One State, page 17
Of this list, only the third option, as argued in Chapter 5, stood any chance of enduring in the long term. That is because it was the only just arrangement to resolve a conflict whose essence was injustice. It had become customary never to address the root causes of the conflict – Palestinian dispossession and its consequences. That position led to a series of peace proposals, each of them flawed by inequality between the two sides, and the deliberate omission of the refugee issue from any solution. For these reasons, they would not have endured, even had they been implemented.
To summarise, the most persistent of these ‘non-solutions’ was the proposal that took shape after 1974 to partition the old Mandate Palestine into two states, one, Israeli, on four-fifths of the land and the other, Palestinian, on the remaining fifth. As we saw, this inequitable solution continued to be put forward, despite the reality on the ground of a decimated portion allotted to the Palestinians, the near-annexation to Israel of almost half the West Bank territory, the barrier wall which was relentlessly drawing a new border between the two sides in Israel’s favour and nothing like the 1967 lines meant to delineate a Palestinian state, as well as the total isolation of Gaza, and the loss of East Jerusalem to Israel, as its capital city. Most important of all was the geo-political reality of what had become in effect one state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, ruled by one sovereign Israeli government.
Crucially, the favoured two-state solution never provided any countercheck on the power imbalance between the two sides, an imbalance so huge as to ensure that the stronger party, Israel, could always determine events in its favour. It also put Israel under no obligation to accept any proposal with which it disagreed. This unaccountability was vividly illustrated by the total impunity with which the Israeli Army repeatedly attacked the Palestinian territories, and at times, Syria and Lebanon.
It was beyond belief that in 2022 the people of Gaza could have been subjected for 15 years to the inhumane conditions of a deadly siege without any effective attempt on the part of the world community to end it. Such gross Israeli abuses of power have led me to wonder more than once why it was that Israel did not go the whole way: bomb Gaza to smithereens, for example, deport the Palestinians en masse, and raze their towns and villages to the ground. Who would have stopped Israel had it done so? Certainly not the European powers, which meekly followed the US’s lead, and not the Arab states, which were incapable of independent action. And of all the Muslim states which supported the Palestine cause, only Iran espoused it fully, but whether it would ever be in a position to challenge the US-Israeli axis on Palestine’s behalf was unknown and unlikely.
Not once in the last 75 years had Israel failed to accomplish what it wanted, if not immediately then later, as its steady progression from fledgling state to regional superpower convincingly shows. That success was like an intoxicating drug for Israelis, making them impervious to the need for their leaders to seek peaceful relations with their neighbours. So long as Israel was powerful enough to smite the Arabs if they showed the slightest opposition, Israel had no interest in a deal except on its own mean terms. We saw how the other side shifted considerably to accommodate the Israeli position, as the Oslo Accords and other Arab peace proposals showed. For Israel, however, that was not enough and it continued to take more and offer less.
While that remains the case, it is evident that the two-state solution cannot succeed, and, so long as Israel remains a Zionist state enjoying unabated Western support as such, things will never be any different. The Jewish state must, by its very nature, fight on to maintain itself as ethnically separate, supremacist and privileged. Any retraction from this position, however small, would open a Pandora’s box of unpalatable questions that Israel and its creators do not want to answer. Why, for example, should such an anomalous state, out of step with the regional culture, language, religion and Weltanschauung, ever have been established in the Middle East? It should have seemed inevitable that people mostly accustomed to seeing humanity as divided into Jews and eternally hostile Gentiles, whom they had constantly to protect themselves against, could never have blended into the region or made for good neighbours.1 More importantly, most Israelis held the Arabs and particularly the Palestinians in contempt. This was a theme running through Zionist history from the start. Such people would fight every attempt to integrate them – the sine qua non of any proper solution – would reject it as an attempt to ‘Arabise’ them, and would maintain their special bond with the Jews outside the region and with the West. Only through such links could they maintain their sense of themselves as the centre of world Jewry and a part of Western civilisation.
The future
That a state with such an ethnically biased, exclusivist ideology as Israel’s can survive in this rigid form indefinitely must be open to question. But the logic of allowing it to remain in its present hegemonic form meant that there could be no long-term peaceful settlement, and the short-term future would be one of recurrent strife. In these conditions, a settlement in the form of Ariel Sharon’s Jordanian option would have made sense from Israel’s point of view, and represented for the West a last effort to salvage the two-state solution from the wreckage of Israel’s leavings in the West Bank; hence the variations on this theme that included Donald Trump’s Middle East plan of 2020.2 But many practical and political problems stood in the way of this option, as already explained, which made it an unlikely outcome.
Of the future options listed above, the one most likely to prevail was the first, that of maintaining the status quo. So long as Israel remained powerful and had the backing of Western states, it was unrealistic to hope for any other, least of all the one-state alternative for which we laid out several cogent strategies. In a different world, one of those principled, peaceable plans would have succeeded But in the case of Israel-Palestine, the attainment of one, democratic, state was fated to come about in a very different way.
By 2021, the signs of widespread Palestinian frustration and resistance, which had been in evidence in the First Intifada, had only grown with time. How else could one interpret Hamas’s dogged persistence in developing its rocket capability, remarkable for a movement forced to operate under constant Israeli attack, and from 2007 under siege? Israel managed to conceal this heroic reality by treating Hamas and, by implication, everyone in Gaza as ‘terrorists’ that it needed to defend its citizens against, however ruthlessly. This lie was tacitly accepted by Israel’s Western backers, and it was left to the UN and aid agencies to pick up the pieces after each Israeli war on Gaza.
A prophetic Israeli writer described the situation 15 years ago as ‘explosive, unstable and impractical’, that carried within it ‘the beginnings of an intifada of resistance which will be more violent than those before and which will put before Israel choices that threaten its very existence’.3 He could have been writing about the uprisings of May 2021. Was that to be the moment when everything changed? Many Palestinians thought so at the time, although similar dramas had happened before, only to quieten down and return to ‘normal’ – and every time they did, Israel went on to commit even more abuses of Palestinian rights, while still enjoying Western favour.
But what if that pattern was not repeated this time, and Palestinians had found a taste of unity and common struggle with each other that impelled them to refuse a return to the status quo ante – especially given the uprisings of Palestinians in 1948-Israel who had joined the fight? These were important partners in the struggle, albeit dangerous for Israel: resistance inside the heart of the state would be difficult to defeat if it persisted.
What if the uprisings we saw in May 2021 recurred with greater frequency and force? As we observed, indications that this might already be happening were in evidence in 2022, a year after the May uprisings, and could be expected to increase, especially as many Palestinians finally began to understand they were on their own in the struggle against Israel. No country or army, and certainly not the PA’s militia, had come to their rescue, in spite of Israel’s repeated and illegal assaults on them. And so they would have to go it alone, building new groups and working together against the enemy.
In such a scenario, what would Israel do? On past performance, we can anticipate a knee-jerk response to defend Zionism and safeguard the state with overwhelming force. Israel would intensify its anti-Palestinian repression, accelerate its colonisation programme, go on building the wall, and try to expel or starve out the Palestinians to thin their numbers. At the same time, the worldwide army of Israel’s supporters would be mobilised to stifle the faintest anti-Israel criticism, and silence Palestinian voices everywhere it mattered. Antisemitism allegations would feature largely in this campaign, and attempts at influencing government legislation in Western states to outlaw criticism of Israel and Zionism would be intensified. These methods had already been shown to succeed in the West, and would be intensified for that reason.4
As a result of these attacks, Palestinians would feel they had no choice but to continue resisting by every means, and this time, they might carry world public opinion with them, which at the time of writing had shifted in their favour more than at any time previously. If nothing else, the recurring rounds of fighting showed that Hamas could not be eradicated as an opposition force and would need to be reckoned with each time Israel went on the attack. Connections between these fighters and the resistance movements in other areas of Palestine-Israel, which already existed, would be strengthened. With local leaderships, coordination and resources, uprisings would eventually be effective in countering and in time defeating Israel.
But even if that level of organisation did not exist, sooner or later, the Palestinian territories would rise up again, and over time would become more radicalised and ungovernable, something that had previously been difficult to envisage, given the PA’s restrictive control of the West Bank. But there is nothing to say that control would persist, given the PA’s unpopularity, and its ageing, widely discredited president, Mahmoud Abbas. A new generation of fighters in the West Bank emerged in 2021 who openly rejected the PA, and adopted armed resistance in direct opposition to the PA’s peaceful strategy. These young fighters were not likely to disappear, and the cycle of Israeli savagery and military violence, followed by Palestinian retaliation, would repeat itself more frequently.
Eventually, and after much chaos and bloodshed, the barriers erected by Israel would disintegrate and a bi-national situation, if not a state, would come about, not in an orderly manner but willy-nilly. The entry of Palestinians into what Israelis had always wanted to be an exclusive club for Jews might prompt those who had the means to leave the country. These would most likely be the Jews of European origin who always saw themselves as part of the Western world anyway, and those for whom life with Arabs was unpalatable (often the same people). Emigration from the Jewish state at times of crisis had often been a well-kept secret of Israeli life. During the short-lived conflict with Lebanon in July 2006, for example, the rate of emigration from Israel increased fivefold, and the US and Canadian consulates were flooded with visa applications.5 As the Israeli writer Irit Linur lamented many years ago in Haaretz (24 September 2004):
Life in Israel is of a trial period, and anyone who can get his hands on more glittering options abroad should take advantage of them … We, the aware and the correct, all too often see the State of Israel the way it is seen in Europe: a country on probation, a home on probation.
Today, that is still the case.
The remaining Israeli population would be composed of the poor, the ultra-religious, the mizrahi Jews and many of those born in the state who felt they belonged nowhere else. So a new situation would develop: a state for Jews and Palestinians, not through a managed process of orderly transition, but through chaos, displacement, the creation of new refugees and the deaths of many people on both sides. And in the end, all that the Zionist experiment would have accomplished would be to have postponed the inevitable for a few decades.
The Middle East has absorbed myriad communities, no matter what their origins, and the hotchpotch of European and oriental Jewish migrants and their descendants who had formed the Israeli community would be no exception. In time, they too would become part of the region, as if the state of Israel had never been. The pity of it was that it should have taken so much destruction, death and suffering to return history to its initial point of departure.
The fact is, of course, that the Zionist project was flawed from the start and Israel should never have been set up. The best solution to this intractable problem ideally would be to turn back the clock before there was any Jewish state and rerun history from there. I recall making this point at a meeting in London in 1978, one of the first of its kind between a few of us Palestinians and a handful of Israelis who defined themselves as anti-Zionist or non-Zionist. Their shock and surprise at such sentiments were evident, and all of them rejected my comment as a personal attack on them. What made them think, I remember wondering, that Palestinians could ever have wanted a foreign settler community to set up a state in their country?
It was perverse for Zionists to believe that the Palestinians could ever have vanished or become irrelevant. As Meron Benvenisti put it:
The Zionist dream was maimed from the outset. It didn’t take into account the presence here of another national group. Therefore, from the moment the Zionist movement decided that it was not going to exterminate the Arabs, its dream became unattainable.6
But Benvenisti did not see that even had Israel eradicated the Palestinian population, there was still the wider Arab world to contend with, hugging its every border. ‘If Israel remains a colonialist state in its character, it will not survive,’ wrote Haim Hanegbi. ‘In the end the region will be stronger than Israel, in the end the indigenous people will be stronger than Israel.’7 Zionism’s ethos was not about peaceful coexistence but about colonialism and an exclusivist ideology to be imposed and maintained by force.
All the same, the clock will not go back and, although the Jewish state cannot be uncreated, it might be, so to speak, unmade. The reunification of Palestine’s shattered remains in a unitary state for all its inhabitants, old and new, is the only realistic, humane and durable route out of the morass. It is also the only way for the Israeli Jewish community (as opposed to the Israeli state) to survive in the Middle East. To quote Haim Hanegbi once more, ‘Anyone who wants to ensure the existence of a Jewish community in this country has to free himself from the Zionist pattern … Because as things are now, there is no chance. A Jewish nation-state will not take hold here.’8
The inevitable end point
The scenario outlined above is not based on wishful thinking. Nor can one discount Israel’s considerable ability to fight back and dominate from a position of global power and influence. Nevertheless, the situation in Palestine-Israel was inherently unstable and could not hold in its current form for long. In a way, it was too late for Israel to keep using the old thinking and the old methods. The Palestinians and their cause were too entrenched in the global public consciousness to be dismissed in 2022.
Even if the next uprising takes a different form, it cannot be averted. And what emerges at the end has been the main concern of this book. Our review of the tremendous obstacles facing the one democratic state solution may be daunting to some of those who support it in theory. But the fact that something is difficult to realise does not make it any less the right thing to do. Nor does the attainment of the one democratic state hinge solely on the wishes of Israel and its supporters. Other factors, though now unforeseen or thought improbable, could intervene and alter the situation dramatically: for example, a change in US foreign policy or a renaissance of Arab power, or some other extraordinary circumstance. Any of these could make a radical difference to Palestinian fortunes, although none of them has yet happened and some might never do so.
If and when they do, such events will merely dictate the pace and timing of the one democratic state solution. But the concept itself must have been established long before, not as an immediately attainable goal perhaps, but as a vision, an aspiration and a belief in the ultimate humanity of Palestinians and Jews and all those who wish to see them prosper.
Notes
Introduction
1. Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (London: Verso, 2009).
2. Benjamin Haddad, ‘How Europe became pro-Israel’, Foreign Policy, 20 May 2021.
3. Rex Brynen, ‘Palestinians and the Arab state system: Permeability, state consolidation, and the Intifada’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1991), pp. 552–621.
4. Sanya Mansoor, ‘How online activism and the racial reckoning in the US have helped drive a groundswell of support for Palestinians’, Time, 21 May 2021.
1 The Problem of Zionism
1. Ari Shavit, ‘Survival of the fittest’. Haaretz, 8 January 2004.
2. Z. Jabotinsky, Writings: On the Road to Jerusalem, cited in A. Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (London: Allen Lane, 2000), pp. 13–14. See also Lenni Brenner, The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir (London: Zed Books, 1984), pp. 73–5.
3. Moshe Dayan, Milestones: An Autobiography [Hebrew], (Jerusalem: Edanim Publishers, 1976), cited in Shlaim, The Iron Wall, p. 101.
4. D. Ingrams, Palestine Papers, 1917--1922: Seeds of Conflict (London: John Murray, 1972), p. 73.
5. The Balfour Declaration, named after Britain’s Foreign and Colonial secretary of the time, Lord Arthur Balfour, was issued in 1917, It was addressed to the Britsh Zionist leadership, and offered to facilitate the creation of a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine, at a time when Britain had no control of the country it was offering. Nevertheless, the Zionists seized upon it to legitimise their claim to Palestine.
