[rad-green] Israel as Palestine: One State is Not the Solution, It’s Reality

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/174190

*History News Network          2/2/20*

Israel as Palestine: One State is Not the Solution, It’s Realityby Ian S.
Lustick

*Ian S. Lustick  is the Bess W. Heyman Professor of Political Science at
the University of Pennsylvania and the  author of Paradigm Lost: From
Two-State Reality to One-State Solution
<https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/4306.html>(Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).*
[image: image.png]

In my years as a graduate student at Berkeley in the early 1970s I was a
member of a group of idealistic and eccentric Jewish students known as the
Radical Jewish Union.  We were directly involved in struggles to save
Soviet Jewry, resist the draft, convince Jewish welfare federations to
direct more funds to Jewish education, revive Jewish cultural and artistic
traditions, fight anti-Semitism, and encourage Israel to move in
progressive directions.

In 1972 I wrote an article in the group’s newspaper, *The Jewish Radical*,
announcing formation of a petition campaign to be called “Yaish Breira” (in
Hebrew, “There is an alternative.”) We published and energetically
distributed a petition calling on the Israeli government to stop settling
Jews in the West Bank and accept the establishment of a non-belligerent
Palestinian state alongside Israel in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In my
article I argued that if settlement of the West Bank continued political
forces would arise in Israel that would make future withdrawal impossible,
thereby “locking the Jewish state in a political dungeon from which it
would never escape.”  At that time there were fewer than 2000 West Bank
settlers outside of expanded East Jerusalem. Now there are nearly 400,000.
The half dozen activists who were the core of Yaish Breira (most of whom
moved to Israel, and are still living there), were liberal Zionists.  We
were desperate to protect a democratic Israel from irredentist expansion
that would mean repression, discrimination, and the prevention of
Palestinian self-determination.

This was the still avoidable catastrophe that obsessed us and drove us to
reach out to Jewish activists all over the world. Committed to keeping the
“dirty laundry” of conflict among Jews from being seen by the gentiles, we
wrote and spoke only in Jewish publications and in Jewish events.  At that
time there was very little awareness of the phenomenon of Jewish settlement
of the West Bank and the immense implications of that settlement for the
options Israelis and Palestinians would have in the future. Even figures
who would eventually become leaders of the peace movement, such as Colonel
Morele Bar-On and Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, criticized our efforts.  It was
ridiculous, they claimed, to imagine that settlements would ever amount to
anything of political significance.

We were regularly harassed and insulted as “self-hating Jews,”
“anti-Semites,” and even “Nazis.”  I was even fired from my part-time job
as a Hebrew-school teacher.  Nevertheless, we collected over 400 signatures
from Jewish activists in fourteen countries.  In 1973 we submitted our
petition to the Golda Meir government, which completely ignored us.

West Bank Palestinians, however, took notice.  Shortly before the 1973 war
erupted, the front page of one Arabic newspaper in Jerusalem—*Sout
al-Jamaheir*-- featured a long article about our petition with the excited
headline that there were actually Jews who opposed settlements in the West
Bank and favored establishment of a Palestinian state.

Times change and so do majority opinions. After decades of delay and
continued settlement activity, most Israelis did accept our argument that
West Bank settlements posed a dire threat to the only negotiated solution
to the conflict--a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip.  Unfortunately, however, no government in Israel acted decisively
enough or soon enough to make that vision a reality.   For almost a decade
now, there has been no real possibility of achieving it, even though it
remains convenient for Americans, Israelis, and some Palestinians to
pretend otherwise. It is for saying that, for saying that I no longer
support the two-state solution, that I am *now *denounced as an anti-Semite
and self-hating Jew.

It used to be that Israel, after 1967, was a state within the boundaries
established after the 1948 war, temporarily “occupying” other territories,
not in the state, that could have been a Palestinian state.  No more. One
out of eleven Jewish Israelis live in the territories captured in 1967 that
Israel calls “Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem.”  There are no Israeli
Jews living in the Gaza Strip, but the two million inhabitants of that
ghettoized region are for all intents and purposes also ruled by the
policies and power of Israeli governments.  The state of Israel collects
taxes from Gazans, regulates their trade, controls entry and exit, and
determines whose homes and whose lives will or will not be protected from
destruction (the fundamental function of a state). Even official Israeli
maps depict no international borders separating “Israel” from Palestinian
enclaves or from the Gaza Strip.  If Israel leaves much for Hamas to do in
Gaza, and something for the Palestinian Authority to do in the West Bank,
so too do Palestinian organizations operate in Israeli prison yards without
thereby removing them from the state of Israel.

The two-state solution is no longer a viable political objective or a
practical, useful plan for thinking about the problem. Officially, however,
it is still honored, even by those who privately know the truth.  It is, in
effect, a “Dead Solution Walking.”  But because one state controls the
entire territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River does
not mean we have witnessed the coming of the one-state *solution*. What we
have is a one-state *reality*.

The future, and with it prospects for peace and a better set of problems
than those afflicting Jews and Palestinians today, will not be determined
by renewed diplomacy or negotiations.  The diplomatic merry-go-round may
continue to turn, but as all merry-go-rounds, its purpose is simply to keep
turning, not to go anywhere.  Instead the future will be determined by long
struggles to change the one state, Israel, that has united the entire
country.  This will mean what it did for freed black slaves in the Unites
States, for non-whites in apartheid South Africa, for Irish Catholics in
nineteenth century Britain, and for women in all western industrialized
countries: generations of conflict and shifting alliances that transform
limited democracies by incorporating formerly excluded populations thereby
ending, or at least greatly reducing, discrimination and inequality.  In
this way, eventually, all those whose lives are subject to the power of the
Israeli state, Jews in the Galilee, Arabs in Gaza, Jews in the West Bank,
and Arabs in Haifa, will have equal rights and equal representation in the
government that governs them.

In other words, the struggle for peace *between *Israel and the
Palestinians has been replaced by struggles, likely to take generations,
for the equality *of *Jews and Arabs within the state now known as Israel.

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