One-State Solution

Peace prospects between Israel and Palestine are dimmer than ever.

by David Faris

The recent kerfuffle over the announcement of new settlement construction in East Jerusalem, made while Vice President Joe Biden was in Israel to jump-start peace talks, highlighted tensions between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government in Israel, but unfortunately obscured a much more serious problem: the growing infeasibility of the two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

The Americans mustered an unusually protracted period of mock outrage, punctuated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's wounded claim that the announcement was "an insult to the United States." But, of course, Monday saw a return to Clinton's "rock solid, unwavering, enduring and forever" commitment to Israeli security that is perhaps the surest sign of an upcoming U.S. election.

The bottom line is that the Israeli government's determination to build new settlements in explicit defiance of U.S. demands means that prospects for peace are incredibly dim. The relative absence of violence since Israel's Gaza invasion in 2007 (achieved at the cost of an inhuman siege of the Strip) has taken the conflict off front pages, while the widely known ideology of the right-wing Netanyahu coalition basically snuffs out any talk of peace before it can begin.

Relations between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government have been colder than a Kiev winter from the get-go, as both rightly anticipated substantial policy differences over the resolution of the conflict. The trouble with this discourse is that it doesn't really get to the heart of the matter. While legally problematic, most of the settlement blocs are likely to be incorporated into Israel as part of any two-state solution. It is difficult to envision a nonmilitary government in Israel with the capability to undertake a total evacuation of the nearly 300,000 settlers in the West Bank (excluding Jerusalem). The American diplomatic focus on settlements therefore enables a mind-numbingly predictable back-and-forth that prevents more creative discussions: The Israelis expand their existing settlements, the Americans complain for a few days, and the process begins anew. Ultimately, the conflict won't be resolved by halting the construction of settlements, but by a concerted effort to compromise on core issues like holy sites and the status of East Jerusalem.

Repeated efforts to solve these differences have failed, and now, the two sides can't even talk about talking about talking.

The question, then, is whether the two-state solution is still the shortest path to a lasting peace. There are real concerns about whether the unequal power relations between these two peoples will ever allow for a just division of territory and resources. And the longer Palestinian statehood continues to be an abstraction rather than a reality, the more plausible the "one-state solution," as it's known, begins to seem.

In the one-state solution, rather than arranging for a partition of Israel and the occupied territories into two countries, both entities would be integrated into one bi-national state, reserved for neither people as an ethnic exclusivity.

Instead of endless negotiations about how to separate this tiny slice of territory, the parties would discuss how best to share it. Instead of demanding a state that would be of questionable viability and dubious sovereignty, Palestinians would launch a campaign for full equality between all people living in Israel-Palestine. A reimagining of the parameters for peace is especially imperative because the plight of the Palestinian people has long been untenable. Whatever the actions of the terrorist minority, they do not justify collectively punishing millions of people and denying them the two 'hoods of modernity: statehood and livelihood.

Critics might argue that the one-state solution is even more unrealistic than the two-state solution. The campaign for a two-state solution, after all, has brought the region tantalizingly close to real peace, but at a great cost in lives, treasure and dashed expectations. And a one-state solution has very little support inside of Israel.

Whatever the merits of either approach, there is no justification for the continued siege of Gaza, and the imposition of horrific material conditions on the Palestinians.

And if the Israelis can't be persuaded to take even the basic steps necessary to move toward two states, the United States should begin discussing alternatives.

David Faris is all about discussing alternatives. E-mail him at david.faris@gmail.com.