ere Will Be a One-State Solution But What Kind of State Will It Be? BY YOUSEF MUNAYYER November/December 2019 YOUSEF MUNAYYER is a writer and scholar who serves as Executive Director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. The views expressed here are his own. For nearly three decades, the so-called two-state solution has dominated discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conict. But the idea of two states for two peoples in the territory both occupy was always an illusion, and in recent years, reality has set in. e two-state solution is dead. And good riddance: it never oered a realistic path forward. e time has come for all interested parties to instead consider the only alternative with any chance of delivering lasting peace: equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians in a single shared state. It has been possible to see this moment coming for quite a while. As he tried to rescue what had become known as “the peace process,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress that the two-state solution had one to two years left before it would no longer be viable. at was six years ago. Resolution 2334, which the UN Security Council passed with U.S. consent in late 2016, called for “salvaging the two-state solution” by demanding a number of steps, including an immediate end to Israeli settlement building in the occupied territories. at was three years ago. And since then, Israel has continued to build and expand settlements. e arrival of U.S. President Donald Trump in the White House put the nal nail in the con. “I am looking at two-state, and one-state, and I like the one that both parties like,” Trump explained in February 2017. Policy wonks and seasoned diplomats rolled their eyes at the reality-TV celebrity turned commander in chief describing the options as if they were dishes on a buet table. But the remark indicated a genuine shift: since the current phase of the peace process began in the early 1990s, no U.S. president had ever before publicly suggested accepting a single state. What Trump had in mind has become clear in the years that have followed, as he and his team have approved a right-wing Israeli wish list aimed at a one-state outcome— but one that will enshrine Israeli dominance over Palestinian subjects, not one that will grant the parties equal rights. Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has abandoned any pretense of seeking a two-state solution, and public support for the concept among Israelis has steadily dwindled. Palestinian leaders continue to seek a separate state. But after years of failure and frustration, most Palestinians no longer see that path as viable. e simple truth is that over the decades, the Israelis developed enough power and cultivated enough support from Washington to allow them to occupy and hold the territories and to create, in eect, a one-state reality of their own devising. Netanyahu and Trump are seeking not to change the status quo but merely to ratify it. e question, then, is not whether there will be a single state but what kind of state it should be. Will it be one that cements de facto apartheid in which Palestinians are denied basic rights? Or will it be a state that recognizes Israelis and Palestinians as equals under the law? e latter is the goal that Palestinians should adopt. e Americans and the Israelis should also embrace it. But rst they must realize that the status quo will eventually prove unsustainable and that partitioning the land will never work—and that the only moral path forward is to recognize the full humanity of both peoples. FACTS ON THE GROUND Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea live approximately 13 million people, all under the control of the Israeli state. Roughly half of them are Palestinian Arabs, some three million of whom live under a military occupation with no right to vote for the government that rules them and around two million of whom live in Israel as second-class citizens, discriminated against based on their identity, owing to Israel’s status as a Jewish state. Two million more Palestinians live in the besieged Gaza Strip, where the militant group Hamas exercises local rule: an open- air prison walled o from the world by an Israeli blockade. Meanwhile, between 500,000 and 700,000 Jewish Israeli settlers live among millions of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Protecting the settlers and increasing their numbers have been chief priorities for Israel ever since it captured territories from the Arab states it defeated in the Six-Day War of 1967. In 1993, the Oslo accords started a new phase of the relationship, based on a quid pro quo: Israel would withdraw from parts of the occupied territories and abandon some settlements in return for an end to Palestinian resistance and the normalization of relations with Israel’s Arab neighbors. But a vast settlement-building project never sat easily with that goal and created strong political incentives to avoid it. Today, large numbers of Israelis support keeping much of the occupied territories forever. A week before the Israeli election in September, Netanyahu delivered a televised address announcing his intention to annex the Jordan Valley and every Israeli settlement in the West Bank—a move that would eat up 60 percent of the West Bank and leave the other 40 percent as isolated cantons, unconnected to one another. e Israeli settlement of Efrat in the occupied West Bank, September 2019 Sergey Ponomarev / e New York Times / Redux What was remarkable about Netanyahu’s announcement was that it was so unremarkable: among Jewish Israelis, annexation is not a controversial idea. A recent poll showed that 48 percent of them support steps along the lines of what Netanyahu proposed; only 28 percent oppose them. Even Netanyahu’s main rival, the centrist Blue and White alliance, supports perpetual Israeli control of the Jordan Valley. Its leaders’ response to Netanyahu’s annexation plan was to complain that it had been their idea rst. is state of aairs should not come as a surprise to anyone, especially policymakers in Washington. In fact, one national intelligence estimate drawn up by U.S. agencies judged that if Israel continued the occupation and settlement building for “an extended period, say two to three years, it will nd it increasingly dicult to relinquish control.” Pressure to hold on to the territories “would grow, and it would be harder to turn back to the Arabs land which contained such settlements.” at estimate was written more than 50 years ago, mere months after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank began. Nevertheless, Israel has forged ahead with its expansion and has enjoyed uninching U.S. support, even as Israeli ocials periodically warned about its irreversibility. Palestinian leaders also made decisions that reduced the chances for a workable partition—none more signicant than agreeing to the Oslo framework in the rst place. In doing so, they consented to a formula that encouraged Israel’s expansion, relinquished their ability to challenge it, and sidelined the international community and international law. Under Oslo, the Palestinians have had to rely on the United States to treat Israel with a kind of tough love that American leaders, nervous about their domestic support, have never been able to muster. In the 26 years between the 1967 war and the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993, the population of Israeli settlers (not including those in occupied Jerusalem) grew to around 100,000. In the 26 years since then, it has reached roughly 400,000. As the failure of the peace process became clearer over time, Palestinians rose up against the occupation—sometimes violently. Israel pointed to those reactions to justify further repression. But the cycle was enabled by Palestinian leaders who resigned themselves to having to prove to Israel’s satisfaction that Palestinians were worthy of self-determination— something to which all peoples are in fact entitled. CONQUER AND DIVIDE Arguments about the conict often devolve into shouting matches about who bears more of the blame for the failure of the two-state solution. But such disputes miss the point: any plan that saw partition as a means to a just solution was always doomed to fail. e belief in the viability of a two-state solution has depended on a awed assumption that the conict was rooted in the aftermath of the 1967 war. Peace through partition would be possible, advocates argued, if only the two sides could break the violent cycle of occupation and resistance that took hold after the war. Yet the dilemmas posed by partition long predate 1967 and stem from a fundamentally insoluble problem. For the better part of a century, Western powers—rst the United Kingdom and then the United States—have repeatedly tried to square the same circle: accommodating the Zionist demand for a Jewish-majority state in a land populated overwhelmingly by Palestinians. is illogical project was made possible by a willingness to dismiss the humanity and rights of the Palestinian population and by sympathy for the idea of creating a space for Jews somewhere outside Europe—a sentiment that was sometimes rooted in an anti-Semitic wish to reduce the number of Jews in the Christian- dominated West. In 1917, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, outlining the goal of creating a “national home” in Palestine for the Jewish people without infringing on “the civil and religious rights of the existing non- Jewish” population.