Those who advocated for a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict under the slogan of ‘One land, two peoples’ took what was always the more principled stand, saying that was the only way to reconcile the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people to the land they were living in with the need of the Jews who also wanted a homeland, was to have both groups live there together and work out a modus vivendi. It was idealistic no doubt, but made sense since the two groups shared so much in common, except for allegiances to their different tribal gods.
Those who favored a two-state solution took a more pragmatic stance and felt that given the history of violence and animosity, the only workable option for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was to separate the two people. In 2002, even the Arab League unanimously accepted the two-state solution.
Like many people, I used to support the two-state solution on pragmatic grounds although the one-state solution was always the more appealing one. But recently I have shifted to the one-state, because the two-state solution has become increasingly untenable. This one graphic below tells the whole story of how Israel has increasingly taken over Palestinian land with its settlements, forcing the Palestinians into an increasingly fragmented and smaller archipelago of regions that cannot conceivably be made into a viable state.
In his talk in Cleveland last October that I promised to write up but never got around to doing (but fortunately kept my notes), Jeff Halper of the organization Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolitions (ICAHD) said that the Israel lobby has worked hard to promote the myth that Israel repeatedly makes ‘generous’ offers of peace and land to the Palestinian but keeps getting rejected, which proves that the goal of the Palestinians is to destroy Israel and kill all the Jews. The 1988 talks at Camp David are repeatedly brought up as an example of this spurned generosity.
He says that this is false. In reality, the Israeli government has made offers that they knew would be unacceptable as a method of stalling while they keep taking over Palestinian lands. Seth Ackerman describes how the major media has relentlessly pursued this false narrative of short-sighted, foolish, and ungrateful Palestinians rejecting the Israeli hand of peace in direct contradiction of easily verifiable facts.
This account is one of the most tenacious myths of the conflict. Its implications are obvious: There is nothing Israel can do to make peace with its Palestinian neighbors. The Israeli army’s increasingly deadly attacks, in this version, can be seen purely as self-defense against Palestinian aggression that is motivated by little more than blind hatred.
To understand what actually happened at Camp David, it’s necessary to know that for many years the PLO has officially called for a two-state solution in which Israel would keep the 78 percent of the Palestine Mandate (as Britain’s protectorate was called) that it has controlled since 1948, and a Palestinian state would be formed on the remaining 22 percent that Israel has occupied since the 1967 war (the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem). Israel would withdraw completely from those lands, return to the pre-1967 borders and a resolution to the problem of the Palestinian refugees who were forced to flee their homes in 1948 would be negotiated between the two sides. Then, in exchange, the Palestinians would agree to recognize Israel (PLO Declaration, 12/7/88; PLO Negotiations Department).
Although some people describe Israel’s Camp David proposal as practically a return to the 1967 borders, it was far from that. Under the plan, Israel would have withdrawn completely from the small Gaza Strip. But it would annex strategically important and highly valuable sections of the West Bank–while retaining “security control” over other parts–that would have made it impossible for the Palestinians to travel or trade freely within their own state without the permission of the Israeli government.
Note that even the original 1967 partition gave the Palestinians only 22% of the land they lived in while Israel got 78%. But even that was not enough and the Israeli government has steadily encroached on that 22% by driving Palestinians away by demolishing their homes and subsidizing settlers in those lands. In addition they have created a network of massive walls that split Palestinian lands and require people to pass through onerous checkpoints (over 600 of them dotting the region) all the time, similar to the one I showed two days ago.
Halper explained how all this is done ‘legally’ using zoning rules. Almost all the land owned by Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories is zoned as agricultural and thus no houses can be built without first obtaining a variance and then a permit. For 46 years, Palestinians who own the farmland have not been able to get permits to build homes on their own farms. As a result they cannot work their land because they are forced to live far away. But Jewish settlers can easily get variances for permits to build houses because the zoning commissions are made up of Jews. Hence the steady displacement of Palestinians by settler housing continues to this day.
If the Palestinians do go ahead and build a home on their land, the Israeli government forces come without notice but with assault weapons and order the homes to be vacated within 15 minutes. The families living there collect whatever they can in that brief time and then bulldozers crush their homes while the families watch in despair and horror while their lives are destroyed. ICAHD tries to help people by rebuilding the homes but one family’s home was demolished by Israel six times. Halper was present during this and said that one child in the family was so traumatized by seeing what happened that she became blind but fortunately recovered her sight later in hospital. This is the ‘legal’ system that exists today in Israel.
Who are these 500,000 settlers who now live in the occupied territories as a result of these policies? Halper says that about 70,000 are religious fanatics who are driven by their belief that Jews are somehow special in their god’s eyes and have been commanded to occupy all that land. The others are ‘economic settlers’, people who have been essentially bribed by the Israeli government with the promise of cheap housing (which is in turn subsidized heavily by US taxpayers) and encouraged to move there as part of the government’s plan to take over Palestinian land. Many of them are recent immigrants from the former Eastern bloc countries seeking a better standard of living.
Halper says that he has come to the conclusion that Israel will never give up the occupied territories and that the government’s policies have doomed the two-state solution. He says that Israel is not a democracy but an ‘ethnocracy’, a state that believes that the only rightful inhabitants are those that belong to one ethnic group, in this case the Jews. He says that what is happening in Israel is even worse than what we saw with the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa. He calls what is happening the ‘warehousing’ of Palestinians, making their lives so hellish that they will leave.
The 2 state solution has always been a scam; Israel’s approach (per Colnago80: “settlements now, settlements forever!”) has never been to allow a viable second state.
What’s crazy is that we’re talking about a “second state” like Palestine wasn’t a state to begin with, before it was conquered. What is the “second state” in this picture? Israel is simply the latest in a long string of conquerors.
The big lie from Halper. The partition plan propose at Taba in 2000 was designed by the Clinton Administration, not the Government of Israel, and would have allocated 95% of the West Bank and 100% of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians. This was summarily rejected by Arafat because it would have required him to give up the Palestinian demand for resettlement of the occupants of refugee camps in Israel, something which he, like his successors absolutely refuses to give up. Since no Israeli Government will accept any such demand and wouldn’t last in power a day if it did, this is the real deal killer. There are currently in excess of 1 million Arabs living in Israel and, contrary to the lies of Halper, they ain’t going anywhere. And by the way, Avigdor Lieberman’s land swap proposal also is dead on arrival, in case anyone wants to bring that up. IMHO, Secretary Kerry’s efforts are an exercise in futility, much like the ongoing negotiations with Iran and the Syrian “peace” conference.
The bottom line is that the Palestinians aren’t going to give up the resettlement demand and the Israelis aren’t going to accept it. End of story.
But recently I have shifted to the one-state [solution]…
I’m beginning to think the one state will have to be Jordan. Israel is constantly making a Palestinian state inviable; and Israel may be making itself inviable with its policy of endless preemptive aggression, which is only making them more hostile enemies in the longer term, and keeping its people in the mindset where all their problems have to be solved by more force — even though that was the cause of their problems.
The whole idea of Israel was to be a Jewish state where Jews could live in peace as Jews — but Israelis today are getting nothing of the sort. They don’t live in peace, they live in a fortress-state where ever-stricter apartheid is necessary to keep their subject peoples at bay, and even the people in power — Israeli Jews — are losing their freedom to backward bigoted bullies.
I’m not a Jew, but if I was one, Israel would be the last place I’d want to live — that’s where the antisemitism seems to be WORST these days.
Re Pennsylvania pinhead @ #1
The area designated “Palestine” was part of the Ottoman Empire for several hundred years and, by the middle of the 19th century, was a backwater thereof. When the American writer Mark Twain visited the area in the late 1860s, he found it almost depopulated with Jerusalem appearing to be no larger then his hometown of St. Joseph, Mo. After WW1 when Turkey was part of the losing side, it was given over to Great Britain to administer. There never was an independent Palestinian state there. Of course, the Pennsylvania pinhead’s ignorance of history surprises no one.
By the way, apparently, not everybody has given up on the West Bank. The link below describes some developments there by independent entrepreneurs. But of course, you won’t read anything about this in the lamestream media which is fixated on the conflict and the administration’s futile “peace” proposals.
http://goo.gl/54vHTl
Hence redistribution of land according to inaccurate bronze-age myths should not be a 21st century policy.
I prefer to ignore you, but sometimes you make that impossible. Twain was writing of his journey through a non-arable part of Palestine. This was, of course, cherry-picked by interested parties.
Kathleen Christison;
And I’d hardly call a country the size of 1860 Palestine with 400,000 people ‘depopulated’.
Hack.
There never was an independent Palestinian state there
I didn’t say that there was. But there could have been, and Israel has been making damn sure that it won’t happen.
Regardless -- why don’t you support the Roman right of return, or the Umayyad right of return? Could it be because you’re just a tribalist who thinks your particular ethnic group has rights to land because, what, god gave someone title to it thousands of years ago? Absurd.
Also, your carefully constructed phrasing about the million of palestinians that are still allowed to live as second-class citizens on their land -- doesn’t fool anyone. There are more palestinians living in refugee camps than in the lands they used to inhabit, by far. Yeah, it’s nice of the Israelis to allow -- what is it -- about 20%? -- of the original population to remain. But, as Mano’s map shows, they’re being pressured constantly, face overwhelming military force and assassination, and blockade.
If you think it’s appropriate to violently displace people from their lands and kill them when they resist, can I assume that you felt it was acceptable with the nazis did that in Germany? Or are you the kind of moral monster who only thinks it’s wrong when someone is attacking “your” people, but it’s completely OK when the cruelty and violence flows the other way?
(For what it’s worth, if there had been a movement to create an Israel in Germany or Austria after the defeat of the axis powers, that might have made some kind of sense. Barely. But the idea that because the Germans did something awful to one tribe, therefore it justifies doing something awful to some other tribe that had nothing to do with what the Germans did -- absurd.)
John J. Mearsheimer:
The Future of Palestine: Righteous Jews vs the New Afrikaners (pdf)
In the following, Mearsheimer explains how he comes to this conclusion.
But the idea that because the Germans did something awful to one tribe, therefore it justifies doing something awful to some other tribe that had nothing to do with what the Germans did – absurd.
In fairness to the original Zionists, that’s probably not what the founders of Israel were really thinking at the time. From what I’ve read, they took Palestine for themselves because they didn’t think they’d HAVE to do anything awful — the people they’d have to displace were few, politically primitive, and easily pushed off elsewhere. It was only after they’d committed themselves to their experiment that they found they had to do more awful things to stave off failure.
Then again, the original white Afrikaners were probably thinking the same thing when they first called their piece of Africa “home.”
Yet a Jewish Apartheid state is not politically viable over the long term. In the end, it will become a democratic bi-national state, whose politics will be dominated by its Palestinian citizens.
That’s only if the Israeli Jews show the same restraint and foresight the white South Africans did. A more likely outcome is that Israel will cling to the power and warlike policies that have rewarded them in the past, until they either become a Green-Zone-style bunker-state, or simply collapse under a relentless onslaught of rebellion and outside attacks.
they took Palestine for themselves because they didn’t think they’d HAVE to do anything awful — the people they’d have to displace were few, politically primitive, and easily pushed off elsewhere.
Yeah, most pogroms start with “othering” and when there’s resistance ‘harder measures’ are then justified.
Can you expand on this. I fail to see that “One land, two peoples” is more principled.
It was certainly my wish prior to hearing of the two state solution, but I fail to see how it is more principled.
What does one land mean? Are you referring to California and Baja California? That’s always looked like one land to me. Or Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Same with the completely separate countries of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Does your more principled approach to one land, two peoples, generalize to your views on these borders?
Did you feel this way about the Kurds in Northern Iraq? The Kurds should learn to live with the Sunnis?
Or the Kurds in Southern Turkey?
Or maybe like many you felt that some new country or territory should be carved out to permit the Kurds and their culture to thrive.
So does your more principled approach to one land, two peoples, generalize to one land, three peoples (Arabs, Kurds, Turks)?
I would prefer the future in which Klingon and Federation work together and become fast friends, but I doubt the best path to get there is to remove all these borders that create two lands out of one land and toss these groups together.
What does the more principled stand of one land two peoples say about many lands one people?
Is it fair to let borders between Arab states stand? Or even the borders between North and South Dakota?
Canada and the US?
I am genuinely curious about how you feel regarding NAFTA and how it seems to threaten Mexican corn species. Or how Italian pasta was threatened by the WTO.
Are we back to the melting pot theory? Will you explain that to the various groups (often multiculturalists) that had advocated progressing past that for the salad bowl?
Can we all look forward to the great merging that results from the more principled stand of one land, two peoples?
Good news for one land, two people theorists!
In March 2014, the majority population of California will be Latino.
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Latinos-set-to-surpass-whites-in-California-in-5146876.php
I look forward to the reunification of California with Baja California and the embracing of Mexican environmental law, well all of Mexican law, including food and safety, across California!
Re mathilde @ #8
Mearsheimer is a man who pals around with Holocaust deniers. Hardly an authoritative source.
http://goo.gl/oyATcQ
Let’s see which other nations might have a claim on what’s now Israel/Palestine:
Egypt -- New Kingdom
Syria -- Seleucids, Umayyads
Iraq -- Assyrians, Babylonians, Abbasids
Iran -- the Persian Empire
Greece -- Alexander the Great’s empire
Italy -- the Roman Empire
Turkey -- the Ottoman Empire
Britain -- the Palestine Mandate
I’ve got a two-state solution that should work marvelously for everyone:
State One will encompass cities, areas of major manufacturing and agriculture, points of historical interest/antiquities sites, tourist attractions, and anything else that a human might find useful. It will be populated by anyone, Israeli or Palestinian or whoever else, who wants to go about their business peacefully.
State Two will encompass all the desert and wasteland that nobody else wants. It will be populated by the zionists, islamists, theocrats, end-timers, and anybody else who wants to fight a war over what they think is god’s opinion. They get the wastelands because there’s less potential for collateral damage out there.
Re Rob Grigjanis @ #6
These figures include Bedouins who were not permanent residents but who migrated over Northern Africa and the Middle East. They are not separated out. And by the way, Twain specifically visited Jerusalem and noted that it wasn’t much of a town, even compared with St. Joseph, Mo.
Re Pennsylvania pinhead @ #7
If you think it’s appropriate to violently displace people from their lands and kill them when they resist, can I assume that you felt it was acceptable with the nazis did that in Germany?
So when is the Pennsylvania pinhead going to return the land on which his domicile sits to its Native American original owners? Hell will freeze over before that happens.
It’s just terrible, the oppression under which the folks in the West Bank suffer. Ramallah becoming the tech hub of the Arab World. Will wonders never cease.
http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Ramallah-on-verge-of-becoming-tech-hub-for-Arab-world-341926
What are the demographics of the Right of Return for Palestinians? Israel has like 8 million people, 6M Jews and 2M Arabs. How much would the right of return bring in? 1-2M?
Wouldn’t they still have political majority anyway?
And Somalia has a thriving communications sector. They doesn’t mean I would want to live there.
Here are three videos that might be of interest in understanding the ahistorical map that Professor Singham presents that discusses the history of palestinians, and the history of the borders
Danny Ayalon: Israel Palestinian Conflict: The Truth About the West Bank
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGYxLWUKwWo
Response by two Palestinian women
The ACTUAL Truth About Palestine in response to Danny Ayalon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBYkBqY1-LM
Rebuttal by Danny Ayalon
Rebuttal The Real Truth about Palestine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jjOOpEvMHA
I am unaware of any further responses to that youtube debate — I will say each sides videos are very well done (distinguishing them from 99% of unwatchable youtube rants.)
I do disagree with Ayalon and still think the settlements however legal he believes they are, are an impediment to peace.
More links about the distortions and dishonesty being the map presented above:
http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2012/07/debunking-map-that-lies.html
And a good debunking of the Palestinian response video that details in depth the origin of the “palestinian nation”:
http://www.israellycool.com/2013/11/06/young-palestinians-post-the-real-truth-about-palestine-in-response-to-danny-ayalon/
Re doublereed @ #20
And Somalia has a thriving communications sector. They doesn’t mean I would want to live there.
Citation needed.
@22 colnago
??? You can google it pretty easily.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4020259.stm
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704608104575220570113266984
@17:
There really is no end to your bullshit.
It’s actually pretty cool and weird, right? But yea, you can have tech booms in war-torn places like this.
Re #24
Grigjanis should learn how to read. Virtually all the figures cited are after Twain’s visit in the late 1860s. There was economic development that started to occur in the 1860s, spurred on by competition between Prussia and England, which really started to gain momentum after the unification of Germany under the Kaiser in 1873. The economic development attracted Arabs from all over the Middle East; most of the Palestinian Arabs are descended from those Arabs who migrated to the area in that time period. By the way, the figures cited of about 400,000 to 500,000 are pretty small beer, compared to the current population of 8 million in Israel, 1.5 million in the Gaza Strip and 2.5 million in the West Bank.
Tl;dr. Dr. Singham uses the word “Israel,” colnago80 flips out and insults multiple regulars using their geographic information, and nothing results whatsoever in the real word, yes?
Colnago80 has evidently been rendered unable to read by the froth rising from his mouth: Halper does not mention the Taba talks at all in the extract quoted, but Camp David, 12 years earlier. Colnago80’s account of Taba is also absurdly tendentious: the two sides were close to agreement according to negotiators from both, but the Israeli election in which Ariel Sharon defeated Ehud Barak, and the handover from Clinton to George W. Bush, put an end to any chance of a settlement.
Re Nick Gotts @ #28
Gotts is either seriously misinformed or is a liar. According to Clinton and his assigned negotiators Dennis Ross and Aaron Miller, it was Yasir Arafat who rejected the Clinton proposal and walked out. I will be charitable and assume that Gotts is using Robert Malley as his source. Malley is a notorious Israel basher, much like Richard Falk. It is unfortunate that Obama has taken Malley on as one of his Middle East go to guys. Malley’s credibility in Israel is about equal to that of John Mearsheimer, who palls around with Holocaust revisionists.
Oh dear, Ross and Miller were “palling around” with Malley, so nothing they say can be trusted.
Where did that map come from, and has anybody updated it in the last 14 years?
Colnago80:
the figures cited of about 400,000 to 500,000 are pretty small beer, compared to the current population of 8 million in Israel, 1.5 million in the Gaza Strip and 2.5 million in the West Bank.
Why did you not mention the population in the refugee camps? Don’t they count?
And dismissing 400,000 people as “pretty small beer” is disgusting. Or would you have been OK with it if the Germans had stopped at 400,000?
Are you incapable of understanding that a crime against one person is as bad as the same crime against 1,000,000 people? The fact that someone can make it larger doesn’t excuse it, any more than the nazis’ actions would be excused if someone came along and killed more than they did. See how that works?
So when is the Pennsylvania pinhead going to return the land on which his domicile sits to its Native American original owners? Hell will freeze over before that happens.
Actually, I’ve entailed my property to the nature conservancy on my death. But giving it to one of the native american tribes is not a bad idea, I’ll look into it.
But that’s beside the point. Why don’t you answer my question?
If you think it is acceptable to violently displace people from their lands, do you think it was acceptable when the nazis did it?
If you don’t think that was acceptable, why is it acceptable when Israel does it? If you do think it’s acceptable, then, uuuuuuuh, are you a nazi?
Can we all look forward to the great merging that results from the more principled stand of one land, two peoples?
Nationalism is a bad idea; I think that Israel, the US, and Palestine are an ample demonstration of what I mean. If further demonstration is necessary, consider WWII and WWI as supporting argument.
Once you reject the legitimacy of the state, then arguments about whether or not such-and-such is a “real” country or not, are obviously pretty absurd.
There are two excellent new books, one by Avi Shavit and the other by Mark Blumenthal, about the Israeli government’s scam on this issue…..make possible only by the active connivance of the Israel Lobby in the US.
A key part of this scam has been to convince Americans that the US and Israel share values. Our most fundamental value is that all men are born equal, whereas in Israel Jews are born superior. The other part of this scam has been to attack any critic of Israel as “anti Semitic”.
Big lies always fall flat sooner or later. As the annexation of the West Bank is completed Israel will be seen for what it is, a nuclear religious state in the Mideast, among other similar states, except that it manages our foreign policy for its benefit in the region by leeching into our body politic.
Once you reject the legitimacy of the state, then arguments about whether or not such-and-such is a “real” country or not, are obviously pretty absurd.
And such arguments won’t stop if we abolish the state — because (among other things) there will still be arguments over which people get to occupy which piece of land. That’s what many arguments between states are based on anyway.