Once again, we are hearing about “the two-state solution” to the intractable Israel-Palestine conflict, construed as something only dolts, dullards, and vicious ideologues refuse to recognize as deriving from the highest of laws in place in the cosmos. To turn one’s back on the two-state solution, we’re told, is to turn one’s back on all that the diplomats have allegedly accomplished since 1993—and to do so at the very moment when even the hereditary enemies of Israel (the Saudis, the Egyptians, and even (if you believe Jimmy Carter, the Syrians, the Iranians, Hezbollah and Hamas, in their heart of hearts) have come to recognize its sublime character.
One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict
Yale University Press
256 pages
$20.95
Time to reach for the shelf that holds Benny Morris’ One State, Two States, published last year by Yale University Press. For this book, Morris, who is generally regarded as the dean of academic revisionist Israeli historians, went back to all the notes he had gathered over the course of the years of writing The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1988), The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004), Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (1999), and 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (2008; see the review in Books & Culture, March/April 2009, pp. 40-42). He sifted everything carefully for examples of all the many proposals of the past for reconciling Jewish and Arab designs upon the land the British governed as the Palestine Mandate (from 1922 to 1948).
So much imagination and invention, so much idealism and so much cunning, so much propaganda and so much double talk, went into these many now-forgotten proposals for “resolving the Jewish-Arab (or “Israeli-Arab,” or later still, “Israel-Palestine”) conflict! The permutations and combinations of the terms of these projects are astronomical in number. Long before the vote for Partition was taken in the UN General Assembly on November 29, 1947—a vote that was supposed to settle the matter for eternity— there had been advocates (all of them Jews) of a one-state solution in which Jews and Arabs would share. Practical details varied greatly: there was the “bi-national state”, as proposed by Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, and there were “cantonal” arrangements, under which Jews and Arabs would live separated lives while some other, imposed authority, usually pictured seated in internationalized Jerusalem, would represent the general interests of all in such matters as defense and international relations.
By November 1947, the leaders of the Jews—not only those living in Palestine but those all around the world—had become reconciled to the Partition of the Mandate, even though the portion to be assigned to the Jews was only about one-quarter of what the State would become following the War of Independence of 1948 and the Six Day War of 1967. But the Arabs living within the Mandate adamantly refused to concede any part of what was, they said, one great Arab patrimony. And so they appealed to the god of war—accompanied by the armies of the several Arab states then in the world and by Arab and Muslim volunteers from all over the world.
Morris shows that at no point in this entire record is there any evidence of Arab support for the concept of a binational state such as the Jewish idealists were still proposing at the time of the UN’s debate on Partition. On the other side of the coin, Morris has no difficulty demonstrating that that when the senior Zionist statesmen, led by David Ben-Gurion, stood up and saluted the two-state solution in 1947, many of them, if not most of them, secretly expected that, as Ben Gurion put it, the State achieved in 1948 would serve as “a Jewish Piedmont”—meaning that, as the minor Kingdom of Piedmont grew and grew by picking quarrels with its neighbors until it became the Kingdom of Italy (1848-1870), so opportunities would ere long be provided by the military failures of the Arab leaders to enlarge the borders of Israel, so that in due course there would be a single State of Israel with borders more like those of David’s Kingdom, and perhaps extending further, all the way from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates. But Morris also shows that the painful experience of governing Arabs who found themselves within Israel’s real borders eventually turned the leaders of all of Israel’s mainstream parties against the one-state vision. Only among a small minority at the fringes of Israeli politics is that pre-emptive vision of the One State still saluted.
Historians have had to reckon with a kaleidoscope of transient banners appearing and then disappearing over the heads of the leaders and the crowds on the Arab side. There was Ottoman unity, Arab Nationalism, Syrian Nationalism, and most recently Palestinian Nationalism. But from beginning to end it has always been (as Morris shows) about the rights of Islam—and those rights are exclusive, pre-emptive and zero-sum in character. The objection to the existence of a Jewish polity in the region follows from a deeply entrenched, religiously based contempt for the Jews, the sons of pigs and monkeys.
In short, the secretaries of state and foreign ministers who speak about how much has been accomplished recently toward achieving acceptance on all sides to the “two-state solution” are refusing to acknowledge that the original “solution” was a two-state one, the one that Israel has been abiding by from the first day. Furthermore, Morris shows that what the statesmen portray as recent Palestinian acceptance of the two-state solution is all smoke and mirrors. “Palestinian Arab Islamic fundamentalists, of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad varieties, have always advocated the elimination of Israel and a one-state – a Muslim Arab state-solution for the Israel/Palestine problem,” he writes. This is generally conceded. But what is not understood in our part of the world is that this is the program of all the principal players on Arab Palestine’s political scene—that even the “moderate Palestinians … had always believed, and continue to believe, that all of Palestine belongs to them, the Palestinian Arabs; that a Jewish state in any part of Palestine is illegitimate and immoral; and that in the fullness of time, the whole country will eventually revert to Arab sovereignty.”
During the 1990s, the Fatah Party and the PLO publicly espoused “a two-state solution” as the price of admission for their freedom fighters into the land, and their establishment as the government of the Palestine Authority. The PLO promised solemnly and publicly to amend their Charter so as to accommodate the thinking preferred by the Western statesmen and required by the terms of the Oslo Accord – two states, living side by side in peace. But in fact they have never done so (see especially, pages 118-123, 130-133, 166-169). It should have been clear to even the starry-eyed that when Arafat cast off with contempt Barak’s proposals at Camp David in July 2000 and President Bill Clinton’s “parameters” for further negotiation in the first days of 2001, that he was spitting upon the vision of a world in which a Palestinian State, or indeed any Muslim state, and a Jewish State could co-exist. Arafat’s oft-expressed disdain for the notion that there had ever been a Jewish presence at any time upon the Temple Mount (page 150) reflects contempt for historical facts and historical claims based upon them. This note, Morris writes, “has been the constant refrain of Palestinian leaders, from [Haj Amin] Husseini [the leader of the Arab jihad against the Jews in the 1920s and 1930s] through Abbas, throughout the history of the Palestinian Arab movement.”
While the Palestinian nationalists have been performing what Morris calls their “duplicitous and reluctant” recital of the American and European governments’ “two state-mantra,” a number of anti-Israel intellectuals in the West have been going back to the “one-state” vision with which the PLO began, and have been turning it against the Israelis. Leftist intellectuals argue, for example, that “[in] a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry … Israel is truly … [a] dysfunctional [anachronism]” (quoting an article written by Tony Judt, “Israel: The Alternative”). Clearly, says Morris, “it is not “Israel’s reform or the reform of its policies” that the anti-Zionist intellectuals want, “but its disappearance.”
If we could compel all those statesmen and commentators who are currently rehearsing their two-state sermons to take two weeks off and read this scholarly, calmly argued, thoroughly researched book, there might then be a true “breakthrough”—one which brings the controversy back to where it began, with the Two State solution of 1947. But they should be warned: brief as it is, this book is tightly packed with history. History is harder to digest and less amusing than the briefings which the State Department provides for the use of policy-makers whose vocabulary derives from Schools of Conflict Resolution and whose arguments stand upon colorful “narratives'” in lieu of documentation.
Paul C. Merkley is the author of American Presidents, Religion and Israel (Praeger).
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