Two-state Dreamers
If one state is impossible, why is Olmert
so afraid of it?
By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
13/03/08 "
ICH
" -- --
If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the
world’s most intractable, much the same can be said of
the parallel debate about whether its resolution can
best be achieved by a single state embracing the two
peoples living there or by a division of the land into
two separate states, one for Jews and the other for
Palestinans.
The central argument of the two-staters is that the
one-state idea is impractical and therefore worthless of
consideration. Their rallying cry is that it is at least
possible to imagine a consensus emerging behind two
states, whereas Israelis will never accept a single
state. The one-state crowd are painted as inveterate
dreamers and time-wasters.
That is the argument advanced by Israel’s only serious
peace group, Gush Shalom. Here is the view of the
group‘s indefatiguable leader, Uri Avnery: “After 120
years of conflict, after a fifth generation was born
into this conflict on both sides, to move from total war
to total peace in a Single Joint State, with a total
renunciation of national independence? This is total
illusion.”
Given Avnery’s high-profile opposition to a single
state, many in the international solidarity groups adopt
the same position. They have been joined by an
influential American intellectual, the philosopher
Michael Neumann, who wrote the no-holds-barred book
The Case against Israel. He appears to be waging a
campaign to discredit the one-state idea too.
Recently in defence of two states, he wrote: “That
Israel would concede a single state is laughable. …
There is no chance at all [Israelis] will accept a
single state that gives the Palestinians anything
remotely like their rights.”
Unlike the one-state solution, according to Neumann and
Avnery, the means to realising two states are within our
grasp: the removal of the half a million Jewish settlers
living in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Both believe that, were Israel to withdraw to the
pre-1967 borders, it would be possible to create two
real states. “A two-state solution will, indeed, leave
Palestinians with a sovereign state, because that’s what
a two-state solution means,” argues Neumann. “It doesn’t
mean one state and another non-state, and no Palestinian
proponent of a two-state solution will settle for less
than sovereignty.”
There is something surprisingly naive about arguing
that, just because something is called a two-state
solution, it will necessarily result in two sovereign
states. What are the mimimum requirements for a state to
qualify as sovereign, and who decides?
True, the various two-state solutions proposed by Ariel
Sharon, Ehud Olmert and George Bush, and supported by
most of the international community, would fail
according to the two-staters’ chief criterion: these
divisions are not premised on the removal of all the
settlers.
But an alternative two-state solution requiring Israel’s
withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders might still not
concede, for example, a Palestinian army – equipped and
trained by Iran? – to guard the borders of the West Bank
and Gaza. Would that count? And how likely do the
campaigners for two real states think it that Israel and
the US would grant that kind of sovereignty to a
Palestine state?
Importantly, Neumann and Avnery remind us that those
with power are the ones who dictate solutions. In which
case we can be sure that, when the time is right, Israel
and its sponsor, the United States, will impose their
own version of the two-state solution and that it will
be far from the genuine article advocated by the
two-state camp.
But let us return to the main argument: that the
creation of two states is inherently more achievable and
practical than the establishment of a single state.
Strangely, however, from all the available evidence,
this is not how it looks to Israel’s current leaders.
Prime minister Ehud Olmert, for example, has expressed
in several speeches the fear that, should the
Palestinian population under Israeli rule -- both in the
occupied territories and inside Israel proper -- reach
the point where it outnumbers the Jewish population, as
demographers expect in the next few years, Israel will
be compared to apartheid South Africa. In his words,
Israel is facing an imminent and powerful “struggle for
one-man-one-vote” along the lines of the anti-apartheid
movement.
According to Olmert, without evasive action, political
logic is drifting inexorably towards the creation of one
state in Israel and Palestine. This was his sentiment as
he addressed delegates to the recent Herzliya
conference:
“Once we were afraid of the possibility that the reality
in Israel would force a bi-national state on us. In
1948, the obstinate policy of all the Arabs, the
anti-Israel fanaticism and our strength and the
leadership of David Ben-Gurion saved us from such a
state. For 60 years, we fought with unparalleled courage
in order to avoid living in a reality of bi-nationalism,
and in order to ensure that Israel exists as a Jewish
and democratic state with a solid Jewish majority. We
must act to this end and understand that such a
[bi-national] reality is being created, and in a very
short while it will be beyond our control.”
Olmert’s energies are therefore consumed with finding an
alternative political programme that can be sold to the
rest of the world. That is the reason he, and Sharon
before him, began talking about a Palestinian state.
Strangely, however, neither took up the offer of the
ideal two-state solution -- the kind Avnery and Neumann
want -- made in 2002. Then Saudi Arabia and the rest
Arab world promised Israel peace in return for its
withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders. They repeated their
offer last year. Israel has steadfastly ignored them.
Instead an alternative version of two states -- the
bogus two-state solution -- has become the default
position of Israeli politics. It requires only that
Israel and the Palestinians appear to divide the land,
while in truth the occupation continues and Jewish
sovereignty over all of historic Palestine is not only
maintained but rubber-stamped by the international
community. In other words, the Gazafication of the West
Bank.
When Olmert warns that without two states “Israel is
finished”, he is thinking primarily about how to stop
the emergence of a single state. So, if the real
two-state camp is to be believed, Olmert is a dreamer
too, because he fears that a one-state solution is not
only achievable but dangerously close at hand. Sharon,
it seems, suffered from the same delusion, given that
demography was the main impulse for his disengaging from
Gaza.
Or maybe both of them understood rather better than
Neumann and Avnery what is meant by a Jewish state, and
what political conditions are incompatible with it.
In fact, the division of the land demanded by the real
two-staters, however equitable, would be the very moment
when the struggle for Israel to remain a Jewish state
would enter its most critical and difficult phase. Which
is precisely why Israel has blocked any meaningful
division of the land so far and will continue to do so.
In the unimaginable event that the Israel were to divide
the land, a Jewish state would not be able to live with
the consequences of such a division for long.
Eventually, the maintenance of an ethnic Israeli state
would (and will) prove unsustainable: environmentally,
demographically and ultimately physically. Division of
the land simply “fast-forwards” the self-destructiveness
inherent in a Jewish state.
Let us examine just a few of the consequences for the
Jewish state of a genuine two-state solution.
First, Israel inside its recognised, shrunken borders
would face an immediate and very serious water shortage.
That is because, in returning the West Bank to the
Palestinians, Israel would lose control of the large
mountain acquifers that currently supply most of its
water, not only to Israel proper but also to the Jewish
settlers living illegally in the occupied territories.
Israel would no longer be able to steal the water, but
would be expected to negotiate for it on the open
market.
Given the politics of water in the Middle East that
would be no simple matter. However impoverished the new
sovereign Palestinian state was, it would lose all
legitimacy in the eyes of its own population were it to
sell more than a trickle of water to the Israelis.
We can understand why by examining the current water
situation. At the moment Israel drains off almost all of
the water provided by the rivers and acquifers inside
Israel and in the occupied territories for use by its
own population, allowing each Palestinian far less than
the minimum amount he or she requires each day,
according to the World Health Organisation.
In a stark warning last month, Israel’s Water Authority
reported that overdrilling has polluted with sea water
most of the supply from the coastal acquifer -- that is
the main fresh water source inside Israel’s recognised
borders.
Were Palestinians to be allowed a proper water ration
from their own mountain acquifer, as well as to build a
modern economy, there would not be enough left over to
satisfy Israel’s first-world thirst. And that is before
we consider the extra demand on water resources from all
those Palestinians who choose to realise their right to
return, not to their homes in Israel, but to the new
sovereign Palestinian state.
In addition, for reasons that we will come to, the
sovereign Jewish state would have every reason to
continue its Judaisation policies, trying to attact as
many Jews from the rest of the world as possible,
thereby further straining the region’s water resources.
The environmental unsustainability of both states
seeking to absorb large populations would inevitably
result in a regional water crisis. In addition, should
Israeli Jews, sensing water shortages, start to leave in
significant numbers, Israel would have an even more
pressing reason to locate water, by fair means or foul.
It can be expected that in a short time Israel, with the
fourth most powerful army in the world, would seek to
manufacture reasons for war against its weaker
neighbours, particularly the Palestinians but possibly
also Lebanon, in a bid to steal their water.
Water shortages would, of course, be a problem facing a
single state too. But, at least in one state there would
be mechanisms in place to reduce such tensions, to
manage population growth and economic development, and
to divide water resources equitably.
Second, with the labour-intensive occupation at an end,
much of the Jewish state’s huge citizen army would
become surplus to defence requirements. In addition to
the massive social and economic disruptions, the
dismantling of the country’s military complex would
fundamentally change Israel’s role in the region, damage
its relationship with the only global superpower and
sever its financial ties to Diaspora Jews.
Israel would no longer have the laboratories of the
occupied territories for testing its military hardware,
its battlefield strategies and its booming surveillance
and crowd control industries. If Israel chose to fight
the Palestinians, it would have to do so in a proper
war, even if one between very unequal sides. Doutbless
the Palestinians, like Hizbullah, would quickly find
regional sponsors to arm and train their army or
militias.
The experience and reputation Israel has acquired -- at
least among the US military -- in running an occupation
and devising new and supposedly sophisticated ways to
control the “Arab mind” would rapidly be lost, and with
it Israel’s usefulness to the US in managing its own
long-term occupation of Iraq.
Also, Israel’s vital strategic alliance with the US in
dividing the Arab world, over the issue of the
occupation and by signing peace treaties with some
states and living in a state of permanent war with
others, would start to unravel.
With the waning of Israel’s special relationship with
Washington and the influence of its lobby groups, as
well as the loss of billions of dollars in annual
subsidies, the Jewish Diaspora would begin to lose
interest in Israel. Its money and power ebbing away,
Israel might eventually slip into Middle Eastern
anonymity, another Jordan. In such circumstances it
would rapidly see a large exodus of privileged Ashkenazi
Jews, many of whom hold second passports.
Third, the Jewish state would not be as Jewish as some
might think: currently one in five Israelis is not
Jewish but Palestinian. Although in order to realise a
real two-state vision all the Jewish settlers would
probably need to leave the occupied territories and
return to Israel, what would be done with the
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship?
These Palestinians have been citizens for six decades
and live legally on land that has belonged to their
families for many generations. They are also growing in
number at a rate faster than the Jewish population, the
reason they are popularly referred to in Israel as a
“demographic timebomb”.
Were these 1.3 million citizens to be removed from
Israel by force under a two-state arrangement, it would
be a violation of international law by a democratic
state on a scale unprecedented in the modern era, and an
act of ethnic cleansing even larger than the 1948 war
that established Israel. The question would be: why even
bother advocating two states if it has to be achieved on
such appalling terms?
Assuming instead that the new Jewish state is supposed
to maintain, as Israel currently does, the pretence of
being democratic, these citizens would be entitled to
continue living on their land and exercising their
rights. Inside a Jewish state that had offically ended
its conflict with the Palestinians, demands would grow
from Palestinian citizens for equal rights and an end to
their second-class status.
Most importantly, they would insist on two rights that
challenge the very basis of a Jewish state. They would
expect the right, backed by international law, to be
able to marry Palestinians from outside Israel and bring
them to live with them. And they would want a Right of
Return for their exiled relatives on a similar basis to
the Law of Return for Jews.
Israel’s Jewishness would be at stake, even more so than
it is today from its Palestinian minority. It can be
assumed that Israel’s leaders would react with great
ferocity to protect the state’s Jewishness. Eventually
Israel’s democratic pretensions would have to be
jettisoned and the full-scale ethnic cleansing of
Palestinian citizens implemented.
Still, do these arguments against the genuine two-state
arrangement win the day for the one-state solution?
Would Israel’s leaders not put up an equally vicious
fight to protect their ethnic privileges by preventing,
as they are doing now, the emergence of a single state?
Yes, they would and they will. But that misses my point.
As long as Israel is an ethnic state, it will be forced
to deepen the occupation and intensify its ethnic
cleansing policies to prevent the emergence of genuine
Palestinian political influence -- for the reasons I
cite above and for many others I don’t. In truth, both a
one-state and a genuine two-state arrangement are
impossible given Israel’s determination to remain a
Jewish state.
The obstacle to a solution, then, is not about dividing
the land but about Zionism itself, the ideology of
ethnic supremacism that is the current orthodoxy in
Israel. As long as Israel is a Zionist state, its
leaders will allow neither one state nor two real
states.
The solution, therefore, reduces to the question of how
to defeat Zionism. It just so happens that the best way
this can be achieved is by confronting the illusions of
the two-state dreamers and explaining why Israel is in
permanent bad faith about seeking peace.
In other words, if we stopped distracting ourselves with
the Holy Grail of the two-state solution, we might
channel our energies into something more useful:
discrediting Israel as a Jewish state, and the ideology
of Zionism that upholds it. Eventually the respectable
façade of Zionism might crumble.
Without Zionism, the obstacle to creating either one or
two states will finally be removed. And if that is the
case, then why not also campaign for the solution that
will best bring justice to both Israelis and
Palestinians?
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. His new book, “Israel and the Clash of
Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the
Middle East” is published by Pluto Press. His website is
www.jkcook.net
