Argument: One State/Two States
Argument: One State/Two States
Argument: One State/Two States
In his article “One State/Two States: Rethinking Israel and Palestine” in the Spring 2010 issue of Dissent, Danny Rubinstein wrote,
Israeli governments have enabled the settlement of over half a million Jews beyond the 1967 borders. This represents almost 10 percent of the Jews in Israel. About 300,000 of them live in settlements in the West Bank and about 200,000 are in the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. There are those among them who will fight with all their strength to prevent an Israeli withdrawal and the establishment of a Palestinian state. But what is no less important is that on the Palestinian side as well a new situation has emerged. National unity has dissolved, the national movement has atrophied and declined, and the idea has become acceptable that if there won’t be two states for two peoples, it is better that there be one state.
In the following issue, Alexander Yakobson continued the discussion with “Two States or One (Arab) State”:
Most of those who today speak of one state…argue that the two-state solution has become, or is fast becoming, untenable because of the settlements—and so a single binational state from Jordan to the Mediterranean is inevitable. These people are wrong on both counts: partition is possible, and a binational state is not. The two-state solution is possible if both sides genuinely want it….
On the other hand, a binational state—an extremely rare state-form in the Western world and wholly nonexistent in the Arab-Muslim Middle East—is not a realistic option. A single state in the whole of the former Mandatory Palestine will have a large Arab-Muslim majority, if only because of the Palestinian “right of return.” Naturally, there has to be a right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants under any settlement of the conflict—either to the Arab-Palestinian state alongside Israel (under a two-state solution) or to the one state in question. It is obvious that this state, regardless of anything that may be written in its constitution, will not be binational but Arab and Muslim.
Here, we feature responses to Yakobson’s article by Rachel Lever and James B. Rule. Yakobson had substantially finished his reply to Lever when Rule’s response arrived; since the arguments of the two critics overlap to a considerable extent, we didn’t ask Yakobson to reply separately to each one. We are simply posting both responses here, along with Yakobson’s reply to Lever.
-Editors
Read Rachel Lever’s “A Very Jewish State”
Read James B. Rule’s “The Crocodile and Captain Hook”
Read Alexander Yakobson’s “Two Peoples, Two States”
ALEXANDER YAKOBSON has concocted a fantastic conspiracy theory: the PLO doesn’t just want to run their own separate state, they want the whole of original Palestine. All to themselves. They’ve kept everyone talking, saying “no” to generous deals, biding their time while Israel’s settlements expand to prevent a viable Palestinian state. Then the PLO will turn around and demand the whole country, so as to have an “Arab-Muslim” single state.
Yakobson thinks two states are still possible: simply withdraw the IDF and leave the settlers to make their own way home or to stay put under Palestinian jurisdiction.
As an idea for ushering in long term peace, this is also pretty fanciful. In a matter of hours, a settler-related “security incident” (real or contrived) would provoke a violent incursion by the IDF and vengeful mob attacks against Palestinians all over Israel. We’d be back where we started.
Israel has already insisted on its right to invade a Palestinian state; to control its borders and air space; to siphon off the water; to oversee even its tourism and run its industrial estates; to keep, run, and service electronic spying devices; to give chase “in hot pursuit”; and, as with Gaza, to impose collective punishment on a population that votes the wrong way. It also has an established habit of changing, adjusting, and redrawing agreed boundaries, or simply making up border positions as it goes along; and, as Tzipi Livni made crystal clear to Palestinian negotiators, it has every intention of continuing to do so.
This unstable ceasefire is marketed as a permanent peace. But a unified single state as a way to peace is said to be totally impossible. Why?
Yakobson, and others of his ilk, say it’s because “the Arabs” won’t share: it’s simply an ethnic thing. Just as the lack of democracy in the Middle East (before Tunisia and Egypt…and Libya…and Yemen…and…?) is an ethnic thing. Imagine saying that Iron Curtain regimes were a Slav or Russian thing.
Yes, a joint Jewish and Arab democracy would be the first in modern times, though there was a similar mix in medieval Córdoba and Al-Andalus. The old Jewish communities in Arab countries did not share power, as all the power was held by feudal monarchs and Ottoman or European empires.
Within Palestine, the centuries-old, settled, and respected Jewish community had lived at peace with Muslims and Christians of every stripe and sect.
All this is known, yet Yakobson still peddles the myth of the wily, inherently violent, anti-Jewish Arabs. Though his particular conspiracy theory is up there with the more bizarre, the twisted vision of Palestinians calculating their birthrate and planning to out-breed and out-vote the Jews from a single state is quite commonly repeated in all seriousness.
Two States or One?
The difference between one united state and two separate states is one of ethics and philosophy. Two states is about territory, insecurity, and separation. One state removes both the physical and the mental borders. The parameters of one state are framed around rights, not land. Universality of rights (the same rights applying to every individual) means that the state and the law do not make distinctions on the grounds of ethnicity. Each individual is seen, judged, and respected as a human being, not as a stereotype. This may seem elementary, but it really can’t be repeated often enough: everything that’s wrong with racism and anti-Semitism stems from the absence of this universal human value.
To achieve such a change, a majority on both sides has to want it. But what about the rest of the people? New laws achieved by the struggle for rights and justice in turn create further changes, which have their own effects. In the struggles for civil rights, women’s suffrage, and racial equality, the resulting laws isolated and marginalized intolerance that had previously been commonplace. Hence a well-managed one-state transition would be a process for growing and expanding tolerance, whereas two states would fix the old hostilities and let them fester and worsen.
What’s the Demographic?
Would a single state see Jewish or Muslim ascendancy? How do the numbers stack up? What’s the demographic? These are all false questions. Safeguards, checks, and balances would ring-fence agreed upon universal rights and arrangements, so that they can only be amended by an overwhelming vote that would need support across the whole population. Propositions or decisions that contradicted these rights would be invalid and could not become law, and therefore would not be enforced by the police, the courts, or the army.
Armed force could in theory tear all this up, but it is unimaginable that the country’s armed forces (and their civilian reserves) would not remain heavily dominated for many years by Israel’s Jews. The Palestinians would have far more to fear from an army takeover.
Nor would a social and cultural takeover be likely. Israel has by now a solidly established character, way of life, language, customs, and civil society. Even if Jews ultimately became a minority in a merged country, this character would remain pretty dominant. Rather than a takeover, there would be organic changes in response to new circumstances and influences.
If a unified country got off to a good start, such changes might remove some of the cynicism and self-righteousness in Israel’s character, and on the other side lessen the anger and hurt felt by Palestinians. The biggest change will probably come not from multiculturalism, but in moving from a permanent war footing to being at peace internally and at peace with one’s neighbors. If the refugees were welcomed home, that would start to heal the 1948 wounds, too, and have a transformational effect on Israel’s place in the Middle East. Whereas two states would be a grudging compromise.
Yakobson says a Muslim state would be inevitable, because after return of refugees the Palestinians would have an electoral majority. But it would take far more than that to create a Muslim state. And why would they want to risk upheaval and maybe a new Nakba by trying to overturn a shared constitution that guarantees their religious freedom and does not discriminate against or in favor of any faith? If they felt that the result fell short of the promise, they would surely be fighting to enforce the law, not to overturn it.
What if this “Arab-Muslim” state that Yakobson fears is indeed their hidden agenda? Would they be able to muster the near–100 percent Muslim vote that they’d need? In a recent poll in Gaza, just 1.5 percent of respondents wanted an Islamic state. Palestinians are not even all Muslim, and among Muslims there are myriad shadings in belief and observance.
Maybe Yakobson isn’t really worried about the constitution being overthrown but just doesn’t want to see so many Arabs on the streets, much as Israel reacted when all the Mizrahi Jews turned up on the doorstep. People fear change. But change happens all the time. Israel itself has changed beyond recognition from the Israel I remember, where school friends thought my family was fearfully religious because we ate kosher food.
A Very Jewish State
Once a single country is on the agenda (and we’re pretty close to that already), its benefits, instead of these fables, could be considered: free access to all the country, no one forced to move, and a massive economic bonus as part of a new Middle East.
So who will want it? Palestinians would dearly love to see their exiled relatives coming home but are not sure they can trust those who expelled them, and are desperate to get the oppressors off their backs. On the Israeli side, the biggest obstacle is “the end of the Jewish state.”
But this is an argument that turns against itself: it’s pretty clear that the “Jewish state” has been deeply damaging to Jewish values, especially to Judaism’s foundational value of justice. A “Jewish democracy” is no less of an oxymoron than a “white democracy.” And as American-born Jeff Halper wrote of his “conversion,” “my Israeliness had completely supplanted the ethnic Jewish identity I had grown up with.” For many Israeli Jews, and the million or so living abroad, the very fact that a single state would be multiethnic could be a bonus: and incidentally, have those obsessed with demography counted these ex-pats into their reckonings?
Israel would go from being “a Jewish state” (or “the Jewish state”) to being a “very Jewish state,” where nearly half the population were Jewish. This is also a unique proposition, and maybe, in ethical terms, more Jewish than Israel is.
All over the world in pluralist societies, Jewish minorities (as also Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and other minorities) are comfortable celebrating their festivals and holy days and doing their rituals without wishing these were official state-sponsored occasions. The Jewish tribe didn’t need a homeland or an army to produce Freud, Karl and Groucho Marx, Disraeli, Einstein, Mahler, Spinoza, Woody Allen, or Steven Spielberg. The only thing Israel has added to that cannon is smart weapons technology, the longest highest concrete wall in the world, and a frantic international lobby.
Being a “haven for persecuted Jews” is of little interest to most Israelis, and only a tiny minority of its immigrants ever fit that scenario. Israel is a long way down the wish list of anyone seeking safety. The first request of a united state to the world could be that all other countries also open their doors to those fleeing persecution: Jews should not again have to pass through Israel on their way to safety.
A Shift in the Middle Ground
How would Israeli Jews come to want a single state? They won’t be convinced by mere arguments. Between the outer extremes are some 60 percent of pragmatic, non-ideological Israelis, moveable according to perceived personal interests. Topping their list would be an end to “life by the sword,” an end to fear and watchfulness, and the desire to live an ordinary life. Here, parents and grandparents take a longer view than politicians with an eye on the next election. What might change this middle ground mindset?
“Known unknowns” could be: recoil from Israel’s current orgy of racism; antipathy to the growing power of politico-religious orthodoxy; pressure of the boycott campaigns; inspiration from the Palestinian popular resistance and its solidarity campaigns; pressure from friends and relatives abroad, and a weakening of diaspora support; a film, song, or image; weariness with military service; an impressive or charismatic public personality; more revelations and scandals; changes in political alignments so that the hundreds of NGOs, human rights campaigns, and coexistence groups turn to the political process; or maybe a human rights candidate running in Jerusalem’s next municipal election, backed by both Jews and Palestinians.
And then there are the “unknown unknowns.” We just got two of them in a single week: the Palestine Papers smashed through a slew of two-state myths; and then came the Egyptian revolution.
Two weeks later, 2,000 J-Street members (a virtual focus group closely matching the Israeli center ground) heard Mona Eltahawy tell them that after “our beautiful, non-violent revolution it’s now time for the revolution for freedom and dignity of Palestinians.” And she challenged J-Street: “Make that call. This isn’t something that should scare you, this is something you must reach out and embrace and say, we too will march with you for the freedom and dignity of Palestinians, and I guarantee, you will be met with Arabs from every single country in the region.” The tumultuous applause that greeted this vision of commonality flung open the doors of the stifling two-state citadel, though it will take some more time to walk through them.
The two-state peace road has been through every conceivable twist and hairpin bend, and can have no surprises left. The project for a single unified state, on the other hand, is sensitive to different things that can completely rewrite the scenario and change the game, much as the Arab revolutions are doing.
But when it comes to making the choice, it will not be between two states and one. It will be posed as a natural, organic choice between a naked, full-frontal, in-your-face, international pariah apartheid single state with its “Oslo” fig leaf removed—and the selfsame single country but with full and equal civil rights, democracy, and normality.
A Possible One-State Road Map
So how would it come about? Eventually, after lesser or greater struggles, shifts, changes, and upheavals, a government could be elected on a promise to explore this option, to discuss it, in full transparency, with Palestinian counterparts, and to report back with concrete proposals and a draft constitution.
This phase would encourage, enable, and organize practical coexistence projects; a structured dialogue at all levels; meeting points in culture, education, science, and sports; learning each other’s language; and acts of reconciliation.
If this worked out, it could lead to a problem-solving transition toward merger, involving professions, institutions, service providers, and communities arriving at a wide variety of solutions ranging from total separateness to total communality. These are not mutually exclusive, and in varying measure both are necessary, so some hybrid of binationalism and one-person-one-vote may emerge. Only when major issues have been resolved and many questions have been answered would a final commitment be made.
Does that really sound so threatening?
The intellectually powerful Jewish Ichud group in the 1940s, which had lived as part of the Jewish minority in Arab Palestine, believed that the two populations could combine democratically in one country, with “Government in Palestine based on equal political rights for the two peoples.” Today, a decision from a position of strength to follow the guidance of the founders of two of Israel’s most venerable institutions, Hadassah and the Hebrew University, for the sake of lasting peace and universal human values, could hardly be characterized as damaging to Judaism.
[Correction: As originally posted, this response contained the following passage: “The Mizrahi Jews who flooded into Israel from Arab countries in the early 1950s were not expelled or driven out. It was a peaceful migration responding to Israeli promises, and panicked by some freelance anti-Semitic attacks of very dubious provenance: all very low-key compared with the treatment of America’s Japanese community during the Second World War, and incredibly restrained considering that self-proclaimed Jews had just committed a major act of ethnic cleansing and massacres against fellow Arabs.”
In fact, Jews fled, at the very least, Libya, Morocco, Iraq, and Egypt in the early 1950s under direct persecution. See Ada Aharoni, “The Forced Migration of Jews from Arab Countries.”]
Rachel Lever contributed to the One State Declaration adopted in Dallas in October 2010 and runs www.onedemocracy.co.uk.
The Crocodile and Captain Hook
In the fascinating exchange between Danny Rubinstein and Alexander Yakobson, two Israeli political analysts weigh the future of their country’s relations to its Palestinian citizens and neighbors. The striking revelations and prises de position embodied in these two statements command sober reflection from any conscientious outsider to these conflicts—especially in light of events since they were written.
Rubinstein, a specialist in Arab and Palestinian affairs, traces a profound shift of interests among Palestinians, both Israeli citizens and others now living under Israeli authority. “One can sense a great change among Palestinians,” he writes—to wit, “a new lack of trust in the possibility of a Palestinian state.” Many Palestinians today, he holds, “…would prefer to fight for equal rights a single binational state rather than continue a struggle that seems almost hopeless—to establish an independent state.”
This notion of sharing Israeli citizenship on equal terms with that country’s non-Jewish population attracts Yakobson about as much as a proposal for steak tartare as the main course at the vegans’ annual banquet. Any such prospect, he avers, would lead to acceptance of what he holds to be a key and intolerable Palestinian demand: a “right of Palestinian return” to places they inhabited before their expulsion by Jewish insurgents. Such a step, in his estimation, would be “tantamount to nullifying the independence of the Jewish people.” For “independence” here, you can substitute “dominance.”
Meanwhile, of course, Israel continues to extend that dominance by devouring more and more of the neighboring Palestinian lands. The expansion of Jewish “settlements” (in French they are more properly called “colonies”) farther and farther into Palestinian territory makes it apparent (except to Yakobson) that the tasks of Zionism are not complete for the Israeli regime. Yakobson hints that this process disturbs him, as well: “I have plenty of [criticism of Israel’s attitudes and policies],” he writes, “first and foremost regarding the settlements.” But then he moves on to his main point—that any binational arrangement in Israel/Palestine would be a disaster for Jewish interests. “It is obvious,” he writes, that such a state, “regardless of anything that may be written in its constitution, will not be binational but Arab and Muslim.”
But if Israel is indeed, as Yakobson would have us believe, ripe for a definitive territorial settlement on equal terms with the Palestinians, what are we to make of Israel’s continuing colonization of its weaker neighbor? Not to worry, he insists. When the deal is ultimately struck to establish a Palestinian state, today’s Jewish colonists (many of them Americans, incidentally) will simply be offered a dramatic choice: either abandon the homes they have created, or live under Palestinian sovereignty. Under such a solution, he writes, “The Israel Defense Force (IDF) will escape the nightmare of having to drag the settlers from their homes.” In short, “[t]he settlements are only an insurmountable obstacle to peace if we allow them to serve as an obstacle.”
Evidently, enormous weight hangs on how one understands the “we” in a statement like this. Yakobson is of course free to include himself. But is there reason to believe that any Israeli regime, or for that matter any state of Jewish public opinion, would tolerate such an outcome?
Yakobson refers us to opinion polls: “A clear and consistent majority of Israeli Jews affirms, in every poll, its readiness to see an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.” When reading such results, I always wonder whether they are drawn from the same population as other reported poll results from Israel. A report from a 2005 poll concluded that “some 46 percent of Israel’s Jewish citizens favor transferring [i.e., expelling] Palestinians out of the territories, while 31 percent favor transferring Israeli Arabs out of the country.” This does not sound like a population ready to reduce its territory in order to achieve historic compromise with the despised group.
Better to examine the record of actual deeds by the Israeli regime. The process of colonization of the West Bank has gone on since its conquest by Israel in 1967, despite the sharp disapproval of the UN and most world opinion. The United States has occasionally expressed very quiet reservations, but throughout this time has continued to finance and protect the Israeli governments carrying out the colonization. No reasonable observer can doubt that this continuing projection of Jewish population and control into the vanquished territories tips the balance of power in favor of the colonists and makes any attempt to negotiate more humiliating for the vanquished. And yet colonization continues.
In its 2010 efforts to broker direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, the United States requested that Israel suspend its construction in the West Bank. Israel initially demurred. The Israelis demanded special inducements for even a brief suspension—reportedly including provision of some twenty F-35 fighter jets to Israel and an American promise to block future UN resolutions critical of Israel. When the clock ran out on the suspension last autumn, the Israelis resumed construction virtually overnight, and the Palestinians predictably stopped participating in the talks. A resolution was subsequently put forward in the UN Security Council condemning the renewed expansion. In February 2011, the United States vetoed it—as promised, apparently.
Few other commentators seem to discern Israeli readiness for wholesale abandonment of its colonies. Bernard Avishai, for example, has recently published an account in the New York Times Magazine of what he considers a tantalizing near-miss in peace negotiations between then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas in 2008. Avishai’s article describes hard trading between the two parties and major concessions on both sides. By his account Olmert was willing to contemplate removal of some settlements, but there were severe limits. Some of the most obnoxious enclaves were untouchable. “Many settlers are fanatical, armed and contemptuous of Israeli democracy…,” Avishai writes; “Israelis, Olmert implied, are loath to fight [these settlers] for the sake of Palestinians.”
If you need further grounds for skepticism, consider Israel’s construction of the eight-meter–tall “separation barrier” near the Green Line dividing Israel from the West Bank. This monolith’s avowed purpose is to prevent terrorists from slipping into Israel. But another purpose is evidently to extend Israel’s boundaries. The wall does not follow Israel’s 1967 frontier, but weaves into neighboring Palestinian lands—disrupting Palestinian travel and agriculture, where it does not actually claim Palestinian property. If ever a governmental action were “set in stone” (concrete, in this case), this is it. Is anyone expecting this barrier to be removed by any imaginable future Israeli government?
To judge from its actions, Israel resembles that gleeful crocodile in Peter Pan, who liked the taste of Captain Hook’s hand so much that it kept coming back for more.
FOR YAKOBSON, Israel’s ongoing colonization of lands supposedly destined to be an adjoining independent state represents a mere detail—easily reversed in the course of a peace settlement that is almost within reach.
For people like me, this colonization is something quite different: an arrogant outrage against international law and elementary good sense, a deliberate and systematic obstacle to any decent two-state settlement, and—above all—an all-too-revealing disclosure of the self-image of a country animated by its conviction that it has a God-given destiny to rule over lands inhabited by others. The stunning thing is that, as a U.S. taxpayer, I’m helping to pay for this shocking and destructive project.
Compare the American role in all this to its response to Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion and attempted annexation of Kuwait—a country about three times as large as the West Bank, with about twice its population. That action was all but universally condemned around the world and resulted in the American-led attack that reversed it. But here, of course, Kuwait was an American client, whereas Saddam (a former client) had wandered off the reservation allotted him by U.S. policy-makers.
If the United States accomplished anything good in undoing Iraq’s invasion, it was to underline the principle that military occupation is simply unacceptable as a way of redrawing national boundaries. That is a lesson well worth conveying—though the United States undermined it soon enough, by its subsequent war of choice against Iraq. In fact, the United States should never support any such unilateral territorial conquest—by Israel, or any other country. It should never subsidize any country engaged in such aggression. A credible threat to suspend the estimated $2.5 billion per year now flowing from American taxpayers to the Israeli regime would stop such expansion in its tracks. But there is no prospect of any such action, given the death-grip of Israeli interests on U.S. policy—widely acknowledged, but never effectively challenged.
I will be happy in my astonishment if Yakobson’s vision is fulfilled, and the “settlements” evaporate as a result of a two-state agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. But no rational observer should count on such an outcome. From all available evidence, Israeli colonization seems intended to work in the way Samuel Johnson described the force of habit: too weak to be felt, until too strong to be broken. I fear that we will awake one day to find that Israel has consolidated its domination of the West Bank, vastly eroding remaining conditions for an independent state there. And should that day come, it would be absurd to expect anything more forceful from U.S. policy-makers than what we have seen lately.
All of which makes it easy to see why, as Danny Rubinstein reports, Palestinians these days see their best chance in fighting for equal rights within Israel, rather than holding out hopes for a state of their own.
James B. Rule is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a member of Dissent’s editorial board.
RACHEL LEVER thinks that it is very offensive for me to suggest that the “single state” she favors, a state with an Arab and Muslim majority in the heart of the Arab and Muslim Middle East, will inevitably be Arab and Muslim, rather than binational. This she takes to imply that, in my view, “lack of democracy” is “an ethnic thing” for “the Arabs.” But, of course, this is not what I said. An Arab state can in principle be democratic, as we all hope that the Egyptian Arab Republic will now become. It cannot, by definition, be binational.
Arab Palestine might, conceivably, be a democracy, treating its Jewish minority decently—with Jewish members of the Palestinian Parliament as free to criticize their government as Arab members of the Knesset now are, the Palestinian Supreme Court as willing to overrule the government in defense of minority rights as the Israeli Supreme Court is, and a Jewish judge at the head of a panel trying a Palestinian ex-president. This would be a radical change for the better compared to regional practices with regard to democracy and the treatment of minorities (not to speak of Jews) in past decades. To say that this scenario is wholly impossible would indeed be offensive—just as ignoring the danger that a very different scenario will emerge is silly and irresponsible.
But there is nothing remotely offensive to Arabs in assuming that an Arab-majority state will be Arab. Oppressing minorities is not an Arab consensus; the “Arabness” of every Arab-majority state is. As a supporter of the Jewish state, and of the right to national self-determination, I can find nothing wrong with an Arab state as such. Arab peoples, including Palestinian Arabs, have a right to national independence; a state that realizes this right is Arab—just as the state that does so for the Jewish people is Jewish. This is how all the Arab-majority states in the region (including those with large non-Arab minorities) are officially defined; some, including Egypt and Syria, have “Arab” in their name. This is not caused by the prevalence of undemocratic regimes in the region—the “Arabness” of all Arab states, and their being part of the Arab world (“the Arab nation”), is a view shared by all significant sectors of Arab public opinion. The Arab secular Left has traditionally put greater emphasis on this than “reactionary” regimes. While pan-Arab nationalism has weakened a lot since its heyday under Nasser, no significant group can afford to renounce the fundamental notions of Arab affinity and solidarity.
In the British Mandatory Palestine, the tiny Communist party split in the 1940s, when the Jewish Communists adopted the idea of a binational Jewish-Arab state. The Arab Communists insisted on Palestine being an Arab state, “part of the Arab homeland,” with Jews recognized as a national minority. That was the most non-nationalist stance that any Arab group in Palestine took. Today, the Palestinian Declaration of Independence (Algiers, 1988), the Palestinian Authority’s Basic Law, and the draft constitution of the future Palestinian state contain all the usual definitions: Palestine is an Arab state, part of the Arab homeland; the Palestinian people are part of the Arab nation. Moreover, “Islam is the official religion”; “the principles of Islamic Sharia are a major source for legislation.” These statements (alongside provisions on religious freedom and civic equality) do not come from Hamas, but from Fatah and its “leftist” nationalist allies. Such formulations are typical of the relatively secular constitutions in the Arab world. In Egypt (with its indigenous Christian minority numbering in the millions), the constitution now says that Islam is the state religion, and Sharia is the main source of legislation. We shall see whether the new democratic Egyptian constitution, to be worked out with the Muslim Brothers’ participation, will change that.
In the draft Palestinian constitution, the Palestinian people are defined not just as part of the Arab nation but as part of the “Islamic nation” as well. This is considered “kosher” by the more secular Palestinian factions—not a “denial of the other” in regards to Palestinian Christians. The Palestinian national movements’ Western supporters are, naturally, too busy denouncing that great offender against secularism in the Middle East, Israel, to notice such things. Is there then anything offensive in assuming that the “single state” will be Muslim as well as Arab? Of course, being officially “Muslim” doesn’t necessarily mean that a state is oppressive to non-Muslims—though in practice it often does mean that; constitutional definitions are far from being the main problem for Christians in the Palestinian Authority, in Egypt, and elsewhere. There are West European countries with an official Church. The official status of the Orthodox Church in Greece goes well beyond the symbolic field. In Israel, the ties between Judaism and the state are unproblematic in some fields, but problematic in others (chiefly with regard to the personal status).
Lever speaks of a state where “ethnicity” won’t matter. But the Jews and the Arabs don’t regard themselves as two ethnic communities belonging to the same nation; they see themselves as two distinct peoples, with two national identities. Needles to say, there is no “objective” way to distinguish between ethnic and national identity: what matters, ultimately (though not to Lever), is how the people in question regard themselves. The Jewish-Israeli national identity, incidentally, must be one of the most multiethnic in the world. A notion of peoplehood that regards immigrants from Poland and Yemen as belonging to the same people is nothing if not multiethnic. To Lever, the story of Jews from Arab countries in Israel is just another occasion for Israel-bashing. In fact, this is surely the most successful case of integration between people of European and Middle Eastern origin, in roughly equal numbers, in recorded history. Israel received, in the first several years of its independence, a huge wave of immigrants—Holocaust survivors and Jews from Arab countries—that tripled its population, making them citizens on arrival. The process of integration was, unsurprisingly, accompanied by many difficulties; cultural gaps and, indeed, cultural and ethnic prejudice certainly played their part. But anybody who knows anything about Israeli society knows that Jews from Arab countries are not just unquestionably loyal to Israel—their support for the notion of a Jewish state is even more adamant and overwhelming than that of Jews from Europe (which is overwhelming enough).
A Jewish state and an Arab state are terms signifying, in principle, the national independence of a people, rather than the domination of a certain ethnic community. Of course, any nation state is also obliged to ensure the equal rights of national minorities, if they exist within its borders—those citizens who aver a national identity (not merely “ethnicity”) different from that of the majority. Under conditions of bitter national conflict, this is not an easy task—though it is doubly vital precisely because of this. While Arab Knesset members (and many Jewish ones) criticize the flaws of the Israeli democracy in this respect, no parallel criticism is possible regarding the Arab world, for the simple reason that no Jewish community has been able to survive there. Lever holds that these Jews “migrated peacefully,” having been tempted, or “panicked” by Israel—a serious explanation indeed for the emptying of the Arab Middle East of its Jews, reflecting great moral earnestness and genuine concern for human rights. But many of those Jews ended up in the West, not in Israel; Mossad was evidently unable to brainwash or kidnap them all, and not everybody was a Zionist. It is just that their life in the Arab countries was made impossible—even for those who regarded themselves as Arab nationalists and tried to play the part. The undeniable fact is that it is Arab nationalism, rather than Zionism, that has up to now proved, in practice, incompatible with Jewish-Arab coexistence. In fairness, one should note that there have been voices among Arab intellectuals in recent years, notably in Iraq, exposing and decrying the shameful way in which Jews of Arab countries have been treated by Arab governments (“progressive” and reactionary alike) and societies. Among other things, they recall the infamous “Farhud”—the massacre of hundreds of Jews in Baghdad (in 1941, long before Israel’s war of independence). Rachel Lever would do well to listen to those brave voices. It is not an “ethnic thing” for Arabs to be incapable of subjecting Arab society to serious and honest criticism—merely a “cultural thing” for the useful dupes of Arab nationalism in the West.
Certainly, what happened to the Arab countries’ Jews was influenced by the Arab-Israeli conflict (though not just by it—witness what is happening to Arab Christians). But what happened to Arabs in this country, including the tragedy of refugees and the occupation, was also influenced by the conflict. The conflict, after all, raged, and still continues, here. Its impact, however, has been such that Jews cannot live under Arab rule thousands of miles away, while Arabs do live, in great numbers, under Israeli rule. Arab citizens of Israel, for all their criticisms (some more justified, some less), are horrified by suggestions that they should be liberated from this rule—not, God forbid, that they should move to the future Palestinian Arab state, but that this state should come to them, as part of territorial swaps. They adamantly insist that in any future two-state peace deal, their towns and villages should still be under Israeli rather Palestinian sovereignty. Has any nation state ever received such a vote of confidence from a national minority in the midst of a national conflict? I wonder how I would have felt, as an Israeli, if a Jewish community in a neighboring Arab state had faced a suggestion that the border be moved to enable its inclusion in Israel, and reacted in a similar way.
In fact, in polls that ask directly about their attitude to Israel, Israeli Arab citizens are, despite ups and downs, consistently more positive than what one usually hears from their leaders. In a January 2009 poll, conducted five days after the ceasefire in Gaza (not exactly the most favorable moment), 45 percent of them said they were “proud to be Israeli”; in 2008 the figure had been 53 percent. In a later poll, 60.8 percent of Israeli Arabs agreed that “the Jews in Israel are a people with a right to a state”, 51.6 percent accepted that “Israel had a right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.” Obviously, the official formula (“Jewish and democratic”) is disliked by many, but the substantive point about the legitimacy of a Jewish state is reflected in the first question as well. And 50.5 percent (far fewer than in the past, but still a majority) agreed that “the regime of the state of Israel, despite its flaws, is democratic also as regards its Arab citizens.”
What Lever proposes is to do to all the Israeli Arabs what Avigdor Lieberman wants to do to the inhabitants of Um-el-Fahm, to their consternation: to make them part of Palestine rather than part of Israel. As for Israeli Jews, she proposes to deprive them, under the best—not necessarily the likeliest—scenario of how Arab Palestine would look, of their people’s right to national independence.
For the “single state” to be truly binational, it is not enough to get rid of the Jewish state; the Palestinians must accept that there won’t be an Arab Palestinian state either. They must agree to be the only one of the Arab peoples whose country will not be defined as Arab and part of the Arab world. This concession they must make not in favor of Berbers or Kurds, but of Zionist Jews, whose coming to the country has been regarded as a foreign invasion aimed at depriving Arab Palestine of its proper Arab character. Such a concession would be considered humiliating and illegitimate. Even if undertaken in good faith, it could not survive the disappearance of Israel as a sovereign state and the emergence of a new state, with an Arab majority, naturally regarding itself as part of the Arab world and the Arab consensus. It is one thing to speak, vaguely, about “one state” now, when this formula is a recipe for doing away with Israel, and quite another to tolerate the intolerable—that such a state, once established, would not be Arab and part of the surrounding Arab world. Under such conditions, it is silly to think that anything written in some constitutional document will allow the minority to prevent the majority from giving expression to what is not merely its worldview but its core identity.
South Africa is sometimes adduced as an example of a successful “one-state solution” that confounded pessimistic predictions. But, apart from all the other differences, the ANC (unlike some more radical groups) never espoused the idea of “black nationalism,” which would have paralleled the Arab nationalism espoused by the Palestinian national movement. It waged its whole struggle under the banner of an idea of nationhood including all the communities of South Africa—to be governed democratically. In a land with dozens of ethnic groups and languages, the notion of a national identity comprising all of them is—apart from any other consideration—the best way to avert the danger of the country being smashed to smithereens. The new South Africa is multiethnic but “mono-national”; it is based on the principle that all the country’s groups share the same national identity. The Palestinian parallel for this would have been to define the Palestinian people as including the millions of Israeli Jews but not as Arab or linked to the Arab world. It is sheer fantasy to imagine that such a notion can somehow be imposed on the Arab majority in a post-Israeli state of Palestine. Of course, the notion of Palestinian national identity, which is Arab and part of the Arab world, is perfectly legitimate and natural; it is hard to see what other notion of peoplehood the Palestinians could have developed, given their history and culture. Neither of the two peoples needs to apologize for its identity; both these identities make the analogy with South Africa irrelevant.
On the other hand, the option, dismissed by Lever, of allowing settlers to remain as a Jewish minority in the Arab Palestinian state, fully subject to its sovereignty, is publicly accepted by prominent Palestinian figures and, as recent leaks have shown, was actually raised by Palestinian representatives at talks with Israel. The claim, made by some, that a viable Palestinian state as part of a genuine two-state solution is no longer feasible, is wholly predicated on the assumption that Jews could not live in such a state—and have become, in the West Bank, too numerous to be removed in order to make room for it. That the settlement drive has been aimed at creating precisely this situation is undeniable; but why should we go along with this aim?
Here is the best way to display optimism regarding the chances of democracy and pluralism in the Arab world and to show that Arab-Jewish coexistence will henceforward be possible not only under the Zionist rule: promote a peace treaty providing for two nation states, guaranteeing national independence to both peoples, with national minorities on both sides of a peaceful border. If anything goes wrong, the gates of the Jewish state will be open.
Alexander Yakobson teaches ancient history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is an op-ed writer for Haaretz.
