The one-state solution is the idea of bringing justice and peace to Palestine/Israel by having all inhabitants of historic Palestine—the land that includes Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza—living in one, binational country, where everyone has equal rights and political matters are settled on the basis of one person, one vote. This arrangement differs from the two-state solution, which would partition historic Palestine into two states divided along ethno-religious lines, and contrasts with present conditions, in which Palestinians live as second-class citizens inside Israel, and under Israeli occupation in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza—the last of which is subject to a merciless siege.
The one-state option is gaining traction, but media coverage consistently suggests that the only possible scenarios for Palestine/Israel are either the two-state solution or the continued regime of Israeli occupation, colonization and apartheid.
A Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Israeli author Yossi Klein Halevi (4/13/18) says that “partition is the only real alternative to a Yugoslavia-like single state in which two rival peoples devour each other,” even though that quite clearly is not the “only real alternative”; there are numerous binational or multinational states whose peoples have not “devoured each other,” including Malaysia, Switzerland and South Africa.
A Reuters report (4/30/18) on US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying that he is “open to a two-state solution” lists the failures of this approach, noting:
Some 70 years after the creation of Israel, prospects for a Palestinian state appear dim. Israeli/Palestinian peace talks were based on the 1993 Oslo accords that envisaged a two-state solution. Those talks have been stalled for years, and Israel has built more settlements in the occupied territories, which it seized during the 1967 Arab/Israeli War. Israel has refused any right of return for Palestinians who were expelled or fled and became refugees after the country declared independence in 1948, fearing it would lose its Jewish majority.
However, the article fails to note that maintaining ethnic supremacy is not a justifiable rationale for denying an internationally recognized human right like the right to return to one’s home. It also excludes the idea of everyone living across historic Palestine being part of one, democratic country as a legitimate alternative to partition.
The Los Angeles Times (5/13/18) ran an op-ed in which Halevi, a staunchly Zionist Israeli researcher, says of Palestine/Israel that it’s necessary to “acknowledge that two rightful claimants share this tortured land between the river and the sea,” but the two-state solution is the only one he considers, ignoring the possibility of everyone living on that “tortured land between the river and the sea” doing so as equals.
The editorial board of the Independent (5/15/18) writes that the Trump administration’s decision to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem “has killed stone dead any remaining hopes of peace and a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians,” without recognizing that the two-state solution isn’t the only measure that might be taken to create a just peace.
In the New York Times’ editorial (5/14/18) on Israel’s mass murder of 62 unarmed Palestinians on May 14, the paper takes for granted that dividing historic Palestine into two states along ethnic lines is the answer, criticizing “successive right-wing Israeli governments” for expanding “Jewish settlements in the West Bank, on land Palestinians expected to be part of any Palestinian state,” as well as blaming Trump for failing to urge “a peace formula in which” Palestinians and Israelis “would negotiate core issues” such as “establishing boundaries between the two states.”
The Washington Post (5/20/18) ran an op-ed by Daniel B. Shapiro, an advisor to President Obama, entitled “Don’t Let This Gaza Crisis Go to Waste” (a phrase so ridiculous he may as well have coined the term “massacre-tunity”). Shapiro, who blames Israel’s killing of unarmed Palestinians on Hamas, supports the embassy move but says it should have been done “in the broader context of US efforts to end the conflict in a two-state solution, in which Palestinians could also realize their ambitions for a capital in East Jerusalem.” This phrasing wrongly suggests that the two-state outcome is the one to which all Palestinians aspire.
In Thomas Friedman’s piece (New York Times, 5/22/18) endorsing the May 14 atrocity, he (in the manner of a colonial schoolmaster) instructs Palestinians that Israel might stop slaughtering them if all 2 million residents of Gaza go to the fence between the Strip and Israel carrying an olive branch in one hand and in the other a sign written in both Hebrew and Arabic that says, “Two states for two peoples: We, the Palestinian people of Gaza, want to sign a peace treaty with the Jewish people — a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, with mutually agreed adjustments.”
Later, he criticizes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for
implanting more settlers deep inside Palestinian-populated areas of the West Bank—now 100,000 — beyond the settlement blocs that Israel might keep in any two-state peace deal. It makes separating Israelis and Palestinians increasingly impossible and therefore an apartheidlike situation increasingly likely.
For Friedman, the only choices are two separate states or a single “apartheidlike situation,” as the option of having all residents of the land live in one country, based on the principle of one person, one vote, is excluded from his framework. Note also that “increasingly impossible” is an oxymoron; if partition is already impossible, the only thing that is increasing is the obviousness of this fact. (One could also point out that an “apartheidlike situation” already obtains in Palestine/Israel, and is more succinctly described as “apartheid.”)
These cases are consistent with longer-term trends. A search of the last five years of the New York Times’ archives using the media aggregator Factiva finds 1,077 articles with the terms “Israel,” “Palestine” (and variants) and “two state solution.” Pairing “Israel,” “Palestine” and variants with “one state solution” yields 93 results. The same queries of the Washington Post produce 283 articles that mention the two-state solution and 18 with references to the prospect of one state. In the Wall Street Journal, the ratio is 595 to 20 for two states/one state.
By suppressing the one-state idea, the media are hampering the public’s capacity to comprehend and debate the full range of possible ways to reach a just and viable resolution to the question of Palestine, and to act accordingly.
A single state of bloody mindedness
A single state would quickly turn into Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia was fine till the West decided to dismember it.
Jews had been persecuted for centuries in majority-gentile countries. Even when not actively persecuting the Jews, the majority-gentile countries refused to give refuge to the Jews when they needed it. There would have been no Holocaust if majority-gentile countries would have allowed in Jewish refugees who were escaping from the Nazis. The idea of Zionism was that Jews would return to their homeland & have a majority-Jewish country because majority-gentile countries had failed to provide safety for the Jews.
I have no quarrel with your remarks; I actually do agree with you. I also agree with your statement that Zionism represents a call for the Jews to return to their ancestral homeland. However, this homeland in not Palestine. The ancestors of the Jewish people were the ancient Israelites who inhabited the western part of the Arabian Peninsula and Yemen. The Old Testament may be acceptable as a compilation of oral historical memory, but the compilers (or their financiers?) shifted the geography northward to point to Palestine because of its ideal commercial location at the centre of the ancient world. If archaeologists turn their attention to Hejaz and Yemen, they will find ample evidence of Israelite settlements in these regions. Digs in Palestine seem to favour the minimalist (or Tel Aviv) school which holds that traces of Jewish life in ancient Palestine are highly exaggerated. One should never take religious texts as scientific historical documents. I am sorry if I disappointed you.
When scientists seek to understand an indigenous culture, they depend on among other evidence, archeological artifacts. No one has produced even ONE such artifact proving a Palestinian connection to this land. Jews can provide hundreds of thousands of such artifacts.
You have suggested that people should be allowed to return to their homeland.
Do you believe that your principle should be consistently applied?
Donald Trump turned to Netanyahu in front of the world and said, one state or two, if you both agree, I’m good to go. (Exactly Iran’s position BTW). This will become a great incentivizer to find a two states agreement in the period after he puts his plan down (and both sides disagree). History may give him credit for the ONE STATE with Jerusalem as the capital.
Thank you for this survey attempting to highlight the bias of the 2 as aginst 1 state solutions and international failure to face the truth of the situation on the ground. i wish I knew how to gain acceptance of equality and justice for both peoples by those in power manipulated by money and mixture of threats and advantages from pedalling the Right wing Israeli narrative!
TO ACHIEVE A TWO STATE SOLUTION WITH EAST JERUSALEM AS THE CAPITAL OF PALESTINE IT IS NECESSARY TO OVERTHROWN THE ISRAELI RIGHT WING WITH VIOLENCE
Not mentioned in your 1 State scenario are four factors:
a) Israeli’s, right or wrong, fear becoming a minority in “their” own state,
b) 1 State does not preclude further and continual expansion of settlements. In fact, it may exacerbate the problem
as no borders will be crossed and international condemnation would be even weaker than at present.
c) Both of the above could lead to a population explosion as each group races to increase the number of voters.
d) Israeli’s are unwilling to share stolen water resources and that will not change.
As the comments clearly show and the close observers of Israeli society (Norman Finkelstein, Gideon Levy, Max Blumenthal) all confirm, such solutions have no popular support within Israeli society let alone Likud.
LOL, You mean Israel haters Finkelstein, Levy and Blumenthal. Israelis don’t listen to them, they listen to what Iran has to say, they watch Iran and Syria murder over 500,000 of their own people, they see what is happening in Libya, Yemen, Iraq. They hear clearly what Hamas and Islamic Jihad say.
I was in an Israeli town where early attacks and mass killings of Jews by Arabs in 1929s preceded the expulsion of the Arab population during the independence war in ’48 (19 years later). Standing in the Jewish square looking down the road to the Arab square, I understood the issue of each tribe fearing the one next to them.
Can you really imagine opening up your neighborhood to the same people who killed some of your family and friends a few years ago?
Think about the street you live on. If things went downhill and someone from 5 blocks down gathered a group to attack your part of the street, killing people, how would it seem? If they out-numbered you, would “one person one vote” sound like a good way to resolve differences?
Good fences make good neighbors, and the two state solution with a free, safe state for each of Palestinians and Israelis is the way forward.
I don’t believe that the only possibilities are either a strictly one state solution, or a strictly two state solution. I have written an outline for a sort of hybrid one state/two state model, that I feel deserves more serious consideration (but just please note that The Daily Kos is a site for Democrats, hence the references to the Democratic party platform in this): https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/4/22/1758556/-Envisioning-the-IsriPal-Alliance
We can all agree that Israel is a shining star of freedom in a region, sadly, largely devoid of it.
In truth, Israel is a veritable social justice Shangri-La compared to the rest of the Arab Middle East.
good post FAIR! but others should call into account their hero Bernie Sanders who rejects the one state solution as well as BDS and also was doing victim blaming on Hamas when violence broke out, or should I say when Israel was massacring protestors who were protecting themselves from Israeli bullets that the US, UK, France, Germany, Canada, India, the Gulf States, and Australia and New Zealand provide them with.
I suspect that the author has never actually lived in the region, never mind visiting it. There is pretty much not one Arab/Muslim state that is free and democratic and the Palestinians are most certainly not, given that Abbas is in the 13th year of his 4 year term and Hamas rules Gaza by the gun. Yet, in the last election in Israel, over 1M Arab Israelis voted. So, who is oppressing the Palestinians. The primary backer of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hizbollah are the Holocaust denying, Holocaust promising mullahs of Iran who hang gay people from cranes, stone women to death, imprison and rape women who remove their hijab and help the butcher Assad of Syria murder over 500,000 of his own people. Somehow, this “progressive” author missed all that. Then again, people in the Ivory Tower don’t need facts.