The State and the States

Or Why One Combined State for Israel & Palestine is Less of a Fantasy than the “Two-State Solution.”

In the novel The City and the City, author China Miéville imagines an Eastern European city-state shared by two peoples, yet one where they are strictly divided from each other, not by walls but by juridical rules which means they do not interact or even see each other. It is a fantasy of ethnic separation, of one people naming the city Beszel and the other calling it Ul Qoma, a form of magical realism that imagines coexistence without conflict, or, in truth, a horror story of ghosts that avoid each other to the point of “unseeing” each other to maintain the fragile balance of such a divided but shared space.

The actual story focuses on the problems of governing “breaches” of this unseeing divide where communication is not just avoided but prohibited to maintain the illusion of completely separate existences for each people.

Mieville’s novel is a parable of borders and ethnic divides across our world, but Mieville himself has noted in interviews that similar fantasies of separation permeate discourse on Israel and Palestine. But as he also argues, such “unseeing” separation in the real world is usually backed with “one population being very, very aggressively seen by the armed wing of another population.”

Which highlights why any so-called “two-state solution” is ultimately far more of a fantasy than a one-state solution that would unite rather than divide the peoples of Israel and Palestine.  The process to get to either solution is hard to imagine but it is even harder to imagine maintaining two separate states peacefully, while a one-state outcome would be far more stable.  And far better for both peoples, including for the Jewish population.

From the River to the Sea is the Desire of Both Peoples

This is a conflict where both sides want not part but all of the disputed land. While Palestinian protestors chant “from the river to the sea,” the Likud similarly argued in its founding manifesto in 1977 that "Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty." Any land has unique features and history but nowhere else in the world is such a small patch of area laden with so much history over so many thousands of years, of religious significance to three major religions, with Israelis still referring to Judea and Samaria instead of the West Bank, along with a rich local history over the last millennium as Crusaders and trade in its port cities shaped the local populations. Add in the Nakba of 1948 which drove 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes in Israel and the cultural memory of cities like Haifa and Jaffa that is hard to extinguish for Palestinians.

There is no way to divide such a land and not leave overwhelming irredentist obsessions on both sides of the divide. While Ehud Barak’s Labor government and Yassir Arafat’s Fatah Party came close to agreeing to divisions of the land at the Camp David and Taba negotiations, the specifics of which land to trade and, shades of Mieville, how to share control of Jerusalem remained contested.  And Hamas helped blow up the negotiations with its launch of the second intifada and the new Ariel Sharon government elected in 2001 rejected the whole peace process, both reflecting the broad rejection by many on both sides of a two-state solution.

The evolution of politics in both communities towards ever more racist Jewish nationalism represented by Likud’s coalition in Israel and ever more extreme Arab Islamic militancy represented by Hamas is not a recipe for two states that can live in peace. Having two states where each one’s government tilts toward nationalist dissatisfaction with the remnant patrimony from such a split is a recipe for inevitable future wars- one reason many Israelis have reasonable doubts about such a goal and most Palestinians discount it at this point as well.

Uprooting the Jewish settlements required to make any two-state solution possible would just feed this politics of resentment in Israel, a point Representative Rashida Tlaib has made, comparing it to the resentments that the Nakba created among Palestinians. 

“Some settlements have been there for so long, right? And just the idea around taking families that — that’s been their home — it’s just completely uprooting, forcibly displacing. It’s something I struggle with because, like, we’re doing it all over again, right? This happened during the Nakba.”

Tlaib is a supporter of a one-state solution where Jews and Palestinians and other communities in the West Bank, Israel and Gaza could all live together, so her point is that abandoning division in favor of unity would be a far better future for everyone.  Jews could live near Abraham’s tomb in Hebron on the West Bank and Palestinian families could return to their ancestral neighborhoods in Haifa. All the irredentist obsessions could give way to a reality of a shared land.

As this map shows, the Israeli presence in the West Bank is so pervasive that it is hard to see any two-state map now that creates a viable Palestinian state without creating a crazed constituency of ex-settlers bent on reclaiming their lost homes.

The Power of Pluralism over Division

If people who hate each other enough to kidnap, murder and go to war with each other can’t make separate states work, why would sticking them together in a single state be more stable?  Empirically, the ability of Germany and France to make a go of the European Union after mass murder of one another in multiple world wars and the transitions to relatively stable politics in South Africa, Northern Ireland and a number of other shotgun political marriages show it’s quite possible.

In fact, the solution of putting people likely to war on each other or oppress one another in the same state is an old idea at the root of democratic theory, articulated by James Madison in Federalist 10 on why factions were likely to do less harm in a combined state than as separate ones.

“Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens…The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular states, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other states”

The political arithmetic of a combined Palestinian-Israeli state is that, even if a majority of Jews and a majority of Arabs want the other to be annihilated, neither of those factions will have a majority to control the combined state and the balance of power will fall to those willing to manage the peace, however uneasy. Nothing would permanently reduce Hamas as a political force more thoroughly than such a combined state.  Subgroups within both the Jewish and Arab communities will find their voice in a more pluralistic political space and groups with little political weight currently- Arab Christians, Bedouins, Armenians. and Druze -might find themselves swing factions within a new politics.

Such a state, I believe, would not just be better for the Palestinians but would be better for the Jews as well.   From a pure question of physical safety, such a state would be far less likely to find Jews at war not just with the Palestinians but with any of its neighbors, since the inherent conflict left over from the 1948 partition would largely be resolved.  The probability right now of Israel ending up as nuclear char in an exchange with Iran or another neighbor who matches its nuclear capacity is all too real, so a just and stable long-term solution is in the Jewish self-interest.

And a state controlled exclusively by Jews seems in retrospect like an experiment gone wrong that just reinforces the truth that religious states seem to inevitably commit atrocities in the name of that religion and, conversely, degrades the people and religion associated with that state.  A state that constitutionally protects the rights of Jews – and has a population of Jews large enough to ensure that protection politically – would be a state that could be a far better haven for Jews without the ethno-religious racism of the current Israeli state that has created a global equation of Judaism with the mass murder of children.

The Path to a Unified State

How to get to a one-state solution is of course the challenge, but it will inevitably require US policy abandoning a two-state solution as its goal.  Working to move public opinion in the U.S. in that direction should be a key goal of pro-Palestinian activists. This will also likely take a significant portion of the Jewish population in the U.S. coming to believe as argued here that this would be the best and most just outcome to help drive such a shift in US policy by politicians sympathetic to Israel now. No doubt it will also take mass global pressure and sanctions on Israel, but that ultimately has to be combined with clear global assurances of protections of the rights of Jews and Judaism in any final settlement. 

Despite public outcries over Rep. Tlaib daring to publicly support a state “from the river to the sea,” there is already a strong constituency for a one-state solution in the United States, especially if the public decides a two-state solution is not viable.  This poll from a few years ago found roughly one-third of the public support a single state solution for Israel, where Palestinians and Jews live together in a secular state. 

More tellingly, if a two-state solution no longer is seen as an option, which the Israeli government seems determined to convey to Americans and the world, then a two-thirds majority, including 78% of Democrats, support a one-state solution over indefinite extension of current deprivation of Palestinian democratic rights.  And notably even a plurality of Republicans favors a one-state solution over one where Palestinians permanently have second-class status.

Even with a shift in U.S. policy and global pressure, the path may include some amalgamation of a two-state and one-state solution, a Belgium-like confederated state sitting on top of two sub-states.  Tough issues will still have to be addressed like balancing the right of Jewish refugees to immigrate to the combined state with the right of return of Palestinians living outside current borders. Constitutional protections of minority rights and the autonomy of religious authorities within the combined state would all need to be negotiated as well.

Yet all of that – however horrendously hard to imagine happening – still seems more plausible than the survival of two states likely dominated by Likudnik Jewish nationalism on one side and a Palestinian state dominated by Hamas (or some new similar incarnation) operating next to it.  Pushing for that latter outcome is a dead end, when one state is ultimately the far more just and stable outcome to strive for.

Ending the Legacy of Wilsonian Nationalism

The problem of Israel and Palestine is sometimes framed as a product of colonialism, but it far more derives from colonialism’s bastard child, Wilsonian nationalism, which carved up the colonies of the world after World War I and World War II into ethno-religious enclaves along arbitrary borders, which spawned endless wars in their wake.  The 1948 Partition of Israel and Palestine had a similar character as the Partition of India a year earlier: large numbers of deaths and mass dislocations, with Palestinians streaming out of Israel and Jews steaming in from surrounding Arab countries.  Like the dislocations and ethnic wars set off by the arbitrary lines drawn in Africa, the carving up of the Ottoman Empire into the various middle eastern countries has fed the internal and external wars that have raged across the region.

Striving for two states in Israel-Palestine is just building on that failed Wilsonian legacy, while a one-state solution is part of what should be the broad progressive global project for the 21^st century: ending the dominance of ethnic-religious nation-states in favor of multi-ethnic collaborative states like the European Union and hopes by many to deepen institutions like the African Union and to make trade structures vehicles for collaborative governance around environmental, social and labor standards.

In the ideal, we would roll back the original dissolution of Ottoman borders in favor of a multi-ethnic state of Arabs, Kurds, Jews, Armenians, Greeks and other subgroups governing the whole middle east region democratically.  But we can at least start with rolling back the failure of the 1948 Partition and work with Palestinians and Jews of good will to create a model for moving the region towards greater collaborative governance that can replace the current killing fields that have dominated the region from Yemen to Iraq to Syria to Gaza.