Binational solution

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Binational solution is a term most often used in reference to a proposed resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is also known as the One-State Solution, as opposed to the Two-State Solution.

Proponents of a binational solution to the conflict advocate a common state in historic Palestine shared between Jewish and Arab populations. All of the West Bank and Gaza Strip would be annexed to Israel, with their Palestinian Arab inhabitants given citizenship and an equal status to the Jewish and Arab citizens of present-day Israel. The new state would have a secular character rather than being dominated by Judaism.

The idea is immensely controversial. It has been around for decades with relatively little impact, but in 2003 the demographic challenge, that is, the potential for a near-term majority Arab population and a minority population of Jews west of the Jordan river brought the binational proposition back to centre stage.

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[edit] Binationalism before 1947

Binational proposals for a common Jewish-Arab state in Palestine have existed since at least the 1920s. In 1925, the journalist Robert Weltsch established Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace) to promote Jewish-Arab understanding in Palestine. Brit Shalom, which functioned until 1933, stood on a platform of creating "a binational state in which the two peoples will enjoy equal rights as befits the two elements shaping the country's destiny, irrespective of which of the two is numerically superior at any given time" (from their first publication Our Aspirations, 1927). It had a few hundred members, mostly European-born intellectuals like Martin Buber. The general concept of binationalism was to be adopted by other minority Zionist groups, like Hashomer Hatzair and Mapam, Kedmah Mizracha, the Ichud and the League for Jewish-Arab Rapprochement.

Before 1947, many leading Jewish intellectuals were firmly convinced that a binational state could be formed through partnership. One of the most prominent and forceful early advocates of binationalism was Martin Buber, a renowned Jewish theologian. In 1939, shortly after he emigrated from Germany to British-ruled Palestine, he replied to a letter by Mahatma Gandhi, who thought that "Palestine belongs to the Arabs" and the Jews "should make that country their home where they were born."[citation needed] Buber rejected this idea but agreed that there had to be a consensus between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. He believed that Jews and Arabs needed to "develop the land together without one imposing his will on the other". In 1947, he wrote, "we describe our programme as that of a bi-national state - that is, we aim at a social structure based on the reality of two peoples living together... This is what we need and not a "Jewish state"; for any national state in vast, hostile surroundings could mean pre-meditated national suicide."

Hannah Arendt, known for her analyses of totalitarianism and fascism, also resisted the extremism that she saw as seizing the Zionist movement in 1947. In an article in the May 1948 issue of Commentary, she wrote,

"A federated state, finally could be the natural stepping stone for any later, greater federated structure in the Near East and the Mediterranean area...The real goal of the Jews in Palestine is the building up of a Jewish homeland. This goal must never be sacrificed to the pseudo-sovereignty of a Jewish state."

In the 1947 UN Special Committee on Palestine Report of Subcommittee Two, three draft solutions to the Palestine conflict are proposed. The third solution called for a unitary democratic state in British Mandate of Palestine. Another proposal, the Morrison Grady Plan, is a British proposal presented by Herbert Morrison in July 1946, calling for federalization under overall British Trusteeship. Ultimately, both solutions failed to win the majority of the UN General Assembly.

After the 1947 UN Partition Plan demonstrated international support for the two-state solution, most of the opposition to the concept of a Jewish state, including binationalisms espoused by Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt, evaporated. During this climate change, Arendt also chronicled the sudden repression of dissent in the Zionist movement. After 1947, the official Zionist policy advocated a "Jewish state".

[edit] Binationalism, 1948-1973

With the establishment of Israel in May 1948, a binational solution became largely moot when much of Israel's native Arab population was displaced in the ensuing conflict. Some aspects of the binational ideal - such as equal political rights for the remaining Arabs - were granted in principle, but this was limited by the Israeli leadership's determination that the country would have a Jewish majority and political leadership. Successive Israeli governments have pursued a policy of encouraging Jewish immigration to Israel, known as aliyah, which guaranteed the Jewish majority.

On the Arab side, the idea of a binational solution was generally rejected by the Arab national movement, which saw little to gain from it; the Arab leadership were opposed to their people becoming a minority in what they saw as their own country. From their point of view, the huge influx of Jews from Europe and the Middle East represented a gigantic colonisation project, which many saw as being a recreation of the medieval Crusader kingdoms. The Crusades were (and still are) an event seared on Arab collective memory, as was their outcome - the defeat of the Crusaders by Saladin and the subsequent expulsion of the European settlers. A binational solution was not, in other words, something that had any precedent in the Arab history of Palestine.

The binational ideal did not disappear altogether during this period, despite its lack of support, and was given a boost following Israel capturing Gaza from Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan in the Six Day War of 1967. Israel's victory over its neighbours was greeted by euphoria within Israel, but some critical Israeli and foreign observers quickly recognised the new territories had potential to pose a major long-term problem.

In the aftermath of the war, there was considerable debate about what to do next. Should the territories be annexed to Israel? In which case, what would be done with the Palestinians? Should they be given citizenship, although that would significantly dilute Israel's Jewish majority? Could they be expelled en masse, although that would come at a terrible cost to Israel's reputation? Should the territories be returned to Arab rule? In which case, how would Israel's security be guaranteed? In the event, the Israel government fudged the question by implementing the controversial policy of Jewish settlements in the territories, establishing "facts on the ground" while keeping open the question of the Palestinians' long-term fate.

The dilemma prompted some foreign supporters of Israel, such as the crusading American journalist I.F. Stone, to revive the idea of a binational state. This found little favour in Israel or elsewhere and the binational solution tended to be presented not so much as a potential resolution of the conflict as a disastrous outcome risked by Israeli government policies. As early as 1973, the prospect of a binational state was being used by prominent figures on the Israel left to warn against holding on to the territories. Histadrut Secretary General I. Ben-Aharon, for instance, warned in a March 1973 article for The Jerusalem Post that Israel could not have any real control over a binational state and that Israelis should be satisfied with a state already containing a sizable Arab minority -- that is, Israel proper.

[edit] Binationalism 1973 - 2002

The outcome of the 1973 Yom Kippur War prompted a fundamental political rethink among the Palestinian leadership. It was realised that Israel's military strength and, crucially, its alliance with the United States made it unlikely that it could be defeated militarily. In December 1974, Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), then regarded as a terrorist group by the Israeli government, declared that a binational state was the only viable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The change in policy was met with considerable confusion, as it was official PLO policy to replace Israel with a secular and democratic state with a full right of return for all displaced Palestinians, including the Jews who were living in Palestine before 1948. This would effectively have ended Israel's Jewish majority and, by secularising the state, would have weakened its exclusive Jewish character. In short, a binational state on the PLO's terms would mean a different kind of Israel. This prospect is strongly opposed by various sides in Israeli politics.

Despite this, opposition to binationalism was not absolute. Some of those on the Israel right associated with the settler movement were willing to contemplate a binational state as long as it was established on Zionist terms. Members of Menachem Begin's Likud government in the late 1970s were willing to support the idea if it would ensure formal Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza. Begin's chief of staff, Eliahu Ben-Elissar, told the Washington Post in November 1979 that "we can live with them and they can live with us. I would prefer they were Israeli citizens, but I am not afraid of a binational state. In any case, it will always be a Jewish state with a large Arab minority."

In the mean time, there were considerable internal dissent in adopting the one state solution on the Palestinian side. The Oslo Accords in 1993 raised the hope for a two-state solution, even though the Accords are rejected by various factions on the Palestinian side, including the Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The Oslo Accords were never fully adopted and implemented by both sides. After the Second Intifada in 2000, many believe that the two-state solution is increasingly losing its appeal.

[edit] The Friedlander-Goldscheider study

In 1980, Hebrew University professors Dov Friedlander and Calvin Goldscheider published a highly influential study entitled "The Population of Israel," which concluded that - even allowing for a big increase in Jewish immigration - the high birth rate among Arabs would erode the Jewish majority within a few decades. The two demographers predicted that the total population of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza strip would be 6.7 million by 1990, and some 10 million by the year 2010. By that time, the Jewish population could be only 45% of the total. Friedlander and Goldscheider warned that maintaining Israeli rule in the territories would ultimately endanger the Jewish majority in Israel. Ariel Sharon, then Agriculture Minister in Begin's government, rejected this conclusion; he claimed that Jews would make up 64% of the population in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza strip by the year 2000 if Jewish immigration remained at the rate of about 30,000 a year, although he did not cite any sources for this estimate.

The conclusions of the Friedlander-Goldscheider study soon became a hot political issue between Israel's two main parties, Likud and Labour, in the June 1981 parliamentary elections. Both parties opposed withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders or setting up a Palestinian state, and both supported building more Jewish settlements in the territories and maintaining exclusive Israeli control over Jerusalem. However, Labour argued for building settlements only in areas Israel intended to keep, while handing the rest back to Jordan. Likud was strongly critical of this proposal, claiming that the result would be a binational state spelling "the end of the Zionist endeavour." Many on the left of Israeli politics were already warning that without a clean separation from the Palestinians, the outcome would be either a binational state by default (thus ending Israel's Jewish character) or a South African-style "Bantustan" with a Jewish minority forcibly ruling a disenfranchised Arab majority (thus ending Israel's claims to be a democracy).

In the event, Begin won the election and announced (in May 1982) a formal policy of "extending state sovereignty ... over Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip" accompanied by a major expansion of Jewish settlement and the granting of "full autonomy" to the Palestinians.

On the Palestinian side, the Israeli opposition to a binational state led to another change of position which evolved gradually from the late 1970s onwards. The PLO retained its original option of a single secular binational state west of Jordan, but began to take the position that it was prepared to accept a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza in land from which Israel had withdrawn under Security Council Resolution 242. Settlements would need to be dismantled and Palestinian refugees allowed to return (to Israel as well as the new Palestine). This new position, formally adopted in December 1988, was overwhelmingly rejected by Israeli public opinion and the main political parties but was subsequently used as the basis of peace discussions in the 1990s.

[edit] Binationalism since 2003

Since 2003, there have been renewed interest on binationalism. For example, in 2003, New York University scholar Tony Judt wrote an article titled "Israel: The Alternative" in the New York Review of Books. In the article, Judt deemed the two-state solution as fundamentally doomed and unworkable.

Other leftist journalists from Israel, such as Haim Hanegbi and Daniel Gavron, are also calling the public to face the facts and accept the binational solution. This article has engendered a frenzy media blitz in the UK and US. The New York Review of Books received more than one thousand letters per week on the essay. On the Palestinian side, similar voices are raised. In 1999, Edward Said wrote in The End of Peace Process: Oslo and After: "The problem is that Palestinian self-determination in a separate state is unworkable." Several high-level Fatah Palestinian Authority officials have voiced similar rhetorics, including Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei, Hani Al-Masri. “Time is running out for a two-state solution,” Britain’s The Guardian newspaper quoted Yasser Arafat as saying in an interview from his West Bank headquarters in 2004. Many political analysts, including Omar Barghouti, believe that the death of Arafat harbingers the bankruptcy of the Oslo Accords and the Two-State Solution.

Today, the prominent proponents for the one-state solution include Palestinian lawyer, Michael Tarazi *, Jeff Halper *, and Israeli writer Dan Gavron *. They cite the expansion of the Israeli Settler movement, especially in the West Bank, as a compelling rationale for binationalism and the increased unfeasibility of the two-state alternative. They advocate a secular and democratic state while still maintaining a Jewish presence and culture in the region. They concede that this alternative will erode the dream of Jewish supremacy in terms of governance in the long run.

After the 2006 election of the Palestinian parliament, Hamas claimed the majority of the parliamentary seats. Hamas rejected the Two-State Solution in principle. Claiming "Palestine is an Islamic Waqf", Hamas believe that "it is possible for the members of the three religions: Islam, Christianity and Judaism to coexist in safety and security...only under the shadow of Islam." Facing the Hamas challenge, in June 2006, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called for a controversial referendum by Palestinians on whether to proceed with negotiations for a two-state solution with Israel.

[edit] Criticisms of the binational solution

According to Alan Dershowitz, most moderate Israelis and Palestinians alike believe that a binational solution is not only unworkable, but also unwanted. He says that the most obvious problem with the binational solution is that it would destroy the Jewish character of the state of Israel due to the high birth rates among Palestinians living in the occupied territories. Secondly, the idea that the Palestinians and the Israelis could live side by side as equals is a problematic one due to the large economic gap between the two peoples. Critics of the binational solution also cite the ethnic/religious conflicts in the binational states of Lebanon and the former Yugoslavia (Dershowitz, 28).

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  • "Palestine - Divided or United? The Case for a Bi-National Palestine before the United Nations" by M. Reiner; Lord Samuel; E. Simon; M. Smilansky; Judah Leon Magnes. Ihud Jerusalem 1947. Includes submitted written and oral testimony before UNSCOP; IHud's Proposals include: political, immigration, land, development (Reprinted Greenwood Press Reprint, Westport, CT, 1983, ISBN 0-8371-2617-7)
  • Alan Dershowitz. The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can Be Resolved. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005.
  • Hattis, Susan Lee. The Binational Idea in Palestine during Mandatory Times. Haifa: Shikmona, 1970.
  • "Begin Loyalist Given Inside Track for Dayan's Job", Washington Post, November 14, 1979
  • "The Population of Israel", Friedlander D. and Goldscheider C., Hebrew University, 1980
  • "Fifteen Years' Successful Conquest Has Wounded Israel's Soul", Washington Post, June 6, 1982
  • "Demography in the Land of Israel in the Year 2000", Sofer A., Haifa University, 1987
  • Mendes-Flohr, Paul R. A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs. Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1994.
  • "Jewish and Democratic? A Rejoinder to the "Ethnic Democracy" Debate," Gavison, R., Israel Studies, March 31, 1999
  • Leon, Dan. Binationalism: A Bridge over the Chasm. Palestine-Israel Journal, July 31, 1999.
  • Tilley, Virginia. The One-State Solution : A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock, University of Michigan Press, May 2005

[edit] External links

  • [1] Haaretz Special Report "Is the two-state solution in danger?" 2004
  • [2] ONE-STATE.org - a web campaign for one-state in Israel/Palestine, Temporarily Unavailable on June 2006
  • Putting the Pieces Together? a Forum on Binationalism in The Boston Review December 2001/January 2002
  • Alternative Palestinian Agenda. Proposal for an Alternative Configuration in Palestine-Israel. Alternative Palestinian Agenda. Retrieved on February 26, 2006.
  • [3] The New York Review of Books: Israel: The Alternative by Tony Judt, October 23, 2003
  • [4] The London Review of Books: The One-State Solution by Virginia Tilley, November 2003
  • [5] The Nation. The One-State Solution by Daniel Lazare, November 3, 2003
  • [6] Ha'aretz. No more two-state solution? by Ari Shavit, August 28, 2003
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