BDS and Rabbis For Palestine. Credit: Mike Gifford/cc by 2.0
- The recent suspension of the U.S. -engineered Israeli-Palestinian talks signals a much deeper reality than the immediate factors that caused it. The peace process and the two-state solution, which for years were on life support, are now dead.
It is time for the United States and the rest of the international community to stop the 20-year old quixotic effort to resurrect a dead “process” and to seriously begin exploring other avenues for Israeli-Palestinian coexistence between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Perpetuating Israeli rule over half the population through military occupation and without granting them citizenship or equal rights would in the foreseeable future deprive Israel of its Jewish majority, negate its democratic political culture, and ultimately lead to apartheid-like conditions.
The two-state solution has been a convenient policy position that allowed negotiations to go on and on, prompted primarily by the argument that no credible alternatives existed. Many governments, diplomats, negotiators, politicians, academics, NGOs, and consultants on both sides of the Atlantic and in the region have staked their life-long careers on the two-state paradigm.
Dozens of international agreements and declarations and thousands of meetings have been held all around the globe on the so-called modalities of a two-state solution. Unfortunately, all have come to naught.
Whenever the two-state approach was questioned over the years, its defenders would quickly ask, “What’s the alternative?” and would dismiss the “one-state” suggestion and similar options as non-starters. The retort has always been that no Israeli government would dare contemplate any proposal that involves Israelis and Palestinians living together in one political entity.
Palestinian nationalists and ruling economic and political elites, who benefited from their association with the PLO power structure, whether in Ramallah or elsewhere, supported the two-state formula despite their belief that Oslo was a hollow victory that would never lead to statehood. They went along because in the view of one Palestinian at the time, “It was the only game in town.”
The Arab states that advocated this approach drew comfort from the rhetoric because it appealed to Western countries, especially the United States. Yet, these states have failed to commit the necessary resources and political capital and seriously pursue their “Arab Peace Initiative” to its intended conclusion.
Official Arab leaders’ rhetoric continued to extol their unwavering commitment to Palestine, but they gave priority to their separate national interests, which often included unofficial economic, political, and intelligence contacts with Israel.
Successive Israeli governments played a similar game. Whenever the discussions of establishing a Palestinian state got serious, they advanced new conditions and “redlines”, which made it more difficult for Palestinian leaders to accept. The entire negotiating enterprise was reduced to talks about talks, resulting in decoupling the negotiation “process” from the envisioned “peace”.
The pro-Israeli lobby in Washington has successfully erected a solid pro-Israeli stand in the United States Congress. Such support, which has always been identified with right-wing policies in Israel, has severely constrained the diplomatic flexibility of the Executive Branch of the U.S. government.
In lieu of a political settlement, Western countries and the United Nations provided massive aid programmes to Palestinians, and Palestinian leaders and ruling elites benefited disproportionately from the largesse, resulting in newfound wealth and rampant corruption. In the absence of government accountability and transparency, it’s not clear where the huge chunks of the money went.
While rhetorically committed to a two-state solution, high-level PA officials have not been uncomfortable with this arrangement of the political status quo under Israeli occupation. So much so, in fact, that a Palestinian intellectual has described the situation as “The National Sell-out of a Homeland.”
I have supported the two-state solution for almost five decades. Based on my field research in the Occupied Territories in the late 1970s, I published a short book titled “The West Bank and Gaza: Toward the Making of a Palestinian State,” which argued for the creation of a Palestinian state in those parts of Palestine.
In reaction, self-proclaimed Palestinian nationalists, including the current Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, attacked me publicly for “advocating an American position.” Some pro-Palestinian newspapers in the Gulf derisively described me as a “Palestinian American Sadatist”, a reference to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel.
Of course, 10 years later, the PLO formally supported the two-state approach and proceeded with the Oslo agreement.
Sadly, I have come to the conclusion that the two-state option is simply no longer viable. The two parties and the international community must search for other options that could accommodate the two peoples living together.
I reached this position fully cognizant of the realities on the ground – Israeli occupation, Palestinian factionalism, and rising poverty and frustration among Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and in Israel – and the lack of credible alternatives to the two-state approach.
As more and more Palestinians search for alternatives, they are transforming their confrontation with the Israeli occupation and anti-Arab discrimination in Israel to a peaceful struggle for human rights, justice, and economic self-sufficiency. BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) has become the global rallying cry against Israeli occupation and continued settlement construction.
Some members of the Israeli cabinet, on the other hand, have begun talking publicly about taking “unilateral actions” on the West Bank, including annexing Area C and the major settlement blocs. Meanwhile, Israeli security forces continue to enter Area A, which is nominally ruled by the PA, at their whim.
In the absence of a Palestinian state, the Israeli government will be faced with a growing Palestinian population in Gaza, the West Bank, and in Israel, which, taken together, constitutes almost 50 percent of the total population between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.
Perpetuating Israeli rule over half the population through military occupation and without granting them citizenship or equal rights would in the foreseeable future deprive Israel of its Jewish majority, negate its democratic political culture, and ultimately lead to apartheid-like conditions.
The international community and the two peoples should begin a serious exploration of new modalities based on justice, fairness, and equality. These could range from a unitary state to confederal arrangements that guarantee Palestinians equal rights, privileges and responsibilities. But all of them require an end to the occupation.
Some critics might consider this approach Pollyannaish, but it’s not unthinkable in light of the demonstrated failure of the two-state approach.
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From Al-Monitor:
"[...] After that meeting I further realized that the endless debate over what Tony Judt defined as “the only real alternative” — a single, binational state — to the two-state solution was (and is) an empty and counterproductive exercise.
It is “empty” because it is based on a wrong assumption. The chances that the Israeli authorities may express an interest, albeit weak, in the creation of a single state, or just in the annexation of the Palestinian territories, are near to null. The status quo ensures the exploitation of the Palestinian territories — as well as control of an area considered of strategic importance for defense purpose — without requiring additional “inconvenient responsibilities.” In this sense, the Palestinian territories represent in many ways a unique case. In other somewhat similar contexts, such as Tibet, Abkhazia, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Western Sahara and East Turkestan, the “occupying powers” of these areas have incorporated the local inhabitants as their citizens: with all the guarantees, rights and problems that this entails.
On top of this, it is counterproductive because the alternative to the two-states solution has never been a binational state but instead a state of permanent tension, if not war. True, in an ideal world borders should not exist. However, as Noam Chomsky once noted, “If you are serious, you say, ‘how do we get from here to there?’” In a reality in which one of the two contending parties is exponentially more powerful than the other — from a political, economic and cultural point of view — a single state would soon turn into a legalized tool for “choking” the weaker party. Mutatis mutandis, the idea of creating a binational state already failed at the time of Brit Shalom (in the late 1920s), when the attitude of the people, free from the scars of this last century, would have been in theory far more “malleable” than today. The one-state scenario would require the absence of a marked imbalance between the two parties. Furthermore, the support for such an option is problematic inasmuch as it offers a sort of justification for the ongoing unilateral construction of new settlements; if the two-states solution is not anymore feasible, as often claimed by the binational state supporters, what should prevent the creation of additional “facts on the ground”? To put aside the two-states solution without first obtaining a practical alternative is a political suicide that will further affect the lives of million of persons.
The real issue at stake, then, is not if the two-states solution is feasible or not, but to strive for a re-articulatation of the political approach of Washington — and, to a minor extent, of the EU — on these issues. The position of the Obama administration is that the two parties involved must initiate direct negotiations “without preconditions.” This was also the reason given by the United States in February 2011 to justify their veto against a resolution of the UN Security Council that held the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to be “illegal.” Fourteen out of 15 members of the Security Council voted in favor of that resolution.
From a symbolic point of view, the US veto had serious consequences. The message that it sent out is that the issue of settlements and the exploitation of the natural resources (water, stone, gravel) in Palestinian territory are topics of negotiation. More then this, Washington’s standpoint was further problematic because both Israel and the US administration continue, on the other hand, to require various pre-conditions from the Palestinians; from recognizing the State of Israel to the rejection of any abstract idea or effective implementation of armed struggle: i.e., the reasons why Hamas has been excluded by the political process. On the other hand, as Noam Sheizaf clarified, “Israel was never asked to formally recognize the Palestinians’ right to this land, nor has its government ever voted in favor of the two-state solution.”
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