Israel, Jordan, and Palestine: The Two-State Imperative

Conclusion

conclusion With the failure of the peace process and after seventeen long years since the signing of the Oslo Accords, the two-state solution lost much of its appeal, legitimacy, and practicality in the eyes of all concerned. The entrenchment of the Israeli settlements and the fecklessness of successive Israeli governments (with the surprising exception of Ariel Sharon) in contending with the challenge of the settler movement have been major obstacles to the attainment of a two-state solution. The political disarray in Palestine—with the PA and Hamas at loggerheads ever since the Hamas electoral victory in 2006 and the takeover of Gaza in 2007, the dispirited condition of the PA, and the concomitant ideological fatigue and organizational stagnation of Fatah—also made the successful negotiation of a two-state agreement an unrealistic prospect. With memories of the rocketry from Gaza and southern Lebanon still fresh in their minds and the unprecedented turmoil that swept through the entire Middle East in early 2011, there was widespread uncertainty among Israelis, even among supporters of the two-state solution, about the wisdom of imminent withdrawal from the West Bank, at a time when the PA might not be able or willing to guarantee security. There was therefore, an equally widespread tendency to support the continuation of the status quo, even among those who would in principle prefer to rid Israel of the occupation. In such complicated political circumstances, those who continued to endorse the two-state solution also had to “acknowledge how much of the framework supporting it [had] collapsed.”1 However, the conclusion that some drew from this grim assessment, that a one-state “solution” was the viable alternative to the faltering two-state paradigm , was offering a remedy that would in all likelihood be infinitely worse than the existing malady. The self-proclaimed moralists who assessed reality not on the grounds of what it was but on the basis of what they believed it ought to be, in a world ostensibly founded on ethics, justice, and legal recti- 214 israel, jordan, and palestine tude, and on the constantly disproved assumption about the rationality of political actors, had little connection with the real world. In the real world, the highly combustible mixture of power, emotion, collective identity, political culture, and ideology, which were all of no consequence in the moralists’ worldview, actually dominated the political order. As Nathan Brown has put it, the advocates of a binational state, or what he has so aptly dubbed as the “one-state non-solution,” generally “fall into the trap of holding out an admirable utopian solution without analyzing what such a state would be like in practice or how entrenched adversaries could ever construct such a state. In a sense, the one-state solution resembles communism— a utopian idea many found preferable to the grim realities but that led to horrifying results in practice.”2 One should have no illusions, Hussein Ibish observes, “that the final abandonment of a two-state agenda” will simply “give way to a campaign of nonviolent resistance, boycotts and sanctions that will somehow succeed in bringing Israel to its knees.” For boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) to be effective would require a radical shift in the intimate linkages between the US government, institutions, and corporations and general American society with Israel. On the other hand, Israeli institutions, organizations, corporations, military, intelligence, industry, research and development, and scientific research were all interwoven very intricately with US counterparts,3 and less intensively with many other countries, from the EU to India, China, and Japan. BDS in the globalized world of today was a very different form of operation than in the pre-globalized era of the struggle against South Africa. Moreover, even in South Africa, BDS was not the major factor that induced the historical policy shift. Abba Eban once commented that “not for a single minute in a day do the . . . Palestinians and the Israelis share a common memory, sentiment, experience or aspiration.”4 The real alternative to the two-state agenda was not Israel’s imminent collapse into a one-state “solution” but escalating “conflict, violence and occupation that [would be] increasingly dominated by religious fanatics on both sides.” The alternative to the two-state paradigm was not the utopian paradise of one state, but catastrophe.5 The evolution of a one-state reality might very well be the outcome of the final demise of the two-state idea, but that was very likely to...