestinian nationalism has long viewed Israeli Jews as analogous to these communities. No reconsidering of this characterization took place during the period of the peace process of the 1990s. Due to the geographical proximity, the example of the Algerian "pieds noirs" has been that most commonly cited.[32] The "pieds noirs" have been of particular interest to Palestinian nationalists because of their large number and more or less complete departure from Algeria back to France following the granting of independence to Algeria.

The view of Israeli Jews as analogous to the "pieds noirs" and others like them — i.e., the view of Zionism as merely a movement of European colonialism — has never undergone revision among Palestinian nationalists. It is a view shared by the most moderate and the most radical circles within this trend.[33] Certain adherents to this view decided on pragmatic grounds in the 1990s that the one-state solution should be abandoned because of prevailing political realities. The essential rightness and justice of the one-state idea, however, was never questioned. The short period of acceptance of the "two-state solution," therefore, can to a certain extent be seen as a departure by Palestinian nationalism from its more natural stance, and the current trend of return to the "one-state" option is a return to a position more in keeping with the deep view of the conflict held by this trend.

The problem with this outlook is that Israeli Jews have refused to play the role allotted them. One of the notable characteristics of both Palestinian nationalism and broader Arab analysis of Israel has been the tendency to engage in gloomy predictions for Zionism and Israel. Ever since the 1960s, prophecies suggesting that the divide between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, or the "artificiality" of Israeli culture, or the religious-secular divide, or fear induced in "settlers" by Palestinian "resistance" would soon lead to the collapse of Zionism have abounded. Israel, in the meantime, has absorbed immigrants and developed — not without problems, to be sure, but generally successfully.

This, however, has not led to a fundamental rethink of the nature of the adversary. The intellectual tools surely exist for such a rethink, and engaging in it need not necessarily imply sympathy or agreement with Zionism or the Jewish national project. Were Palestinian nationalism, for example, to factor into its understanding of Zionism not only those aspects involving settlement and colonization but also such elements as the presence of Jewish sovereignty in the area in antiquity, the unbroken link via Jewish tradition felt by Jews with that ancient sovereignty, the many — sometimes successful — attempts in pre-modernity of Jews to re-establish communities in the area in question, the terrible suffering of Jews in the Diaspora and the notion in Jewish tradition of the "return to Zion" and the centrality of Jerusalem, this might make possible a better understanding of the durability and nature of Jewish and Israeli nationhood. This, in turn, might make the deepening of a more pragmatic outlook more feasible. As yet, however, there are no signs of this happening.

Rather, the conceptualization among secular Palestinian nationalists of Zionism as a colonization movement par excellence and nothing else continues to hold sway. The return to the idea of the "one-state solution" reflects the continued strength of this characterization. The growth alongside Palestinian nationalism of a newer, Islamist competitor whose very different outlook leads it also to a similar strategy of negation of the opposing side is perhaps the most important development in Palestinian politics over the last two decades. In the current situation, legitimacy in Palestinian politics continues to be judged according to fealty to an idea of the complete defeat of the enemy, and the most potent growing political force is a religious movement committed to this ideal. Against this backdrop, secular Palestinian nationalism appears to be retreating back down the road it traveled in the 1990s, to the point at which its journey began in the late 1960s. The growing resonance of the old-new idea of the "one-state solution" is the most notable evidence of this process.
 

NOTES

[1] See Michael Terazi, "Why Not Two Peoples, One State?," New York Times, October 25, 2004.

[2] Tony Judt, "Israel: The Alternative," New York Review of Books, Vol. 50, No. 16, (October 23, 2003).

[3] See the Hamas Charter, August 18, 1988, http://www.mideastweb.org.

[4] Alain Gresh, The PLO: The Struggle Within (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1988), p. 49.

[5] Palestinian National Covenant, 1964, Article 7, http://www.un.int.

[6] Yehoshafat Harkabi, "Commentary on the Palestinian National Covenant," attachment to letter from Israeli Ambassador to the UN Chaim Herzog to the President of the Security Council, January 14, 1976, http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF.

[7] See Gresh, The PLO, pp. 49-50, for a discussion of the common but mistaken use of the word "secular" in describing the kind of state sought at this time by the PLO. Arafat himself denied that this term was ever used by the Palestinians.

[8] Hamas Charter, Article 11.

[9] Palestinian National Charter, 1968, Article 22, http://www.yale.edu.

[10] Palestinian National Charter, 1968, Article 21.

[11] Palestinian National Charter, 1968, Article 15.

[12] Palestinian National Charter, 1968, Article 20.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Palestinian National Charter, 1968, Article 12.

[15] See Gresh, The PLO, pp. 34-51 for details on the debate in the PLO in the early 1970s before the adoption of the "Democratic state" formula.

[16] Ibid, p. 49.

[17] Uri Avnery, "The Struggle for Land," Palestine-Israel Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1997), http://www.pij.org.

[18] Gresh, The PLO, p. 168.

[19] See Avnery, "The Struggle for Land," for an exposition of this point of view.

[20] "Kaddumi Reports That PLO Charter Never Recognized Israel," Bicom Weekend Brief, April 26, 2004.

[21] "Qurei: Palestinians Might Demand Citizenship," Jerusalem Post, August 11, 2008, http://www.jpost.com.

[22] "Kaddumi Reports."

[23] For a variety of articles advocating the "one-state solution," see http://www.one-state.net.

[24] See, for example, Ahmad Samih Khalidi, "A One State Solution: A Unitary Arab-Jewish Homeland Could Bring Lasting Peace to the Middle East," The Guardian, September 29, 2003.

[25] Visit http://www.one-state.net for archive of articles advocating this option in the period up to 2007.

[26] See Palestinian National Charter for evidence of the specifically Arab ethno-national nature of the Palestinian nationalist ideology.

[27] Virginia Tilley, The One State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), p. 132.

[28] In many examples, Israel is not considered unique, but is classed with a very small group of other aberrant states, such as Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and apartheid South Africa. See interview with British journalist Jonathan Cook for an example of these comparisons, http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com. Virginia Tilley herself considers Israel an example of "ethnic nationalism," which she considers also once pertained in South Africa and Northern Ireland but has since been defeated. Her criteria for defining what this ideology consists of are unfortunately never clarified.

[29] Nabil Malek, Reviewing the Promotion and Practical Realization of the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to Minorities at the National Level: A Country Situation: The Coptic Minority of Egypt, Commission on Human Rights, Sub-Commission on Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, Fifty-seventh session, Working Group on Minorities, Eleventh session, May 30-June 3, 2005.

[30] Constitution of Syria (1973), Jurist Legal Intelligence, http://jurist.law.pitt.edu.

[31] Constitution of the state of Palestine, Third Draft, March 25, 2003, http://www.jmcc.org.

[32] See for example, PLO Leader Yasir Arafat's speech to the UN General Assembly in 1974, which he opened by recalling UN support for the Algerian struggle for independence before going on to cite Zionism as an example of Western colonialism. Speech of Yasir Arafat before the UN General Assembly, November 13, 1974, http://www.mideastweb.org.

[33] See, for example, the statements made by moderate Palestinian figure Professor Sari Nusseibeh in Akiva Eldar, "We Are Running Out of Time for a Two-state Solution," Haaretz, August 16, 2008. http://www.haaretz.com.

 
Dr. Jonathan Spyer is a senior research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, Herzliya, Israel.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

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