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One and Two State Solutions
The Myth of International Consensus
By Kathleen Christison
24/01/08 "Counterpunch" -- -- Among the panoply of reasons
put forth against advocates of a one-state solution for
Palestine-Israel, perhaps the most disingenuous is the
injunction, repeated by well meaning commentators who believe
they speak in the Palestinians' best interests, that
Palestinians would simply be irritating the international
community by pressing for such a solution, because the so-called
international consensus supports, and indeed is based upon, a
two-state solution. At a time when the "international consensus"
could not be less interested in securing any Palestinian rights,
particularly in forcing Israel to withdraw from enough territory
to provide for real Palestinian statehood and genuine freedom
from Israeli domination, this call for compliance with the
wishes of an uncaring international community is at best an
empty argument, at worst a hypocritical dodge that undermines
the Palestinians' right to struggle for equality and
self-determination. By telling the Palestinians that they cannot
even speak out for one state without antagonizing some mythical
consensus around the world, this line of argument undermines
their right simply to think about an alternative solution.
The one-state solution is envisioned as an arrangement that
would see Palestinians and Jews living together as citizens of a
single, truly democratic state, with guaranteed rights to
equality and guaranteed equal access to the instruments of
governance. Such a solution would mean the end of Zionism as
currently conceived and the end of Israel as an exclusivist
Jewish state, but it would guarantee equal civil and political
rights for Israeli Jews and the right to encourage further
Jewish immigration, just as it would guarantee -- for the first
time -- equal civil and political rights for Palestinians and
the right of Palestinian refugees exiled over the last 60 years
to return to their homeland.
The notion of establishing a single state for Palestinians and
Jews, although historically not a new idea, has regained
currency in recent years as it has become increasingly obvious
that Israel's absorption of more and more Palestinian land in
the occupied territories -- land stolen from Palestinians for
constantly expanding settlements, a vast network of roads for
the exclusive use of Israelis, the monstrously destructive
separation wall, and Israeli military bases and closed security
zones -- has made the vision of "two states living side by side
in peace" a cruel joke.
Establishment of a single state is strongly supported by a small
but growing core of scholars and activists. Virginia Tilley
raised the idea in her 2005 book The One-State Solution. Ali
Abunimah continued the discussion with One Country the following
year, and Joel Kovel contributed Overcoming Zionism in 2007. In
the last few years, numerous articles, international
conferences, and debates between advocates and opponents of one
state, largely in Europe and Israel, have addressed the
possibilities. An emerging grassroots movement in Palestine is
directing its energies toward promoting one state, working with
scholars and solidarity activists around the world.
But many treat the idea with casual disdain, dismissing it as
"naively visionary," "an illusion," or simply "a non-starter."
Other opponents at least give the idea more thought and have put
forth some reasoned, and often quite soundly reasoned,
argumentation for their opposition. This article will address
only one of the objections: one of the most commonly heard, that
a single state would violate an "international consensus"
supporting the two-state solution.
This argument holds that international bodies such as the United
Nations and its subsidiaries, as well as human rights
organizations and the leaderships of most nations in the world
-- including, not least, the PLO and the Palestinian Authority
themselves -- want the end of the occupation and support
Israel's continued existence inside its 1967 borders, along with
the establishment of a Palestinian state in the one-quarter of
Palestine that would thus be left to the Palestinians. This
international consensus is automatically assumed to be
sacrosanct, apparently simply because it is international (and
perhaps also because it does not endanger Israel's continued
existence as a Jewish state).
The most obvious response to this honoring of the international
consensus is that in actuality the international community is
not in the least interested in what becomes of the Palestinians,
now or ever in the past, and does not give more than lip service
to any particular solution. Whatever "international consensus"
exists has never been interested in specific positions but
primarily in accommodating the U.S. and its policies -- which
ultimately means preserving Israel's existence above all,
supporting a two-state solution because that is the position to
which the U.S. and Israel currently themselves pay lip service,
but not exhibiting concern for Palestinian rights in any
respect. The international community does not initiate policies;
it merely parrots and goes along with the positions promoted by
the centers of international power, in this case the U.S. and
Israel.
There is in fact no international consensus supporting two
states for Palestine-Israel. Those who cite UN Security Council
Resolution 242 as the basis for two states ignore the reality
that the resolution never imagined two states. When it was
adopted in the wake of the 1967 war, during which Israel
captured territory from Jordan, Egypt, and Syria, it called for
Israel's withdrawal "from territories occupied" in the war and
affirmed the right of all states in the region "to live in peace
within secure and recognized borders" (a formulation later
twisted into the demand that Palestinians and other Arabs
recognize Israel's "right to exist"). Although it became the
basis for future peace initiatives, as well as the basis for
future UN resolutions, Resolution 242 did not even mention
Palestinians except as "the refugee problem" and clearly did not
put forth a proposal for two states in Palestine-Israel. The
international consensus at this point acted as though it had
never even heard of Palestinians. At the time, any consideration
of the fate of the occupied West Bank and Gaza was directed
solely at ending Israel's control and returning these
territories to Jordan and Egypt respectively, their original
occupiers.
If there was ever an international consensus in favor of two
states in Palestine, this was during the year or so surrounding
passage of the 1947 UN partition resolution, which divided
Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. This period of
support for two states ran from mid-1947, when a UN committee
recommended partition, until early 1948, when Israel and Jordan
began what became the theft of the territory designated for the
Palestinian Arab state, each taking approximately half of it
(except for Gaza, which Egypt controlled, but did not annex,
until Israel captured that tiny strip of land in 1967). The
international community expressed absolutely no concern over
this dismemberment of the second state supposed to be
established in Palestine -- or over Israel's ethnic cleansing of
the Palestinian population, or over the fate of the 750,000
Palestinians forced into exile and consigned to refugee camps in
surrounding Arab countries, or over Israel's and Jordan's
continued control over territories stolen from the Palestinians.
So much for the international consensus.
Today, whatever international consensus exists in support of two
states arises not out of any true international interest in
seeing a Palestinian state formed alongside Israel, but from the
Palestinians' own formal decision in November 1988 to accept the
two-state formula. This came at the height of the first
Palestinian intifada and immediately after Jordan had
relinquished any claim to the West Bank. Even then, neither the
U.S., Israel, nor the international community accepted the idea
of allowing the Palestinians a state until several years later,
when the notion of two states gradually came to be accepted
implicitly as the logical outcome of peace negotiations that
continued through the 1990s. Throughout the Oslo peace process,
Palestinian statehood was still rarely if ever explicitly
mentioned as a likely outcome.
It was not until the last days of President Clinton's term in
January 2001 -- more than 30 years after the occupation began,
over 50 years after Palestine had been dismembered -- that a
U.S. president first publicly and explicitly advocated
Palestinian statehood. (George Bush has been claiming to be the
first president to call for a Palestinian state, but Clinton
beat him to it by more than a year. Clinton does not boast about
being first on this issue, presumably because no one wins
political points in the U.S. by seeming to advocate any benefit
for Palestinians or demand any concessions from Israel. Both
Clinton and Bush have specifically ruled out the likelihood that
the Palestinian state would include all of the Palestinian
territories captured in 1967, as both have asserted that Israel
will retain control of major settlement blocs in East Jerusalem
and the West Bank.)
The "international consensus" had little to say about the
Palestinians' fate throughout the dozen years between the PLO's
acceptance of the two-state formula in 1988 and the collapse in
2000 of the only serious peace process that might have led to
genuine Palestinian statehood. The international community did
not press for a Palestinian state; it did not object to Israel's
continued expropriation of the territory where such a state
would have been located; it did not object to the fact that the
number of Israeli settlers in that territory doubled during the
years of the peace process intended to resolve the questions of
land and settlements.
The so-called international consensus can hardly be said ever to
have stood for Palestinian statehood in any meaningful way. It
is engaged today, in fact, in an active effort to undermine any
prospect of genuine Palestinian statehood. By continuing to
support Israel as it makes a two-state solution an utter
impossibility and by turning away as Israel perpetrates what in
any other context would be recognized as war crimes against a
powerless civilian population, the vaunted international
consensus is in actuality helping to perpetuate support for the
decimation of an entire people and its national aspirations. The
humanitarian disaster that is Gaza is entirely the result of the
international community's supine refusal to stand up to Israel
and the U.S. and its active support for an embargo on Gaza that
is imprisoning and starving 1.5 million inhabitants and
devastating the Gazan economy.
In an interview at the new year began, Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert crowed about how much international support Israel
enjoys for its program of oppression. The international
constellation of world leaders supporting Israel, he said, is
almost a kind of divine intervention. "It's a coincidence that
is almost 'the hand of God' that Bush is president of the United
States, that Nicholas Sarkozy is the president of France, that
Angela Merkel is the chancellor of Germany, that Gordon Brown is
the prime minister of England and that the special envoy to the
Middle East is Tony Blair." How could Israel have asked, he
wondered, for a "more comfortable" combination? The fact that
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian
Authority apparatus in Ramallah support and encourage this nice
comfort zone in which Israel relaxes and encourages the
humanitarian disaster being imposed on fellow Palestinians in
Gaza does not lessen the responsibility of the "international
consensus" for its part in going along with these horrors.
Those who tout the international consensus as something to be
heeded point out that public opinion polls in Israel, the U.S.,
and Europe show strong popular support for an end to Israel's
occupation and consistently support the two-state formula by
large majorities. This is accurate, but these polls are
essentially meaningless. On Palestinian-Israeli issues, as on
the march toward war in Iraq, international public opinion has
virtually no impact on the policies pursued by governments, and
in any case public opinion on this issue is merely reactive. In
the minds of most people in liberal western societies,
Palestinian statehood is a nice concept in a vague sort of way,
but few understand what is happening on the ground in Palestine
and fewer still are willing to go out on the streets to back up
their casual "yes" answers to pollsters with anti-occupation
protests. Moreover, support for statehood drops off when the
precise nature of the Israeli concessions required is spelled
out. It is also worth noting in any consideration of the
importance of polls on this issue that in Israel polls show the
same large majorities for ethnically cleansing Palestinians from
Israel and the West Bank as they do for permitting the
Palestinians a state.
Invocation of the international consensus to induce Palestinians
to stop advocating true equality in a single state in all of
Palestine comes out of a kind of denial, a refusal to
acknowledge that the international consensus is so oblivious to
the injustice being perpetrated against the Palestinians that it
has not noticed and does not care that the possibility of
establishing two states died quite some years ago. A real
two-state solution -- in which a Palestinian state in all of the
West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem would enjoy full sovereignty
and independence in a contiguous territory not segmented and not
totally surrounded by Israel -- is now a forlorn dream from
which the international consensus has yet to awaken.
Kathleen Christison is a former
CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for
30 years. She is the author of
Perceptions of Palestine and
The Wound of Dispossession. She can be reached at
kathy.bill.christison@comcast.net
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