Lost in the international uproar over Russia's Olympic Games-eve invasion and
occupation of Georgia and now the political and meteorological storms sweeping
across the United States is a seismic shift in the dynamics of another
conflict, one which offers a similarly vexing challenge to the core policy
goals of the United States, Europe and many Middle Eastern governments to that
posed by a newly belligerent Russia.
Largely unreported in the American and Western media, on August 10, two days
after the start of both the Russian invasion and the Olympics, Palestinian lead
negotiator Ahmed Qurie declared that if the peace process did not advance
towards a final settlement soon, Palestinians would stop pursuing a
two-state
solution and demand the establishment of a bi-national state with Israel.
After the Annapolis peace conference held last November in the United States,
Israel and the Palestinians agreed to form two negotiation teams to reach an
agreement on major permanent status issues before the end of this year. Hopes
are fading for any agreement within this timeframe, especially on statehood,
which makes Qurie's comments all the more pertinent.
Qurie, better known as Abu Alaa, explained, "The Palestinian leadership has
been working on establishing a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders ... If
Israel continues to oppose making this a reality, then the Palestinian demand
for the Palestinian people and its leadership [would be] one state, a
bi-national state."
In effect, pressure would be put on Palestinian Authority (PA) President
Mahmoud Abbas to halt all negotiations and demand that Israel annex the
Palestinian territories with all their residents. Indeed, Abbas has hinted he
might dissolve the PA and demand a bi-national state if progress is not made
soon.
According to the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, a forum has begun activities in the
Occupied Territories and the Palestinian diaspora aimed at dismantling the PA
and the return of responsibility for the territories to Israel. A petition in
this regard was published this week in the London-based, Arabic-language
al-Hayat daily newspaper.
To date, Israel's leadership has refused to get excited by the Palestinian
threat of a bi-national state. "It's all a tactic," said a senor government
official was quoted in the media as saying this week. "I would not bet on it in
a casino."
All the same, the issue represents a sea-change in Palestinian attitudes
towards the peace process. Even at its lowest ebb, former Palestinian leader
Yasser Arafat threatened merely to declare a state within the West Bank and
Gaza.
Today the mere possibility of a bi-national solution so frightens Israel's
leaders that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert equated it with apartheid, warning that
if the two-state process failed, Israel would "face a South African-style
struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens, the state of
Israel is finished".
The reason Israel would be "finished" is clear: given the current state of
relations between Jews and Palestinians it is difficult to envision Jews
maintaining control over the territory, holy places, military, economy and
immigration of Israel/Palestine in a bi-national state, especially after the
demographic balance shifts in favor of Palestinians, as many experts believe it
is close to doing.
In such a situation, Israel as a Jewish state would either "vanish from the
pages of time", as Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad has infamously
advocated, or an all-out civil war would erupt that would likely result in the
exile of the vast majority of Palestinians from both Israel and the Occupied
Territories.
Despite these apocalyptic possibilities, the peace process today stands close
to the bi-national abyss. The more Palestinians feel they have nothing left to
lose, the more likely it becomes that they will press for "one person, one
vote", returning in essence if not rhetoric to the Palestinian Liberation
Organization's pre-1988 advocacy of a "secular democratic state" in all of
pre-1948 Palestine.
In reality, this turn of events should not surprise anyone. Already a
generation ago, Israeli geographer Meron Benvenisti argued in his 1987 West
Bank Data Base Project that by the mid-1980s, the Occupied Territories had
become so integrated into Israel that it was no longer possible to separate
them. By the time Palestinians and Israelis were ready to negotiate a "divorce"
in the early 1990s it was too late to do so.
Israelis certainly wanted peace, but they weren't prepared to make the huge
territorial, political and economic sacrifices that was necessary to allow for
the creation of a viable Palestinian state. Instead, under the guise of a "New
Middle East" Oslo reinforced rather than ameliorated the most basic dynamics of
the occupation.
Benvenisti described the conglomeration of Israel and the Occupied Territories
"a bi-national entity with a rigid, hierarchical social structure based on
ethnicity ... The only reason this has not been universally acknowledged is
that the territories have not been formally annexed".
In the decade and a half after Benvenisti wrote these words the number of
settlers doubled, land confiscations continued apace, and the ties between the
settlements and Israel proper grew ever more deep, a phenomenon that continued
during the eight-year long al-Aqsa intifada. The PA became increasingly corrupt
and paralyzed during Oslo, while Hamas failed to move beyond terrorism even
though it reinforced the occupation.
With Palestinians wielding bi-nationalism as a threat and Israelis imagining it
as a curse, it's not surprising that the idea still has relatively few
supporters. But what if a bi-national state was re-imagined as a positive
development, one that allows for the greatest possible realization of both
Jewish and Palestinian aspirations? Indeed, the idea had this connotation for
progressive Zionists such as the Brit Shalom movement during the pre-1948
period, and an increasing number of Israeli academics and activists are giving
the idea a second look today.
Even Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), in Zionism's ur-text, Altneuland (The
Old New Land), describes the future Jewish state as one in which Jews and
Palestinians have equal rights and responsibilities in the civic and economic
life of the country.
Of course, Herzl also imagined "spiriting" Palestinians "across the border" to
ensure the creation of a Jewish state. And it is precisely such paradoxical
sentiments towards Palestinians - wanting to live with them as good neighbors
and wanting to get rid of them in order to ensure unfettered possession of the
land - that has defined the serpentine trajectory of Zionism during the past
century.
Today it seems
we are back to Herzl's Old-New Land, with no one sure which path will lead to a
peaceful future. One thing that is certain, however, is that in the interregnum
between the death of the two-state solution and emergence of a workable
alternative much blood will be shed, with increasingly dangerous consequences
for the stability of the Middle East at large, and with it, for the security of
the United States.
Mark LeVine is professor of modern Middle Eastern history at UC Irvine
and author of half a dozen books, including Heavy Metal Islam (Random
House) and An Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books,
in press).
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