Some people, most prominently the Palestinian American activist Ali Abunimah, have called for a single democratic state of all its citizens, a vision that is slowly but steadily gaining allies. In 2011, former Knesset speaker and Peace Now activist Avraham Burg declared the two-state paradigm finished—“So enough of the illusions,” he wrote in Haaretz, “there are no longer two states between the Jordan River and the sea”—and called on the Israeli left to cease giving cover to the right by pretending that outcome was any longer in the offing. For a number of conservatives in Israel, an acceptable alternative would be to withdraw unilaterally from parts of the West Bank and annex the parts it intends to keep. While this option has been discussed for years, it recently acquired urgency when Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the United States, raised the idea in a February interview with The Times of Israel: “If we declare our borders, that creates a de-facto situation of two nation states recognized by the UN. … We would be one of dozens of pairs of countries in the world that have a border dispute.” Right-wing Israeli journalist Caroline Glick has an even more extreme plan. Glick recently published The Israeli Solution, in which she calls for the country to annex all of the West Bank and offer the Palestinians living there a “path to citizenship” (a path, one imagines, that would be quite arduous). In response to concerns that Israeli Palestinians would eventually outnumber Israeli Jews in such an arrangement, Glick insists that, without Gaza, this new Israel would still safely retain a two-thirds Jewish majority. Some alternatives are baroque. In a 2008 piece for Tikkun, scholar Russell Nieli proposed an arrangement that he called “Two-State Condominialism”: a two-state confederation in which Palestinian Israelis “would be required to transfer their citizenship, national identity, and national voting rights—but not their residence—to the new Palestinian state.” These Palestinians “would retain their permanent right to live in Israel and they would also retain their current benefits under the Jewish welfare state, but it would be required that they become citizens of—and permanent voting members of—the Palestinian state, not Israel.” A much more pessimistic proposal was offered by Palestinian intellectual Sari Nusseibeh in his 2011 book-length essay, What Is a Palestinian State Worth? Reflecting on the failure to create a state, Nusseibeh asked the reader to consider what a state is for in the first place—securing the rights of those within it. To this end, Nusseibeh proposed “that Israel officially annex the occupied territories, and that Palestinians in the enlarged Israel agree that the state remain Jewish in return for being granted all the civil, though not the political, rights of citizenship.” In other words, Palestinians accept second-class status, rather than continuing to fight an apparently unwinnable battle against the Israeli occupation. Recognizing his own proposal as “so objectionable that it might well generate its own annulment, either by making all parties see the need to find a tenable alternative or, if indeed adopted, by serving as a natural step toward a single democratic state,” Nusseibeh nevertheless insisted that such a plan would provide Palestinians with “a far better life than they have had in more than forty years under occupation or would have under another projected scenario: Israeli hegemony over scattered, ‘autonomous’ Palestinian enclaves.” Even though offered as a “thought experiment,” such a proposal coming from a longtime supporter of two states like Nusseibeh is a sign of the Palestinian intelligentsia’s exhaustion with endless rounds of negotiations. That exhaustion is shared broadly among the younger generation. Two Palestinians at opposite ends of the establishment spectrum—the first an activist leader in the West Bank, the second a young Palestinian official close to the negotiations over the past several years—illustrate a fundamental shift in views. The activist is done with two states, with Oslo, and with the Palestinian government created under its auspices. “I don’t want a Palestinian Authority representing me that hasn’t had elections since 2006,” she told me. “It’s time to get people out of thinking about land and into thinking about rights. I’m tired of arguing about land. I want my rights.” The Palestinian official confessed to me that, after years of being at negotiations, “I never thought I’d say this, but I care less about a state than I do about being treated with dignity. Give me an Israeli passport, but don’t humiliate me at checkpoints.” These sentiments were echoed in a recent New York Times article on growing frustration with the two-state solution among younger Palestinians, including the son of President Abbas. “If you don’t want to give me independence, at least give me civil rights,” Tareq Abbas told the Times. “That’s an easier way, peaceful way. I don’t want to throw anything, I don’t want to hate anybody, I don’t want to shoot anybody. I want to be under the law.” Still, no one has articulated a plausible process for how that could happen. “There’s no exact model, but there’s no exact situation like Israel-Palestine anywhere else in the world,” says Yousef Munayyer, the executive director of the Jerusalem Fund, a Washington-based nonprofit that does educational and humanitarian work on behalf of the Palestinians. “I think there are lessons that can be borrowed from the outcomes in different places that can help us move in a different direction in Israel-Palestine, but we have to always remember that it is a unique situation, and so unique solutions have to be thought about.” Given the massive investment in diplomatic efforts over the past decades, it’s difficult to imagine that U.S. policy can be redirected toward a solution beyond two states. But American policy is going to have to confront openness to other answers on the part of Israelis and Palestinians. The logic of the Oslo process that created the Palestinian Authority was that it was a transitional period leading to the creation of a Palestinian state, in which the Palestinian people would enjoy sovereignty and self--determination. Because the occupation was nearing its end, the thinking went, it was better to focus on the ultimate goal and not get distracted arguing about the daily challenges that Palestinians face. After almost 47 years of occupation, that thinking may need to change. “We may be entering a ‘nonsolution’ era,’” says Palestinian official Husam Zomlot. “It doesn’t mean renewed conflict, but it means we need to ditch the idea that our peoples’ daily needs must wait for a solution.” Finding a solution remains paramount, Zomlot stresses, “but in a scenario of a nonsolution, then what? The people of Gaza should remain under siege? The people of the West Bank should continue to see their land being robbed by the day? We cannot afford any longer to continue behaving as if everything has to wait until a solution is struck.” Noam Sheizaf believes it is time to change the terms from a struggle for statehood to a struggle for human rights. “When one addresses the occupation as a human-rights issue, and I believe this to be its true essence, attitudes change, even dramatically,” he says. The existing reality in the West Bank, Sheizaf says, is “two different legal systems in the same territory, access to resources based on ethnicity, the lack of due process which is an inherent part of the occupation. All of these are so foreign to the American ethos.” Heightening the focus on that reality, he argues, rather than on a diplomatic process that has proved incapable of changing it, could be more constructive. If the current negotiations effort by the U.S. fails, it’s unlikely that any measure of trust between the sides will be preserved for the next president to have another go at the issue. In such a scenario, the U.S. will find itself in a situation in which it remains deeply implicated but seems to have even less ability to influence the course of events. The time is now to start talking about Plan B, if only to give greater urgency to Plan A.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Nov 2014 02:51:45 +0000
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