The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock

6. The One-State Solution: The Expanding Debate

6. The One-State Solution The Expanding Debate After a century of dreams and con›ict, the Zionist dream has run on the shoals of its own contradictions. Israeli-Jewish, Israeli-Arab, and Palestinian populations are so interdependent and intertwined that their forced partition promises only a downward spiral toward disaster . Culture, ideology, and a century of con›ict divide them. But they are embedded in each other, inextricably linked—conjoined twins in a narrow and delicate landscape. Perhaps at some earlier time, two states were still possible. But the two-state option evaporated years and perhaps decades ago. Perhaps, as some voices have always argued, it never existed at all. Whatever the past possibilities for partition, they are now lost. Today, no ideology, no planning, no new “peace process,” and certainly not the snaking apartheid Wall can make sense of carving this small land into two states. The dilemma now facing both sides is therefore becoming obvious to all. Far too large and too politicized simply to crumble quietly within the Wall, the Palestinian people will ‹ght against national ruin and immiseration. In the two-state formula, Israel must either confront Palestinian reaction with unprecedented repression or capitulate 183 to Palestinian demands for a substantial withdrawal. Yet an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank suf‹cient to allow a viable Palestinian state is no longer imaginable, for the settlement grid has become equally immovable, anchored by its massive demographic, ‹nancial, and ideological weight. Israel’s only other option—forced mass transfer of the Palestinian population out of the West Bank into Jordan— would trigger catastrophic political reaction throughout the region and the world and again bring crisis. No existing political force can alter that face-off. Internal Israeli politics is not capable of resolving the ideological tensions that would escalate at any serious attempt by the Israeli government to withdraw the West Bank settlement grid, and no Israeli government has any capacity or reason to launch such a showdown—at least not in the absence of overwhelming external pressure. Yet no present external actor or coalition of actors possesses both the political will and the raw power (economic, political, or military ) to exert that pressure. Crafted under these terms, the impending two-state option only carries this long-burning ethnic con›ict toward explosion, and widening circles of people are realizing it. In response, within both Jewish and Palestinian politics, a major shift is brewing. With increasing clarity and insistence, people are beginning to speak of a different future for Israel and the Palestinian territories: one democratic state, in all the territory of Mandate Palestine, shared by Jews and Palestinians alike. “The time has come to think the unthinkable,” wrote New York University professor Tony Judt in October 2003, breaking public U.S. political ground in the New York Review of Books. “The two-state solution —the core of the Oslo process and the present ‘road map’—is probably already doomed.”1 In a Ha’aretz interview in 2003, longtime Israeli peace activist Haim Hanegbi, a leftist journalist born in Israel, calls for everyone to face facts: “Everyone with eyes to see and ears to hear has to understand that only a binational partnership can save us.”2 Israeli journalist Daniel Gavron makes the same point ›atly in The Other Side of Despair (2003): “We are left with only one alternative : Israeli-Palestinian coexistence in one nation.”3 Gavron made aliyah to Israel with his family in 1961, in wholehearted pursuit of the Zionist dream; in proposing the one-state solution, he knew very well how deeply his transformed views challenged the mainstream. But he The One-State Solution 184 and others are speaking and writing as voices among a growing cluster of Jewish and Palestinian journalists, activists, and intellectuals who have accepted—many with inner pain and moral turmoil—that the two-state solution is already unworkable. Meron Benvenisti, former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, came to the binational solution only after decades of research on his native land and with a sense of deep sorrow. “It is not easy for me to part with my father’s dream of a Jewish nation-state. It’s hard for me. For most of my life that was my dream, too,” he said. But he, too, sees no alternative . The conclusion is that the seemingly rational solution of two states for two nations can’t work here. The model...