One State, page 11
According to the adherents of the one-state solution, in a single state, no Jewish settler would have to move and no Palestinian would be under occupation. The country’s scarce resources could be shared without Israel stealing Palestinian land and water, or Palestinians left starving and thirsty. Jerusalem would be a city for both peoples, not the preserve of Israel to the anger of Arabs, Muslims and Christians, and the detriment of international law. Palestinian refugees would be allowed to return to their original homeland, if not to their actual homes. Their long exile and blighted existence would end, and the states that had played host to them could be relieved at last of a burden they had carried for more than seventy years. The long-running sore of dispossession that had embittered generations of Palestinians and perpetuated their resistance could heal at last.
With the outstanding issues thus resolved, no cause for conflict between the two sides would remain, and the Arab states could then accommodate the Israeli presence in their midst with genuine acceptance. Such an outcome would by extension also dampen down the rage against Israelis and Jews that had come to fuel violence and terrorism. Arab hostility, real or imagined, which Israelis constantly faced and which forced them to maintain their state by superior force of arms and US patronage would end. Israel, which had become the most unsafe place on earth for Jews, could, when transmuted into the new, shared state, be a place of real refuge for them. A normal immigration policy, once the returning Palestinian refugees had been accommodated, would operate, under which Jews and others who wanted to live in Palestine/Israel could do so according to fair and agreed rules.
On this analysis, the one-state solution was the most obvious, direct and logical route to ending an intractable conflict that had destroyed the lives of so many people and damaged the Middle East region so profoundly. And for that reason it should have been the most actively pursued of all the options, but especially by the Palestinians, for whom it meant a reversal (as far as that was practically possible) of a process that had robbed them of their land and made them stateless refugees.
People often discussed the one-state solution as if it were a revolutionary idea. But it was no forward-looking innovation: rather more a way of going back, of restoring a land deformed by a near-century of division, colonisation and plunder to the whole country it had been before 1948. It was a healthy rejection of disunity in favour of unity and a humane desire for a life based on cooperation rather than confrontation. How much better for Israeli Jews to learn to live together with Palestinian Arabs in a relationship of friendship and collaboration that had the potential to be excitingly productive, rather than be condemned to the barren and dangerous dead-end future that Israel was driving them towards.
Variations on the one-state theme
In spite of the obvious advantages of a one-state solution, its very mention was traditionally met with a variety of objections, the most cogent (and accurate) of which was that Israel would never agree to it and thus it was dead in the water before it started. In fact, the idea of Arabs and Jews sharing their land had a long and notable pedigree, far longer than that of the two-state solution, which was a recent notion in Palestinian history arrived at, as we saw, in response to a series of defeats for the Palestinian national liberation movement. There were two main ways in which Palestine could be shared: the bi-national model in which the two groups could share the country but remain ethnically separate, and the secular democratic, one-person-one-vote model, based on individual citizenship and equal rights irrespective of race, religion, or gender. The bi-national model preserved the structure of the two religious/ethnic communities, while the secular democratic model emphasised the individual rather than the community, in the style of Western liberal democracies. Thus bi-nationalism enabled Zionism to survive, albeit in a reduced form, while the secular democratic alternative did not.
The bi-national state
The various ideas for partition which were put forward during the Mandate period were really bi-nationalist proposals that answered to the Zionist need to separate from non-Jews in a space which would permit a Jewish majority to exist. Their aim was the revival of Jewish life in its ‘ancestral homeland’, as they phrased it, which should not be incompatible with Arab life in the same space.
Judah Magnes was the strongest proponent of this ‘cultural Zionism’. His vision was of a bi-national state as part of a wider federation with the Arabs states, whereby Jewish immigration would not lead to Palestinian dispossession.26 Such ideas led to the formation of the Brit Shalom organisation in 1925, which proposed adopting the Swiss or Finnish bi-national models for a putative shared state with the Arabs. Magnes later impressed the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, set up in 1946 to investigate post-war Jewish immigration to Palestine, with these bi-nationalist ideas. With his fellow members of Ihud (Hebrew for ‘union’), the organisation he founded to promote bi-nationalism, he went on to testify to the UN on the same subject.27
David Ben-Gurion, while chairman of the Jewish Agency in 1930, thought that a balance between Arabs and Jews in a bi-national state was necessary in order to guard against the danger of one side ruling the other. Mapai, the main Zionist party of the time, adopted this view in 1931. Indeed, between 1921 and 1939, the Zionist leadership, which included Chaim Weizmann, tended to be somewhat bi-nationalist in orientation.28 The socialist-Zionist organisation, Hashomer Hatzair, founded in 1946, also advocated bi-nationalism as the means to realise the aims of Zionism.
For the Zionists, who were simply an immigrant minority, sharing the country would have been quite an achievement. Their support of bi-nationalism, which would have brought them closer to their goal, was mainly based on that consideration. Needless to say, the vast majority of Palestinians felt differently. They did not share these bi-nationalist ideas, which they saw as a means of forcing them to accept that a group of foreign colonists had equal rights with them in their own land.
But during the Mandate years, when Zionists were actively putting these bi-nationalist ideas forward, a very small number of Palestinians did respond positively. Secret negotiations between these Palestinians and the Jewish bi-nationalists took place, negotiations which would have been a source of intense shame to the Palestinians had they been discovered. The Arab bi-nationalists were motivated by a variety of reasons, not all of them noble, for example, accepting bribes in return for their support for Jewish Zionists, or because of internal rivalries between prominent Palestinian families in which supporting the Zionists was used as a weapon in the contest. But a small number of them genuinely believed that the Jewish presence in Palestine could be beneficial by drawing in foreign capital to develop the country. It may also have been their sense that Zionism would prove difficult to dislodge and opted for the best arrangement in such circumstances.
One of these negotiators was Ahmad Khalidi, head of the Government Arab school during the Mandate period; in 1933, he proposed a state divided into two cantons, Jewish and Arab, the latter to be linked to Transjordan, with Jerusalem, Hebron and Safad left outside the cantons as ‘free cities’ belonging to neither. The cantons would have a joint ruling council of Arabs, Jews and British representatives, and Jewish immigration would be confined to the Jewish cantons and the three free cities.29 Another adherent was Musa Alami, a member of a prominent Palestinian family and Arab secretary to the British High Commissioner, who also proposed a cantonal plan in the 1930s. The Jewish canton would include the Jewish colonies already established, and a national government with proportional representation would be set up which, inter alia, would restrict immigration to the Jewish canton. During the 1970s, I met Alami in London; he was an old man but still active in running an agricultural project for Palestinian farmers in the West Bank. I found him an impressive figure, despite his age, with sad eyes and a warm, intimate manner. Our meeting was short and the conversation inconsequential, and afterwards I wished passionately that I had asked him to share with me his memories of that special and crucial time in our unrecoverable history.
Fawzi Husseini, the head of the Filastin al-Jadida (The New Palestine) organisation that supported bi-nationalism, was another Palestinian figure who believed that Jews and Arabs could develop the country together as a bi-national state. He went so far as to sign a formal agreement in 1946 with the League for Jewish-Arab Rapprochement and Co-operation, a coalition of several Zionist organisations that sought to build a programme for a bi-national state in Palestine. At the popular level, Palestinian villagers were in neighbourly contact with Jewish settlements in their vicinity and often had friendly relations with them. However, shortly thereafter, fellow Palestinians assassinated Husseini for his pains, and the Zionists rejected the cantonal plans of his predecessors.
Two years later, none of it mattered much anyway, as most of Palestine’s indigenous population was expelled and the Jewish state acquired the Jewish majority it had sought. We will never know if the Jewish bi-nationalists would have succeeded in the end, but it is unlikely. They were never anything more than a minority phenomenon and their basic aim was still to establish a European Jewish settler community in an Arab land, in the belief that the indigenous population could come to accept or even be grateful for it. That such men as Magnes and Buber had the foresight – and decency – to appreciate that the Arab majority in Palestine had legitimate rights and could not be disposed of cannot be denied, and they were often held up as models of virtue. But it did not alter the fact of their unshakeable belief that European Jews like themselves had an equal right to the land of Palestine. Reading this history evokes for me memories of the European Jews I grew up with in Golders Green, a North London suburb with a large Jewish community, who seemed as alien to my native land as, say, the Chinese. The idea that the forebears of such people thought they belonged in Palestine during the 1920s when the country was overwhelmingly Arab and the Jewish state no more than a gleam in Chaim Weizmann’s eye, must have struck my forebears as wholly preposterous.
Later bi-nationalism
The bi-nationalist idea became obsolete for decades as the Arab nationalists strove, at lease initially, to reclaim the whole of Palestine, including the territory of the Jewish state. But by the 1970s and 1980s, experiences of the difficulties in integrating ethnic groups harmoniously in one state were also not encouraging to the bi-nationalist model. The conflict in Cyprus between Greeks and Turks, and the struggle for Kurdish independence in Iraq, were frequently cited as examples of the failure of this approach. But in Palestine, bi-nationalism resurfaced in the last years of the twentieth century, as the pre-1948 problem of having to accommodate two communities living in the same space returned. Thanks to Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank and Gaza, the two peoples became inextricably mixed, making partition an impossibility and evoking the question of bi-nationalism once again. In fact, some observers argued that the Oslo Agreement itself was a bi-nationalist arrangement because it set up a division of responsibility based on ethnicity between the Palestinians and the (dominant) Israeli groups.30
Impelled by the situation of ethnic separateness yet physical connectedness, a small number of Israelis and Palestinians began to discuss the bi-national idea in the 1990s as the only way for the two peoples to share a state and yet preserve their ethnic/cultural identities. This was of great importance to Jewish Israelis of course, but Palestinians also, aware of the need to reconstitute their society and identity, wanted to keep themselves apart for this purpose. Proponents of this solution argued that the two peoples had too strong a national affiliation and self-identification to accept any plan that ignored this important issue.31 In a bi-national state, each community would be autonomous in terms of language, education and cultural life, and would have its own administrative council to run such affairs. But for matters of common concern, such as national policy, defence and the economy, there would be joint institutions and a joint parliament with equal representation.
By the late 1990s, an active debate on the one-state solution was taking shape, with writers and political figures such as Haim Hanegbi, Meron Benvenisti, Azmi Bishara and Edward Said arguing for such an outcome.32 (Said’s position on this issue was in fact vague. His main concern was the coexistence on humanist grounds between Jews and Arabs in a shared homeland, without spelling out the mechanism that would achieve this.33) Long before that, in the aftermath of the 1967 war, the American political scientist, Dom Peretz, had argued for a bi-national state as the preferred solution to the conflict.34 He saw a Palestine-Jordan federation as a natural part of the plan, with this initial federation later becoming federated with Israel, an idea echoed in the 1971 Jordanian proposal for a ‘United Kingdom’ of Jordan and the West Bank, and the post-Camp David confederation or ‘condominium’ proposals of Menachem Begin and Jordan’s King Hussein in the late 1970s. Although the arrangement Israel and Jordan envisaged was for shared rule between them over the occupied Palestinian territories, such a suggestion hinted at the same idea of a Palestine-Jordan federation, whether consciously or not.35
The prominent US intellectual Noam Chomsky had been a committed bi-nationalist before 1948. An opponent of the Jewish state as an entity, which could not be democratic and was bound to discriminate against non-Jews, he saw bi-nationalism as the only model for Arab-Jewish coexistence. However, the Jewish state having been established, Chomsky went on to believe that after 1967 there was still an opportunity to create a federal arrangement between Israel and the Palestinian territories, which could make a closer integration between them possible over time. He thought this was a feasible idea up until the 1973 war, when the two-state solution became the adopted international position.36 In the late 1980s, Sari Nusseibeh, (later the president of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem) put forward the idea of a bi-national Jerusalem by encouraging Palestinian residents to apply for Israeli citizenship. This brought him much opprobrium from Palestinians at the time, although in fact he mainly supported the two-state solution.37 But a similar equal rights proposal – this time for all the Palestinians under occupation to become Israeli citizens – emerged later, and is discussed below.
Types of bi-national state
The following remarks are meant in no way to provide an exhaustive analysis of bi-nationalism, which is available in many studies elsewhere. A bi-national state could be configured as cantonal, federal, or, in an innovative variation latterly devised by the Swedish diplomat Mathias Mossberg, as ‘dual states’ superimposed on one another. An earlier writer had proposed a similar idea described as ‘parallel sovereignty’ for the two peoples in the same territory.38 These suggestions explored the possibility of Palestinians and Israelis sharing the same land by separating the concept of statehood from territory. Instead of two states alongside each other, Israelis and Palestinians would live in states superimposed on each other. Both of them would have the right to settle the whole area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River as citizens of each state. But they also had the right to take the citizenship of each other’s states if they so wished. Predominantly Jewish localities would belong to ‘Israel’ and Palestinian ones to ‘Palestine’, but Palestinian individuals living in an Israeli canton could opt to remain citizens of Palestine and vice versa. Each state would have its own administration and could maintain its separate ethnicity and culture. But there would be a common currency, taxation, labour market, joint defence and other shared services. In essence, this arrangement was similar to the Swiss cantonal system, and could become a truly globalised state of the twenty-first century, where people did not need to be tied to a specific land for national definition.
Lama Abu-Odeh saw the bi-national state as a federation of separate Jewish and Arab administrative units linked to a central government on the US model, as did Tarif Abboushi.39 The units would be autonomous and could even develop their own economic strategies with help from the central government. Citizens would have the right to move about freely and live in the units of their choice. Since all were supposed to be equal in such a state, resources would need to be transferred from the wealthier (Jewish) units to the poorer (Arab) ones to equalise their status. Such a transfer of funds could also serve as a way for Israel to make amends for the dispossession and exile it had caused generations of Palestinians. The refugees would have the choice of returning to either the Palestinian or Israeli units, or be compensated for their losses and injuries over decades of dispossession.
Nasser Abufarha proposed a bi-national configuration of two sovereign states in political and economic union.40 The geography of these states would be based on demography: the Palestinian state to include areas of predominant Palestinian habitation, such as the West Bank, Gaza and the Galilee, and the Israeli state those, like Tel Aviv, Safad and Haifa, of predominant Israeli residence. The sparsely populated areas would be part of ‘Palestine’, reserved for the returning refugees. Each state would have its own legislative council but would be federal in terms of political representation, external security and the economy. The residents of each state would be subject to that state’s jurisdiction, regardless of ethnicity. Jerusalem would become a separate district to encompass Bethlehem and would have its own independent council, which would grant equal residency rights to Israelis and Palestinians.
Several other federal solutions were proposed, all based on the concept of two territorially separate states, but without always delineating their exact borders. Belgium, Canada and Switzerland were frequently cited as models. The last was probably the most successful example of how ethnic communities could live peacefully with each other. All 26 Swiss cantons are self-governing, using their own languages and relating to the federal government only in such matters as the judiciary, managing the currency, foreign policy and national defence. In Canada’s case, the French and English-speaking divide was managed by granting French-speaking Quebec virtual independence within the federal framework, and Belgium was another example of a federal union between its Dutch and French-speaking halves. This united Flemish and Walloon communities, who were different culturally and had a long-standing history of conflict with each other, and thus made Belgium seem a suitable model for a federated Israel/Palestine.41 Its three regions – Flemish, Walloon and that of the capital, Brussels – had their own parliaments, languages and cultures, but citizens could travel and work anywhere in the country. Each ethnic community was responsible for the educational and cultural affairs of its members wherever they resided, so as to maintain a communal cultural continuity outside of geographical space. In a similarly federated Israel/Palestine, Jerusalem would be the equivalent of Brussels. The federal constitution would protect the rights of Israelis and Palestinians, guarantee religious freedom and separation of church and state so as to guard against Jewish and Islamic theocratic extremism. Returning refugees could live in Israel as well as Palestine, but retain Palestinian citizenship.
