ESSAY
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Arguments: Against The "One State Solution"
WITH THESE SELECTIONS from the Z Word blog, we inaugurate a new and occasional series entitled Arguments. The debate generated by the Middle East conflict is necessarily broad, with the result that it becomes invoked on everything from the price of oil to academic freedom; from tackling hate crime to the crisis of the left. Nonetheless, certain themes recur with more frequency than others.
One issue which Z Word's blog has dealt with repeatedly has been the so-called "one state solution." This solution is one which is projected despite existing realities on the ground in Israel and Palestine. Its goal is the creation of single state between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan. The elimination of Israel as a sovereign state, with all that implies, is a necessary condition for its implementation.
The notion of a unitary state is old as the conflict itself; it certainly predates the creation of the State of Israel. In the 1920s, some of the more exotic thinkers in the Zionist movement, among them Judah Magnes and Martin Buber, coalesced around Brit Shalom, which advocated a binational solution to the growing Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine. This, they maintained, would entail autonomy for the two nations within a unitary state framework. As a consequence Brit Shalom was strongly attacked by more mainstream Zionists, some of whom accused its adherents of being devoid of Jewish national sentiment. "This was grossly unfair," writes Walter Laqueur in his monumental history of Zionism. "Their Zionism was as deeply rooted as that of their opponents. But they feared that without an agreement there would be perpetual strife between Jews and Arabs which would lead to a deterioration in Zionism and ultimately perhaps to its ruin."
These ideological moorings are important, because they demonstrate the fallacy behind the contention that a unitary state is necessarily a more democratic and just state
What made Brit Shalom distinct was not its emphasis on a unitary state, but the liberal character of that state. When it came to the conceptualizations of the Arab side, any differences in approach were subsumed by the sense that the Jews were unwelcome, that they were the enemy and that, at best, they could be a tolerated, if inferior, minority. This was certainly the message of the anti-Jewish riots of 1929 and of the Arab Revolt which commenced in 1936. After1948, this basic hostility was combined with a historical interpretation of Israel's creation as an "original sin."
The canard of original sin has lost none of its persistence. It was the foundation for the PLO's Palestinian National Covenant in 1968 and it informs the approach of the rejectionists in the Middle East - foremost Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime - today. It enables, too, other familiar tropes, like the conflation of Zionism with racism and the equation of Israel with apartheid.
These ideological moorings are important, because they demonstrate the fallacy behind the contention that a unitary state is necessarily a more democratic and just state. As one of the blog selections below argues, it is impossible to separate the idea of a unitary state from the narrative of original sin. Perhaps more importantly, it is just as impossible to conceive of any unitary state emerging which is not enforced upon Israeli society. All the texts gathered here insist that, far from being a formula for peace, the one state idea is a guarantee of further conflict and further suffering.
- Ben Cohen
- Confronting the One Staters
In this section, we highlight responses to specific articles advocating a one-state solution. Of particular significance here is the rejection of the idea that a unitary state is inherently more liberal.
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