There is talk once again of a one-state bi-national solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
March 12, 2007 10:59 PM   Subscribe

The idea of a single, bi-national state is not new. Its appeal lies in its attempt to provide an equitable and inclusive solution to the struggle of two peoples for the same piece of land. It was first suggested in the 1920s by Zionist leftwing intellectuals led by philosopher Martin Buber, Judah Magnes... and Haïm Kalvarisky... Underlying their Zionism was a quest for a Jewish renaissance, both cultural and spiritual, with a determination to avoid injustice in its achievement. It was essential to found a new nation, although not necessarily a separate Jewish state and certainly not at the expense of the existing population.
Time for a bi-national state
See also B'Tselem's Map of Jewish Settlements In The West Bank
posted by y2karl (38 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
Not the most graciously formatted FFP I've seen. But yeah, the idea has been around for some time. I though Tony Judt's essay on the matter was great when it appeared back in 2003 or so. It's sort of the default solution which everything slowly progresses to if no one is proactive about it.
posted by bhouston at 11:24 PM on March 12, 2007


A contrasting view from the leader of the settler movement, interviewed on BBC's Hard Talk.
posted by senor biggles at 11:29 PM on March 12, 2007


Without a FP headline, for just a second there I thought this was about partitioning the US into Red and Blue.
posted by Clave at 11:39 PM on March 12, 2007


I thought Tony Judt's essay on the matter was great when it appeared back in 2003 or so.

Your link was broken. Consider it graciously formatted.
posted by y2karl at 11:47 PM on March 12, 2007


Anyone here remember a classic Friz Freleng cartoon called "The Fair Haired Hare"? Probably not by name. It begins with Sam building a house on top of Bugs' hole in the ground. Bugs takes his case to "the highest court in the land" (on top of a mountain) and the judge decides that they will both share the house. "And if either of you passes on, the other shall inherit the whole thing." Sam starts to laugh fiendishly, and Bugs looks terrified.

The end is total war and a massive explosion.

I'm quite sure that there's plenty of "talk" about a one-state "solution", but it'll never happen. The Israelis will never accept it, because they know it would only be a temporary truce, a hudna prior to resumption of hostilities by the Palestinians.

The OP article contains this quote:
According to historian Tony Judt, this is where Israel reaches its limits. No state can claim democratic credentials whilst practising ethnic exclusion; not after the crimes of the last century (7).
Tony Judt, like so many others, ignores the fact that nearly a quarter of the population of Israel is Arab. They are citizens. They vote. They have a political party and hold seats in the Knesset. They serve in the IDF. Most of them are Muslim. They've been living peacefully with the Jews in Israel for 60 years.

Israel isn't excluding Arabs. There isn't any "ethnic exclusion" going on. Israel is excluding a hostile foreign political power bent on militarily destroying Israel, and there's nothing at all unreasonable about that.

This is the best summary of the moral inequivalence of the situation I have ever seen: "The Palestinians would wipe out the Israelis, but can't. The Israelis could wipe out the Palestinians, but won't."
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 11:50 PM on March 12, 2007 [4 favorites]


...Indeed, Israeli Jewish public opinion turned sharply anti-Arab during the war and in its aftermath. And since it ended, the head of the Yisrael Beiteinu Party, Avigdor Lieberman -- who has repeatedly questioned Israeli Arabs' loyalty and called for the possible revocation of their citizenships -- has been brought into the Olmert government and given an important security position in the cabinet.

The sad fact is that Lieberman might not be entirely wrong about their loyalty. It is not unreasonable to believe that, despite their citizenship, many Israeli Arabs don't feel much of an allegiance to Israel these days. Many of them have relatives among the Palestinians in the occupied territories, or at least identify with their plight, and although they themselves do in theory have full rights in Israel, they still face a great deal of discrimination from their Israeli Jewish neighbors, and frequently unofficial bias from various arms of the government.

They are expected to be loyal citizens of a country whose flag and national anthem, steeped in Jewish imagery, explicitly exclude them. A country in which a recent poll found that 68 percent of Jews would refuse to live in the same building as an Arab. A country in which Israeli-Arab villages are often refused official permits by the government -- and then sometimes even demolished because they are deemed "unrecognized." In December, for example, a small riot ensued in the Bedouin Arab village of Al-Twayil in Israel's south, when Israeli Arabs protested a government decision to demolish some of the buildings in their village -- buildings they had just repaired after a demolition a few weeks earlier.

Perhaps as a result of the disenfranchisement that inevitably results from all this, there has been an increasing number of Israeli Arabs linked to Palestinian terrorism in Israel over the past few years. Israeli intelligence recently reported that 14 percent of all suicide bombings perpetrated in Israel have been the work of terrorists who gained citizenship through marriage with Israeli Arabs, or "family reunification." As a result, the Shin Bet -- Israel's internal intelligence service -- has repeatedly petitioned for an extension on a law that bans such "reunification."
Israel's Arab problem hits home
posted by y2karl at 11:59 PM on March 12, 2007


There is no clear law protecting equal rights for the Israeli Arabs. The Basic Law: Human Dignity and Freedom, which is Israel's mini bill of rights, does not mention the Arabs' right of equality. However, this law stresses the ethnicity of the state as Jewish. Furthermore, the Israeli Supreme Court has dismissed all cases dealing with discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel. The Arab citizens of Israel have the right to vote and be elected to the Knesset, but discriminatory laws limit these two rights. Such law is the Basic Law: The Knesset and the Law of Political Parties section 7(A) amended in 1985. This law mentioned above states that, first, a political party will be disqualified at election time if it calls for the State of Israel to give its Arab citizens full and equal rights as its Jewish citizens. Second, a political party, to be qualified to run for elections, must not challenge the Jewish character of the State of Israel. The law states, "a list of candidates shall not participate in the elections for the Knesset if its aims or actions, expressively or implicitly, point to the denial of the existence of the State of Israel as the State of the Jewish people." Tawfik Toubi, an Israeli Arab, who is a member of the Knesset, finds problems with this law. He opposed the law by saying: "to say today in the law that the State of Israel is the State of the Jewish people, means saying to 16% of the citizens of the State of Israel that they have no state and they are stateless, that the state of Israel is the state only of its Jewish inhabitants, and that Arab citizens who live in it reside and live in it on sufferance and without rights equal to those of the Jewish citizens.... Don't the people who drew up this version realize that by this definition, they tarnish the State of Israel as an apartheid state, a racist state?"
Arab Political Mobilization And Israeli Responses
posted by y2karl at 12:05 AM on March 13, 2007


The Israelis could wipe out the Palestinians, but won't because they are aware of what would happen to them if they tried. So they're using the "boiling frog" method instead.
posted by Jimbob at 12:08 AM on March 13, 2007 [1 favorite]


I can't say I'm too surprised that there are some problems for the Arab citizens of Israel.

But they pale by comparison to the plight of non-Muslims living in the Palestinian territories.

And if we're talking about "ethnic exclusion", there is one major group involved in that which has a formal written policy advocating that kind of thing: Hamas, the current majority party among the Palestinians, whose party charter pledges annihilation of the Israeli state and removal of all Jews from the territory of "Palestine", either by killing them or by forcing them to leave.

No one involved in this is angelic and pure. But to try to cast this as "Evil mean awful Israelis beating up on the poor, downtrodden, victimized Palestinians" is perverse. If the Israelis were as awful as many claim, the Palestinians would all have been killed decades ago.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 12:11 AM on March 13, 2007


An Israeli human rights group today proposed a new national constitution that gives more rights to the country's Arab minority and says Israel should be defined not as a Jewish state but as a "democratic, bilingual and multicultural state".

Although the paper - from Adalah, a legal organisation working for Arab rights - is unlikely ever to become law, it is part of a fresh effort by the Arab minority in Israel to argue for a stronger role in society.

Most striking was the proposal to scrap Israel's law of return, which gives automatic citizenship to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent. The paper argues that citizenship of Israel should be for those born in Israel with a parent also born there; those with a parent who is a citizen; those married to a citizen; or those arriving for humanitarian reasons, including political persecution...
Israeli Group Calls for Increased Rights for Arabs
posted by y2karl at 12:13 AM on March 13, 2007


The Israelis could wipe out the Palestinians, but won't because they are aware of what would happen to them if they tried.

Do you really think that's the only reason?
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 12:14 AM on March 13, 2007


No state can claim democratic credentials whilst practising ethnic exclusion; not after the crimes of the last century.
posted by y2karl at 12:15 AM on March 13, 2007


The term "Israeli Arabs", as used above by the New York Times, is widespread inside and outside Israel, both in the media and in scholarly articles. The emphasis is on the second word -- "Arabs" rather than on the qualifier "Israeli". The alternative term "Palestinian Israelis" would come as a rude shock to many Israelis, even secular nationalists, conditioned as they are to think of the Palestinians amongst them (20 percent of the population) as a people who had no hand in the agrarian or industrial building of the Zionist State. These people are tolerated at best, so long as they submit themselves to the Zionist ideal. Arab Israelis, for example, must acknowledge "the existence of the state of Israel as the state of the Jewish people" before they can even participate in the political process (1992 Basic Law).

In one way, the subtext for this usage emphasizes the Zionist narrative: Jews (the majority of whom come from outside Israel) have a God given right to live in historic Palestine, but the indigenous Palestinian is a generic Arab with only a tenuous sense of belonging to a specific geographic area. The term "Israeli Arabs" includes Muslim and Christian Arabs, the remnant of indigenous Palestinians that had escaped the ethnic cleansing of 1948, now numbering 1.3 million strong. Significantly, it does not include Jewish Arabs, who are referred to, instead, as "oriental Jews". Nor does it include the dispossessed Bedouins (about 100,000), who are denied legal recognition and herded in the arid northeastern part of the Negev (the western and fertile part having been reserved for Jewish settlers).
Israeli Arabs: 'Who are we and what do we want?'
posted by y2karl at 12:25 AM on March 13, 2007


y2karl,
I think you've made your point about the plight of Arabs/Palestinians living in Israel. But you seem to be ignoring a valid point Steven C. Den Beste has brought up in regards to this one-state, two-nation solution. There are groups, like Hamas, literally committed to the absolute destruction or dispersal of Israel. These groups aren't just crazy extremists, they are powerful, mainstream political forces amongst the Palestinian people. It's hard to imagine Hamas suddenly backing down and saying that they no longer think the destruction of Israel is a good idea. If a one-state solution is pursued, how do you deal with this problem?
posted by Sangermaine at 12:44 AM on March 13, 2007


Tony Judt, like so many others, ignores the fact that nearly a quarter of the population of Israel is Arab. They are citizens. They vote. They have a political party and hold seats in the Knesset. They serve in the IDF. Most of them are Muslim. They've been living peacefully with the Jews in Israel for 60 years.

Israel isn't excluding Arabs. There isn't any "ethnic exclusion" going on. Israel is excluding a hostile foreign political power bent on militarily destroying Israel, and there's nothing at all unreasonable about that.


Then of course of there are those who conveniently ignore that there are large number of Palestinians fled their land in terror because of deliberately aggressive Zionist tactics meant to achieve just that and were never allowed to return. If it happened today it would be a war crime. Though Israel almost did it again with the Lebanese War this summer when there was talk of occupying the devastated areas.

I used to know a man who as a child was deliberately run over by a jeep as part of this conflict. His family fled losing a considerable olive farm which was everything they had. They went from prosperous to poor refugees in a matter of days. It's a lot less academic when you have a human being across from you showing you scars.

True justice would involve allow those Palestinians who fled for there lives to return and to regain their property.
posted by srboisvert at 1:24 AM on March 13, 2007 [1 favorite]


Within this regional context, the Israeli-American opposition to Hamas's government suffers from a double flaw: it is incongruous in terms of democratic principle, and it is counterproductive in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because it strips all moderate voices within Hamas of credibility. The failure of Hamas's government, now the focal point of the Israeli-American strategy towards the movement, would have the effect of pushing Hamas back to the militarised approach of the pre-election period.

Rather than a strategy of containment designed to bring Hamas further into the arc of politics and its compromises, Tel Aviv and Washington seem content to drive Hamas back towards its previous radicalism, in which the tactic of suicide-attacks played a central role. Such an attempt to besiege Hamas in the hope of breaking its will to make greater concessions is a stance full of risks, not least that it will only make a desperate Hamas even more ready to accept Iran's offers of much-needed support...

A deep irony of this situation is that the most peaceful and calm period that Israeli cities enjoyed over almost the past two years was the period in which Hamas was preparing for the elections and after the movement took power in Palestine (until, of course, the invasion of Lebanon on 12 July and the Hizbollah missile-attacks that ensued). Hamas refuses to make verbal concessions on the issue of clear-cut recognition of the right of Israel to exist. It says that it acknowledges Israel as an existing fact on the ground, no more. Yet, in power, it has stopped attacking Israel as it used to do when it was part of the opposition to Palestine's governing authority.

This again highlights the rhetoric-practice dichotomy. Hamas needs to keep its rhetoric high and loud, refraining from any blunt offer of recognition of Israel, in order to compensate for the slow, daily "undoing" of its military struggle. If Hamas gives in on both rhetorical and practical fronts, it will lose out greatly in the eyes of its supporters.

For the time being, then, the choice for Israel, the United States and other concerned states seems to be: do you prefer a rhetorical Hamas in power (observing a practical truce), or a rhetorical and military Hamas in opposition, where the resumption of suicide-bombings is only one step away?
Hamas's path to reinvention
posted by y2karl at 1:32 AM on March 13, 2007


y2karl,
Thanks, that was interesting.
posted by Sangermaine at 1:36 AM on March 13, 2007


Seconded, y2karl. Good work.
posted by imperium at 2:54 AM on March 13, 2007


Thank you, y2karl.
posted by By The Grace of God at 2:58 AM on March 13, 2007


for just a second there I thought this was about partitioning the US into Red and Blue

Weird. I thought the same thing.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 3:53 AM on March 13, 2007


No state can claim democratic credentials whilst practising ethnic exclusion

I guess it can if that's what a majority vote for.
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 3:58 AM on March 13, 2007


Israel isn't excluding Arabs. There isn't any "ethnic exclusion" going on.

no, those 5 million or so palestinians are just waiting around for the bus or something, i guess

The Palestinians would wipe out the Israelis, but can't. The Israelis could wipe out the Palestinians, but won't.

what about 100 years from now? ... or 5 years from now?

the problem with your statement is that the palestinians and their allies won't always be so impotent ... and there's no guarantee that the israelis will always be so "moral"

There are groups, like Hamas, literally committed to the absolute destruction or dispersal of Israel.

true ... and there are israelis who believe in the expulsion of all the palestinians

how does one deal with it? ... i'm convinced that it will end in catastrophe, no matter what happens

those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it
posted by pyramid termite at 4:54 AM on March 13, 2007


I'm just going to sit back and let WWIII sort the Israeli-Palestinian conflict out.
posted by i_am_a_Jedi at 6:17 AM on March 13, 2007


I thought that the whole Trans-Jordan (now just Jordan) thing WAS the partitioning of the land into two different states....

I'm confused.... since when do you get to get half, then half of what's left?
posted by dwivian at 8:07 AM on March 13, 2007


This post reminds me of this BBC article from a week or two ago about an Israeli-Palestinian couple and their problems. They seem like nice folks, too bad they can't be in charge.
posted by pinespree at 8:19 AM on March 13, 2007 [1 favorite]


Rather than a strategy of containment designed to bring Hamas further into the arc of politics and its compromises, Tel Aviv and Washington seem content to drive Hamas back towards its previous radicalism, in which the tactic of suicide-attacks played a central role.

Yes... "drive back." It's such a comforting and a popular lie that Hamas ever went forward.
posted by Krrrlson at 4:38 PM on March 13, 2007


As for a single-state solution, anyone with half a brain is capable of seeing this is practically impossible and will never happen. I can only wonder about the motives of those who push this angle.
posted by Krrrlson at 4:40 PM on March 13, 2007


I thought that the whole Trans-Jordan (now just Jordan) thing WAS the partitioning of the land into two different states....

I'm confused.... since when do you get to get half, then half of what's left?
posted by dwivian at 8:07 AM PST on March 13 [+] [!]
It turns out that in 1948 the Jordanians didn't want to take in 1-2 million refugees. So they're imprisoned in Gaza and the West Bank. The ones who didn't flee the Zionists are now either semi-enfranchised "Israeli Arabs" or destitute Bedouins.
posted by blasdelf at 5:22 PM on March 13, 2007


The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 left some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs refugees, but another 160,000 stayed put and became Israeli citizens. Today, Israel's Arab community numbers 1.2 million, constituting nearly a fifth of the country's population. By all material measures -- income, education level, unemployment -- they lag far behind the Jewish population, but they are also denied certain privileges guaranteed by law to the Jews. The Law of Return, for example, gives Jews from anywhere in the world, or their descendants or spouses, the right to show up and claim Israeli citizenship...

"Future Vision" describes Israel as a state with two classes of citizens, and the remedy it envisions would reconstitute the country as a "consensual democracy" that would serve as a "joint homeland" for both Jews and Palestinians.

If enacted, the proposals of the "Future Vision" document would end the Law of Return -- or extend a similar right to Palestinians. If land in Israel has been distributed unevenly -- the paper points to the fact that only 3.5 percent is in the hands of the 20 percent of its "indigenous" population -- "Future Vision" calls for the return of property that has been appropriated from Arabs by the state, or failing that, compensation, and for Arab involvement in all future planning decisions.
The other Israelis
68.4 percent of Israeli Jews fear a civil uprising on behalf of Israeli Arabs and 63.3 percent say they won't enter Arab towns in Israel, according to the results of the 2006 index of Jewish-Arab relations released on Monday.

The poll also showed that 62 percent of the Arab population in Israel fears that the "triangle" area will be ceded to a future Palestinian state and 60 percent say they fear a mass expulsion from Israel.
New poll shows 68.4% of Israeli Jews fear Israeli Arab uprising
posted by y2karl at 5:32 PM on March 13, 2007


I can only wonder about the motives of those who push this angle.

How about the angle that in modern democracies (you know, the kind of places we should be supporting), whether they be Canada, or the United States, or Britain, or Australia, or wherever, Israelies and Arabs, Jews and Muslims, live alongside each other without lobbing missiles at each other, and that this is not an unreasonable thing to be striving for.

The other option; states that are racially or ethnically defined on exclusionary principals, is something we shouldn't be happy about.

I think that's generally the angle people tend to be taking.
posted by Jimbob at 5:39 PM on March 13, 2007 [1 favorite]


Nothing is going to change in Israel though because of the Israel lobby in the United States. Many people aren't familiar with the history of Apartheid South Africa, but one of the reasons why it went on for so long was because of the American South. The whites in the southern US sympathized with the white Africaners anti-black racism and their politically clout prevented the US from breaking economic ties for decades. But eventually this support from the south dried up and soon after the US did put in place economic sanctions and the apartheid system soon ended. Ethnic interest groups in the United States are again playing a key role in perpetuating an apartheid-like situation.

Also, this Wikipedia article on Israeli apartheid may be of interest.
posted by bhouston at 6:02 PM on March 13, 2007


In the end, these ethnostates are anarchisms. What should happen in the Middle East is the same thing that happened in Europe. There should be a drive to create a superstate structure like the EU with free trade and unrestricted immigration between the various countries. Sort of like a neo-Pan-Arabism but without a focus on just Arabs, but more inclusive of Truks, Persians, Kurds and Jews. Of course, I won't hold my breath, but that is the way things should really go.
posted by bhouston at 6:06 PM on March 13, 2007




Y2Karl said:
This law mentioned above states that, first, a political party will be disqualified at election time if it calls for the State of Israel to give its Arab citizens full and equal rights as its Jewish citizens. Second, a political party, to be qualified to run for elections, must not challenge the Jewish character of the State of Israel.

Do you mean this? Because it doesn't say that. How could you imagine that you could get away with a claim like this? It took me less than a minute to find the actual text. (1)
It took a couple more minutes to find a bunch of current Israeli parties that explicitly call for equal rights for Arab Israelis. (2) Your claim implies that more than a quarter of the current Knesset should be disqualified.

I don't want to be some sort of flamer and go on about lying liars and the lies they peddle, but this is really ridiculous. This information is easy to find - why would you think that you can get away with saying stuff like this? Didn't you think that anyone would actually check?


(1) Basic Law of the Knesset - Who shall not be a candidate
7A. A candidates list shall not participate in elections to the Knesset, and a person shall not be a candidate for election to the Knesset, if the goals or actions of the list or the actions of the person, expressly or by implication, include one of the following:

(1) negation of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state;

(2) incitement to racism;

(3) support for armed struggle by a hostile state or a terrorist organization against the State of Israel.


(2) Some Israeli political parties that ran on a platform endorsing full equality for Arab Israelis:
Labor
The Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash)
Meretz
National Democratic Alliance (Balad)
United Arab List
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:35 AM on March 14, 2007


How could you imagine that you could get away with a claim like this?

Calm down, Sparky. That was quoted text from the article--Israeli Arabs: 'Who are we and what do we want?'--linked below it. Rima Merriman wrote the article quoted. It's a very partisan point of view from a Palestinian-American living in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

Quoting text to give a flavor of an article linked is not necessarily a blanket endorsement of the point of view of the quote quoted. It's called a blockquote. That is why the margins were indented. The choices for quoting text here have been to italicize the text, use small text or to use blockquotes. After much controversy, I have settled for using blockquotes. All styles of quotation have drawbacks but a quote is a quote. Pay attention to those margins before you go off half cocked next time.
posted by y2karl at 6:00 AM on March 14, 2007


How about the angle that in modern democracies (you know, the kind of places we should be supporting), whether they be Canada, or the United States, or Britain, or Australia, or wherever, Israelies and Arabs, Jews and Muslims, live alongside each other without lobbing missiles at each other, and that this is not an unreasonable thing to be striving for.

How 'bout we all make garlands, get naked, and sit in a Love Circle hugging each other and singing Kumbaya? If the single-state "solution" results in the almost certain destruction or expulsion of one of the populations, then yes, it's an unreasonable thing to be striving for. Of course I doubt many here would care as long as it's the Israelis getting screwed.
posted by Krrrlson at 12:21 PM on March 14, 2007


How 'bout we all make garlands, get naked, and sit in a Love Circle hugging each other and singing Kumbaya? If the single-state "solution" results in the almost certain destruction or expulsion of one of the populations, then yes, it's an unreasonable thing to be striving for. Of course I doubt many here would care as long as it's the Israelis getting screwed.

Peace. Such a shitty idea.
posted by srboisvert at 12:41 PM on March 14, 2007


Reality. Such a drag.
posted by Krrrlson at 6:29 PM on March 15, 2007


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