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In a few recent posts we’ve discussed the question of whether one state or two states is the most logical or possible resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (You can see my argument here.) A few days ago TPM Reader RC sent me this April Foreign Affairs article, Israel’s One-State Reality. It was written by three scholars at GW and another at the University of Maryland. The piece was interesting to me because it illustrates a lot of what the one state argument is really about. As the title suggests, the article is not so much an argument that one state in Israel-Palestine is a solution to anything but an assertion that it is the current reality.
In other words, Israel’s not a country that functions as a democracy while controlling occupied territories whose final status will be decided at some point in the future. It’s a single country in which all Jews have political and civil rights and most Palestinians have limited civil rights and no political rights. Given that the post-67 occupation has persisted for 56 years, this argument has many merits to it. But what is the import of that assertion? In itself it’s simply a definitional claim. That part comes next. It’s an argument for the withdrawal of US support and some escalating framework of sanctions to compel Israel to come up to international standards in which one ethnic group or most of it facing systemic legal discrimination just isn’t okay.
I have myself long subscribed to or at least did subscribe to a version of this withdrawal of support argument. Control over and access to the whole of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean is core to most variants of Zionist ideology, just as it is to Palestinian nationalism. For any kind of historic compromise both sides have to give up a lot of concrete stuff and a lot of national aspirations. But unflagging US support has in very real ways protected Israel from the need to make those compromises. No person and no country gives up things that are deeply important to them if it’s easy not to.
My point here isn’t to get into the rights and wrongs of this compulsion approach. I want to focus on something a bit different. If you read the article it doesn’t really make any case that a single state can be viable in operation or acceptable to either national group.
The core paragraph of the whole piece is this one.
A better U.S. policy would advocate for equality, citizenship, and human rights for all Jews and Palestinians living within the single state dominated by Israel. Theoretically, such a policy would not prevent a two-state solution from being resurrected in the unlikely event that the parties moved in that direction in the distant future. But starting from a one-state reality that is morally reprehensible and strategically costly would demand an immediate focus on equal human and civil rights. A serious rejection of today’s unjust reality by the United States and the rest of the international community might also push the parties themselves to seriously consider alternative futures. The United States should demand equality now, even if the ultimate political arrangement will be up to the Palestinians and the Israelis to determine.
While the paragraph starts by referring to two states as only a ‘theoretical’ possibility, the latter part suggests something rather different, referring to “alternative futures” and “ultimate political arrangements.” What are those exactly? If the solution is a single state with full civic and political equality, what’s to decide? The international community, with the full support of the US, is imposing it. It’s already decided.
What the authors are really proposing is this: faced with the reality of a single state in which Jewish Israelis cease to make up a decisive majority within a democratic polity Israelis will decide to shift gears and agree to some kind of partition. I doubt the authors would agree that that is quite what they’re saying. But their unwillingness or inability to explain how a single state would work tells the story in spite of them. Read the piece and you can see they all but concede this. The real argument is that faced with that unhappy or unworkable future, both sides, but especially the Israelis, will get down to really negotiating, under compulsion.
I know many people would argue, what exactly is so horrible about civic and political equality, what we assume here in the United States as a given? That is both a good and complicated question. The simplest answer is that you have two peoples who have very specific histories, which place a state roughly aligning with their national aspirations at the very center of their political cultures. In other words, it doesn’t matter what you or I think. It is demonstrably a super big deal to them. This point isn’t even contested. Even the most ardent one state supporter concedes the idea currently has virtually no support in either group.
Both peoples have deep claims to the entire land and both can’t have it. Not at all of it. I can’t speak to Palestinian maximalism, though I think I understand its outlines as much as an outsider can. But I understand Israeli maximalism.
Thirty years ago there was majority support among Israelis for some kind of two state solution. But that support was always based on some key vagueness about its actual outlines. It might be better to say there was majority openness to the idea rather than ‘support.’ That support or at least the belief that such a plan is at all realistic has dropped precipitously since then. For distinct but parallel reasons it has dropped just as much on the Palestinian side. But there was always, say 30% of the Israeli public absolutely opposed to any territorial compromise of any kind. They were against Oslo; they were against giving up the settlement project; they were against evacuating the settlements in Gaza. They remain equally and totally committed to all these things today. The arc of the last quarter century has been to add to that 30% of absolute rejectionists at least another 30% of the population who were maybe in theory open to the idea but decided it was dangerous, unrealistic or just not possible. Critically, the premise of Netanyahu’s long tenure was that whatever they thought they just didn’t need to worry about it.
The reality I always come back to is this: to believe that “one state” is possible is to imagine that this group, which won’t agree to stop building new settlements, let alone evacuating some number of existing West Bank settlements or fiddling with the territorial status quo in Jerusalem, will somehow agree to lose all of that and actually give up Jewish majority control of the entire country. So a group which won’t agree to painful but ultimately manageable concessions will somehow magically agree to, what are to them, total and existential concessions. Stated as such the very idea is just absurd. If and when the Israeli body politic is actually faced with that choice they will almost certainly resort to some territorial retrenchment that avoids it.
The “one state” solution is really less an actual proposed solution to the conflict than a cudgel designed to force serious consideration of ‘alternative futures’ and ‘political arrangements’ which are very likely to be some version of two states.