Israel did not wait long to reveal its first response
to the United Nations General Assembly’s overwhelming
recognition of Palestine as a non-member state, almost
immediately announcing its intention to push forward with
plans to build housing for Jewish settlers in E1, an area
of the West Bank just to the east of Jerusalem.
Although it
is sometimes misleadingly referred to as “disputed” or “controversial,”
settlement construction in E1 is no more and no less of a contravention of
international law than settlement construction elsewhere in the West Bank or East Jerusalem. What makes this development significant
is E1’s location, sealing tight the gap between East Jerusalem and Israel’s
largest settlement, Maale Adumim, further to the east.
In
moving forward with long-threatened plans to develop E1, Israel will be breaking the back of the West Bank and isolating the capital of the prospective
Palestinian state from its hinterland. In so doing, it will be terminating once
and for all the very prospect of that state — and with it, by definition, any
lingering possibility of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
Oddly
enough, the Palestine recognized by the United Nation is only an abstraction;
the one that Israel is now about to throttle is much more real, at least
insofar as the throttling will materially affect the lives of hundreds of thousands
of Palestinians in a way that mere recognition does not.
However
heavy the blow to Palestinian aspirations, an equally heavy political price for
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s E1 plan will be paid by Israelis. For by
terminating the prospect of a two-state solution, Netanyahu will also be
sealing the fate of an exclusively Jewish state.
As
cannier Israeli politicians (Ehud Olmert among them) have long warned,
maintaining the existence of Israel
as a Jewish state fundamentally requires perpetuating at least the idea of a
Palestinian state, even if only as a deferred fiction kept alive through
endless negotiations.
Once
the fiction of a separate Palestinian state is revealed to have no more
substance than the Wizard of Oz — which the E1 plan will all but guarantee —
those Palestinians who have not already done so will commit themselves to the
only viable alternative: a one-state solution, in which the idea of an
exclusively Jewish state and an exclusively Palestinian one will yield to what
was really all along the preferable alternative, a single democratic and
secular state in all of historical Palestine that both peoples will have to
share as equal citizens.
A
campaign for rights and equality in a single state is a project toward which
the Palestinians will now be able to turn with the formidable international
support they have already developed at both the diplomatic and the grassroots
levels, including a global boycott and sanctions movement whose bite Israel has
already felt.
For
Palestinians, in any case, one state is infinitely preferable to two, for the
simple reason that no version of the two-state solution that has ever been
proposed has meaningfully sought to address the rights of more than the
minority of Palestinians who actually live in the territory on which that state
is supposed to exist.
The
majority of Palestinians live either in the exile to which they were driven
from their homes during the creation of Israel in 1948, or as second-class
citizens of Israel, where they face formidable obstacles as non-Jews in a state
that reserves a full spectrum of rights only for Jews.
For
Palestinians, the right to return home and the right to live in dignity and
equality in their own land are not any less important than the right to live
free of military occupation. A separate state addressed only the latter, but
there can never be a just and lasting peace that does not address all those
rights, even if it means relinquishing the prospect of an independent
Palestinian state.
What must be added
here is that if a one-state solution offers the last remaining key to a just
and lasting peace, Israeli Jews will pay what will turn out to be only a
short-term price in exchange for many long-term gains. Like Palestinians, they
will lose the dream and the prospect of a state exclusively their own. But —
also like Palestinians — what they will gain in turn is the right to live in
peace.
By Saree Makdisi – Herald Tribune
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