From the June 23rd National Post, here is an article by Steven Scheinberg and Neil Caplan from Canadian Friends of Peace Now.
One State is No Solution
A conference with the objective of advancing a so-called “one-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began yesterday at York University in Toronto. The conference’s title — “Mapping Models of Statehood and Paths to Peace” — is misleadingly broad: Though a handful of respectable speakers have been added to the program in an effort to cultivate some legitimacy, the presence at the event of non-academic advocates of this extreme premise is evidence of the original political objective of the organizers.
The one-state solution has been around, in a variety of forms, for almost 80 years. Its first formulation — the theory of a “binational” state — was the product of a handful of liberal, humanitarian Jews in British Mandatory Palestine. These were honourable individuals, who tried to envision Palestine/ Israel as a land shared by two peoples. They wanted to create constitutional arrangements to protect the autonomy of separate but equal Arab and Jewish communities. Unfortunately, their proposals was drowned in a chorus of demands from the political leadership on both sides.
To break this deadlock, first Lord Peel, in 1937, and then UNSCOP, in 1947, proposed to partition the disputed land into separate Jewish and Arab states — i. e., a two-state solution. After 1948, when the Arab states not only rejected the UN’s partition of Palestine but also invaded and tried to destroy the nascent state of Israel, the binational variety of one-statism receded.
In the late-1960s, another form of one-statism emerged. Advocated by the Palestine Liberation Organization and its allies, this formulation envisioned the removal of Zionist Israel through armed struggle, to be replaced by an Arab Palestinian state. Israel, according to this view, was totally illegitimate–and, thus, the state and its people must simply be swept away.
Since it was difficult to argue openly (at least in some circles) for the destruction of an existing member-state of the United Nations, PLO spokesmen deceptively cloaked their goal in the popular phraseology of the day: an inclusive, democratic and secular state of Palestine. But inclusiveness in this scenario was to be limited to Jews whose ancestors had lived in the land before 1917, leaving no place for the millions of Israelis whose parents had arrived there after that date.
The current revival of interest in a one-state solution can be attributable largely to the failure of Israel and the Palestinian Authority to achieve real progress toward a Palestinian state. The historic 1993 Israel-PLO mutual recognition treaty and the Oslo peace process led many to hope for an imminent solution based on two states living side by side. The shattering of those dreams in the wake of the July, 2000, Camp David summit, and the eruption of the al-Aqsa Intifada in September of that year, has led some to abandon hope for a two-state solution. Their flirtation with the onestate option is born of this despair.
We believe that frustration with the lack of progress toward a two-state solution does not provide a sufficient basis for advocating a one-state solution. Current calls for a one-state solution mask a desire for the disappearance of Israel as a Jewish state. They not only reinforce the demands of fundamentalist groups like Hamas, but also cater to demagogic seekers of “justice” and anti-Israel campus groups.
In contrast to this armchair radicalism, a recent poll indicates that 74% of Palestinians and 78% of Israelis would support a two-state solution. Our view, as activists and scholars who have been engaged for many years in promoting peace and understanding, is that the resurrection of the onestate doctrine is highly inflammatory. Despite its apparent popularity in some circles, this “solution” is without doubt a recipe for the continuation of this 130-year-old conflict.
- Stephen Scheinberg is emeritus professor of history at Concordia University, Montreal, and co-chair of Canadian Friends of Peace Now. Neil Caplan is adjunct assistant professor of history at Concordia University, author of The Israel-Palestine Conflict: Contested Histories and a member of the Montreal Board of Canadian Friends of Peace Now.
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