Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
The One-State
Solution
Daphna
Thier, Sumaya Awad
April
30, 2021
Jacobin
Debate around
Israel’s occupation of Palestine often revolves around the two-state solution —
one state for Palestinians, another for Israelis. Currently, there is a single
state in historic Palestine: the apartheid state of Israel. A web of walls,
settlements, and a legal system of discrimination gives Israel full reign of
the land, sea, and air.
Former executive
director of US Campaign for Palestinian Rights Yusef Munayyer writes: “the
simple truth is that over the decades, the Israelis developed enough power and
cultivated enough support from Washington to allow them to occupy and hold the
territories and to create, in effect, a one-state reality of their own
devising.” Israelis have obstructed the formation of a second, Palestinian
state anywhere in Palestine. That second state is off the table.
So the question
now is not how many states, but rather what kind of
state it will be: an apartheid state privileging Jewish Israelis over
Palestinians, or a democracy for all its people?
Two-State Illusion
In 1948, the
indigenous Palestinian population was systematically dispossessed of 78 percent
of its ancestral land. In 1967, Israel occupied the remaining 22 percent of
Palestine, including the holy city of Jerusalem, which Israel unilaterally and
illegally declared its capital. Israel has consistently refused
Palestinians in these areas citizenship and social and political rights (seen
most recently in the Israeli government’s refusal to distribute
COVID-19 vaccines to Palestinians).
Signed on the
White House lawn in 1994, the Oslo Peace Accords categorically denied
Palestinians sovereignty under the facade of negotiations toward future
statehood. Under Oslo, Israel would maintain military control over
the West Bank and Gaza, while a scattering of Palestinian enclaves,
effectively Bantustans, would be granted varying degrees of civil autonomy.
After five years, the treaty stipulated another round of negotiations for a
permanent agreement of two states.
Twenty-five years
later, Israel prevents Palestinian construction and access to most of the land
while building hundreds of illegal Jewish-only settlements,
continuing its dispossession of entire Palestinian neighborhoods and
towns, and developing Jewish-only infrastructure (including roads, parks, and
natural-resource extraction). A new 213-page report by Human Rights Watch
details this apartheid reality and charges Israel with “crimes against
humanity.”
Within Israeli
society, the nation-state law, which explicitly denies Palestinian
national and cultural existence, is the latest iteration of dozens of
laws enshrining the second-class status of Palestinians since Israel’s
founding. A country that denies an indigenous population access to land, home
ownership, or residence in large parts of the country; prevents its access to
employment, education, and welfare benefits; denies its right to national or
cultural self-determination; and even denies its political representatives the
right to call for equality, is no democracy. The Jewish race riots in Jerusalem
last week, where Palestinians were ambushed and beaten in the streets by police
and mobs of Jewish Israelis chanting “Death to Arabs,” is just one example of
Israel’s commitment to an ethnonationalist state. A two-state solution would
leave such a state intact.
Two-state
negotiations deny millions of Palestinians, one of the world’s largest refugee
populations, the internationally recognized right to return to land
and homes from which they were forcibly expelled. While Israeli law offers Jews
from anywhere in the world the right to “return,” it denies the right to
Palestinians born in Palestine and their descendants. Any sustainable solution
cannot ignore the legitimate aspirations of seven million Palestinian refugees.
As member of Knesset Ofer Cassif put it, “Right of return is not a
threat. It’s a solution.”
Any solution that
maintains the state of Israel as a Jewish state violates the individual and
collective democratic, civil, and human rights of Palestinians. Israel is a
settler society that wants to overcome and subdue a defiant indigenous
population. That Israel is settled on Palestine.
From the River to
the Sea
A truly free and
democratic country for all its people is one in which, as Edward Said once put
it, citizenship entitles all to the same privileges and resources.
Pretty basic stuff, judging by the low standards of modern democracy. But
Israeli and American political leaders have painted this as unrealistic, even
unfair.
Many living under the brutality of Israel’s project posit that it is the only realistic long-term solution. Launched in 2018, the One Democratic State Campaign (ODSC) calls for “full civil equality” for both peoples, the right of return, and the creation of a process to mend Palestinians’ “historical grievances” as a result of the Zionist project. Its manifesto calls for a constitutional democracy that will protect collective rights and the freedom of association, whether national, ethnic, religious, class or gender . . . [and] ensure that all languages, arts and cultures can flourish and develop freely. No group or collectivity will have any privileges, nor will any group or collectivity have any control or domination over others. The Constitution will deny the Parliament the authority to enact any laws that discriminate against any community, be it ethnic, national, religious, cultural or class.
The ODSC connects
its call to the progressive campaigns across the Arab world and internationally
for a world “free of exploitation, racism, intolerance, oppression, wars,
colonialism and imperialism.”
Supporters of the
two-state solution often cite the right of Jews to self-determination. However,
a Jewish right to self-determination does not mean a Jewish right to statehood.
As Peter Beinart recently pointed out, to offer all peoples a right to
statehood would be impossible without doing so at the expense of others, as is
the case in Israel.
Israel purports to
speak on behalf of all Jews and to be a “homeland” for Jewish peoples. But even
within Israeli Jewish society, nonwhite Jews
are discriminated against by the state and denied cultural
self-determination.
The Zionist movement
has also long separated the Jewish diaspora from its most logical allies —
oppressed minorities. It has connected them in twisted ways
to white supremacists, the very people that loathe them. This weakens
opposition to the rise of the Right and undermines solidarity.
For decades, the
idea of a single democratic state was a galvanizing point in the Palestinian
liberation movement. The call was for democracy and freedom throughout historic
Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and an end to the
Jewish ethnocracy.
However, following
the capitulation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the
Palestinian governing party that agreed to the restricted terms of the Oslo
Accords, demoralization lowered the sights of many and steadily demobilized
grassroots resistance. Growing mistrust in the PLO and its role in maintaining
and benefiting from endless hollow negotiations also played a role in
disillusionment with the two-state framework. A large majority of all
Palestinians agree that the two-state solution is unrealistic. A growing
number believe in one democratic state, especially younger Palestinians
and those in diaspora. Palestinian cofounder of the Boycott, Divestment, and
Sanctions (BDS) movement Omar Barghouti called such a solution “the
more just, moral and therefore enduring alternative.”
In the absence of
a national liberation movement, we can look to the BDS calls put forward by
Palestinian civil society that lay the groundwork for an end to Israel’s
colonial project: ending ethnonationalism and Israel’s occupation of all Arab
land, dismantling Israel’s apartheid wall, and upholding the rights of
Palestinian refugees.
If you believe in
democracy, justice, and the end to all forms of oppression, you should also
support a one-state solution, from the river to the sea.
Daphna Thier is a
socialist, the mother of a toddler, and activist based in Brooklyn. She is a
contributing author of the volume Palestine: A Socialist
Introduction (Haymarket Books).
Sumaya Awad is Adalah
Justice Project's director of strategy and communications, and coeditor
of Palestine: A Socialist Introduction (Haymarket Books).
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Source URL: https://portside.org/2021-05-02/one-state-solution
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The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
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