Saree Makdisi: End of the Two-State Solution
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In order to try to create an exclusively Jewish state in what had been the culturally diverse land of Palestine, Israel’s founders expelled or drove into flight half of Palestine’s Muslim and Christian population and seized their land, their houses, and their property (furniture, clothing, books, personal effects, family heirlooms), in what Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948.
Even while demanding – rightly – that no one should forget the Jewish people’s history of suffering, and above all the Holocaust, Israel has insisted ever since 1948 not merely that the Palestinians must forget their own history, but that what it calls peace must be premised on that forgetting, and hence on the Palestinians’ renunciation of their rights. As Israel’s foreign minister has said, if the Palestinians want peace, they must learn to strike the word “nakba” from their lexicon.
Some must never forget, while others, clearly, must not be allowed to remember. Far from mere hypocrisy, this attitude perfectly expresses the Israeli people’s mistaken belief that they can find the security they need at the expense of the Palestinians, or that one people’s right can be secured at the cost of another’s.
Little wonder such an approach has not delivered peace. The only way to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to end the denial of rights that fuels it, and to ensure that both peoples’ rights are equally protected.
For some years it was thought that peace could be obtained by sidestepping the central fact of the nakba, and creating a Palestinian statelet in what remained of Palestine after 1948, namely, the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, which Israel occupied in 1967.
But such a two-state solution is no longer possible. The inescapable fact is that one state controls all of the land, and it has done so for over 40 years, affirming one people’s right to live, marry, work and settle by negating another people’s right to do the same, on land that two peoples – not just one – call home.
The only question now is how much longer this negation can go on, and how long it will be before a state premised on it is superseded by its opposite, an affirmative, genuinely democratic, secular and multi-cultural state, the only kind that can offer Jewish Israelis and Muslim and Christian Palestinians alike a future free of discrimination, occupation, fear and violence.
The question, in other words, is not whether there will be a one-state solution, but when; and how much needless suffering there will be in the meantime, until those who are committed to the project of creating and maintaining a religiously exclusivist state in what was historically a culturally and religiously heterogeneous land finally relent and accept the inevitable: that they have failed.
This last point is especially important, because the conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians is – and has always been –– driven by the notion that hundreds of years of cultural heterogeneity and plurality could be negated overnight by the creation of a state with a single cultural and religious identity.
It hardly matters that that identity was never as homogeneous as Zionists like to claim: witness Israel’s methodical de-Arabisation of its Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) population in the 1950s and 1960s, or the perennial debate over “who is a Jew” – an unseemly question that in Israel is not merely a matter of arcane theological exegesis but tied directly to matters of citizenship, nationality, and law.
Israel’s claim to an exclusive Jewish identity – as symbolised by its flag – has been sustained ever since 1948 by denying the moral and legal right of return of those Palestinians expelled during the nakba, by forms of legalised discrimination inside the state, and by the maintenance of a much more violent system of apartheid in the territories Israel has militarily occupied since 1967.
Palestinian citizens of Israel – officially referred to by the state as deracinated “Arabs” because it cannot bring itself to acknowledge the fact that they are Palestinian – face institutionalised forms of discrimination far worse than those once encountered by African Americans. For example, while Jewish Israelis who marry non-citizens (or residents of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories) are entitled to have their spouses come live with them, Israeli law explicitly denies that right to Palestinian citizens who marry Palestinians from the occupied territories. Palestinian citizens are also denied various other privileges, including access to state lands, reserved exclusively for Jews.
Meanwhile, Israel maintains two separate infrastructures in the occupied territories, and it subjects the two populations there to two distinct legal and administrative systems. Indigenous Palestinians are subject to a harsh form of military rule, whereas Jewish settlers enjoy the protections of Israeli civil law, even though they have been transplanted -– in violation of international law – beyond the borders of their state.
Indeed, Israel’s intensive settlement of the occupied territories is the primary reason for the demise of the two-state solution. Not only is the settler population increasing at a rate three times greater than that of Israel itself, but, according to a UN report published last summer, almost 40% of the West Bank is now taken up with Israeli infrastructure to which Palestinians are denied access. The remainder of the territory has been broken up into an archipelago, each little “island” of territory in effect a small-scale Gaza, cut off from the outside and completely vulnerable to Israel’s whims. Under such circumstances, an independent Palestinian state is inconceivable.
Even if it were conceivable, the creation of a Palestinian statelet in the occupied territories would do nothing to safeguard the rights of the 20% of Israel’s citizens who are Palestinian; on the contrary, its existence would further empower the likes of former deputy prime minister Avigdor Lieberman, who wants all Palestinians removed to make room for Jewish immigrants (like himself). Nor would it address the right of return of the Palestinians who were deliberately expelled to make room for a Jewish state in 1948, who have been kept out and living in limbo – or in the prison that is Gaza – solely in order to preserve Israel’s tenuous claim to Jewishness.
Negation, denial and imprisonment have run their course. The future should be built on affirmation, cooperation, and the constitution of a democratic and secular state that guarantees the rights of Israelis and Palestinians, of Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike.
* Saree Makdisi is Professor of English Literature at the University of California, and the author of Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, published by WW Norton, £15.99. This article originally appeared in the July 28, 2008 edition of The Guardian.
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Couldn’t agree more. But the most important people to get on board the single-state bus are the PLO factions. I must have been listening to PA negotiator Saeb Erekat for over a decade now stating, after each settlement expansion is announced, that “this threatens the viability of a future Palestinian state and the two-state solution”. I’ve got this terrible vision of him, in another decade or so, clinging to the top of the column in Ramallah’s central square completely surrounded by settlements and declaring “this is the last chance for a two-state solution”. Someone should ask him at what point does he consider it not viable. Since the PLO’s catastrophic decision to recognise “the Jewish state”, it has to go down in history as the most ineffectual national liberation movement in the history of national liberation movements.
“Negation, denial and imprisonment have run their course. The future should be built on affirmation, cooperation, and the constitution of a democratic and secular state that guarantees the rights of Israelis and Palestinians, of Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike.”
Is Israel the only state in the Middle East that must guarantee the rights of all of its citizens- whether they be Christian or Moslem or Jew or Kurd or men or women or gay or straight? Have intellectuals/academics such as Prof. Makdisi or Edward Said or Hanan Ashwari make the same demands of such guarantees of other states in the Middle East? Does it matter if they do not? Can it really be said that Israel guarantees these rights less than the other states? Did Jewish populations of the other states in the Middle East/North Africa go to Israel for no other reason than a desire to oppress Arabs and send postcards from Tel-Aviv? Does Prof. Makdisi indeed believe that “Israel’s intensive settlement of the occupied territories is the primary reason for the demise of the two-state solution” and an equal– if not greater reason for the demise of this solution — is Israel fear of its neighbors?
These are actual questions –not rhetorical ones.
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Gregor – thanks for the comments… I will try to answer your questions, though Professor Makdisi will have to answer the last one.
Is Israel the only state in the Middle East that must guarantee the rights of all of its citizens- whether they be Christian or Moslem or Jew or Kurd or men or women or gay or straight?
Of course not. Problems of civil rights and social justice are prevalent in every state, not only Israel. But I would say that this article is interested primarily in the Israeli situation vis-à-vis these issues. Given Israel’s history of dispossession, occupation and colonial-settler expansion, these issues are especially important. Of course, Israel is far ahead of the Arab dictatorships in many of these areas… at least internally – but certainly not in the occupied territories. Civil rights go out the window in a military occupation, and though Israel has done everything possible to make its occupation palatable to the West, the fact is that Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza live a miserable existence. There is no need to discuss the 80% unemployment rate in Gaza since Israel sealed that territory off from the outside world. Nor do we need to discuss the hundreds of Israel/international-only roads upon which no Palestinian is allowed to drive. Military occupation necessarily denies rights we in the West take for granted. Besides, Israel is good friends with the Egyptian and Jordanian dictatorships (both of whom receive massive sums of money from the United States for this reason), so it would seem they also support the repression occurring in these states.
It would be too much to go into very specific case of Israeli oppression in the occupied territories, but you mentioned homosexual rights so I will just say this. Israel’s Shit Bet regularly threatens Palestinian homosexuals with exposure if they do not collaborate… and while Israel did allow a gay Palestinian man to move to Israel (for good PR), they have also banned marriages between Israelis and Palestinians. Israelis are not allowed to live in the occupied territories – and Palestinians are certainly not allowed to live in Israel.
Have intellectuals/academics such as Prof. Makdisi or Edward Said or Hanan Ashwari make the same demands of such guarantees of other states in the Middle East? Does it matter if they do not?
Yes. Many in the academic world decry abuses of civil rights in the authoritarian Arab states… Certainly Edward Said was always strongly critical of these governments (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan), for their repressive internal policies… nevertheless, these governments are propped up by the United States. Mubarak, for example, receives 90% of the vote and Bush calls him a “democratic reformer”!
Israel, on the other hand calls itself a democracy, but in practice this is automatically problematic. The state was founded on a fundamentally exclusionary, racist mentality – that is a Jewish state for Jews. Even the original socialist Zionists never considered incorporating the native Palestinian population into the state of Israel. This population was always thought to be a nuisance and could not remain in situ if there was to be a Jewish state. Today, the 20% Israel Arab population naturally faces discrimination in a variety of ways…
Of course, discrimination is not unique to Israel… but by setting up a separate set of laws governing 1) Israel and 2) the occupied population, Israel has created a de facto apartheid state in which to be an occupied Palestinian means to be stateless, without rights, and dominated by the Israeli military in everything from basic freedom of movement, to illegal seizure of land, to indefinite “administrative detention”.
Can it really be said that Israel guarantees these rights less than the other states?
Israel continues to prosecute the longest military occupation in modern history. As I wrote, Israel is ahead in areas of social rights – but only internally. None of these rights are enjoyed by the people suffering under their brutal occupation. So, in this respect, the occupation undermines Israel’s very credibility as a democracy. Indeed, it’s not that Israel guarantees these rights less, it’s that they guarantee nothing at all – no rights – to those in the occupied territories. THey have never even accepted that the fourth Geneva Convention applies to the occupied territories. And when the international community attempts to protect even the most minor rights of an occupied population (the right not to have land seized by an occupying power for example), the United States always vetoes it on the Security Council. When the vote goes to the General Assembly, just look at the results. Inevitably you have the United States and Israel (and perhaps the Cayman Islands) versus every other country in the world. But this doesn’t really matter. The American veto on the security council is the important thing…
Did Jewish populations of the other states in the Middle East/North Africa go to Israel for no other reason than a desire to oppress Arabs and send postcards from Tel-Aviv?
Of course not – and I don’t think anyone believes that. But modern Jewish nationalism in the form of Zionism, especially post-WWII, believed that the Jews needed a state of their own to determine their own destiny, and Palestine was the only state with the necessary nationalistic emotions attached to raise a popular movement. I believe most ordinary Jewish immigrants at the time were largely oblivious to the political situation in Mandatory Palestine. Certainly the Yishuv (pre-1948 Jewish government) had no intentions other than removing the Palestinian population and this has been well documented (email me if you would like sources for anything I write by the way). This intention coupled with the understandable sensitivity after the Holocaust and with David Ben-Gurion’s rhetoric of “another Holocaust”, ensured that Israel has constantly believed itself to be engaged in an existential battle – and such a mentality justified all kinds of appalling deeds (mass expulsions, massacres, razing of villages, etc.).
Specifically in the case of Mizrahi Jews… most were adamantely opposed to Zionism, but as tensions grew between European Jewish and Arab Muslims/Christians, lines blurred and religion became the most important unifying factor. During the Palestinian rioting in 1936, some orthodox Mizrahi Jews were killed and this sparked the beginning of their alienation from their erstwhile copatriots…
Does Prof. Makdisi indeed believe that “Israel’s intensive settlement of the occupied territories is the primary reason for the demise of the two-state solution” and an equal– if not greater reason for the demise of this solution — is Israel fear of its neighbors?
As I said, Professor Makdisi would have to respond to this question, but I will give you my perspective… Israel was perhaps at risk of destruction in 1948 – certainly not in 1967, nor in 1973, nor at any time since. Israel is nuclear… Israel has the second most technologically advanced military in the world. Israel is backed by the United States militarily and politically in the international community. Individual Israelis receive more money from the U.S. government than the average American receives…
And we should always question an accepted truth when all parties agree with each other’s propaganda. Ask Iran, and they will tell you that Israel faces destruction on all sides. Ask Olmert and he will tell you that Israel faces destruction on all sides. Of course, as a political tool, it is useful for politicians to heighten these notions. In Iran and in the Arab world, it is often a rhetorical canard that dictators like to repeat – popular to hear, but without substance. In Israel it is used to justify immeasurable military expenses and unchallenged oppression in the occupied territories. Besides, it is silly to imagine that Israel is vulnerable to destruction by an impoverished, disheartened, and broken people: the Palestinians. It is not pleasant to compare numbers, but there is no comparison in number of Palestinian civilians killed on a near-daily basis in the occupied territories… and the occassional rocket that hits someone in Sderot. It is ridiculous to imagine that Israel has legitimate fears of the Palestinians in military terms…
But the greatest evidence that Israel’s government does not want peace can be found in the settlements. They regulary sacrifice security for expansion. Today, Israel continues to expand settlements against international law and even the U.S.’s wishes (though the U.S. does little more than to call the practice “unhelpful”). Yassir Arafat gave up ¾ of mandatory Palestine by recognizing Israel’s right to exist, yet Israel has never recognized Palestine’s right to exist. Oslo was an insult… settlements expanded during negotiations and Israeli created the Palestinian Authority – not a sovereign government, but a puppet regime given certain powers by the occupiers and denied others.
Yitzak Shamir, upon leaving office in 1992, said that he intended “to drag out the talks on Palestinian self-rule for 10 years while attempting to settle hundreds of thousands of Jews in the occupied territories” to make a successful outcome unlikely. Today, the West Bank is cut apart by hundreds upon hundreds of settlements, military checkpoint, Israeli-only roads and the West Bank Barrier (built on the Palestinian side of the Green Line). This has created small islands of potential land for a future state, but how does one form a state from a series of islands? This is primarily why Makdisi and others blame the settlements for blocking negotiations. How do you bargain over land, when it is being stolen simultaneously? And none of this is controversial… I’m sure you are aware of Israel’s desire to “create facts” through settlement. The idea is to move as many people as possible into the West Bank so that if there ever is a future settlement, these areas will have taken root and (though illegal) will be morally difficult to remove. Thus, the chances for a two-state solution pass with every new house built in the West Bank… and I am very pessimistic. I believe Israel will continue to expand until all that is left for the Palestinians is Gaza – 1% of historic Palestine.