In this post, I argue that the principle of "two-states for two peoples" is the only realistic and just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In this post, I'll argue that the principle of "two-states for two peoples" is the only realistic and just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The post is divided into four sections, based on the following questions:
1. WHY HAVE STATES AT ALL? This is a deep question, so I'm going to have to be brief. The current global international order consists of a great number of nation-states, kept loosely in check by a system of international law that is enforced by a coalition of the strongest states. A lot of people on the Western political left are rather uncomfortable with this order of things, because nation-states do not tend to behave altruistically. Rather, they represent and serve the interests of particular constituencies, which are often defined along ethnic or religious lines, more or less explicitly. And nation-states seem to be perpetually involved in petty squabbles with one another, which often enough escalate into war. Critics of the nation-state system often envision a new, better world, in which there are open borders and anyone can live anywhere s/he wants to, without having to identify with any particular group, or declare loyalty to any particular government. It is a beautiful, cosmopolitan vision. But it is unrealistic. Even people whose politics is motivated by compassion and human rights (rather than simply the interests of one's own group) should firmly support the nation-state system, imperfect as it is. If one looks at the places in the world where there is the most human misery, one quickly finds that they are the places where people are stateless or live in failed states-- states that fail to protect all of their citizens. True, many states are quite nasty to one another and even to their own citizens. But human groups that lack the money, organization, institutional backing, and military protection[1] of a state tend to suffer the most horrific privations, depredations, and exploitations. (Some examples from recent history include the Armenians before they had a state of their own, the Jews before 1948, the Kurds, the Yazidis, and the Palestinians.) And the sad fact is that despite their loud cries, private organizations and international bodies are usually either too weak or simply not dedicated enough to any one people to prevent these things from happening. So, even from the standpoint of protecting human rights, nation-states seem to be a justified arrangement. But the protections of a state do come at the inevitable price of particularism: a state's job is to serve and protect its citizens. [1] A colleague points out to me that there are a few exceptions to the need for military protection. Costa Rica seems to have no significant military and yet its people manage to live safely. However, this is the exception rather than the norm. Other countries that don't have militaries, such as Japan, get away with this only by relying on the USA's military umbrella. 2. WHY TWO STATES FOR JEWS AND PALESTINIANS? Both the Jews and the Palestinians are peoples with the right to self-determination: each deserves to be represented in a state.
For a state to be viable, its people have to have a robust sense of shared identity and common good.
The Jewish people and the Palestinian people do not have enough of a shared identity to be able to live together in one functioning state.
These examples show what it means for a state be dedicated to serving a people. The institutions of the state are brought to bear, with all of the efficacy that that entails. And the state is willing to take risks, even to the point of violating international law, to serve the interests of that people. Private organizations and international bodies are typically either too weak or else not dedicated enough to any one people to carry out operations like these. ...But most Jews can be excused for doubting that a binational "Israstine" would be so dedicated to protecting global Jewry that it would be willing to violate another country's sovereignty, or rapidly absorb huge numbers of Jewish immigrants. Indeed, massive immigration of Jews fleeing European anti-Semitism was the principal factor that triggered Palestinian violence from the 1920s to 1948. So it is especially doubtful that an "Israstine" in which Palestinians had a significant influence on immigration policy would be willing to absorb large numbers of persecuted Jews from all over the world, were such a need to arise. [1] I think it was on this episode of the Tikvah podcast: https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/israel-zionism/2019/04/podcast-daniel-gordis-on-the-rift-between-american-and-israeli-jews/ [2] It is true that some of these communities endured hardships after immigrating, that the state was insufficiently prepared to integrate them into the Israeli economy and society, and that some of them continue to face discrimination today. But still, Iraqi, Yemenite, and Ethiopian Jews have made enormous contributions to Israel. And it is hard to deny that they are better off having escaped persecution. If you talk to them, overwhelmingly they are proud to be Israeli, even when they have many legitimate criticisms of the Israeli government. 3. WHY DO SOME ADVOCATE ONE STATE? It'd be foolish to argue for two states without considering the obstacles to this solution, and the facts that have driven people to support one state. I will address these matters in a series of unfolding updates to this post. Israeli settlements in the West Bank have made it very difficult to draw a workable border between Israel and a future Palestinian state. In two sentences: Most advocates of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict envision a future Palestinian state that would encompass the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, with the exception of certain areas in the Old City of Jerusalem that would have a more complicated status. The Israeli presence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem makes this more complicated to achieve. Some Historical Background: Between 1948 and 1967, the West Bank was controlled by Jordan. In 1967, after Jordan joined Egypt and Syria in their war with Israel, Israel conquered the West Bank from Jordan. Shortly thereafter, Israel built a small number of military outposts at strategic points in the West Bank, for reasons of military security[1] (see also below). Starting in 1977 larger numbers of Israeli Jews began moving to the West Bank, settling first in those outposts and then gradually also building villages, towns, and eventually cities. While Israel did not formally move its citizens into the West Bank, it did build infrastructure for them and supplied them with water and electricity. At first these settlers were mostly religiously-motivated people, but by now a diverse range of Israeli Jews live in West Bank settlements. According to the Israeli Interior Ministry, there are 389,250 Israeli citizens living in the West Bank and a further 375,000 in East Jerusalem. People often argue about whether Jewish settlements in the West Bank are legal under international law. But set these debates aside, at least for the moment (I'll return to this issue in response to some comments). Our question is whether these settlements are an obstacle to two states. As far as the two-state solution is concerned, the settlements are widely thought to cause several problems:
So, why not just dismantle the settlements, give that land to the Palestinians for their state, and declare a two-state solution accomplished? Things are not so simple. Many of the settlements would be very hard to dismantle, for the following reasons:
Coming soon in further updates: Is it too late for Israel to evacuate enough settlements to produce a workable compromise? [1] Because it is high ground that overlooks the coastal plain containing 70% of Israel's population, Israel has, other things being equal, an interest in maintaining military control of the West Bank, from the standpoint of its national security. Whether this interest is mooted by Israel's great military strength compared to its enemies and its probable possession of nuclear weapons is a further question. Each party wants Jerusalem and its holy sites to be part of its state. The Palestinians want East Jerusalem (or, even better, all of Jerusalem) as the capital for their future state, and consider all Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem to be settlements. (Though some Palestinians have been willing to compromise on the Western Wall and the Jewish quarter of the Old City.) But the broad consensus in Israeli society is that all of Jerusalem is part of Israel. Even Israeli Jews who are willing to give up the settlements for the sake of peace tend to be much less flexible about Jerusalem. One commonsensical solution to this that has been part of many two-state peace plans is to divide East Jerusalem from West Jerusalem, give East Jerusalem to the Palestinians and West Jerusalem to Israel, and make special arrangements for the Old City of Jerusalem and its holy sites. The biggest problem with this solution is that it is very hard to bisect a city with an international border. Although East Jerusalem is in certain ways already rather isolated from West Jerusalem, it is becoming less so; at any rate, the two are integrated enough to make a clean break hard to achieve. Moreover, no one in the region wants to have to cross an international border to see her/his holy sites. The Palestinians insist on a Right of Return. In the course of the Israeli War of Independence (November 1947 - March 1949), some 750,000 Palestinians either fled or were displaced from the territory that became Israel. Palestinians refer to this as the Nakba, or the catastrophe. The details of who and how many left for what reasons, and who exactly was involved in bringing this about and in what ways, are a very sensitive and controversial subject that I can't get into here. (There are many books written about it; Benny Morris' The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem is one classic source. The Wikipedia article on the 1948 Arab-Israeli War is also fairly good.) The short of it is that some Palestinians fled because militias were fighting nearby, while others were forcibly expelled by Israeli soldiers. (I've heard the breakdown described as 60% to 40%, respectively, but I can't remember the source so don't quote me on that.) Israel's highest officials harbored no official plan of ethnically cleansing the region of Palestinians, but in various places, local commanding officers of the Israel Defense Forces saw a strategic interest in expelling Palestinian civilians and took it into their own hands to do so. Suffice it to say that the Palestinians were deeply and indelibly shaped by the trauma of the Nakba. During the war, the UN passed Resolution 194, which sets out the terms for a peace settlement. These terms include the return of Palestinians who fled or were expelled to what became the State of Israel. However, Resolution 194 was never implemented. The Arab League rejected some of the Resolution's other stipulations, and Israel, which was not yet a member of the UN at that time, rejected the principle of return. Israel argued that it could not reasonably be asked to readmit a large, hostile population which would instantly become a demographic majority. (On the eve of the war, the Jewish population in the region had been only 630,000.) Since 1948, many Palestinians continue to claim a legal and moral right for all Palestinians who left during the Israeli War of Independence, as well as all of their descendants, to return to what is now Israel and live there. This is called the Right of Return. The yearning to return, and the insistence that it is a legal and moral right, have become a definitive part of Palestinian identity-- they help to define what it means to be a Palestinian. Of course, I'm not claiming that every Palestinian wants to return; a given individual may relate to these feelings in many complicated ways. For my purposes here, the point is that even if some Palestinian representative body agrees to compromise on this issue, it is plausible that the Palestinian public will never be fully satisfied unless an unlimited Right of Return is granted. This is not to say that all or even most Palestinians who would have this right would exercise it; many of them are doing well enough in the countries where they now live. It is to say that the Palestinian public will likely not be fully satisfied with any solution unless it involves Israel accepting their right to return-should-they-so-choose, even though many of them would not so choose. Coming soon: why the right of return would mean one state. Coming soon in further updates: 4. WHAT IS WRONG WITH ONE STATE? For an excellent podcast episode on which some of the material of this post is drawn, see the following interview with Michael Walzer on the Tel Aviv Review: https://tlv1.fm/the-tel-aviv-review/2019/05/24/tel-aviv-review-live-in-new-york-michael-walzer-on-the-problem-of-the-left/
28 Comments
David
5/27/2019 02:59:13 pm
I basically follow you and also doubt that an Israstine would work at this point. But here's something that bothers me. Are the Israelis really one people with a shared identity? There are radically different sub-groups in Israel: Mizrahi vs Ashkenazi, secular vs. Orthodox, Orthodox nationalist vs. Orthodox anti-Zionist, and on and on. In fact, without the external threats that Israel faces one wonders whether there would be very serious civil strife or even civil war. The root reality, I feel, is that the only definition of Jewish peoplehood that encompasses all these groups is a religious, not ethnic, definition. So how does that play out? I don't know. What I do know is that I feel between a rock and a hard place. Palestinian nationalism is largely anti-Jewish (though not exclusively), but the new Israeli blood-and-soil nationalism veers closer toward pure racism and even fascism every year. In the end I keep an emotional attachment toward Israel but I at the same time feel alienated. Sometimes life offers true dilemmas. But I wish you luck, Anonymous, on this blog.
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LiberalZionist
5/27/2019 03:19:46 pm
A few reactions.
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LiberalZionist
5/28/2019 01:01:40 pm
Another thought:
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Horazio
5/29/2019 07:07:22 am
I'd like to make a three comments on the point raised by David. First, I'd like to reiterate LiberalZionist's point that bitter division - while certainly a potential threat to the unity of a people - is not unique to Jews. Similar phenomena exists in other countries, and not only along political but also along religious lines. Think of Turkey, for example, where there is bitter fighting over the secular vs. religious/traditional character of the state.
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Horazio
5/29/2019 07:22:44 am
I also wanted to make two small points on LiberalZionist's opening thread.
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Internationalist
7/2/2019 10:17:20 pm
I couldn’t decide whether to post this comment under this blog post or the one entitled “Liberal and Leftist Zionism”. What I say here will pertain to much of what you write in both posts.
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Internationalist
7/2/2019 10:32:53 pm
The rest of what I wanted to say got cut off somehow, but much of what I wanted to say in the rest of the comment can be found inthis essay:
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7/3/2019 08:22:35 am
Hi Internationalist! Very interesting and stimulating reactions! Thanks for having a look. Below I respond to just a few points; there'll be more to follow, including updates of the relevant posts where I'll take your concerns into account.
Internationalist
7/4/2019 01:21:16 am
For Liberal Zionist (LZ):
Internationalist
7/4/2019 01:23:49 am
The last sentence of the above comment should have been: 7/3/2019 08:36:08 am
Also, FWIW:
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Horazio
7/3/2019 09:20:19 am
Internationalist, thanks for these thoughtful comments. Liberal Zionist was faster than me, so I'll only respond to some of what you wrote. (I'll quickly flag the main point on which I agree with Liberal Zionist: as a matter of purely sociological fact, I doubt that most anti-zionist leftists are coming with Marxist assumptions. That of course says nothing about the merits of the Marxist critique.)
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Internationalist
7/3/2019 09:53:01 pm
(1) It can be moralistic but it need not be, and even if it is, I think it indeed requires quite trivial moral claims for its justification. First, let’s distinguish between moral and non-moral goods. A moral good is one whose realization has moral reasons in its favor. A non-moral good need not have any moral reasons in its favor (this definition makes all moral goods non-moral goods as well, despite the names, but not vice versa). I might desire a certain lucrative job because it would be good for me in that it would garner me a lot of income, even though do not have a right to the job and there are in general no moral reasons for me to get the job. My getting the job is a non-moral good (for me). Even when I desire goods for other people, they need not be moral goods. I might want the Yankees to beat the Mets because the Yankees are my favorite team, or because I dislike the Mets. No moral reasoning goes into the calculus. The Yankees winning is a non-moral good for me, even though it does not concern me directly. All this is to say that the goods which greater international integration (along certain terms) will bring about need not be moral goods. One may prefer even something like greater equality for compelling non-moral reasons, which I will try to go some way towards showing below.
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Internationalist
7/3/2019 10:08:54 pm
[The above comment was intended as a reply to Horazio. The rest of what I wanted to write is below. The first paragraph below is intended to go between After the second paragraph above.]
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Internationalist
7/3/2019 10:11:11 pm
[Here’s the last bit, hopefully]
Internationalist
7/3/2019 10:27:06 pm
One last point for Horazio (this pertains to some of LZ’s points as well). A certain kind of Marxist might argue that there is after all a right to national self-determination, since this is a “bourgeois” right, and bourgeois relations of production, and therefore the “superstructure” arising from them, prevail throughout the world at present. Since morality, including rights, is part of this superstructure, bourgeois rights like self-determination definitely exist. However, like bourgeois morality (the only kind of morality at present) generally, this right can be overridden, not only by other rights or even only by other moral goods, but by non-moral goods as well. This, if I recall correctly, is the view Allen Wood attributes to Marx himself in chapter IX of his book “Karl Marx”: moral goods exist, but non-moral goods can and often do trump them. With regard to self-determination in particular, I think something like this argument was given by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin et al. for the Soviet invasions of Menshevik Georgia and Finland.
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LiberalZionist
7/4/2019 03:11:16 am
Thank you, Internationalist, for your stimulating and thorough remarks. Here are a few thoughts for now. (I’ll not be able to reply to everything you write, since you touch on many issues in quite a bit of detail.)
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Internationalist
7/4/2019 08:21:17 pm
I am actually open to some version of a right to national self-determination, as long as this does not amount to a right to full independence. Indeed, if it is only a right-in-the-interim, and the ultimate goal is international union, then I find it difficult to see how it could amount to a right to independence, since this would cut against the ultimate goal. (Of course, one might endorse independence for particular peoples for all sorts of other reasons). I was under the impression anyway that most people don’t think of self-determination as automatically entailing a right to independence, only to various lesser forms of autonomy and cultural cohesiveness.
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LiberalZionist
7/5/2019 11:36:05 am
"I am actually open to some version of a right to national self-determination, as long as this does not amount to a right to full independence"
Horazio
7/4/2019 01:44:04 pm
Internationalist: there's a lot in there! I'll try to respond to what I see as the more important points.
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Horazio
7/4/2019 01:48:08 pm
(continued) Re (4): "“Germany” as a whole," you write, "does not obviously benefit from the German state’s exercise of its “national sovereignty” in these areas. German workers in particular see their wages and consumption stagnate. [...] nation states do not exist primarily to serve the interests of the “nation” as a whole, whatever this could mean. They exist primarily to serve the interests of those members of the nation who own substantial amounts of capital, as well foreign capitalists who invest in the country."
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LiberalZionist
7/4/2019 03:14:21 pm
Re: moral vs. non-moral
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Internationalist
7/4/2019 07:10:42 pm
Yes, that is one thing I was getting at. Nationalism obviously has a lot of sentimentality built into it, which is why I find it bizarre when nationalists act they are the only harded-headed realists in the room. Even in intra-Left debates, one comes across people who favor Catalan independence for apparently no other reason than Spanish Civil War nostalgia, with nary a word about political economy. But I really do want to also insist that one can desire things, and even make “should” claims, for non-moral reasons. (I will say more about this in my upcoming response to Horazio).
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Internationalist
7/4/2019 08:06:21 pm
Horazio:
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Internationalist
7/4/2019 08:08:21 pm
property and in my association that impose negative externalities on others outside my property or association, including people very far away who are not trying to “trespass” (granting this notion). My right not to be killed does not involve this or does not to nearly the same extent.
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Internationalist
7/4/2019 08:10:06 pm
[continued]
Horazio
7/5/2019 02:04:23 pm
Re (1): Especially in light of what you later say about non-moral vs. moral uses of 'should', I'm starting to worry that it's not clear exactly what we are disagreeing about. I'll highlight your following sentence:
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Horazio
7/5/2019 02:06:47 pm
decreases rather than increases the range of issues to which a population's self-rule extends. I don't think this is controversial, and I take it that you also accept it. (Also, in your example, I could have made similar points about Spain. The theoretical possibility always exists in Spain to elect a government that will implement extreme protectionist economic policies. If such a government is not realistic, it's because the citizenry judges that they are overall better off swallowing the negative effects of international trade with Germany. Anyone who makes a sharp distinction between rights and interest should deem this significant. Having all your rights respected doesn't imply getting everything you want, and in my view there is no such thing as the right to cheap housing or the right to sell one's agricultural products at a non-competitive price. I won't press though, since once again I suspect that we are entering the territory of irreconcilably different starting points.)
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