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between binationalism and partition The debate on partition and, in its present reincarnation, the discourse on the pros and cons of the one-state or two-state solution go back to the earliest days of the conflict in British Mandatory Palestine. Some of the original assumptions of the Zionist founding fathers were flawed. The first was that with the issue of the Balfour Declaration by Great Britain in support of a Jewish national home in Palestine, in November 1917, and the conquest of OttomanPalestinebytheBritishintheclosingphasesoftheFirstWorldWar,the Jews of Eastern Europe would choose in great numbers to immigrate to Palestine . On the eve of the Paris Peace Conference at the end of the war, Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann envisaged a land that would be made available for the settlement of “four or five million Jews.” In their “immediate post-1918 euphoria ” Zionist leaders anticipated “70,000 to 80,000 immigrants annually.”1 Such a pace of immigration would have made the Jews the majority within a decade in the sparsely populated land of Palestine, whose indigenous Arab population at the time hardly reached seven hundred thousand. The territorial desiderata that the Zionists initially put forward to the British were determined far more by geography, resources, and perceived natural boundaries than by demography , which they apparently assumed was not going to pose a real problem. Not only did they demand all of what became Palestine of the British Mandate , but they also set their sights on southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, and eastward across the Jordan up to the line of the Hijaz Railway, and even beyond. Indeed, in the early years of the Zionist enterprise after the First World War, the Zionists claimed both banks of the river for themselves. Even after the creation of the Emirate of Transjordan on the East Bank, the Zionist right continued to demand the creation of a Jewish state with a Jewish majority on both banks of the Jordan River,2 a demand that they only “quietly buried” in the mid-1960s.3 However, the Zionists were soon to find out to their profound dismay that 1 Between Binationalism and Partition 13 the great majority of Jews leaving Eastern Europe preferred immigration to the affluent, liberal democratic West, in Europe and especially in North America. This was far more attractive than the trials and tribulations of settling in the rugged terrain of the uncertain and potentially dangerous frontier of Palestine. Another flawed assumption was that the Arabs of Palestine would eventually acquiesce to the Zionist project. After all, so the Zionists really believed, it would bring the Arabs the material benefit of Western-style modernity and the capital and progressive enterprising spirit of the Zionists, which would raise the standard of living of the indigenous Arab population. Ben-Gurion was stunned when, in his first meeting with the Palestinian leader Musa al-Alami, in March 1934, Alami gave short shrift to Ben-Gurion’s exposé on the benefits of Zionism to the Arabs. Alami retorted to the effect that he would rather have the country remain poor and desolate for another hundred years, until such time as the Arabs would be capable of cultivating and developing it themselves , than to have the Zionists take it over.4 The First Binationalists The failure to rapidly establish a Jewish majority and the force of Arab opposition drove some on the Zionist left (Brit Shalom and subsequently the Ihud and Hashomer Hatzair movements) to support a binationalist solution, that is, a state that would be equally Jewish and Arab. First voiced in the mid-1920s, the idea, though never supported by more than a small minority, remained a disproportionately influential part of the internal Zionist debate5 until the UN partition resolution of 1947. Palestine, the binationalists argued, was a country of two nations, and therefore, it should become “a bi-national state, in which the two peoples will enjoy totally equal rights as befits the two elements shaping the country’s destiny, irrespective of which of the two is numerically superior at any given time.” Majority status was not essential for Brit Shalom. On the contrary, they argued, striving for a Jewish majority only instilled fear in the Arabs and exacerbated the conflict.6 In 1930 Brit Shalom published a memorandum calling for “the constitution of the Palestine state . . . composed of two peoples, each free in the administration of their respective domestic affairs, but united in their common political...

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