263 - The Two State Solution: Is it Feasible?

            "The only just and workable solution to this issue is two nation-states for two indigenous peoples."  That is Thomas Friedman, writing another perceptive column in the New York Times. Friedman is doubtless right, and that has long been the considered opinion of experts, diplomats, and the White House.  But how exactly do we create two states that can coexist, side by side, between the sea and the river? Considering the enmity between the two states, how conceivably could such a body be established?

            Friedman, in a second column published Saturday, is acerbic about a key obstacle: “The Jewish supremacists in his cabinet will not let Netanyahu form any partnership with the non-Hamas Palestinian Authority that governs in the West Bank for fear it could lead to a Palestinian state there and in Gaza.”  Right-wing and extreme Orthodox Israelis went to continue to push Palestinians toward Jordan, not Jerusalem, and – they dream – to take or re-take all of Judea and Samaria to re-establish the Biblical Jewish state in Canaan.

            Yet, early on Friday, the UN General Assembly decided that Palestine already was sufficiently a de facto state to be admitted formally into the Assembly, but without voting rights (the granting of which is the prerogative of the Security Council). Palestine, even with these not quite full rights, thus became a recognized state.  Now it has to gain de jure status, somehow, despite a prospective U.S. veto. Washington has long said that “Palestine” must be the outcome of negotiations with Israel.  Good luck on that so long as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is in office, propped up by supremacists.

            Hence, how exactly, in the aftermath of the Hamas atrocities last year and the continuation of Hezbollah's attacks on northern Israel, can the region really move toward a workable two-state solution? Ostensibly, Hamas (and Iran) want to eliminate Israel and to deny Israelis the right to remain between the sea and the river. Many Israelis, especially the extremists on whom Netanyahu relies for his political survival, want to exterminate Arabs, eradicate the West Bank and Palestine, and push all residents into Jordan or Syria. Not since the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 has the spirit of the Oslo compromise between Israel and an al-Fatah led Palestine  (before Hamas) been viable.

            A one-state solution might be the stronger answer -- except for demography. Between the sea and the river -- all of Judea and Samaria -- now roughly holds equal numbers of Arabs and Jewish Israelis.  About 2 millions of those 7 million Arabs already live in Israel, as citizens.  But throughout what would be the one-state of Israel/Palestine (think KwaZulu/Natal), Arabs have much higher birthrates than Israelis.  Within a single state, Arabs would quite soon out-number Israelis.

            Since Israel is democracy, with honest elections, two peoples within one state would soon transform the Jewish homeland into an Arab-controlled polity. Obviously, that is a non-starter, abnegating the entire post-Holocaust notion that displaced persecuted Jews need a national home.

            Alternatively, the single state option could have once worked if Israelis had not, for obvious identity and survival reasons, marginalized the rights of its own Arab citizens and systematically, especially during the sixteen years Netanyahu has served as prime minister, undermined Palestinian autonomy and humanity in the West Bank. Israel, especially in this century, has compromised what could have been a well-functioning state called Palestine in the West Bank.

            Especially thanks to Netanyahu's leadership lapses, the idea and reality of a state called Palestine has over and over been vitiated. Indeed, he built up Hamas with Qatari money purposely in order to weaken Palestine and Palestinian leadership. That is why the atrocities of October were the abysmal result of a self-serving, twisted, plan to delegitimize the entity and the al-Fatah movement that Netanyahu (accustomed long ago to arguing with Yasser Arafat) still imagined to be his most important rival. He can blame Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for relinquishing command of the Gaza Strip in 2005, but subsequent horrendous Israeli political mistakes of commission and omission (under Netanyahu) compounded that questionable decision and led us all down the stony road to the present debacle.

            Because the single-state answer is not possible, and there is no such thing as a three-state solution -- with Israeli, say, joining hands with contiguous Jordan and together governing what would then be an Arab majority state -- everyone always defaults back to a two-state solution. Diplomats and presidents parrot the words "two-state."  But how can we get there --to the promised land -- when its foundations are so poorly laid on quicksand?

            Under the British Mandate (1922-1948) the land between the sea and the river was allocated by Britain 55 percent to Jewish settlers and 45 percent to indigenous Arabs. But with the establishment of Israel those proportions remained largely respected until the various regional wars after 1948 and the slicing and dicing of the last twenty years.  Netanyahu's Likud regimes have largely permitted or not strenuously opposed the establishment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, often near the border with Israel, occasionally deep into Palestinian territory.  These incursions are illegal in international law and counter to decisions of the Israeli Supreme Court.  But they continue, with Palestinian villagers losing their land, losing their olive groves, losing grazing land for sheep, and - too often -- being attacked by militant Israeli settlers (as in Hebron and more recently near Ramallah).

            Of the original 45 percent of the land, this incessant whittling away of the West Bank since 2000 has left Palestine with only 28 (or 22) percent of its original territory, accounts differ. Even with Gaza added back in (an unlikely prospect), a Palestinian State with no direct access to the sea and much of its agriculturally promising terrain lost to settlements is a poor partner for a more dominant Israel. The new state would hardly be viable unless Israel decided to change course and became determined to help to support a real second and independent polity. (Now Israel treats the West Bank as an unwanted, dangerous, and adversarial dependent.)

            Furthermore, today there is no Palestinian government that its own residents and surrounding Arab countries regard as legitimate.  There have been no elections since 2005; Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, 88, rules arbitrarily. There is no meaningful political participation, one reason why despicable Hamas has a following in the West Bank.

            Outsiders and liberal Israelis rightly cling to a two-state outcome as the only path to sustainable peace once the Gazan war is somehow concluded. There are no more achievable answers. Friedman’s answer, and presumably President Biden’s, is that removing Netanyahu and his supremacist backers would bring us closer to the rational two-state solution, with Arab-nation backing, support, and cash.  My crystal ball goes dark when I ask it, once again, precisely how do we get there from here?