One Land – Two States? Paralell States as a vision for Israel and Palestine

In the world of today, control over territory is in many ways losing its weight as a factor creating economic progress and well-being for people. Globalization has created porous borders and the concept of power is given new content and new dimensions – economic and political power no longer grows out of the power over the land.

But the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is like few other conflicts stubbornly focusing on control of land, of territory. Developments have in many ways gone too far to permit a reasonable territorial division. Physical and political obstacles are growing. The web of Israeli roads and settlements on the West Bank is settling as a geological sediment on top of the existing Palestinian society and the Israeli ”matrix of control” is slowly making substantial  and sustainable development impossible. In Gaza economic and social conditions remain miserable. Palestinians in Israel, although citizens, suffer discrimination in various ways.

Israel controls almost all the territory and has so far not been willing to part with what Palestinians regard as the minimum necessary to enable the creation of a territorially viable Palestinian state. Demographic developments will soon make Palestinians a majority in the whole area. A situation with a minority controlling 80 percent of the territory and suppressing the majority of the population is not a sustainable solution.

The present paradigm of dividing the land geographically has not worked in spite of thirty years of relentless efforts, numerous plans and endless talks, or talks about talks, involving the parties, the US, the EU and large parts of the international community. And there are solid reasons why it is not working – physically there is not much left to divide and politically the necessary political will has not been mobilized.

A two state solution seems no longer in the cards. A one state solution never was.

It is time for a re-think.

If the land cannot be shared by geographical division, can it be shared in some other way? Is there another vision that can provide hope?

Can one imagine a scenario with a new type of two state solution, one Israeli state and one Palestinian state, in parallel, each covering the whole area, with political and civil rights extended to all, Israelis and Palestinians, and developed from existing political, economic and physical structures? Such a scenario would mean a decoupling of the exclusive link between state and territory. Two state structures parallel with each other, or “superimposed” upon each other, would cover the whole area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

The people in the whole area could be able to choose freely which state to belong to and at the same time have the right – at least in principle – to settle in the whole territory. Citizenship could be the result of the individual’s free choice and thus follow the citizen, not the territory.

Given a regional division in counties, a free individual choice could be combined with giving counties the right to choose which state to belong to, based on a majority vote in each county. At the same time a citizen should be free to choose and belong to another state than the one chosen by the county.

Such an arrangement would likely lead to a mainly Jewish/Israeli heartland, consisting of present-day Israel and a number of the larger Jewish settlements in Palestinian areas. But this area should also be open for Palestinians wishing to live there, initially maybe in limited numbers, until the structure has won general acceptance and confidence from both sides. Those counties that thus makes up a Jewish heartland would be under Israeli jurisdiction, but individuals living there would also be free to choose to belong to the Palestinian state, and thus to be under Palestinian jurisdiction.

In the same way one could imagine a Palestinian heartland consisting of the West Bank and Gaza, and maybe parts of the areas in Israel that are now dominated by Palestinians.  This whole area would however in the same way be open for Jews/Israelis – and others – who wished to live there, maybe with corresponding numerical limitations initially. These Jews/Israelis would thus be under Israeli jurisdiction and belong to the Israeli state. Dual citizenship could be an option in some cases.

Thus two parallel state structures would both cover the whole area, with two separate heartlands but with soft and porous borders between them. Both Israelis and Palestinians could claim their own state with its own special character and identity, but they would complement each other and not be mutually exclusive.

In such a structure both states could keep their own national symbols, their own government and parliament, as well as their foreign policy and foreign representation. They could choose to join in a defence union, a customs union, with one currency, one labour market and a joint external border management. But a lot of this is to a large extent already the case today, even if strong forces pull in different directions.

Of course there would have to be joint, or in any case harmonized legislation in a number of areas, including communications, road traffic, police and taxation. In other areas such as civil law and family matters jurisdiction has in many parts of the world already followed religion rather than territory for hundreds of years, and would thus not necessarily present a major problem, although parallel legal systems of course contain complications.

Two such parallel states would be an innovation in international politics, in international law and in basic constitutional matters. The scenario would differ from both a federal and a bi-national system but have elements of both.

Such a structure would allow both for an independent Palestinian state and also for the Israeli state to be both Jewish and democratic at the same time. It would bring an end to occupation and open up for free movement over the whole area as well as providing a vision for end of conflict.

By MATHIAS MOSSBERG

Ambassador Mossberg is conducting a research project being funded by the Swedish Foreign Ministry – the Parallel States Project (PSP). Before coming to Lund, Ambassador Mossberg was Adviser on dialogue with the Muslim world at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Stockholm. Prior to this he was on secondment to the EastWest Institute in New York and responsible for the Middle East Program of the Institute. Ambassador Mossberg was earlier Secretary-General for a major Government review of Swedish security policy during the Cold War, and served as Director of the Policy Planning Group at the Ministry from 1996-2000. He was Sweden’s Ambassador to Morocco in 1994-96 and Personal Representative of the Chairman in office, CSCE, for Nagorno-Karabach in 1992-94. He also served as Assistant Under-Secretary for Africa and the Middle East at the Ministry, and in diplomatic posts in London, Amman, New York, Moscow and Geneva.

The end of the idea of two States for two peoples

Unlike the negotiations with the Palestinians that have been stalled, the separation wall snakes its way through the West Bank. Two veteran leftists have reached a startling conclusion: There cannot be two states for two peoples in this land.

1. The groundwater

Meron Benvenisti and Haim Hanegbi did not exchange views. Benvenisti lives in Jerusalem, on the edge of the desert, and is trying to write a last book, a summing up. Hanegbi lives in Ramat Aviv, not far from the sea, and is trying to formulate a last, definitive, manifesto. Yet this summer both Benvenisti and Hanegbi reached an intriguing point in their conceptual development. They both reached the conclusion that there is no longer any prospect of ending the conflict Israel/Palestine by means of a two-state solution. Each of them separately has come to believe that the time has come to establish one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea: a binational state.

On the face of it, they come from utterly different worlds. Benvenisti's roots lie deep in the old Zionist establishment. He was the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek's right-hand man, a candidate of Ratz (the predecessor of Meretz) for the Knesset. Hanegbi, in contrast, is a retired revolutionary. He was a central activist in the radical-left Matzpen group, one of the founders of the Progressive List, a partner in the leadership of the peace movement Gush Shalom. However, Benvenisti and Hanegbi also share a deep common background. Both are from Jerusalem and are graduates of the city's Beit Hakerem high school, both are Ashkenazi-Sephardi whose ideas were shaped in the latter stages of the British Mandate period. And both of them love this land and love human beings. Both are surging rivers of emotions and stories and sheer human vitality.

It's precisely because they are not cut of the same cloth, because they are not from the same ideological circle, that the parallel, albeit not identical, processes they are undergoing are so fascinating. True, they are both end-figures, lone wolves, sensitive sentimentalists who are sometimes perceived as eccentrics. Nevertheless, each is an original thinker with finely tuned senses. Both have a knee-jerk aversion to falsity, whitewashing, and uniform thought. So perhaps the fact that the two of them arrived during the past year at the conceptual place they now occupy is of some significance. Possibly it says something about the groundwater of the current Israeli reality.

2. Haim Hanegbi

Where did it start? Right after the start of the intifada. Already then I told [veteran peace activist] Uri Avnery that I was regressing, I was returning to my origins, that it might be time to reconsider the dream of a shared state. But Avnery laughed - that's his way. He said I was dreaming. Avnery has done a lot in the battle for peace and the battle against the occupation, but Avnery also has a defect. He has no psychic mechanism. Just as [pioneer Zionist activist Joseph] Trumpeldor had only one arm, Avnery is incapable of relating to people. It's not something evil, it's not indifference, it's a disability. He simply lacks that emotional organ. So he laughed at me with a kind of patronizing disdain and ignored what I said. I didn't respond.

For the next three years we continued to formulate the Friday messages of Gush Shalom. But at the beginning of the summer I decided I could no longer remain silent, that I had to come out with it. So I wrote a text against the occupation at the end of which I included, for the first time, the idea of one state for the two nations. A state in partnership, a binational state.

Avnery went wild. He was furious. He said I was harming the Palestinian cause and endangering the Palestinian state and serving the right wing. That I was reinforcing fears of the "phased theory." When I insisted that the text be sent to all the members of Gush Shalom, I was told that it would not be disseminated because it was contrary to the Gush Shalom consensus. I said, fine, if that's how it is I'm leaving Gush Shalom. So with one phone call, I left Gush Shalom. Others also left in my wake. Half of the hardcore left, so now I am working with a few good people on disseminating my old-new idea about the renewal of binational thinking.

As I wrote in my document, it is plain to me today that there is no other alternative to ending the conflict. Everyone with eyes to see and ears to hear has to understand that only a binational partnership can save us. That is the only way to transform ourselves from being strangers in our land into native sons.

The truth is that it all started long ago, in the Mekor Baruch neighborhood of Jerusalem. When I was 10, at the end of the Mandate period, our landlord was an Arab named Jamil. The word "Alhambra" was chiseled in stone on the house in Arabic and English. And the house next door was not only owned by Arabs, it was also inhabited by Arabs. The whole neighborhood from our house west was mixed. And at my dad's place of work, the Jerusalem municipality, Jews and Arabs worked together, too. My dad took me on outings in and around Jerusalem. I remember Palestinian Ein Karem very well, and Malha and Lifta and Beit Mazmil. So the Arabs were never strangers to me. They were always part of my landscape. Part of the country. And I never doubted the possibility of living with them: house next to house, street next to street.

At the end of 1947 they disappeared. It was in the winter, in the middle of eighth grade. And the strange thing is that it wasn't in the least traumatic. It was all done quietly, without any dramatics. They just sort of evaporated. I'm not even sure I saw them packing. I'm not really sure I saw them collecting their things and melting away down the slope behind Schneller Camp. But I remember Deir Yassin well. I remember that we were in our classroom in the Beit Hakarem high school when we saw the smoke rising from Deir Yassin [an Arab village on the western edge of Jerusalem where a massacre was perpetrated in 1948].

So, in the 1960s, when we talked about the principle of equality in Matzpen, I wasn't just thinking in terms of socialism or a universal concept. With me it was baladi, my country, the scents and memories of my childhood. Then came obsessive collecting of Mandate period maps to locate the villages that had been erased, the life that ceased to be. And the feeling that without them this is a barren country, a disabled country, a country that caused an entire nation to disappear.

So it wasn't easy for me to adopt the two-state solution, in the 1980s. It was a tough inner struggle. And I never, ever, joined the Zionist left. I never abandoned revolutionary thinking. But when I saw that Peace Now existed and that there was some sort of movement in the streets I didn't think it was right to stay cooped up with dogmas. I thought the two-state idea was a worthy one.

When Oslo came, I thought it was really something great. I read the accords thoroughly, under a magnifying glass, and I reached the conclusion that there really was mutual recognition, that the possibility existed of closing the conflict file. So in the mid-1990s I had second thoughts about my traditional approach. I didn't think it was my task to go to Ramallah and present the Palestinians with the list of Zionist wrongs and tell them not to forget what our fathers did to their fathers. I believed in the dynamics of Oslo. I also believed in [Yitzhak] Rabin. After the assassination I even joined the Labor Party.

In the past couple of years I realized that I made a mistake; that, like the Palestinians, I too was taken in. I took Israeli talk seriously and didn't pay attention to Israeli deeds. When I realized, one day, that the settlements had doubled themselves, I also realized that Israel had missed its one hour of grace, had rejected the rare opportunity it was given. Then I understood that Israel could not free itself of its expansionist pattern. It is bound hand and foot to its constituent ideology and to its constituent act, which was an act of dispossession.

I realized that the reason it is so tremendously difficult for Israel to dismantle settlements is that any recognition that the settlements in the West Bank exist on plundered Palestinian land will also cast a threatening shadow over the Jezreel Valley, and over the moral status of Beit Alfa and Ein Harod. I understood that a very deep pattern was at work here. That there is one historical continuum that runs from Kibbutz Beit Hashita to the illegal settler outposts; from Moshav Nahalal to the Gush Katif settlements in the Gaza Strip. And that continuity apparently cannot be broken. It's a continuity that takes us back to the very beginning, to the incipient moment.

I am now reading a book by Eliezer Be'eri about the beginning of the conflict and the start of the Zionist enterprise. At one point, he describes how, on November 3, 1878, as Yehuda Raab tilled the first furrow in the soil of Petah Tikva, he felt that "he is the first person to hold a Jewish plow on the soil of the prophets after the long years of exile." But look what it says here: "Arabs also joined Yehuda Raab on the big day when plowing began. He himself, with his plow harnessed to animals, could not have tilled an area of hundreds of dunams. He was joined in the plowing by 12 Arab fellahin."

What does that mean, Ari? You tell me what it means. What it means is that when Yehuda Raab came to till the first furrow after 2,000 years of exile he didn't have the strength to do it alone. He needed fellahin, and 12 of them came to help him. Reading that, I tell myself that I know all about Raab and who his descendants were and I know how his project developed. But I know absolutely nothing about the 12 fellahin. They appear in history as unknowns and disappear from history the same way, with hardly a trace. They were removed from history by Zionism. Who were they? Where did they go? Where are they today?

So the aging revolutionary you see before you has taken a vow to find those 12 vanished individuals, those 12 abductees of history. My life mission is to set them free from their historical captivity and give them names and faces and rights. Because their whole sin in relation to Raab was that they lived in this country untold generations before him. Why should they be punished for that? Why insist on their oblivion?

I don't think this is some private madness. On the contrary: I think it is an attempt to be released from madness. I am not a psychologist, but I think that everyone who lives with the contradictions of Zionism condemns himself to protracted madness. It's impossible to live like this. It's impossible to live with such a tremendous wrong. It's impossible to live with such conflicting moral criteria. When I see not only the settlements and the occupation and the suppression, but now also the insane wall that the Israelis are trying to hide behind, I have to conclude that there is something very deep here in our attitude to the indigenous people of this land that drives us out of our minds.

There is something genetic here that doesn't allow us truly to recognize the Palestinians, that doesn't allow us to make peace with them. And that something has to do with the fact that even before the return of the land and the houses and the money, the settlers' first act of expiation toward the natives of this land must be to restore to them their dignity, their memory, their justness.

But that is just what we are incapable of doing. Our past won't allow us to do it. Our past forces us to believe in the project of a Jewish nation-state that is a hopeless cause. Our past prevents us from seeing that the whole story of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel is over. Because if you want Jewish sovereignty you must have a border, but as [Zionist thinker and activist Yitzhak] Tabenkin said, this country cannot tolerate a border in its midst. If you want Jewish sovereignty you need a fortified, separatist uni-national structure, but that is contrary to the spirit of the age. Even if Israel surrounds itself with a fence and a moat and a wall, it won't help. Because your fears are well-placed, Ari: Israel as a Jewish state can no longer exist here. In the long term, Israel as a Jewish state will not be able to exist.

I'm not crazy. I don't think that it will be possible to enlist thousands of people in the cause of a binational state tomorrow morning. But when I consider that Meron Benvenisti was right in saying that the occupation has become irreversible, and when I see where the madness of sovereignty is leading good Israelis, I raise my own little banner again. I do so without illusions. I am not part of any army. I am not the leader of any army. In the meantime our act is that of a few people. But I think it's important to place this idea on the table now.

In essence, the binational principle is the deepest antithesis of the wall. The purpose of the wall is to separate, to isolate, to imprison the Palestinians in pens. But the wall imprisons the Israelis, too. It turns Israel into a ghetto. The wall is the great despairing solution of the Jewish-Zionist society. It is the last desperate act of those who cannot confront the Palestinian issue. Of those who are compelled to push the Palestinian issue out of their lives and out of their consciousness. In the face of that I say the opposite. I say that we were apparently too forgiving toward Zionism; that the Jews who came here and found a land that wasn't empty adopted a pattern of unrestrained force. Instead of the conflict foisting moral order and reason on them, it addicted them to the use of force. But that force has played itself out, it has reached its limits. If Israel remains a colonialist state in its character, it will not survive. In the end the region will be stronger than Israel, in the end the indigenous people will be stronger than Israel. Those who hope to live by the sword will die by the sword. That is perfectly clear, Ari: they will die by the sword.

Don't treat me as a stranger, as an outsider. True, it's easier for me, because I'm from Hebron and Jerusalem, from the Old Yishuv. It's easier for me because I never took part in the killing and the dispossession and the occupation. All the same, I feel a commitment toward the society I live in. And precisely because of that, I believe that anyone who wants to ensure the existence of a Jewish community in this country has to free himself from the Zionist pattern, has to open gates. Because as things are now, there is no chance. A Jewish nation-state will not take hold here.

It's totally clear that it can't be done without recognition in principle of the right of return, because this is a case in which a nation was condemned to exile from its land, not because there was no room, but because it was supplanted by others. That injustice has not been erased for 55 years and it won't be erased in another 55 years. But that doesn't mean they will return to Jamusin, which is in the middle of Tel Aviv. It doesn't mean they will settle at the corner of Arlosoroff and Ibn Gvirol.

What it means is that the borders have to be open to them, as in Europe. It means the establishment of a super-modern city in Galilee for the 200,000 or 300,000 refugees in Lebanon. It means the establishment of another Palestinian-Jewish city between Hebron and Gaza that will both make the desert bloom and connect the two parts of Palestine.

In general, we have to shift to a binational mode of thinking. Maybe in the end we have to create a new, binational Israel, just as a new, multiracial South Africa was created.

There will be no other choice, anyway. The attempt to achieve Jewish sovereignty that is fenced in and insular has to be abandoned. We will have to come to terms with the fact that we will live here as a minority: a Jewish minority that will no longer be squeezed between Hadera and Gedera, but will be able to settle in Nablus and Baghdad and Damascus, too - and take part in the democratization of the Middle East. That will be able to live and die here, to establish mixed cities and mixed neighborhoods and mixed families. But for that to happen, the mad dream of sovereignty will have to be given up, Ari. We have to forget that mad dream, which has caused so much bloodshed here, has inflicted so many disasters and has generated a hundred years of conflict.

By Ari Shavit

Israeli apartheid supporters resist Binational Movement

A movement is growing for the adoption of a “binational” form of government in Israel/Palestine. With the failure of the so-called Geneva Accords — signed on Dec. 1, 2003, in Switzerland — to promote the creation of a viable Palestinian state, equal rights activists are increasingly turning to the concept of a one-state solution that encompasses all of modern Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as the most practical and peaceful manner to improve the living conditions and security of all inhabitants in Israel/Palestine, no matter their ethnicity or religion.
Advocates of apartheid in Israel are concerned by the growing binational movement because they realize the country’s Jewish majority would no longer dominate civil affairs, as was enshrined in law with the creation of Israel in 1948, if the nation were to transform into a truly democratic state where no law favored one ethnic or religious group over another and where all ethnic groups and religions could flourish free of government control.
“[W]ith the current bloody stalemate and failure to negotiate a two-state solution, some observers have turned again to the binational option,” Yossi Klein Halevi observes in the Oct. 10, 2003, issue of the Los Angeles Times. Binationalism would not lead to coexistence, he writes. Rather, Klein Halevi, a contributing editor to the New Republic and an associate fellow at the Shalem Center, a think tank in Jerusalem, argues that the birthrate of the Arab residents “would exceed that of the Jews, and sooner rather than later the Jewish inhabitants would find themselves a discreet minority group subsumed in a hostile nation. ‘Binational state’ is a code word for eliminating Jewish sovereignty.”
Advocates of apartheid in Israel often describe the binational solution as leading to the destruction of the Jewish state. Melanie Phillips, a British journalist and winner of the Orwell prize for journalism in 1996, describes as “loathsome” the concept of a multicultural Israel and Palestine. She blasts New York University Professor Tony Judt for advocating in the Oct. 23, 2003, issue of the New York Review of Books the creation of a binational state in Israel. In that article, Judt argues that the “very idea of a ‘Jewish state’ — a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded — is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.”
Phillips says that Judt makes no mention of Israel being “the only democracy in the Middle East.” She also calls “obscene” Judt’s representation that Israel’s policy of granting only Jews automatic citizenship as discriminatory.
The supporters of Israeli apartheid certainly make a valid point when they cite the despicable anti-Jewish policies of Israel’s neighboring countries in the Middle East. But, as Judt asks, in today’s “clash of cultures” between open, pluralist democracies and belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno-states, does Israel want to be in the “wrong camp?”
Would the “destruction” of an oppressive government apparatus that applies a generally benign set of laws to one group of people and a generally repressive set of laws to another be a bad thing? I don’t think so. Just as I don’t think the destruction of all of the oppressive Islamic governments around the world would be a bad thing.
When advocates of apartheid in Israel use the word “destruction” against their opponents, they are seeking to evoke the image of millenniums of suffering endured by Jews, culminating in European governments’ attempts to eradicate Jews throughout the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. There is, however, more than a subtle difference between, on the one hand, what happened when a powerful German government and its confederates across Europe sought to disappear an entire group of people in the 1930s and 1940s and, on the other, equal rights advocates working today toward dismantling an extremely oppressive and noxious governmental system in Israel/Palestine.
In the Oct. 9, 2003, issue of the Christian Science Monitor, Helena Cobban, the British-born American writer, makes an eloquent argument for a binational state in Israel/Palestine. The apparent demise of the so-called “roadmap” to peace between Israel and the Palestinians probably marked the end of the long-pursued concept of a two-state solution, she says. “For if a two-state solution were to provide the stability and security that both peoples so desperately crave, the resulting Palestinian state would have to be just as viable as the Israeli state with whose fate it would always be so closely entwined,” Cobban writes. “But continued implantation of Israeli settlers and all their supporting infrastructure into the West Bank has brought about a situation in which the establishment of a viable Palestinian state looks impossible.”
If the transformation from apartheid to democracy worked in South Africa, why can’t a similar process take place in Israel/Palestine? “If Israeli settlers want to stay in the West Bank — let them stay! But if they want to stay there and be part of a community built on long-term peace, then they cannot refuse to give equal rights within the whole of an expanded state of Israel/Palestine to all Palestinians who want to be a part of it,” Cobban argues.
Right on cue, the Israeli apartheid lobby here in the United States took Cobban to task for daring to compare Israeli government practices to South Africa’s apartheid regime. In an Oct. 17, 2003, letter to the editor, Anti-Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman tells readers of the Christian Science Monitor that there is “no basis of comparison between the political character of Israel today and South Africa’s apartheid.”
Foxman goes on to argue, without a shred of irony, that “Israel has always been a democracy where all citizens, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or color, are accorded full civil and political rights, and equal participation in all aspects of Israeli social, political, civic life.” In the very next sentence, however, Foxman says it’s unfortunate that Cobban “advocates the demise of the Jewish state when every state has a right to control its borders and maintain its fundamental identity.”
Since Israel’s creation in 1948, academics and activists have maintained that the concept of a “Jewish state” cannot coexist with democracy. Furthermore, maintaining a “fundamental identity,” as Foxman says is Israel’s right, is also what Hitler sought to accomplish in Germany, although Jewish citizens of Germany were the ones whose existence didn’t mesh with Hitler’s warped concept of a German identify just as Palestinians today are cast aside in the development of an Israeli identity.
Uri Strauss of the University of Massachusetts says that characterizing Israel as both Jewish and democratic is contradictory. “A state can either be democratic, or it can be Jewish, but not both,” Strauss argues.
Specifically, Strauss notes that the Israeli government can disqualify candidates for political office of any party that opposes the Jewish character of the state. “This law has been used to disqualify candidates for calling for a democratic state, in which all citizens have equal rights,” Strauss says.
There are also a number of laws in Israel, Strauss explains, that discriminate against Palestinians on the basis of race. “For example, 93% of the land in Israel is, by law, under the trusteeship of the Jewish National Fund. By the JNF’s constitution, this land is for the exclusive use of Jews — it may not be rented or leased by Palestinians.”
Uri Davis, an Israeli Jew and author of Israel: An Apartheid State, notes that, unlike the United States, which recognizes, under a democratic constitution, one universal citizenship for all U.S. citizens without distinction of nationality, religion, language, tribe, sex, sexual orientation or any other social status, Israel does not have one single universal citizenship for all of its citizens. “Rather, informed by the dominant ideology of political Zionism, the Israeli legislator (the Knesset) legislated a schedule of four classes of citizenship based on racial discrimination and representing blatant inequality in law, in other words, representing a new form of apartheid,” Davis said in a paper on the Geneva Accords submitted to the Institute of African and Arab Studies of the Russian Academy of Science in December 2003.
“During the heyday of the apartheid regime in South Africa the Dutch Reformed Church educated its constituents, almost exclusively classified as ‘White’ in the apartheid legal system, and their supporters in the West and beyond, that to oppose the political programme of apartheid, to be anti-apartheid, was somehow tantamount to being ‘anti-Christian,’ and thus, ‘pro-Devil,’ or worse, ‘pro-Communist,’” Davis writes. “In a similar way, under the dominance of political Zionist ideology and practice, Zionist and Israeli educational and information establishments educate their constituents, almost exclusively classified as ‘Jews’ in the Zionist legal system, and their supporters in the West and beyond, that to oppose the political programme of Zionism, to be anti-Zionist, is somehow tantamount to being ‘anti-Jewish,’ and thus, ‘anti-Semitic,’ or worse, ‘pro-Nazi.’”
The concept of a binational state in Israel/Palestine is beginning to gain wider acceptance around the world and inside Israel and the occupied territories. The movement is increasingly putting supporters of Israeli apartheid on the defensive, forcing them into the position of publicly advocating a contemptible system of governance similar to one that was officially discarded in South Africa 10 years ago.
The end to Israeli apartheid is not in sight. But positive developments could begin to unfold rapidly, as they did in the final years of South African apartheid, from which a true democracy can emerge in Israel/Palestine that could serve as a beacon of hope for change in all of the other Middle Eastern countries where oppressive governments reign.

By Mark Hand -  Editor of Press Action

Israel and the case of a binational State

The idea of a binational state has repeatedly reared its head throughout the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was already circulating, in various guises, during the 1920s and 30s among the Brit Shalom (“The Alliance for Peace”) group, led by Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, before falling victim to military confrontation. It surfaced in the wake of the Six-Day War, this time under the auspices of the plo, which demanded the dissolution of the “Zionist entity” for the sake of what the official euphemism called “a secular and democratic Palestinian state” where there would be no place for Jews who arrived in Israel after 1948. It was also embraced by some figures of the American literary left. With the signing of the Oslo Accords, it seemed to have vanished for good. But the second Intifada infused it with new life: The resurrection of the binational project is one of the many consequences of the dramatic fiasco at the Camp David negotiations during the summer of 2000.
Today, however, it is not within the Palestinian camp that the idea is most audible, but in the margins of the political debate in Israel and . . . in the writing of Tony Judt (see “Israel: The Alternative,” New York Review of Books, October 22, 2003), who adorns it with the attire of novelty and the noble allure of the “unthinkable.” It is odd to see this epithet attached to an idea that is almost a hundred years old and which has never ceased to be “thought,” despite never having been applied. Here it is back on the agenda.
Mr. Judt, in any case, is neither the first nor the most inspired of the recent travelers in the realm of the unthinkable. The originality of his article is not in the solution he proposes; it consists in the arguments he musters in defense of his proposal and, even more so, in his way of linking the Israeli question, and more generally the question of the nation-state, to the passions of our time and the air we breathe.

A lesser evil?

Several months before his article appeared, in August 2003, the readers of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz had the binational project explained to them by two respected figures of the Israeli left. One of them, Meron Benvenisti, once deputy mayor of Jerusalem responsible for relations with the local Arab population, is one of the men who has toiled most to bring about a reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. An engaging, passionate personality with deep family roots in the Zionist movement, it isn’t as if Benvenisti, at the age of 70, had turned into a furious ideologue who favored the disintegration of Israel.
His reflection proceeded from three fundamental observations. The first is that the development of settlements in the West Bank has created an irreversible trend that precludes a return to the situation before 1967. Mr. Benvenisti has been predicting this since the 1980s. At that time, however, the settlements amounted to barely 20,000 persons; today the estimate is 230,000. And that which to him seemed impossible 20 years ago is all the more so today.
From this observation flows a second one: The irreversible situation produced by the extension of the settlements has already created a binational reality which any political solution should take into account. All the more so, given a third observation: that the debacle at Camp David and the bloody confrontations that almost immediately followed have tragically brought Israelis and Palestinians back to their attitudes of 50 years ago, thus consuming all avenues of compromise which they believed they were so close to achieving: “Both sides have in fact given up their mutual recognition, when we have begun again to consider the Palestinians as a terrorist entity, and they to look at us as aliens.” In this respect, Mr. Benvenisti shows himself almost as hard on the Israeli left as on the right: “This whole problem of the Arabs annoys the people on the left, is too complicated for them, exposes them to a moral dilemma and a cultural embarrassment: this is why they want this horrible wall . . . which is a violation of this land, why they flee Jerusalem, why they flee the countryside and the landscape to crowd together in Tel Aviv.”
In this disenchanting picture, the dominant, decisive fact that prescribes, so to speak, the future is the demographic element: The entanglement of Jewish and Arab populations on the territory that extends from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean renders literally inapplicable the creation of two distinct national states, says Mr. Benvenisti. “Since Zionism excluded the idea of eliminating the Arabs, its dream has become unrealizable. For this land cannot accommodate two sovereignties within it, and will never be able to do so.”
In other words, a binational reality prescribes a binational solution. Between the 3.5 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza, the 1.2 million Israeli Arabs, and the some 5 million Jewish Israelis, it is thus necessary to imagine a new framework of cohabitation. Mr. Benvenisti envisages a structure that is both federal and cantonal — he speaks of “ethnic cantons” — where each people could lead an autonomous existence. The plan, he admits, is still embryonic and nebulous, but the general direction seems clear. “What I propose doesn’t make me rejoice. . . . I cling to the fragile hope that, perhaps, a common purpose may emerge . . .; that we will learn perhaps to live together; that we will understand perhaps that the other is not the devil.”
It is not difficult to enumerate the reasons for which this project appears eminently unrealistic. If the cohabitation of two states is truly doomed, how can one believe that a “cantonal federation” would be more viable? If hatred and mutual distrust have indeed attained such depths, the binational solution seems still more chimerical than any other project of separation. As to the question of whether the situation in the Territories should be considered irreversible, a subject of endless debate in Israel, it is by definition an unresolvable question and will remain so until the day when a peace treaty is concluded between the two sides — or a unilateral decision to leave the Territories is taken — impelling the Israeli government to face the obviously formidable challenge of evacuating some of the settlements. This question cannot be answered with anything resembling certainty because a clear majority of Israelis, even today in the midst of the Intifada, remain favorable in principle to such an evacuation; because many of the Israelis living beyond the Green Line, essentially for economic reasons, will leave if the Knesset orders their departure; and finally, because the ideology of Greater Israel has collapsed in the wake of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, except for the most obdurate among the settlers — who will most probably refuse to leave or even resort to the use of arms. In short, the question of the settlements does not depend, not exclusively, on what happens today on the ground; it depends above all on the dynamic of the future peace or disengagement process — one needs only to observe the trends of Israeli public opinion from Oslo to Camp David — and on the political resolve it requires. To dissolve the state of Israel into a vague binational project on the uncertain premise that nothing can be done about the settlements is to confuse the problem with the solution — at an unfathomable price.
But there exists an ultimate reason, in fact the very first one, that makes such an outcome illusory: No one, or almost no one, wants it, either on one side or the other. Those Palestinians who continue to advocate for dialogue with Israel remain committed to the two-state solution, and the most radical who refuse it do not need any arguments besides their radicalism in order to reject any binational idea. In Israel itself, hostility to this approach is one of the rare subjects of national consensus.
A proposition that provokes such a universal rejection is, by definition, politically unrealistic, even assuming it could be viewed as desirable. If, however, Meron Benvenisti continues to brandish it and to explore its premises, it is not because of some sort of academic doggedness, but because he considers it, wrongly in my view, to be a lesser evil — and an inevitable lesser evil.

The situation

But for tony judt, a binational denouement is not only inevitable; it is eminently desirable. Doubtless, in the past, the solution of two states was possible, even just — Mr. Judt is good enough to admit that; but it seems to him today neither feasible nor above all desirable. And it is not only the situation on the ground that leads him to remit the two-state solution to the catalogue of obsolescences. It is the essence of the state of Israel, of what it has always been in reality: It is its very existence; it is the nature of the Zionist project that Tony Judt considers in hindsight problematic — historically, morally, politically, culturally.
With regard to the situation on the ground, for the years to come Mr. Judt envisages only two plausible scenarios: either the advent of Greater Israel, rid of the Palestinians through ethnic cleansing, or a binational state. Meron Benvenisti believes the dream of Greater Israel to be definitively compromised not only because reality made it impossible, but because he considers the Israelis morally and practically incapable of expelling 3.5 million Palestinians from their homes and lands. Tony Judt, who apparently knows better, does not exclude such a possibility, “either by forcible expulsion or else by starving [the Palestinians] of land and livelihood, leaving them no option but to go into exile”: The history of this last quarter of a century, he speculates, proves that ethnic cleansing of this amplitude is by no means “unthinkable.”
The appropriations and expropriations perpetrated by the settlers, or even sometimes by successive Israeli governments, are reprehensible and have been severely condemned in Israel itself. The recent destruction of olive fields gives an ominous foretaste of what the most extremist of the settlers are capable of doing. But to criminalize a priori all Israelis by declaring conceivable or even likely a generalized ethnic cleansing of which they would be, if not the direct perpetrators, at least the accomplices, or the helpless bystanders, is to subordinate uncertain facts to a preconceived opinion.
Mr. Judt’s use of facts is often inaccurate and nearly always biased. He describes as “heavily armed” the quarter of a million Israelis who reside beyond the Green Line, which makes improbable in his eyes their eventual consent to leave the Territories; many of them “will die — and kill — rather than move.” The facts, however, present quite a different picture: One part of these supposed fanatics, some 40,000, live in towns adjacent to Jerusalem, which various peace plans, including the Geneva Accords, envisage remaining under Israeli sovereignty; and if one believes the polls, most of the others, as I said, will abandon the territories that are returned to the Palestinians once the Knesset decides they should. How then should one estimate the number of those who would refuse to leave over their — and others’ — dead bodies? A few hundred, according to some estimates; a few thousand, suggest others — which is already too many, but clearly not enough for Mr. Judt, who pins that label of irredentist zealotry on a quarter of a million people, including women, children, and the elderly.
He takes the same liberty with the facts in reproaching the Bush administration for alienating Syria and Iran in order to back the interests of the Israeli government. Here is a curious assertion that espouses the thesis of President Assad of Syria, for whom, equally, everything would be rosy between the United States and Syria were it not for the evil Zionist enemy. But it so happens that the American administration — and the American press, even those most hostile to the war in Iraq — do not share this view. They accuse Syria of having let hundreds of fedayeen cross the border in order to attack American troops in Iraq; of seeking for years to produce, acquire, and traffic in unconventional, chemical, and biological weapons, as well as long-range missiles; and of supporting and financing not only the Lebanese Hezbollah, but other international terrorist groups. In any case, the change in attitude of Washington towards Damascus owes much more to the effects of September 11 and to the fallout from the invasion of Iraq than to the manipulations Mr. Judt attributes to the Israelis and their supporters on Capitol Hill.
But the problem for Tony Judt is not in bringing Syria to change its ways or Iran to renounce its nuclear program. It is to explain how and why the state of Israel should make itself disappear for the sake of a binational entity.
On the “how,” he proves singularly hasty and still more vague than — if not as candid as — Meron Benvenisti. The little he says in this regard is disproved by the picture he paints of the situation in the Territories. If the quarter of a million Israelis who live there are as “heavily armed” and radicalized as he contends, how exactly does he see them cohabiting with their Palestinian neighbors in the same state? And how does he envisage the existence of what would become a Jewish minority in a binational entity extending from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea? By what miracle can he imagine that Hamas and the Islamic Jihad will give up Jaffa, Haifa, and Safed and convert to the noble principles of liberal democracy? Turgot explained to Louis xvi that with a good educational system, in less than a decade the French people would all become enlightened philosophers. But Turgot, at least, had a plan. Tony Judt contents himself for his hypothetical binational state with a “brave and relentlessly engaged American leadership,” the presence of an international peacekeeping force, and the emergence of a new political class uniting (I suppose) Jews and Arabs in the peaceful management of the affairs of the polity.
That is where his meager proposals end, and the least one can say is that they don’t come with a guarantee of success. Mr. Judt, who proclaims himself in American circles a disciple of Raymond Aron and who has made a profession of denouncing the irresponsibility of intellectuals — especially when they happen to be French — here turns himself into a promoter of the “literary politics” that Aron, precisely, and Tocqueville before him dismissed with utter scorn. Who could believe that on this land, blood-stained by the alternating rhythm of suicide attacks and implacable reprisals, an international force or an American resolve could bring about or maintain the binational utopia born of his fantasy? Who can imagine that one could impose on two peoples a future that no one or almost no one wants? On the basis of what recent experience could one recommend introducing in the war-torn Middle East a project that has failed regularly in Europe and elsewhere? As Mr. Judt’s critics have observed, a state where the Jews will be destined to form a minority will not be binational; it will be a national Palestinian state that Jews will leave en masse, assuming that Hamas and the Islamic Jihad will give them the chance.

“Bad for the Jews”?

But Tony Judt sticks to his idea and gives his reasons, on which he proves somewhat more expansive. The first and the most extravagant in this extravagant text is contained in one sentence: “The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for Jews.” The conduct of the Jewish state, he writes, affects the way in which others see the Jews; and the increased incidence of attacks to which Jews are subject in Europe and elsewhere “is primarily attributable to misdirected efforts, often by young Muslims, to get back at Israel.”
Here as well Mr. Judt is at odds with the facts. It suffices to consider France, where the largest Jewish community in Europe coexists with the largest Muslim population. The brutality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is obviously not foreign to the wave of anti-Jewish attacks that have taken place on our territory, as well as to the assaults, denunciations, and insults that have become almost everyday occurrences and which seemed unimaginable not too long ago. But it is impossible to isolate these dramatic incidents from two factors noted by all fair-minded observers. These outrages, to begin with, are part of a long history of urban violence, not always particularly anti-Semitic, which is related to the difficulties with integration that confront the Muslim population. This violence does not date from the Intifada and is in danger, alas, of not ending with it, for it is aimed at all the French, Jewish or non-Jewish. The Middle East crises certainly made Jews privileged targets, which gave to these attacks, by the nature of things, a new and all the more troubling significance: that in many cases it is fueled by Arab anti-Semitism taught and encouraged — hence the second factor — by professional preachers, often of foreign origin. This new type of anti-Semitism — for a long time misunderstood and underestimated both in Europe and in Israel — is widespread throughout the Arab world, backed by autocratic and corrupt regimes as an outlet for popular frustration which is meant to draw attention away from their own failings. One can find its echo as well in many Palestinian textbooks which were published not since the outbreak of the second Intifiada, as one might suspect, but during the euphoric period that followed the Oslo Accords.
The anti-Semitic incidents that have multiplied in France and elsewhere over the past three years are evidently related to the current conflict, but they are equally attributable to frustrations and prejudices that have nothing to do with it and predate it as well. In any case, when one burns down a synagogue or attacks a Jew in the street for sins attributed to other Jews, these are not “misdirected” acts (to employ Mr. Judt’s euphemism) but the very essence of anti-Semitism.
Still Mr. Judt doesn’t let up: Israel is bad for the Jews. Bad for the Jews? One may hope this little enormity does not haunt him for long. On what basis is this assertion grounded? To which Jews exactly is Mr. Judt referring here? The Argentinean Jews who recently emigrated to Israel? The million Jews who left the former Soviet Union, where they experienced post-communist anti-Semitism totally unconnected to the fate of the Middle East? The mass of Jews expelled from Arab states during the past half-century? American Jews, whose very support of Israel fuels Mr. Judt with vapors of indignation? And, besides, if Israel is bad for the Jews, can Mr. Judt be so sure that its disappearance will be better for them?
The only valid truth that emerges from this allegation is that Israel is bad for at least one Jew. And since this country obviously poses a problem for Tony Judt, rather than work for its “conversion” — his use of this term is revealing — to a binational entity, it would be simpler and infinitely less costly for Mr. Judt to cultivate his own disagreement rather than project onto the totality of his fellow Jews his own moral discomfort.

An unjust anachronism?

But his preference for a binational solution, to be fair, cannot be reduced to the frustrations he seems to suffer from the bickering about Israel in New York, or the arrogance of the neoconservatives, or the sympathy, which he deems blameworthy, of the Bush administration towards the Sharon government. Besides being “bad for the Jews,” Mr. Judt explains, Israel represents an historical anachronism, founded, what is more, on an original injustice. Several nation-states rose from the ashes of the old empires on the eve of World War i, and their very first action was “to set about privileging their national, ‘ethnic’ majority . . . at the expense of inconvenient local minorities, who were consigned to second-class status.” The creation of the state of Israel not only reproduced this offense, but posed the additional difficulty of having arrived “too late” in a world where borders are open, democracies are pluralist, and there are multiple “elective identities.” This late-blooming nation-state thus embodies the double sin, according to Tony Judt, of both injustice and anachronism.
The legitimacy of the Zionist enterprise was, we know, contested from the outset. But when it comes to legitimacy, it is not ideological posturing but history that is the final judge. The history of Israel’s creation, which is still being written, has not yet produced its moral balance sheet — and thus is incommensurate with the experience of nation-states whose security has been established for centuries. Tony Judt does not contest the legitimacy of the French nation on account of the Frankish invasions, or that of England by stigmatizing the armed expedition of William the Conqueror. But he haggles over Israel’s legitimacy for its supposedly anachronistic character. As Mark Lilla recently noted, as if replying to Judt in anticipation, “all political foundings, without exception, are morally ambiguous enterprises, and Israel has not escaped these ambiguities. Two kinds of fools or bigots refuse to see this: those who deny or explain away the Palestinian suffering caused by Israel’s founding, and those who treat that suffering as the unprecedented consequence of a uniquely sinister ideology.”
The sufferings of the Palestinians, which are not all attributable to Israel, and the condition of the Israeli Arabs do not validate a wholesale denial of the Jewish state but rather impose obligations, moral and political, upon any Israeli government, whether of the right or the left, on which it should be judged — and, if necessary, reprimanded.

The “post-national” perspective

Yet tony judt proposes to make Israel disappear not only for what its government does or does not do, but for what it apparently is: an anachronistic nation-state in a world where the nation-state is doomed to obsolescence. One could object that Israel is not the only or even the latest nation-state born since the end of World War ii; the United Nations directory is full of them. Why then confer on this particular state the “elective” honor of disappearing first? I suppose the reasons cited above are explanation enough.
But, in fact, what is the source of this odd certitude concerning the anachronism, the obsolescence, of the nation-state? Mr. Judt’s American critics have brought to his attention that France, the cradle of the nation-state, is still around and that perhaps one should begin there the undertaking of the nation-state’s obliteration. I am astonished that they had to look across the ocean for material proof that the national state still exists. It would have sufficed to invite Tony Judt to look out his own window. If some had doubts about the overwhelming vigor of the American nation-state, the aftermath of September 11 ought to have opened their eyes. Many Americans (and many French) are obsessed by the gripping weight in American culture of multiculturalism, communitarianism, feminism, rights talk, and the soft tyranny of political correctness. But they are much less aware of the intangible reality that circumscribes these phenomena and transcends them without ever bending to their influence: precisely the framework of the nation. The plurality of elective identities, which Mr. Judt takes to be exclusive of the nation-state, can flourish freely in the United States, as in Israel for that matter, precisely because these identities remain strictly subordinate to the sovereignty of the nation-state: They prevent neither America nor Israel from affirming and consolidating blatantly a national identity, from resorting to military force, and from allowing individual and collective differences to unfold. In both countries, all the invocations of rights and all the particular claims end up giving in to political sovereignty, which remains intrinsically superior to any other claim of legitimacy.
In other words more abstract, here are two living examples, America and Israel, where democracy, the nation, and the sovereign state are closely linked. And if so many Europeans today have a hard time acknowledging this “incongruity,” and a harder time still putting up with it, this is because they tend increasingly to detach democracy from the nation and to persuade themselves, against all the evidence, that democracy does not need either the nation or the state in order to flourish.
The wars of the twentieth century have fatally brought the nation into disrepute, and this process has only grown further with European integration. We do not cherish the nation anymore, but we are unable to abandon it because we do not know how and with what to adequately replace it. Political philosophy does not provide us with any practical alternative: neither the tribe, nor the empire, nor the city. Even Europe disconcerts us: It has taken only one plenary session of the Council, enlarged to 25 states — only one! — to make us discover, belatedly, that the European machine cannot offer an adequate substitute for our disaffection with the nation. But this disaffection remains so deeply rooted that many Europeans are less and less inclined to understand those nation-states which are not afflicted by our doubts, and still less to tolerate the use these states make of their monopoly on legitimate force. The detestation of George W. Bush or of Ariel Sharon does not confine itself to what in their policies could be seen as reprehensible — and God knows they may be, in certain respects. Rather it is combined with a sentiment of alienation and frustration in the presence of such fully assumed expressions of national sovereignty — this still-vital constellation of the nation-state and democracy, which so many of us are inclined to disconnect and even to oppose.
Israel offers a mirror, an exemplary case in which we can contemplate and realize vicariously our schizophrenic relationship towards the national question. It is no accident that the more virulent critics, who often happen to be those of the United States as well, are to be found in the ranks of the antiglobalization movement. The type of postnational nihilism they inscribed on their banner contributed to the depoliticization of their approach to politics in general and the Middle East in particular: Israel, in other words, is that nation-state which most immediately vexes their planetary humanism.
Mr. Judt’s article provides a more reasoned illustration of the same phenomenon: He wants to put an end to the anachronism of the Israeli nation-state, which offends his sensibility, without putting any practical content into his binational fantasy. He dresses a subjective opinion in the outward form of a political discussion. But I fear that reality will shun his moral ultimatum.
The only political option available to Israel today is dictated neither by divine providence nor by its military superiority, and not even by the good or bad will of the Palestinians, but by the obdurate ruling of demographics: If Israel wishes to remain a Jewish nation-state, it must retreat, unilaterally if necessary, and the sooner the better, from most of its territories occupied since 1967, including certain Jerusalem neighborhoods. In so doing — and on this, Meron Benvenisti is quite right — Israel will nevertheless not avoid a certain binational reality, since 20 percent (and soon 25 percent) of those living within the Israeli territory are Arabs. Although they participate formally in democratic life, in electing and being elected to the Knesset  — a privilege their Arab brothers in neighboring countries have not yet savored —  these full citizens  — nationally but not in every aspect and always full — experience all the ambiguities and difficulties of constituting an Arab minority within a Jewish state. When asked, they express at the same time their natural attachment to the Palestinian cause and their refusal to live in the future state of Palestine: too Israeli to be fully Palestinian, too Palestinian to be simply Israeli. It is with them that Israel must urgently renew a dialogue broken some years ago. While there is still time.
By Ran Halévi
Ran Halévi is a professor at the Centre de Recherches Politiques Raymond-Aron in Paris. This article originally appeared in the French journal Le Debat, published by Editions Gallimard, and appears here with permission. Translated from the French by Robert Howse.

A Binational Confederation

Binationalism, as a general category, need not be equated—as Lama Abu-Odeh equates it—with the specific proposal for a binational state as opposed to a two-state solution. Presented below is a three-state framework that is also a species of binationalism. It is offered as an idea to consider, as a possible solution, not just to the problem of self-determination of both peoples, but also to the issues of refugees, Jerusalem, and security. It does this while preserving the Jewish character of the State of Israel.

1. The Confederation of Israel-Palestine
There will be three distinct states:
a) The Jewish State of Israel
b) The Arab State of Palestine
c) The Binational State of Israel-Palestine

2. The confederal government
The confederal government shall have various administrative functions. It will be governed by representatives of the three states with each state exercising veto power.

3. Confederal citizenship
Any citizen of a member state will automatically also be a citizen of the Confederation.
Citizens of the Confederation will have the right to work and travel anywhere within its borders. They will also have the right to own property anywhere within the territory of the Confederation, though this may be subject to regulation by a member state.

4. Member state citizenship
All citizenship in the Confederation's member states will require a choice of citizenship by the adult populations. There will be opportunities for joint and tri-state citizenship.
The Jewish State of Israel
Citizenship will be open to any current citizen of Israel (Jewish, Palestinian or otherwise). Israel will determine its own immigration policy and naturalization requirements. Some opportunities for citizenship will be offered to Palestinian refugees. Permanent residency status will be guaranteed to all current citizens of Israel and their descendants, whether or not they opt to become citizens of Israel. Such residency rights will remain, regardless of whether these individuals opt for citizenship in Palestine or the Binational State. Permanent residents shall have equal access to social programs and enforceable rights under law. Israeli citizenship will continue to be required for voting in Israel's national elections. Voting rights in local elections will be extended to all permanent residents.
The Arab State of Palestine
Citizenship will be open to all Palestinians, whether residing in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, Israel, or outside, whether refugees or not. At the discretion of the Palestinian state, citizenship opportunities may be offered to Israelis currently residing within the original territory of Palestine (e.g., settlers).
The Binational State
Citizenship will be open to anyone eligible for citizenship in either state, but citizenship in one of the two states will not be required for eligibility. Thus, some Israelis and Palestinians may be citizens only of the Binational State, whereas others may enjoy dual or even three-way citizenship.

5. Sovereignty and territory
The original sovereignty of Palestine shall include all of the Gaza Strip and all of the West Bank, with the exclusion of East Jerusalem, which shall be outside the original sovereignty of either state. The original sovereignty of Israel shall consist of the territory under Israeli control prior to the 1967 war.
Both Israel and Palestine will contribute equal amounts of territory to the Binational State from their areas of original sovereignty. It is expected that the State of Palestine will contribute to the creation of the Binational State much of the areas presently occupied by Israeli settlers. It is expected that Israel will contribute to the Binational State areas of equal size from within its pre-1967 borders. Over time, by mutual agreement, the two national states may contribute larger areas.

6. Palestinian refugees
Palestinian refugees will have both a right to citizenship in the Binational State and in the Palestinian state. Within the areas contributed to the Binational State by Israel, refugees will have a priority for the establishment of communities. Israel will also offer opportunities for refugees who are citizens of either the Binational State or the Palestinian state to become permanent residents within Israel. Some opportunities for Israeli citizenship will also be offered.

7. The Old City and religious sites
No state will exercise sovereignty over the Old City or its religious sites, these being said to fall under "the sovereignty of God," or simply, under confederal sovereignty. Overall administration of the Old City will be in the hands of the Confederation of Israel-Palestine; this might extend to all of East Jerusalem. All three states will be entitled to have their capitals in Jerusalem, should they so choose.
The Western Wall and the plaza before it shall be under the control of such authorities as the State of Israel shall appoint. The Haram al Sharif/Temple Mount shall be under the control of such authorities as the State of Palestine shall appoint. Neither state may excavate behind the wall or under the mount without the agreement of the confederal government.

8. Security
a) The Binational State will be demilitarized.
b) Palestine will have only a limited armed force.
c) No state may enter into military agreements with any state not at peace with the other members of the    Confederation.
d) The Confederation may enter into a defense agreement with the United States.
e) The Confederation may maintain monitoring forces on its external borders.

The above is put forward as an exploratory framework; something worth discussing; something, no doubt, in need of modification. It seeks to use the idea of a binational state and a confederation to give Israelis and Palestinians who wish to be citizens of a binational state an opportunity to do so. It offers a way for some refugees to return to lands within current Israel without threatening the demographic balance among Israeli citizens. It further offers a way of circumventing the problem of Israelis' and Palestinians' sovereign claims to the Old City and its religious sites. And it may provide a way of dealing with the long-term demographic challenges facing a Jewish state that aspires to the values of democracy.

By Jerome M. Segal - Senior research scholar at the University of Maryland's Center for International and Security Studies, and the president of The Jewish Peace Lobby.

Israel-Palestine: Time for a binational State

There is talk once again of a one-state bi-national solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Oslo peace process failed to bring Palestinians their independence and the withdrawal from Gaza has not created a basis for a democratic Palestinian state as President George Bush had imagined: the Palestinians are watching their territory being fragmented into South African-style bantustans with poverty levels of over 75 percent. The area is heading to the abyss of an apartheid state system rather than to a viable two-state solution, let alone peace.

There have been a number of recent publications proposing a one-state solution as the only alternative to the current impasse. Three years ago Meron Benvenisti, Jerusalem's deputy mayor in the 1970s, wrote that the question is "no longer whether there is to be a bi-national state in Palestine-Israel, but which model to choose". Respected intellectuals on all sides, including the late Edward Said; the Arab Israeli member of the Knesset, Azmi Bishara; the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe; scholars Tanya Reinhart and Virginia Tilley; and journalists Amira Haas and Ali Abunimah, have all stressed the inevitability of such a solution.

The idea of a single, bi-national state is not new. Its appeal lies in its attempt to provide an equitable and inclusive solution to the struggle of two peoples for the same piece of land. It was first suggested in the 1920s by Zionist leftwing intellectuals led by philosopher Martin Buber, Judah Magnes (the first rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Haim Kalvarisky (a member of Brit-Shalom and later of the National Union). The group followed in the footsteps of Ahad Ha'am (Asher Hirsch Ginsberg, one of the great pre-state Zionist thinkers).

Underlying their Zionism was a quest for a Jewish renaissance, both cultural and spiritual, with a determination to avoid injustice in its achievement. It was essential to found a new nation, although not necessarily a separate Jewish state and certainly not at the expense of the existing population. Magnes argued that the Jewish people did not "need a Jewish state to maintain its very existence".

No to partition

Although supporters of the bi-national state remained a marginal group in Zionist politics under the British mandate, they made sure they were heard both in official Zionist circles and the international arena. They also pleaded before the 1947 United Nations special committee on Palestine. When the commission finally recommended partition, they strongly opposed it, calling for a bi-national state in Palestine, forming part of an Arab federation. They campaigned for a federal state that would respect the rights of all citizens, while guaranteeing the national aspirations of the Jewish people to cultural and linguistic autonomy. They proposed, in line with the British, the creation of a legislative council based on proportional representation, safeguarding the rights of its nationals but also assuring equal political rights for all citizens of the state.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]With the UN's partition plan and the Arab-Israeli war that broke out in 1948, a one-state solution was shelved[an error occurred while processing this directive]
But with the UN's partition plan and the Arab-Israeli war that broke out in 1948, a one-state solution was shelved. It came to light again in 1969 with the call by Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement for the creation of a "secular and democratic state" in Palestine. The new state was based on the right of return -- while accepting a Jewish presence in Palestine -- and it was to end the injustices stemming from the creation of Israel and the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinian villagers. Although it called for the destruction of Israel as a colonial entity, it upheld the principle of a single state for all, Muslim, Christian or Jew. This was the first official attempt by the Palestinians to address the relationship between national and individual rights of citizenry. The idea met with no enthusiasm in Israel, and none internationally, and again lost momentum.

The failure of the one-state option has often been attributed to the idealism of its cause and its failure to come to terms with local realities. Nevertheless, as Magnes pointed out, the option offered significant advantages in demographic and territorial terms in 1947 to the Jewish cause.

In fact, the idea failed because the political actors of the time rejected it: the Zionist organisations were not interested, the British were unsupportive and the Arabs too suspicious. Between 1948 and 1993 the only significant change in these positions came from the Arabs, who finally came to terms with the existence of Israel.

Despite the Palestine Liberation Organisation's calls for a secular, democratic state, Arafat prepared Palestinians for partition as the only available option. The PLO's national council accepted the position in 1974, and confirmed it with its declaration of Palestinian independence in 1988 and the acceptance of the UN partition plan. A separate, independent Palestinian state was the best hope, even if it had to be on only 22 percent of the territory. The long Palestinian struggle for statehood culminated in 1993 with the Oslo accords.

From dream to nightmare

The tragedy of Oslo is that it turned the dream of two states into the nightmare of a single new state of apartheid. Israel's prime minister Yitzhak Rabin declared that the great success of the accords, perhaps their only success, was to recognise that Israelis and Palestinians were "destined to live together, on the same soil in the same land".

Since 1994 the Palestinians have not been liberated; they have been imprisoned by the Israeli system of permits and the installation of 50 permanent checkpoints and terminals fragmenting the territory into eight bantustans. [6] Since 2002 the Palestinian Authority has seen its territory further eroded by the 700km-long wall being built with the aim of severing the West Bank from the remaining 46 percent of the territory.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]A two-state plan appears to be less of a solution to the nationalist aspirations of either Zionists or Palestinians[an error occurred while processing this directive]
What is the attraction of a bi-national state in these circumstances? For a start, a two-state plan appears to be less of a solution to the nationalist aspirations of either Zionists or Palestinians. Before 1947 partition had not been tried; since then it has taken root in circumstances of total Israeli domination. Despite the historic compromise of 1993, the Palestinians have not obtained the independent, viable state they sought. Palestinian nationalism has also met its limits: its leaders have failed to guide their people to independence and are now reduced to tearing themselves apart.

But partition has also failed to give Jews the security the state of Israel promised. About 400 Israelis were killed in suicide attacks in the 1990s, and 1,000 more have died since the second intifada of 2000. Anti-Semitic feelings are worsening around the world.

Demographic changes will continue to undermine any plans for partition. In 2005 there were 5.2 million Israelis living between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river, and 5.6 million Palestinians. Despite Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and its plans to demarcate the West Bank frontier, a separate Israeli state will have to deal with the much more rapid demographic growth of the Palestinian population within its own frontiers. This will have not only economic but political consequences, given the Palestinian population's current lack of basic rights.

There is another factor that argues against a two-state solution: the idea of citizenship founded on justice and equality. History has shown that, in this region as elsewhere, partition cannot be achieved without the expulsion and transfer of populations. This raises ethnic issues. There can be no peace, from a moral point of view, without an equitable solution to the Palestinian refugee problem, based on the right of return or compensation, as required as early as 1948 by resolution 194 of the UN General Assembly.

But this right of return, and the expansion of the Palestinian population, endangers Israel's Jewish identity. This has always been a major problem for Israelis.

Essential anachronism
[an error occurred while processing this directive]No state can claim democratic credentials whilst practising ethnic exclusion; not after the crimes of the last century[an error occurred while processing this directive]
According to historian Tony Judt, this is where Israel reaches its limits. No state can claim democratic credentials whilst practising ethnic exclusion; not after the crimes of the last century. Virginia Tilley says that partition, and the very existence of Israel, are "flawed from the start, resting on the discredited idea, on which political Zionism stakes all its moral authority, that any ethnic group can legitimately claim permanent formal dominion over a territorial state".

The establishment of a bi-national state would redefine the identity of the state; it would favour democracy over nationalism. For Ali Abunimah it would allow "all the people to live in and enjoy the entire country while preserving their distinctive communities and addressing their particular needs. It offers the potential to deterritorialise the conflict and neutralise demography and ethnicity as a source of political power and legitimacy". At the heart of this conflict there remains a persistent territorial issue. Ethnicity (and, even more, religion) continues to be the main source of legitimacy and the quest for power.

Those arguing for a single democratic state now detect growing popular support for this solution, inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement. Boycott campaigns are being organised in Europe and the United States against what is often now called Israeli apartheid.

Groups in Israel and in Palestine are working together against the construction of the separation wall and are inventing new forms of resistance. The struggle has been redirected, against Israel's policies rather than its people, and for rights for all rather than separate states for each.

True, the three political protagonists seem far from convinced. Israel's politicians and the majority of its population insist on separation, as their wholehearted support for the wall seems to prove. The international community seems intent on a two-state solution, but does little to bring it about or influence progress. The Palestinian leadership is at a loss for a strategy, and the differences between Hamas and Fatah continue to generate conflict. But the present deadlock has created new conditions. Perhaps the time is ripe for original ideas and untried solutions.

By Leila Farsakh, The Electronic Intifada, 20 March 2007

Leila Farsakh is an assistant professor at University of Massachusetts, Boston, and author of Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, land and occupation (Routledge, London, 2005). This article was originally published by Le Monde diplomatique on 7 March 2007.

Israel-Palestina: É hora do Estado binacional

Mais uma vez se fala sobre um Estado Binacional como solução para o conflito Israel-Palestina. O processo de paz de Oslo fracassou ao trazer a independência aos palestinos e a retirada de Gaza não criou a base para um Estado palestino democrático como imaginava o presidente George Bush: os palestinos estão vendo seu território ser fragmentado como os Bantustans sul-africanos, com níveis de miséria acima dos 75%. A região está mais próxima de se encaminhar para um sistema de Apartheid do que para uma viável solução de dois Estados vivendo em paz.

Tem aumentado o número de publicações recentes propondo uma solução de Estado único como única alternativa para o atual impasse. Há três anos atrás, Meron Benvenisti, prefeito de Jerusalém nos anos 70, escreveu que a questão "não é mais sobre se deve haver, ou não, um Estado Binacional de israelenses e palestinos, mas sim de qual modelo devemos escolher." Intelectuais respeitados, inclusive o saudoso Edward Said; o membro árabe-israelense do Knesset, Azmi Bishara; o historiador israelense Ilan Pappe; as intelectuais Tanya Reinhart e Virginia Tilley; o jornalista Amira Haas e Ali Abunimah, todos eles apontaram a inevitabilidade dessa solução.

A idéia de um único Estado Binacional não é nova. Seu apelo deriva da tentativa de promover um solução equânime e inclusiva diante da luta dos dois povos pela mesma terra. Ela foi sugerida pela primeira vez em 1920, pelos intelectuais sionistas de esquerda liderados pelos filósofos Martin Buber, Judah Magnes (o primeiro reitor da Universidade Hebraica de Jerusalém) e Haim Kalvarisky (membro do Brit-Shalom e mais tarde da União Nacional). O grupo seguia os passos de Ahad Ha'am (Ascher Hirsch Ginsberg, um dos maiores pensadores sionistas pré-Estado).

Acompanhando o seu sionismo havia uma busca por um Renascimento Judeu, tanto cultural como espiritual, com a determinação de evitar a injustiça em seu cumprimento. Era essencial a fundação de uma nova nação, mas não necessariamente a separação por conta de um Estado judeu e certamente não às custas da população já existente. Magnes defendia que o povo judeu não "precisa de um Estado judeu para manter sua própria existência."  

Não à partição

Ainda que defensores do Estado Binacional se mantivessem como um grupo marginal dentro dos políticos sionistas durante o mandato britânico, eles conseguiram garantir que seriam ouvidos tanto nos círculos sionistas como no plano internacional. Eles também fizeram esse apelo diante do comitê especial das Nações Unidas da Palestina em 1947. Quando a comissão deliberou e recomendou a partição, eles se opuseram radicalmente, defendendo a criação de um Estado Binacional na Palestina, fazendo parte de uma Federação Árabe. Eles fizeram campanha por um Estado federativo que respeitaria os direitos de todos os cidadãos, enquanto garantiria as aspirações nacionais de judeus no que dizia respeito à autonomia em relação à sua língua e sua cultura. Eles propuseram, junto com os ingleses, a criação de um conselho legislativo baseado em representação proporcional, defendendo os direitos das nacionalidades ali residentes, mas também garantindo direitos políticos iguais para todos os cidadãos do Estado.

Mas com o plano de separação da ONU e a guerra Árabe-Israelense que começara em 1948, a solução de um Estado único foi esquecida. Ela só veio surgir novamente em 1969, com o chamado do movimento Fatah, de Yasser Arafat, pela criação de um "Estado secular e democrático" na Palestina. O novo Estado era baseado no "direito de regresso" -- aceitando a presença de judeus na Palestina -- e deveria acabar com as injustiças que surgiram com a criação de Israel e a expulsão de 750.000 colonos palestinos. Ainda que defendesse a destruição de Israel enquanto entidade colonial, ela defendia o princípio do Estado único para todos, muçulmanos, cristãos, ou judeus. Essa foi a primeira tentativa oficial por parte dos palestinos de ir além dos direitos nacional e individual de cidadania no relacionamento dos dois países. A idéia não encontrou nenhum entusiasmo em Israel, e nenhuma referência em âmbito internacional, e novamente perdeu o seu "momentum".

O fracasso da opção pelo Estado único geralmente foi atribuído ao idealismo de sua causa e o seu fracasso em defender termos condizentes com as realidades locais. Ainda assim, como Magnes havia apontado, a opção oferecia vantagens significantes diante dos termos demográficos e territoriais da causa judaica de 1947.

De fato, a idéia fracassou porque os atores políticos da época a rejeitaram: as organizações sionistas não estavam interessadas, os britânicos não deram apoio e os árabes tinham muitas suspeitas. Entre 1948 e 1993, a única mudança significativa nessa posição veio dos árabes, que finalmente passaram a aceitar a existência de Israel.

Apesar do chamado da Organização pela Libertação da Palestina por um Estado democrático e secular, Arafat preparou os palestinos para a manutenção da separação como a única opção avaliável. O conselho nacional da OLP aceitou essa posição em 1974, e a confirmou com a declaração de independência palestina em 1988 e a aceitação do plano de partição da ONU. Um Estado palestino separado e independente era a melhor esperança, mesmo que tivesse que ser com apenas 22% do seu território original. A longa luta dos palestinos pela criação de seu país culminou nos acordos de Oslo em 1993.

Do sonho ao pesadelo

A tragédia de Oslo é que ela tornou o sonho de dois Estados no pesadelo de um novo Estado em regime de apartheid. O primeiro ministro israelense Yithzak Rabin declarava que o grande sucesso dos acordos, talvez o único sucesso, era reconhecer que israelenses e palestinos estavam "destinados a viver juntos, no mesmo solo, na mesma terra."  

Desde 1994 os palestinos não foram libertados; eles ainda estão aprisionados pelo sistema israelense de permissões e pela instalação de mais 50 barreiras permanentes e terminais fragmentando o seu território em oito bantustans. Desde 2002 a Autoridade Palestina viu seu território ser desgastado por um longo muro de 700 quilômetros com o objetivo de separar a Cisjordânia dos 46% restantes do território.

Qual a atração de um Estado Binacional nessas circunstâncias? Para começar, um plano que contemple a criação de dois Estados parece não ser uma solução adequada às aspirações nacionalistas tanto de sionistas como de palestinos. Antes de 1947 a separação não havia sido tentada; desde então a proposta ganhou força diante da dominação total de Israel. Apesar do compromisso histórico de 1993, os palestinos não obtiveram a criação de um Estado independente como imaginavam. O nacionalismo palestino também alcançou seus limites: seus líderes fracassaram ao levar seu povo à independência e agora estão reduzidos em conflitos internos.

Mas a separação também falhou ao não dar a segurança aos judeus que o Estado de Israel prometera. Cerca de 400 israelenses foram assassinados em atentados suicidas nos anos 90, e mais 1.000 foram mortos na Segunda Intifada, em 2000. Sentimentos anti-semitas estão piorando ao redor do globo.

As mudanças demográficas continuarão minando os planos de separação. Em 2005 havia 5.2 milhões de israelenses vivendo entre o Mediterrâneo e o rio Jordão, e 5.6 milhões de palestinos. Apesar da retirada de Israel na faixa de Gaza em 2005 e os seus planos de demarcar as fronteiras com a Cisjordânia, um Estado israelense separado terá que lidar com um crescimento demográfico da população palestina dentro de suas próprias fronteiras. Isso irá trazer consequências não apenas econômicas, mas também políticas, levando em consideração a ausência de direitos básicos que se manifesta na população palestina.

Há um outro fator que se coloca contra a solução de dois Estados: a idéia de cidadania fundada na igualdade e na justiça. A História tem nos mostrado que, nessa região, como em qualquer outro lugar no mundo, a separação não será possível sem a expulsão e a transferência de população. Isso levanta problemas étnicos. Não há como atingir a paz, de um ponto de vista moral, sem uma solução razoável para o problema de refugiados palestinos, baseada no direito de compensação, como já exigido antes de 1948 através da resolução 194 da Assembléia Geral das Nações Unidas.

Mas esse direito de retorno e a expansão do povo palestino ameaça a identidade judaica de Israel. E esse sempre foi um dos maiores problemas dos israelenses.

Anacronismo essencial

De acordo com o historiador Toni Judt, é nesse ponto que Israel chega ao seu limite. Nenhum Estado pode se declarar democrático enquanto pratica exclusão étnica; não depois dos crimes do último século. Virginia Tillley diz que a separação, e a própria existência de Israel, estão "manchadas desde o início, repousando sobre uma idéia desacreditada, na qual o sionismo político defende com toda sua autoridade moral, de que um grupo étnico tem legitimidade de declarar um domínio permanente sobre um território."  

O estabelecimento de um Estado Binacional iria redefinir a identidade do Estado; iria favorecer a democracia acima do nacionalismo. Para Ali Abunimah, ele permitiria "que todas as pessoas vivessem e usufruíssem de todo o país enquanto preservariam as comunidades distintas, tentando solucionar suas necessidades particulares. Ele ofereceria o potencial para desterritorializar o conflito e neutralizar questões demográficas e étnicas como fonte de poderes políticos e de legitimidade." [9] No centro do conflito atual, persiste o problema territorial. Etnicidade (e, mais ainda, a religião) continuam a ser a maior fonte de legitimidade na busca pelo poder.

Esses argumentos por um Estado único e democrático começam a detectar apoio popular, inspirados nos movimentos anti-aparheid da África do Sul. Campanhas de boicote estão sendo organizadas na Europa e nos Estados Unidos contra o chamado apartheid israelense.  

Grupos em Israel e na Palestina estão trabalhando juntos contra a construção do muro da separação e estão criando novas formas de resistência. A luta está sendo redirecionada, voltada contra a política de Israel e não mais contra o seu povo, e pela busca por direitos ao invés da separação de Estados para cada nacionalidade.

Verdade seja dita, os três protagonistas ainda não parecem convencidos. Os políticos israelenses e a maioria da população insistem na separação, assim como parece mostrar o seu apoio à construção do muro. A comunidade internacional busca a solução para a criação dos dois Estados, mas faz muito pouco por ele no que diz respeito à sua influência. A liderança palestina está sem estratégia e as diferenças entre Hamas e Fatah continuam a gerar conflitos. Mas a presente encruzilhada criou novas soluções. Talvez essa seja a melhor hora para ideais originais e soluções ainda não tentadas. 

By Leila Farsakh, "The Electronic Intifada", 20 março de 2007