No future for an Israeli Bi-national State

Failure of the Two-State Solution: A Reply to Ian Lustick

By Yale Zussman, ALGEMEINER

After making it very clear that there is no Palestinian nation, Zussman goes on to make some other useful points which I have highlighted in the extract below:

The “dirty secret” on the Israeli side is that the Oslo process was initiated not solely to make peace with the Palestinians but also to discredit the Israeli Right. It is no coincidence that the Left took up this issue shortly after their monopoly on forming the government was broken. The idea was that by solving this problem, the Left would demonstrate that it alone was worthy of ruling the country. The Palestinian response to the possibility of peace, to raise the level of violence, ended up proving to the Israeli electorate that the Oslo Process was a failure and this strengthened the Israeli Right. The response from the Israeli Left has been an ever more desperate effort to force the peace process toward a solution that will “vindicate” the Left’s claims about their right to rule the country, regardless of the consequences for the country.

The centerpiece of this effort has been promoting hostility toward the settlements. The Left built the first settlements, but when the Right endorsed them, the Left turned against them as part of its effort to undermine the legitimacy of the Israeli Right. Using their contacts abroad, especially in Europe, the Israeli Left has succeeded in vilifying the settlers — many of whom are religious, on the Right, or both — as well as the settlements and in the process legitimized violence against all civilians. Initially, only Israelis were considered legitimate targets, but now we see this violence essentially everywhere in the world. The Left’s “success” here further damaged its credibility with the electorate. With each lost election, the Israeli Left has increasingly seen its survival depending on getting outside powers, the Europeans and the United States, to pressure Israel to accede to the Left’s ideas on how the conflict should be resolved. Thus, we have J Street endorsing ideas rejected by the Israeli electorate while still claiming to speak on behalf of Israel.

The great irony of all this is that the settlements may be the only incentive available to encourage the Palestinian leadership to look past avoiding blame for past suffering toward reaching an agreement with Israel. The Palestinians have made it fairly clear that they value land more than peace and more than the lives of their people (especially those people who come from outside their own circle) and the settlements present a risk of future losses. The expectation that delaying a resolution now will lead to losses of things they value in the future is the only incentive such leaders have to move toward peace. The campaign against the settlements removes that incentive and thus guarantees the failure of the “two-state” solution, bemoaned by Lustick and Kerry, who are, of course, vehemently opposed to the settlements.

Lustick proposes that the continuing failure of the Palestinians to agree to a “Two-State Solution” should lead the world to give them what they want, a single state where they would be able to do to the Jews whatever they wish. He presents this proposal at a time when sectarian fighting is claiming hundreds, if not thousands, of lives a day in neighboring Syria and elsewhere in the Muslim world, and where Muslim Brotherhood-inspired attacks on Copts in neighboring Egypt have led tens of thousands of them to abandon their homeland of many millennia. Jews are already nearly gone from most of the Muslim nations, and Christians are now being forced out as well. Is Lustick (or Kerry or Obama) even aware of this?

Lustick believes Israeli Haredim can make common cause with Islamists — he sees them as similar religious fanatics — but the Haredim mainly want to be left alone to live their lives as they believe the Torah commands, while the Islamists seek to impose their conception of Shariah on everyone, killing as many Jews as possible in the process. Is he even aware of, never mind does he understand, this fundamental difference?

Lustick also believes Mizrachi Jews in Israel will come to see themselves as Arabs. This is even more delusional than the possibility of Haredim and Islamists linking forces. Mizrachi Jews were expelled from Muslim countries where their ancestors had lived, in many cases since before the coming of the Muslims. After the Muslim conquests, their ancestors lived under the dhimma, the original apartheid, only to be expelled after the establishment of Israel, often with nothing more than the clothes they were wearing. In the process, they lost more land than there is in Israel in its entirety. They came to Israel for protection from the Arabs, so the notion that they will regard themselves as Arab reflects profound ignorance at best.

But it’s not just the Middle East where multi-ethnic states are failing today. All of the multi-ethnic states established in Europe in the wake of World War I, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, have now dissolved. Scotland is contemplating departure from the United Kingdom, likewise Catalonia from Spain. In Africa, Muslims and Christians could not coexist in Sudan or Ethiopia, so we now have Southern Sudan and Eritrea.

The notion that a bi-national state consisting of two peoples who have been locked in a bitter conflict for a century could succeed when these other less problem-plagued multi-ethnic states failed is basically irrational. (Martin Sherman keeps making this point also)

So what solutions are there? There appear to be two, both calling for the abandonment of the notion of a Palestinian state, which, as we have seen, is not in the cards any time soon, if ever. If there is to be only one state, clearly it should be Israel because Israel is vibrant and is home to a unique culture that contributes a great deal to global civilization. By contrast, the Palestinian contribution to world culture is a series of ever more ingenious, and nefarious, techniques for killing civilians.

One possibility is for Israel to re-establish the occupation, disarm the gangs and return the Palestinians to the rapid socio-economic progress they made after 1967. This cannot last forever, but a decade or two of quiet is in everyone’s interest.

A more permanent solution would involve learning from what worked before 1967: Egypt would annex Gaza and undertake to remove Hamas and the Islamists based there. Israel and Jordan would negotiate a border between them, including the demilitarization of any Jordanian territory west of the Jordan River. One advantage of this approach is that both Egypt and Jordan have already negotiated treaties with Israel so the issue of recognizing the legitimacy of Israel would not be a barrier to success. Given the current confrontation between the Sunnis and Iran, it might be possible for the Gulf States to endorse such a solution and then recognize Israel. That would effectively end the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Separating Gaza from the territories that will be annexed to Jordan is an acknowledgement that, by dint of geography and demography, either Israel or the putative Palestinian state must be non-contiguous and the track record for non-contiguous states — think Pakistan and Bangladesh, never mind Germany and East Prussia in 1939 — isn’t good. The Partition Commission in 1947 grappled with this and came up with an unworkable solution. Since the region is mainly Arab, it simply makes more sense for Israel to remain contiguous. Once contiguity has been factored in, separating Gaza from the rest makes sense and this proposal follows almost immediately.

Yale Zussman holds a Doctorate in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he concentrated on International Relations, American Government, and the role of leadership.