An idea is gaining ground in the Arab world and beyond that the Palestinians are better off opting out of a frustrating peace process and that they should embrace the vision of a one-state solution. The emotional and intellectual appeal of a binational state of both Israelis and Palestinians is undeniable, especially for well-intentioned but distant academic and cultural elites. The argument speaks to a higher sense of justice and human dignity – that peoples can transcend their suffering and narratives to live side by side, forging a new identity.
A binational state may be inevitable due to rampant Israeli expansionism: settlements are growing and the wall, instead of marking the 1967 borders, is designed to keep much of the West Bank’s most valuable land in Israeli hands. But Palestinian support for a binational state would indeed be a puzzling proposition.
The Palestinian people need to separate themselves from their longtime Israeli tormentors and repatriate the millions of Palestinians living in sometimes subhuman conditions in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. More importantly, they must be given an opportunity to build an identity based not only on victimhood, exile and resistance, but on the common purpose of nation-building and governance. This is the intrinsic value of the two-state logic. No intermediate solution, from trusteeship to confederation with Jordan to a binational state will accomplish this.
The Palestinian leadership failed in its first attempt at good governance in the 1990s because of Israeli intrusiveness, but also on account of its own inability to progress from resistance to institution-building. The current efforts of the Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad have injected a much-needed dose of self-responsibility. Coupled with a growing recognition of Israeli obtuseness, this is transforming how many in the international community think about a Palestinian future.
There is a difference between being resigned to a one-state solution, using its perceived inevitability to pressure Israel and the US, and officially advocating it as a cure-all. Indeed, many Palestinian proponents of the one-state formula do so out of despair, and when the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas warns about its consequences, it is to build leverage and create urgency. Only a radical yet vocal minority, taking comfort that demographic trends and steadfastness will somehow deliver total victory, rejects the idea of a future recognition of Israel conditioned on peace.
It is also important to think through the motions that would bring about a binational state. It would require the Palestinians to do away with the modicum of autonomy they already have, only to sit and wait through many more years of occupation for the unlikely event that Israelis warm to the idea. In this situation, even greater suffering would descend upon the Palestinian people.
Espousing a one-state agenda is likely to harden the Israeli position even more. An already paranoid Israeli public will rally around its most radical leaders. The peace camp will be discredited. Extreme scenarios include full-blown apartheid, ethnic cleansing and civil war. In the meantime, a distraught international community could withdraw political support, and the vital financial backing that the Palestinian cause receives. It would also increase tensions with Israel’s Arab neighbours and irreparably complicate the Israeli-Syrian and Israeli-Lebanese peace tracks. Sadly, many of those convinced of the inevitability of Israel’s demise are oblivious to the human cost on all sides. Those who introduce such ideas don’t live in Jenin or Gaza City.
To be fair, some serious thinking has gone into what the contours of a binational state should be. But there has been little thinking about how the political implications of demographic evolution would be managed. When Arabs outnumber the Jewish minority, what will be the institutional guarantees that they won’t impose a uniformly Arab identity on the new entity? What about the exodus and brain drain that would ensue? A binational state that results in a homogenous country does not square with the idealism of one-staters.
Another problem is the sad record of multi-confessional states in the Middle East. One-staters often hail the distant examples of South Africa and Northern Ireland. Next door, Lebanon has proven incapable of transcending its sectarian politics, descending into civil war every few decades. Since 2003 a bloody confrontation between Sunni and Shia radicals bloodied Iraq, which is steadily losing its Christian and other minorities.
What’s more, while one-staters advocate secular democratic rule, little in the recent Palestinian history suggests that its political elite is capable of abiding by it or containing its own radicals, and the Israeli record regarding the Palestinians and its own Arab minority is no more flattering.
Why would a unified state in the land of historic Palestine fare any better? To think that the land that saw so much blood and rancour could become the laboratory of a postmodern state defies reason and sets the bar impossibly high for an already traumatised and battered Palestinian society. One-state advocates, overwhelmingly idealistic non-Palestinians or non-Israelis in search for a romantic cause, see themselves walking in the footsteps of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. In reality, they are projecting onto the Palestinian people their own expectations and ideals.
It is abhorrent for right-wing Americans to subsidise Israeli expansionism. But it also should not be up to students in California, professors in London and Arab émigrés in the West, however well-meaning, to dictate the peaceful outcome that Palestinians should accept.
Both Palestinians and Israelis are firmly attached to their own narratives. Their identities will evolve, not merge or dissipate, only when Palestinian rights are upheld in a state of their own.
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