No subject

Forget the two-state solution
Israelis and Palestinians must share the land. Equally.
By Saree Makdisi

May 11, 2008

There is no longer a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. Forget the endless arguments about who offered what and who
spurned whom and whether the Oslo peace process died when Yasser
Arafat walked away from the bargaining table or whether it was Ariel
Sharon's stroll through the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem that did it
in.

All that matters are the facts on the ground, of which the most
important is that -- after four decades of intensive Jewish
settlement in the Palestinian territories it occupied during the 1967
war -- Israel has irreversibly cemented its grip on the land on which
a Palestinian state might have been created.

Sixty years after Israel was created and Palestine was destroyed,
then, we are back to where we started: Two populations inhabiting one
piece of land. And if the land cannot be divided, it must be shared.
Equally.

This is a position, I realize, which may take many Americans by
surprise. After years of pursuing a two-state solution, and feeling
perhaps that the conflict had nearly been solved, it's hard to give
up the idea as unworkable.

But unworkable it is. A report published last summer by the United
Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs found
that almost 40% of the West Bank is now taken up by Israeli
infrastructure -- roads, settlements, military bases and so on --
largely off-limits to Palestinians. Israel has methodically broken
the remainder of the territory into dozens of enclaves separated from
each other and the outside world by zones that it alone controls
(including, at last count, 612 checkpoints and roadblocks).

Moreover, according to the report, the Jewish settler population in
the occupied territories, already approaching half a million, not
only continues to grow but is growing at a rate three times greater
than the rate of Israel's population increase. If the current rate
continues, the settler population will double to almost 1 million
people in just 12 years. Many are heavily armed and ideologically
driven, unlikely to walk away voluntarily from the land they have
declared to be their God-given home.

These facts alone render the status of the peace process academic.

At no time since the negotiations began in the early 1990s has Israel
significantly suspended the settlement process in the occupied
Palestinian territories, in stark violation of international law. It
preceded last November's Annapolis summit by announcing the fresh
expropriation of Palestinian property in the West Bank; it followed
the summit by announcing the expansion of its Har Homa settlement by
an additional 307 housing units; and it has announced plans for
hundreds more in other settlements since then.

The Israelis are not settling the occupied territories because they
lack space in Israel itself. They are settling the land because of a
long-standing belief that Jews are entitled to it simply by virtue of
being Jewish. "The land of Israel belongs to the nation of Israel and
only to the nation of Israel," declares Moledet, one of the parties
in the National Union bloc, which has a significant presence in the
Israeli parliament.

Moledet's position is not as far removed from that of Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert as some Israelis claim. Although Olmert says he believes
in theory that Israel should give up those parts of the West Bank and
Gaza densely inhabited by Palestinians, he also said in 2006 that
"every hill in Samaria and every valley in Judea is part of our
historic homeland" and that "we firmly stand by the historic right of
the people of Israel to the entire land of Israel."

Judea and Samaria: These ancient biblical terms are still used by
Israeli officials to refer to the West Bank. More than 10 years after
the initiation of the Oslo peace process, which was supposed to lead
to a two-state solution, maps in Israeli textbooks continued to show
not the West Bank but Judea and Samaria -- and not as occupied
territories but as integral parts of Israel.

What room is there for the Palestinians in this vision of Jewish
entitlement to the land? None. They are regarded, at best, as a
demographic "problem."

The idea of Palestinians as a "problem" is hardly new. Israel was
created as a Jewish state in 1948 only by the premeditated and
forcible removal of as much of the indigenous Palestinian population
as possible, in what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe,
which they commemorate this week.

A Jewish state, says Israeli historian Benny Morris, "would not have
come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. ...
There was no choice but to expel that population." For Morris, this
was one of those "circumstances in history that justify ethnic
cleansing."

Thinking of Palestinians as a "problem" to be removed predates 1948.
It was there from the moment the Zionist movement set into motion the
project to make a Jewish state in a land that, in 1917 -- when the
British empire officially endorsed Zionism -- had an overwhelmingly
non-Jewish population. The only Jewish member of the British
government at the time, Edwin Montagu, vehemently opposed the Zionist
project as unjust. Henry King and Charles Crane, dispatched on a
fact-finding mission to Palestine by President Wilson, concurred:
Such a project would require enormous violence, they warned:
"Decisions, requiring armies to carry out, are sometimes necessary,
but they are surely not gratuitously to be taken in the interests of
a serious injustice."

But they were. This is a conflict driven from its origins by
Zionism's exclusive sense of entitlement to the land. Has there been
Palestinian violence as well? Yes. Is it always justified? No. But
what would you do if someone told you that there was no room for you
on your own land, that your very existence is a "problem"? No people
in history has ever gone away just because another people wanted them
to, and the sentiments of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull live on among
Palestinians to this day.

The violence will end, and a just peace will come, only when each
side realizes that the other is there to stay. Many Palestinians have
accepted this premise, and an increasing number are willing to give
up on the idea of an independent Palestinian state and embrace
instead the concept of a single democratic, secular and multicultural
state, which they would share equally with Israeli Jews.

Most Israelis are not yet reconciled this position. Some, no doubt,
are reluctant to give up on the idea of a "Jewish state," to
acknowledge the reality that Israel has never been exclusively
Jewish, and that, from the start, the idea of privileging members of
one group over all other citizens has been fundamentally undemocratic
and unfair.

Yet that is exactly what Israel does. Even among its citizens,
Israeli law grants rights to Jews that it denies to non-Jews. By no
stretch of the imagination is Israel a genuine democracy: It is an
ethno-religiously exclusive state that has tried to defy the
multicultural history of the land on which it was founded.

To resolve the conflict with the Palestinians, Israeli Jews will have
to relinquish their exclusive privileges and acknowledge the right of
return of Palestinians expelled from their homes. What they would get
in return is the ability to live securely and to prosper with --
rather than continuing to battle against -- the Palestinians.

They may not have a choice. As Olmert himself warned recently, more
Palestinians are shifting their struggle from one for an independent
state to a South African-style struggle that demands equal rights for
all citizens, irrespective of religion, in a single state. "That is,
of course," he noted, "a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular
struggle -- and ultimately a much more powerful one."

I couldn't agree more.

Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at
UCLA and the author of "Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday
Occupation," out this month from W.W. Norton.


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