One State Or Two Within Mandate Palestine?

Helena Cobban     Al-Hayat     2003/07/13

The Quartet's Roadmap represents the "last gasp" of any hopes that a solution can be negotiated to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that involves the establishment of two independent states went of the River Jordan.

Is there any chance that this "last gasp" may come to fruition? That seems very unclear indeed at this point, though not - for various reasons - totally impossible. If the Roadmap does not lead to the establishment of a sustainable two-solution, however, then it seems clear to me that the sheer size of the achievements of Israel's settlement project in the West Bank and Gaza, plus the scale of the project's still-continuing momentum, will mean that after this Roadmap fails the territorial base for a durable two-state solution can no longer be secured.

Yes, we all "know" that a million French colonists were evacuated from Algeria when it won independence, or hundreds of thousands of Portuguese colonists from Angola and Mozambique, or, or, or… So why not 400,000 Israeli colonists from the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and 6,000 from Gaza?

It is true that this latter possibility, a full Israeli evacuation from Gaza, is easier to envisage. But would even a total evacuation of Israeli soldiers plus settlers from Gaza provide the basis for a viable Palestinian state, and thus a sustainable two-state solution?

This is a serious question, since a Palestinian micro-state in Gaza is one possible outcome toward which many of Ariel Sharon's policies seem to have been pushing.  But I fail to see both how any kind of a viable independent state could be built in Gaza, and how the establishment of such a state could be made to fulfill even the bare minimum of the claims the Palestinians of the occupied territories and the Diaspora currently have against Israel.  Palestinians have always, understandably, been wary of any "Gaza first" or "Gaza only" approach to finding a solution. It remains as true today as it was during the Oslo negotiations ten years ago that no approach that seeks to limit the "solution" to Gaza can be sustainable.

So the central question remains: can we see a way that the demographic "egg" that now exists on the West Bank, including of course East Jerusalem, can possibly be unscrambled?

It barely needs noting here that, throughout the past ten years, Sharon and his longtime allies in the settler movement have been creating additional facts on the ground in the West Bank with the precise goal of making any demographic unscrambling impossible. Impossible, that is, not only from the sheer logistic/financial point of view, regarding the need to evacuate and resettle all or many of the 400,000. But impossible also from the political point view, since the settlers themselves and their relatives, friends, and allies inside Israel proper now constitute a hefty voting bloc inside Israeli politics.

In this latter regard, the "pioneers" of the settlement project have worked hard to promulgate a sort of slippery slope argument.  If the "illegal outposts" are dismantled, their argument goes, then, next it would be the turn of more established, though still small, settlements like Beit El. If Beit El is dismantled, then next, it might be the turn of big settlements like Ma'ale Adumim… Then Ma'ale Adumim, as many Israelis think, is really only just "another suburb" of Jerusalem… And very, very few Jewish Israelis are even prepared to think about evacuating the Jewish settlements - or as they like to call them, Jewish "neighborhoods" - of Jerusalem.

At the negotiations the Palestinians held with Ehud Barak from Camp David (July 2000) to Taba (January 2001), the two sides moved quite a distance toward sketching out an outcome that would have involved leaving around 80 percent of the West Bank settlers in place, and redrawing the boundary between Israel and the West Bank in a way that would bring those settlement areas into Israel while handing over an equivalent (or non-equivalent) amount of land from inside Israel to the future Palestinian state.

Well, that kind of approach was proposed for the West Bank excluding East Jerusalem.  Inside East Jerusalem - according to the record of Taba produced by Miguel Moratinos - "Both sides accepted in principle the Clinton suggestion of having a Palestinian sovereignty over Arab neighborhoods and an Israeli sovereignty over Jewish neighborhoods." So, little or no evacuation at all was envisaged of the 180,000-200,000 settlers there.

In July 2002, and building on the negotiating record of Camp David and Taba, the International Crisis Group (ICG) produced its own proposal of what a negotiated two-state outcome might look like. I was looking at that ICG proposal again recently, and what I noted was the following:

* How precarious the map and other details proposed by the ICG really are. The boundary line proposed between Israel and the Palestinian state snakes around a lot, taking deep dives into the West Bank to bring locations like Ariel, Givat Ze'ev, Ma'ale Adumim, and Gush Etzion into Israel. These Israeli incursions do a lot to fragment Palestinian communities from each other. If the ICG's proposed arrangement is to have any chance of working, it depends on a huge amount of goodwill between the parties. Otherwise, at a large number of places one side or the other really has its hands on the other's geographic throat.

* How unlikely it seems now, that this Israeli government or any foreseeable successor would agree even to something as relatively favorable to settler interests as the ICG plan. Under this plan, for example, Hebron looks to be under completely Palestinian control…

The Roadmap, as we all know, has many of the same weaknesses as the Oslo Accord of 1993.  Like Oslo, it spells out no end-point, but only a vague timetable for "starting" negotiations to get to a final settlement (and, like Oslo, no specification of what happens if those negotiations fail).  Even more than at Oslo - which at least allowed the "return" to the occupied territories of a few thousand Palestinians previously living in exile from the homeland - the Roadmap disfranchises the diasporic refugees from any meaningful input into the negotiations, while once again postponing any consideration of their historic claims against Israel until the ever-delayed "final status talks."

But from the Palestinian point of view, the Roadmap also suffers from two additional weaknesses, compared with Oslo: (1) Over the past ten years the size of the challenge presented by the settlements has grown considerably, and (2) There is much less evidence today than there was in 1993 that the Israeli interlocutor has any serious intention of undertaking - even in the "interim" phase - troop withdrawals that would be meaningful for the Palestinians.

As I noted above, I still believe there is a chance - just a fairly slim chance - that the Roadmap process can be made to work. But if it can't, then this time round I think we should know that if this approach fails, then that is the end of the road for a two-state outcome.

What then?

The Palestinians' traditional fallback position has always, in a fairly abstract, rhetorical way, been for the establishment of a "secular democratic state in all of [Mandate] Palestine". And traditionally - that is, before 1974 - the way that kind of state was thought of would have looked, I think, more or less like a mainly-Arab Palestinian state with a Jewish minority in it.  (Especially since the only Jewish Israelis who were judged as being "allowed" to remain in the state would have been those who had lived in Palestine prior to 1948; or even, according to some views, "prior to the Zionist invasion", whenever that was thought to have started.)

I think that to advocate such an idea today would be not only quite unrealizable, but also very racist. Today's Jewish Israelis are there to stay. They have sunk roots in the land. And more than that, they have built an authentic Hebrew-speaking national culture that is rooted there. That is, actually, quite an impressive achievement.

But the fact that the Jewish Israelis have been able to do that does not mean that the Palestinian Arabs need to just give up their claims to the land.  Far from it!  It does, however, mean that Palestinians need to recognize the existence in the land of Palestine/Israel of that other national culture, and to reach out and say, 'Yes, we see that you Israelis are there and that you're staying there. But we Palestinians also have very strong historic claims to that land. So we propose that either we split the land into two national states, or that we share it all within one bi-national state."

The goal of a bi-national state has some similarities with that of a "secular democratic state", and some key differences.  One key difference is that within a bi-national state formula, Palestinians would exchange a formal recognition of each other's nationhood with the Jewish Israelis.  In a bi-national state, the Jewish Israelis would have important safeguards for the continuation of their existence as a national group within the state - and so would the Palestinians. There are, of course, many bi-national - or even, multinational - states around the world that are also democracies and can provide very helpful precedents. (Canada, Belgium South Africa, etc.)

So: one state or two west of the river? It's a choice that all the direct stakeholders - Palestinians and Israelis - can think about.

One thing that is clear to me, meanwhile, is that Bantustans, by whatever name, will never provide a solution.