The ultimate aim of all these efforts has been to come up with a way to create an independent state for the Palestinians that can coexist peacefully alongside the state of Israel. This solution, the so-called “two-state solution,” is still closest to what the great majority of both Israelis and Palestinians want. It is predicated on resolving five major areas of contention: where the borders of the two states will run; how the fate of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories is to be handled; how Jerusalem is to be administered; how the more than three million Palestinian refugees are to be resettled; and what role the international community will play in supporting and, if necessary, enforcing any eventual agreement. Each of these areas is so enormously complex that none of the accords so far have been able to proceed much beyond agreement on general principles, sets of preconditions that, ultimately, have blocked rather than facilitated the peace process. Agreements such as Oslo or the Bush Road Map, precisely because they require a practically non-existent commodity – good faith on both sides – have so far proved untenable.
But there are even more serious problems underlying the two-state solution, problems that may well defy any formal solutions. For example, there is the question of how ready the Palestinians are to govern themselves. Many Palestinian thinkers, including Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, founder and director of the Health, Development, Information, and Policy Institute in Ramallah, suggest that Palestinians do not yet have the civic culture to sustain a sovereign nation. In an interview Barghouti gave to the Cairo-based newspaper, Al-Ahram, last July, he underscored the gap between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, a gap that could undermine the possibility of a meaningful, unified central government to run the new entity responsibly. Dr. Barghouti has called for genuine domestic reforms that would solve problems of lack of accountability among the Palestinian leadership, encourage the capacity for independent decision-making, and support free elections, with the participation of women and the young. He’s optimistic that Palestinians can accomplish all of this in time, but he’s unwilling to postpone the creation of a Palestinian state while Palestinians acquire the skills to run it.
Palestinians, for their part, worry about Israeli self-restraint, and well they should. During the last federal election, the former leader of the Labour Party, Amram Mitzna, campaigning on the two-state solution, argued that living next to a sovereign Palestine could save the lives of Israeli soldiers. In the event of a suicide attack, Mitzna explained, rather than sending in ground troops, Israel could respond with the full might of its air power. It is hardly a scenario in which Palestinians could find much comfort.
Clearly, any imaginable agreement would still demand large reservoirs of good faith and a tactful overlooking of the real problems and limitations of both sides. At the moment, unfortunately, good faith, like water, is in very short supply in the region.
Without much progress toward a two-state solution, another alternative has been gaining ground, one that posits the existence of a single state in which, ideally, Palestinians and Israelis could live together in peace. I once argued for a form of this idea myself, and recently, a major article on the subject by Tony Judt in The New York Review of Books (October 23, 2003) has argued the case eloquently, if somewhat idealistically. Even inside Israel, the one-state solution is now a subject of public discussion. Gary Sussman, a native South African who emigrated to Israel in 1992, told me that articles on the subject have been appearing more and more frequently in the Israeli press. “It’s a phenomenon impossible to imagine before August of 2000,” Sussman said. “I would argue that endorsement [for the one-state solution] will grow in the absence of a genuine diplomatic process.”
At least four versions of the one-state solution are being bandied about. The historian and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti outlined the models in an article in Haaretz last November. First there is the “consociational democracy” model which, he claims, has been successfully applied in Bosnia, with its Muslim and Christian population, and in Northern Ireland. Another is the federated-cantons model, of which Switzerland is perhaps the best example. Then there is “binationalism,” by which Benvenisti means cultural and civic autonomy for Palestinians but without the right to vote, except perhaps in Jordan. And the fourth is the “undeclared binationalist” model, which he says refers to “a unitary state controlled by one dominant national group [Israel], which leaves the other national group disenfranchised and subject to laws . . . of ‘belligerent occupation.’ The convenience of this model,” he adds bitterly, “is that it can be applied over a long period of time, meanwhile debating the threat of the ‘one state’ and the advantages of the ‘two states,’ without doing a thing. That’s the situation nowadays.”
The “threat” underlying the one-state solution, and the main reason why, in the short term, it has no hope of working, is what is often euphemistically referred to as “the demographic problem.” This refers to the very real possibility that the three and a half million Palestinians currently living in the West Bank and Gaza might lose interest in attaining a sovereign state and seek annexation, or be forcefully annexed, by a right-wing Israeli government. Should this population then gain equal rights, including the right to vote, and join forces with the more than one million Israeli Arabs currently residing east of the Green Line, the consequences for Israel could be devastating. The Palestinians know this, which is why some factions of the Tanzim, the Fatah’s paramilitary wing, are thinking of taking their struggle in precisely this direction. Tanzim’s leader, Marwan Barghouti, speaking at the closing session of his trial in an Israeli courthouse last September, declared that if Palestinians do not get a state of their own then the only remaining solution is a single state for the two peoples. In November, Ali Jerbawi, a prominent Palestinian political scientist, went so far as to say that if Israel did not agree to a Palestinian state within six months, the Palestinians should demand immediate annexation.
Because this scenario could give the Palestinians the upper hand and effectively kill the Zionist dream of a Jewish state, it scares the living daylights out of most Israelis.
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