Against the Two-State Solution

Breaking Israel into two states would only encourage more violence. For now, Palestinians and Israelis must learn to live together under one flag.

In plunging into the rough and tumble of Middle East peacemaking, Hillary Rodham Clinton is staking far too much on an alternative that has been thought out far too little. It would be a terrible thing if she, like all those well intentioned states-people before her, failed. For the Obama administration such a failure would mark a downward turn. Angry Republican critics would charge the administration with over-reach and with hubris and because there would be something true about the charge, it would stick, maybe even sprout legs, learn to walk and, god forbid, perhaps even run the Obama administration out of office. Despite all that, it could be said that in the long run and for a far larger slice of the world, it would be far worse if she succeeded.

This is because the “Two States for Two People” – as it is referred to by front-liners – is, both on the face of it and in the most profound sense, a really bad idea. To understand this, one need only contemplate any of several “morning after” scenarios. Let me lift quotes from two interviews I have done with Israeli leaders about just this. When I asked General (res) Amram MItzna, who headed up Israel’s Labor Party, why he advocated for the Two-State Solution, he responded with extraordinary candor: “When Israel is attacked from the territories which we are now occupying, we have no choice but to send in the infantry and thus put our sons in harm’s way. The morning after a sovereign Palestine is established everything will change. If Israel is attacked then, we will be well within our rights to treat the attack as a declaration of war. Our response will be far more severe. It will probably come exclusively from the air.”

When I asked a senior military strategist about the Two State Solution his response was equally thought provoking. He worried that a sovereign Palestine would become a breeding ground for every sort of scurrilous terrorist group, most particularly for a well organized recruitment machine deployed by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. “The day after the sovereign state of Palestine would be declared, Nasrallah would be in there. For a dollar a day he would recruit from a vast cadre of unemployed, an army that he would use not so much against Israel but to destabilize moderate Arab states in the region.”

I’ve heard a third argument against the Two State Solution from a borderline crazy Jewish settler living in one of the tiny illegal outposts on the West Bank of the Jordan River. His view was that the day after the agreement would be signed, or the day after that, or a year later, he or one of his friends would discover a way to blow up the golden domed Al Aqsa mosque. “Over time, security will go limp and we will wait them out.” As I imagine things, the day after the mosque goes, so does the entire region if not half the world.

As a native born Israeli or Sabra, I have yet another serious objection to the Two-State Solution. From my point of view, this alternative would be, for Jewish Israelis, a throwback into the shtetl, the medieval, insular ghetto, from which my grandparents and parents both fought so hard to liberate themselves. Knowing hard-line “purist” Israeli leaders as I do, I worry very much that the day after a sovereign Palestine arises, they will slowly or more rapidly begin implementing a transfer of the 1.2 million Israeli Arabs out of the country and into the New Palestine. The current Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has openly declared that these are his intentions. He wants a state that is Jewish all the way down. And this despite the fact that in my view, he shares not very much in the spirit of Judaism as I know it. Traditionally left wing Israeli leaders have joined Lieberman's call to cleanse the country. They have done so for at least two reasons: either they are worried about what they call "the demographic time-bomb," or they worry that the Arab Israelis could become a fifth column intent on undoing Israel from the inside.

What is the alternative?

Rather than shoot for the Two-State Solution to which artists such as Amos Oz attach the metaphor of "divorce," I believe they’d be better off focusing energies on what I call a “meta-hudna” – not a “divorce” but a stable and tolerable and perhaps someday even acceptable “separation.”

To go with this alternative, we first off need to stop reacting to the word “occupation” as though we have just seen the devil. Consider: who among those of us who sometimes finds themselves on the road to Hell would not wish to be occupied by the spirit of Virgil? Who amongst the mice that roar would not seek to be occupied by a lion?

The problem in the Middle East is not the Occupation, but the kind of occupation which the Israelis have been pursuing for more than four decades. This kind occupation is evil. So were the dozens of occupations that the British Empire and French and the Dutch and the Russians pursued. Each one of these had, as its centrepiece, the concept of self interest which is really nothing more than a big blubbery way of referring to selfishness, and greed, and hubris.

But it is quite easy to imagine a very different kind of occupation. To do that what is necessary is to once again find the courage to resist cynicism and to dream. What needs to be revived is the old idea of a New Middle East. Under these auspices “occupation” is not Israel’s way of ensuring security for itself and at any cost to the Palestinians. It is rather a way of helping the Palestinians become a serious player in the region.

It would take huge effort to negotiate a Meta Hudna, a firm and sustained handshake of the sort which would be in a dozen different ways better and safer than a sovereign West Bank exposed not only to a potentially very aggressive Israel, but also to a perhaps even fiercer Hamas and fiercer still militants on both sides of the Green Line.

To negotiate a Meta Hudna would entail doing all in one’s power to create a sustainable social and political and economic infrastructure in the West Bank. It would entail training Palestinian police to fight militants and corruption without the aid of some occupier. It would entail building new cities, such as the recently built “Rawili," which would bring to the West Bank thousands if not hundreds of thousands of young Palestinian professionals who would very soon bring Palestine into the fray. At the same time Palestinian thinkers will have a chance to get a clear picture of the “end point,” of the kind of sustainable state they really want. Most probably will not opt for the nation-state to which Western Europeans gave birth back in the 19th century. Judging by what I know of the Palestinians they will probably come up with a model that is far more democratic than any which we have thus far seen in our parts.

To achieve this, the Israelis will need to make some immediate changes: replace the 18-year-old untrained soldiers that guard the checkpoints in the West Bank with professional border-crossing guards; better roads and more public transport need to be provided in the West Bank; land grabs by wanton settler groups will need to be curtailed, illegal outposts gotten rid of; Palestinians should be aided in building a sustainable infrastructure and helped to organize their taxation system and long-term economic strategy. These and a hundred other practical, everyday actions would strengthen the Palestinians perhaps to the point where sometime in the future, they and the Israelis could sit around the table and talk eye to eye. But there may be no better administration than the Obama administration to lead the effort

Looked at from closer to the ground, this blood-stained conflict is not really about what it at first seems. It’s not just about land and indigenous peoples, but about the need for a new morality. This morality will be very different than the one that died during the last century – in the trenches and in the gas chambers and in the fields from which Stalin kept the farmers, and in the killing fields. This morality will not be Jewish or Gentile or Arabic – not the fragmented thing we live with, not an ancient concept divided into three separate parts which have been at each other’s jugulars for the greater part of 2000 years.

To make that new morality a reality, western nations must bring Islam into the fold. And to do that should not require another holocaust. In redesigning the region where the west began we have an opportunity to create a model for coexistence – not the side-by-side co-existence of discrete traditions, but the co-existence of all three traditions in a single mind – the kind of mind, I hope, our children will possess.