Is the Two-State Solution Viable after Gaza?

M. Walzer: The Two-State Solution After Gaza

NO ONE can say with any certainty that the two-state solution was viable before the war in Gaza. I can imagine arguments that the war made it more viable and also that it made it less viable. But, really, its viability doesn’t have a lot to do with the immediate strategic/political situation. There isn’t any other solution; this one is unique. People keep coming back to it because there’s no other way to go. It survives, therefore, I guess, it’s viable.

But it isn’t in great shape right now, even though everyone knows what each side would have to do to realize this solution. The Palestinians have to end their civil war, and form a provisional government that recognizes Israel and represses all terrorist activity. The Israelis have to form a government that recognizes the Palestinians’ right to a state of their own, defeats the settler movement, and begins the evacuation of the settlements.

The nice thing about these two lists of what-ought-to-be-done is that they don’t require any mutual engagement. Settling their civil war and repressing terrorism are things that the Palestinians can do—indeed, have to do—by themselves. And Israelis can defeat the settler movement and move the settlers out of the West Bank without a “partner” on the other side and without handing over territory. Move the settlers out and the army in. That would be a sufficient indication of a readiness to withdraw, just as the repression of terrorist activity by the Palestinians would be a sufficient indication of a readiness to coexist. The readiness is all. After that, negotiations would not be difficult (well, they would be difficult, but success would be possible, as it isn’t now).

Of course, each side would find the necessary moves much more comfortable if the other side was “readying” itself at the same time and at the same pace. But it is important to insist that both Israel and the Palestinians can and should act independently, whatever the other is doing. Rabin in 1992 and Barak in 1999 should have moved immediately, the day after their electoral victory, to take on the settler movement. They should have provoked a fight, and won it (as they would have done), and begun the process of bringing the settlers home. The argument against doing this was exactly the same one that many Palestinians made against repressing the terrorists: Why should we start a fight among ourselves when there is no near prospect of a final settlement? In fact, all anyone needs in order to act is the idea of a settlement—and the only idea that can motivate the actions I have described is the two-state solution.

What is necessary on each side is internal unilateralism. By contrast, external unilateralism—as in Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza (and the original Kadima plan to withdraw in a similar way from the West Bank)—is not a good idea. The actual establishment of a Palestinian state and the fixing of its boundaries—that has to be negotiated, and the negotiations must wait until the negotiating partners are sure about each other’s readiness. At this moment, they are not sure at all, and each of them is right to be unsure. The zealots on both sides are too strong. This might be the result of the Gaza war, except that the situation was so dark before the war.

The next Israeli government will stand considerably to the right of the current one, its leaders unwilling to challenge the settler movement (if they aren’t actually supporters of the movement). But that’s what the polls were already suggesting in the months before the war. The drift rightward is the inevitable result of Hamas’s rocketing of Israeli cities. Among Palestinians, the confusion of “resistance” and terrorism seems deeply entrenched, but that was also true, at least in Gaza where the rockets were coming from, before the Gaza war began.

It seems that everyone who supports the two-state solution—the last Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, and the Saudis—hoped that Israel would win a decisive victory in Gaza. The failure to win decisively strengthens the opponents of two states. That’s not an argument that Israel should have “finished” the job; there were good reasons for an early cease-fire. In any case, the long-term outcome of the war is unknowable right now. If the rocket fire from Gaza stops and if internationally supported mechanisms are put in place to prevent the smuggling of rockets—that may be victory enough to make Israelis more ready to withdraw from the West Bank. And the experience of the war, the way Hamas fought and the way Israel fought, may undercut Palestinian support for terrorism as a political strategy—as the 2006 fighting apparently did in Lebanon, though that didn’t look to be the case immediately after the fighting ended.

I have stressed internal unilateralism, but each side needs more than a little help from its friends. Israel and the Palestinians need heavy and continuous pressure to address the obstacles in their own camp. Clinton and his team tried too hard, I now believe, to bring the two sides together before either of them was ready. Arafat, who probably believed in terrorism as a strategy, was less ready than Barak, who apparently was prepared to challenge the settlers—but not quite yet. It would have been better in the 1990s, and it would be better now, to work on each side separately. A division of labor might make sense, with the Americans concentrating on Israel and the Europeans (with help, perhaps, from Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia) on Palestine, but the interventions would have to be equally strong and the external partners equally committed to their tasks: the repression of terror by the PA and the defeat of the settler movement by the Israeli government. Perhaps the awfulness of the Gaza war will produce a new sense of urgency, if not in Israel and Palestine, then in the United States and Europe.

Note that this external assistance could have no other goal than two states. In the international system, states can help make new states and give them legitimacy; they can’t abolish states to which they have already given legitimacy (as Israel would have to be abolished for the sake of a one-state solution). They can recognize and proliferate entities like themselves, and that is the only “solution” they can offer to the Palestinians. Once there are two states, and a boundary they both accept, then it will be possible to talk, if anyone wants to talk, about confederations and unions. But not now. Europeans could form a union only after the post-Second World War settlement had fixed the boundaries of all the European states. Israel and Palestine need a postwar settlement.

A last note: it is critically important right now to address the suffering of the people of Gaza, and no one seems to have figured out a way of doing that—perhaps there is no way—without strengthening Hamas. So be it. But Hamas is obviously not “ready” for negotiations and not ready to get ready. Its refusal to recognize Israel and its commitment to terrorism are, for now at least, central features of its identity. So, I am afraid, is its rabid anti-Semitism: the Hamas Charter reiterates an ancient hatred that long predates the Zionist project and the wars of 1948 and 1967. It solemnly insists that the Jews as a people are responsible for the French and Russian revolutions and for the two World Wars. And that’s part of the message delivered every day and every week in Hamas schools and mosques—which is not a sign of readiness. Perhaps we need to think about a three state solution, with only two of those states—Israel and the PA’s West Bank—preparing themselves for peaceful co-existence.

Michael Walzer is editor of Dissent. This article also appears as a part of a Democratiya symposium.