One-State. Historical debate with renewed relevance – a primer

The “Death” of the Two-State Solution

As the Palestinian Authority pursues de facto recognition of the State of Palestine within 1967 borders and international enforcement of the two-state solution, many observers  are wondering how feasible it is for two interconnected collectivities to draw separate national boundaries. Certainly, it is no small achievement that 122 countries have recognized the State of Palestine since the PLO first declared it in 1988, that the Palestinian Authority has 130 foreign embassies, and that 55 countries in the UN General Assembly and six of the nine needed in the Security Council have publicly confirmed their support for the Palestinian state. It appears to be a foregone conclusion that even in the likely event of a US veto in the Security Council against full statehood recognition, the General Assembly will still grant Palestine observer status, the same status enjoyed by the Vatican, which allows it limited privileges. But for as many articles celebrating the next big leap toward the long-awaited, hard-fought, two-state solution, all it takes is a quick Google search for “two-state solution death” to find no shortage of credible commentators predicting that solution’s impending demise. These writers advocate, warn or simply predict what a growing body of scholarship is also pointing to: that the only alternative to officially separating Israelis and Palestinians is to officially unify them. This alternative is popularly known as the one-state, or binational, solution. In this article, I will summarize the arguments posed against the two-state solution, the voices of binationalism over the past century, and the possible structures of a one-state solution.

 

Fundamental Fissures in Two-State Boundary Drawing

The arguments against the two-state solution can be summarized as follows:

 

The Illusion of the Green Line

The most glaring contradiction to the two-state solution is that the Green Line is illusory, running along a border that hasn’t existed since 1967. 1.5 million Palestinians hold Israeli citizenship (25% of its population and growing), while 300,000 Israeli settlers live illegally in the West Bank (11% of the population living on 40% of the land and expanding), and another 200,000 in East Jerusalem. 85% of the Segregation Wall is built on Palestinian land in the West Bank rather than the Green Line, effectively erasing 1967 borders. And if the Palestinian Authority and Hamas governments exert a certain amount of control over their population, the Israeli government exerts overwhelming power over the most basic levels of human organization in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), reducing the PA to a suzerain government. Israel controls Palestinian movement between cities, and its imports and exports. The Israeli military operates in the OPT with impunity. The idea that Palestinians and Israelis live under two separate governments is thus a fiction that goes hand in hand with the Green Line: even if the Israeli State legislates segregational and Apartheid policies differentiating Jew from Palestinian, it’s the same Israeli State operating throughout the entire Israeli-Palestinian space.

The idea of separating Palestinians from Israelis via internationally recognized boundaries is therefore a third fiction, and a dangerous one. Zionist support for the two-state solution has grown over the years by those who see it as a last-ditch effort to retain a “Jewish and democratic” Israel by avoiding mounting pressure to increase the status of OPT inhabitants from occupied subjects to voting citizens and provide a real answer for the refugees. Meanwhile, the Israeli right, with Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman at the helm, has gained power and implemented a series of laws that marginalize Palestinian holders of Israeli citizenship. One extreme possibility that some have discussed illustrates the high demographic stakes involved: If the West Bank settlements are disbanded and the settlers repatriated in the current political climate, will Israel’s 1.5 million Palestinian citizens also be expected, or forced, to move to the new State of Palestine, an ethnic transfer of Darfurian proportions that harkens back to the post-WWII era of population transfers? And if the settlements are not disbanded, can the State of Palestine be more than an archipelago of Bantustans? Israel’s expansion of illegal settlements has finally accomplished what many have long predicted: it has in effect created a de facto single state. The challenges Palestinians and Israelis would face to impose contiguous, separate borders are gargantuan and highly unfeasible. Rather than repeating yet another mass population transfer, thereby inflicting yet more trauma onto an already volatile dynamic, doesn’t it make more sense to simply de-zone, de-wall, and let people live where they wish?

 

Excluding of Half of Palestinians

Suppose the US decides not to veto the State of Palestine. Suppose that in an unprecedented act of good will, Israel disbands all its West Bank settlements, no questions asked. What is to become of the 4.7 million Palestinian refugees, stateless for generations, who cannot even visit their ancestral homeland? These refugees, and their Right of Return, are at the heart of why the two-state solution is unworkable.

It is difficult for historically-minded observers to miss the irony of Fateh’s transformation. The party built its power base in the refugee camps in the 1950s, fresh on the heels of the 1947-9 expulsion of half of all Palestinians, rallying the masses around the populist cry for armed struggle and the Right of Return as enshrined in UN Resolution 194. Today, Fateh gives no more than lipservice to UNSCR 194, instead pushing for a very different 194, the State of Palestine as the UN’s 194^th recognized country, a bid that for all intents and purposes would nullify the refugees’ claims.

In order for the two-state solution to exist, the State of Palestine must abandon its diaspora. All two-state solution proposals have either postponed the question of the refugees or reduced their return to symbolic numbers, a few tens of thousands who would leave behind the population’s “other half,” the millions of refugees who are its most disenfranchised and in need of a political solution. The very premise of a two-state solution would generate, at best, a State of Palestine on 22% of historic Palestine. This tiny parcel of 5,860 square kilometers, economically and politically fragile, would by definition have no room for refugees. Simply, there would be no geographic or economic capacity to accommodate such a tremendous influx of tired, poor, and hungry.

Any real solution for the refugees would therefore have to allow them to live in what is now Israel. This would mean the likely dissolution of the already-threatened Jewish majority and with it the end of the idea of ethnically-based nation-states, which is the very essence of the “two states for two peoples” philosophy. Just as Israel cannot remain both Jewish and democratic, a political solution cannot both be based on two states and protect refugee rights.

 

State-Building vs. Rights

Historian Yezid Sayigh has called the tension between the state-building project and the call for human rights the “historic faultline within the Palestinian national movement.”[1] A fifty-year obsession with parastatal structures, funded and diplomatically supported by the same genre of diplomats now assessing the UN statehood bid, has created a massive bureaucratic Palestinian machine. This obsession and its supporters have financed Ramallah’s neoliberal real estate boom: chic high-rises, cafés and pubs that the New York Times hearts but that only the elites can access, a phenomenon once glibly described to me by a Palestinian NGO director as “liberation by office space.” The implication was that offices and bars will not and cannot lift the most disenfranchised, the poor, the stateless, and the landless. Ramallah’s “boom” is nothing more than bureaucracy proliferating bureaucracy, and elite buildings built for the elite.

As an alternative to expensive shiny things, Mazin Qumsiyeh, Nasser Abufarha, Virginia Tilley, Ghada Karmi, Ali Abunimah, and many others over the past decade have articulated plans to build on the less sexy but more solid foundation of human rights, as enshrined in UN Resolutions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and as modeled by the numerous countries that have overcome ethnic conflict and division, including Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, Canada, Ireland, and South Africa (an admittedly problematic example considering the persistent and brutal economic exclusion of black South Africans). These are the most commonly cited countries, but in truth the tyranny of privileged minorities and unchecked majorities is so pervasive that the list could be expanded to include all 193 UN seats.

Rather than drawing more borders on a land that is already scarred with them, laying the ground for more ineffective and piecemeal governance, and threatening to further Balkanize the conflict; and rather than insisting on the highly unlikely disbanding of West Bank settlements, in a move that harks backwards to the post-WWII golden age of ethnic transfers, it’s time we moved the conflict forward into the age of multiculturalism, integration, and civil and human rights. Instead of further entrenching the ethnic collectivities into geographical clusters, it’s time for the inhabitants of the Israeli-Palestinian space to become a community of citizens.

 

One-State Advocates, Past and Present

Some of the challenges to the two-state model discussed above are specific to the current political context. The past decade has seen the proliferation of works and citizen groups challenging the two-state construction, and with good reason. In 2000, the Second Intifada announced widespread disillusion with the Oslo Accords and peace negotiations that seemed unable to obtain a Palestinian state even as Israeli settlements doubled in number of inhabitants and geographical size. Since then, skepticism about the possibility of a brokered diplomatic solution for two ethno-states has generated conferences, manifestos, books, and a constant trickle of articles, blog posts, and op-eds advocating what Tony Judt called “the alternative.”

But if the 2000s have brought new life and brainstorming to binationalism, the one-state movement is not as young as its latest advocates. Rather, its century-long history counts a varied cast of actors who, for different reasons and in different contexts, held a common vision, at times pragmatic and at others idealistic, of a single land shared by two collectivities. These historical examples of what almost happened many times take binationalism out of its pigeonhole of intellectual leftists and broaden to lend historical legitimacy that weighs in on the present. They show that the single state isn’t new or innovative, or limited to disparate and marginal groups. Rather it has at many points in history been a real possibility put forward by major players and thinkers. Such twenty-twenty retrospect should serve to normalize the one-state formula and put it securely on the political table of possibilities for conflict resolution.

 

The Cultural Zionists and Early Zionism

Like Palestinians who focus on human rights over state-building, Ahad Ha’am (né Asher Ginsburg) founded the philosophy of cultural Zionism, the idea that Jewish cultural and spiritual revival and self-reliance were more important than a state. A close associate of political Zionist Chaim Weizmann, Ha’am advocated a Jewish state with a Jewish majority inside Palestine, but insisted it couldn’t come at the expense of the indigenous inhabitants, and must be a natural outgrowth of a Jewish renaissance.

His descendants were less equivocal about the philosophy’s political implications. Martin Buber was one of the founders of Brit Shalom, founded in 1925, a group of around 100 Jewish intellectuals who advocated binationalism. In 1936, the Socialist League of Palestine political party was formed, accepted Arab members, and advocated binationalism. Brit Shalom’s founders, most prominently Buber and Judah Magnes (a Reform Rabbi, co-founder of the American Jewish Committee, and co-founder and later president of Hebrew University in Jerusalem), went on to found the small political party the Ihud (“Union”) in 1942, which advocated a binationalist state within an Arab federation, and counted Albert Einstein among its supporters.

While the cultural Zionists are the most commonly cited example of binational advocates of their era, even Ben-Gurion believed in the early 20^th century that binationalism, while not preferable, was inevitable since it was the model top British Mandate officials advocated. A pragmatist, he went along with the best offer he had. Only when Mandate officials changed their tune and started advocating partition did the pragmatic Ben-Gurion follow suit.

British Mandate Officials

Throughout the 1920s, the British approach was generally to establish a single Arab-Jewish state in Mandate Palestine. High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope, for one, sought a multinational political system that would remain under British control. Archer Cast proposed to treat Mandate Palestine and Trans-Jordan as a single unit with three cantons and a central, British-controlled, government, while Douglas Duff proposed two cantons, one Arab and one Jewish, in a single country that would be part of the League of Nations.

The canton approach was largely rooted in British preconceptions of ethnic groups as unable to live together. With the onset of the Arab Revolt in 1936, the crown intervened, sending the Peel Commission to assess the cause of the violence and what should be done about it. The commission, which was officially boycotted by Arabs but courted by Chaim Weizmann and other top Zionists, concluded that Palestinian claims of land dispossession were bunk, and that Palestinians and Jews were unable to cohabit. The Commission threw out the canton approach in favour of partition and a population exchange that would have likely displaced 200,000 people, almost all of them Arab. While the transfer idea was briskly swept away by the Woodhead Commission the next year, the partition approach held fast and would henceforth dominate the mindset of international brokers.

Jews and Palestinians in Mandate Palestine

During the Mandate period (1916-1947), there were also a number of ordinary Palestinians and Jews who may not have had the clout to implement a binational plan at the governmental level, but in many instances enacted it by supporting one another through the shared harsh circumstances of financial crisis, foreign occupation, and natural disasters. This is in part because the British Mandate governed the entire Israeli-Palestinian area, thereby creating “a space in which a basic human urge towards cohabitation and cooperation could exist.”

In several instances, Arab and Jewish unions struck successfully against exploitative British labor practices. In 1931, for example, frustrated by high government taxation, a group of truck drivers organized a successful strike that “paralysed the country” and forced the Mandate government to lower taxes. However, the cooperative atmosphere didn’t last. When the strikers’ chair, Hasan Sidqi al-Dajani, expressed his wish to expand the strikes, the Histadrut (the Zionist labor union) withdrew its support. For their part, Palestinian notables (elites), “condemned” Palestinians who jointly participated in strikes with Jews. Only five years later, at the onset of the 1936 strikes, the same truck drivers who had jointly struck for common gain now “stood in the forefront of the clashes between the Zionists and Palestinians.”[2]

 

Woodrow Wilson and the King-Crane Commission

At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, as Allied Powers set surrender terms for the Central Powers and divided the spoils of the defeated Ottoman Empire, US President Woodrow Wilson proposed as an alternative his Fourteen-Point Plan, advocating among other things the self-determination and independence of formerly occupied peoples of the newly dissolved empires. In this spirit, Wilson organized a commission to travel through Levant to investigate the desires of its inhabitants. Wilson’s King-Crane Commission concluded that Middle Eastern people desired self-determination and independence, and that a Jewish state couldn’t be established without the violent expulsion of the area’s original inhabitants. While the commission did not oppose Jewish immigration, it advocated that Jewish immigrants live as immigrants rather than establishing a state. However, when the commission’s findings were delivered Wilson was ill, the US Congress was pursuing isolationism, and as a result the report wasn’t published until 1922, when Wilson was already out of office and Congress had already came out publicly in support of Zionism. The Commission’s effect was thus solely informative. Its potential for political influence had missed its moment.[3]

 

Palestinian Militant Groups

After the 1947-9 War, the National Liberation League, founded in Mandate Palestine in 1944 after the Palestine Communist Party split along Arab-Jewish lines, actively advocated a binational solution.

Twenty years later, in the refugee camps of the late 1960s and 1970s, the communist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine adopted the goal of a single secular democratic and communist state. Although it has retained this position in principle, its actions since 1986 can appear contradictory. For example, in 1986 it grudgingly agreed, for the sake of national unity, to throw its weight behind the Fatah-dominated PLO approach that implicitly aimed for a two-state solution, and during the First Intifada it continued to participate in PLO activities even as the two-state model became the explicit goal. In 1993, however, it joined the oppositional Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF) against the Camp David negotiations, after which it consistently opposed the Oslo Accords, and boycotted the PA elections in 1996. Then in 1998, founder George Habash and his successor Abu Ali Mustafa accepted the two-state model as an “interim solution”[4] toward the “strategic goal”[5] of a secular democratic state, a position that the organization upheld until the organization’s current jailed leader, Ahmed Saadat, in 2010 reaffirmed the one-state solution as the only viable model.

The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), with Fatah at the helm, has also wavered between the two-state and one-state models. The influence of the PFLP and other secularists, along with changing realities following the 1967 war, pushed the PLO to adopt the goal of a secular democratic state from 1969 to 1973 (this was seen as a concession, a revision from the organization’s prior goal of “total liberation” of historic Palestine and the repatriation of all Jewish immigrants after 1947 to their countries of origin). In 1974, this goal was demoted to a utopic ideal, and “the PLO embarked irrevocably on the road towards pragmatism that culminated in the November 1988 declaration of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories and the definitive acceptance of a two-state solution.”[6]  However, in recent years and in light of the failure to negotiate a two-state settlement, certain isolated statements coming from the PA leadership may point to the eventual renewed adoption of the one-state model.

 

Contemporary Advocates

Post-Zionists and Anti-Zionists

Beginning in the 1970s, deepening fractures within Israeli society, a growing awareness of the Occupation’s moral corruption, and newly uncovered historical facts regarding Israel’s role in the Arab-Israeli wars, all contributed to an increasing disillusionment among certain Jewish academics and intellectuals regarding Zionism. Post-Zionism, the idea that the Zionist project was antiquated and irrelevant in a pluralistic world and a multicultural Israel that was occupying another people; and anti-Zionism, political opposition to any form of Zionism at any point in time and any context, are distinct terms that are often conflated. However, a person can adhere to both ideas.

The purveyors of post-Zionism from the margins to the mainstream are generally identified as the “New Historians”, a generation of Israeli revisionist historians who seized upon the declassification of archival documents relating to the 1947-9 war during the eighties to make public the less savory aspects of their country’s history that had been hitherto denied, justified, or glossed over. Among them are Ilan Pappé, Simha Flapan, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, and Tom Segev. The most significant revelation was new evidence confirming Palestinian claims of Israel’s organized expulsion of half of Palestinians, and destruction of over 400 of their villages. This new evidence raised questions about the morality of the very existence of Israel.

Around the same time, the Israeli Black Panther movement was a key voice in increasing demands by economically and politically marginalized Arab and African Jewish Israelis for social and economic equality. Some linked their movement to feminist and Palestinian claims within the Israeli-Palestinian space, thereby shifting the line of conflict from Israelis vs. Palestinians, to European Jewish men vs. everyone else, and reframing the narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian space from a conflict between Palestinians and Israelis to a broad manifestation of institutional racism.

Disillusionment with Zionism continues to grow, and currently represents a small but significant presence in Israel of people advocating the dissolution of the Jewish state in favor of a pluralist state with equal rights for all. Organizations like Anarchists Against the Wall and Zochrot are among the organizations representing this view, and some Israeli professors share it as well.

 

Palestinian Intellectuals and Politicians

At the signing of the Oslo Accords, most Palestinians were hopeful for a new era. When the state failed to materialize but Jewish settlements expanded twofold, broad disillusion with the Palestinian Authority, peace talks, and eventually the two-state solution were, and are, increasingly alluded to. Even top PA officials like Saeb Erekat and PM Salam Fayyad, who have been wed to the two-state solution as it ensures them staying in power, have threatened that the possibility of it being realized is shrinking. Fayyad, for example, recently stated that if Palestinians didn’t get a state, they would demand voting rights in Israeli elections.

While such remarks from the PA generally read as threats aired for the purposes of pushing the two-state process along, a number of Palestinian intellectuals are more sincere. Professors and researchers Ghada Karmi, Rashid Khalidi, Ali Abunimah, Yezid Sayigh, Omar Barghouti, Ziyad Clot, Ahmad Moor, and Mazin Qumsiyeh are just a few of the growing number of influential writers articulating a vision for a single state. While their language largely remains broad and focused on arguing against the two-state solution rather than specifying the contours of the single state (Israeli commentator Noam Sheizaf has asserted that one-state discourse is currently in an early stage of development akin to where two-state discourse was in the seventies), think tanks, conferences, and a growing literature are slowly piecing that vision together.

 

The Israeli Right

In the past several years, members of this unexpected new camp have emerged as advocates of the one-state approach. Moshe Arens of the right-wing extremist Betar movement, a Netanyahu supporter and former minister of defense and foreign affairs, as well as current Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, both published editorials in Ha’aretz advocating full absorption and citizenship rights for all West Bank inhabitants and their territory. Likud legislator Tzipi Hotovely held a conference in the Knesset entitled “Alternatives to Two States,” a topic she has since continued to push for publicly. Settlers Uri Elitzur and Emily Amrousi, both former representatives of the settlements’ Yesha Council, are now writing and speaking in support for granting full citizenship to West Bank residents.

Ha’aretz journalist Noam Sheizaf succinctly summed up these new burgeoning right-wing voices for peace last year in his article “Endgame.” “They all reject totally… ethnic separation and recognize that political rights accrue to the Palestinians. They talk about a process… at the end of which the Palestinians will enjoy full personal rights, but in a country whose symbols and spirit will remain Jewish. It is at this point that the one-state right wing diverges from the binational left. The right is not talking about a neutral “state of all its citizens” with no identity, nor about “Israstine” with a flag showing a crescent and a Shield of David. As envisaged by the right wing, one state still means a sovereign Jewish state, but in a more complex reality, and inspired by the vision of a democratic Jewish state without an occupation and without apartheid, without fences and separations.”[7]

Analyst Ali Abunimah has pointed out that the same right-wing party that established Apartheid in South Africa finally dismantled it. Could the same cynical clarity that drove Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s realpolitik now drive the right to make a clearheaded push for a sustainable peace?

 

One-State Models

The tension between an ethnicity based, negative/exclusivist conception of nation-building, and its citizenship based, positive/inclusive counterpart, has long preoccupied social scientists. Some argue that the nation is a purely theoretical idée horizon that is “never fully realized,” a civic utopia with no empirical example, but only countries that are closer or further away.[8] Others argue the opposite, that the exclusivity, nationalism, and protectionism are inevitable outgrowths of national construction because the democratic concept of popular sovereignty merges the spatial concept of the “people” with the temporal concept of the “nation,” creating a breeding ground for xenophobia.[9]

Arend Lijphart, who theorized consociational democracy, the model followed by Switzerland, Belgium, and Canada, is one theorist thinking less in the civic/ethnic binary. Lijphart understood that these both inclusive and exclusive impulses compete within any state context, and thus require management. This management is a primary role of good government.[10] While consociational democracy is not the sole formula capable of resolving ethnic conflict within a single state, its management-based (rather than ascriptive) approach must inform the treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this section, I’d like to discuss three viable alternatives to partition: consociational democracy, federalism, and confederalism.

 

 

 

Consociational Democracy

This model, based in geographically delineated cantons, “involves four features: cross-community executive power-sharing, proportional representation of groups throughout the state sector, ethnic autonomy in culture (especially in religion or language), and formal or informal minority-veto rights.”[11] In laymen’s terms, ethnic or religious collectivities are given autonomy and power that is not necessarily tied to geographic boundaries or to having a demographic majority. Specialists of ethnic conflict believe that when the theory of consociational democracy is fully or almost fully applied, it provides “a more fruitful strategy for dealing with conflict in plural societies” than secession or partition.[12] The problem is that its empirical form rarely mirrors theory. Rather, states adopt contextually unique power-sharing models established through brokered negotiations. Lesser forms of the consociational model can exacerbate rather than reduce ethnic tensions, as groups who feel excluded by the outcome may resort to violence. Excluding certain groups from the negotiating table can derail peace negotiations as well in the lead-up to a power-sharing agreement, and even spur exacerbated violence, as Wendy Pearlman has chronicled, rather than alleviating it.[13] Furthermore, as long as political parties remain delimited by ethnicity in the consociational state, inter-ethnic conflict is likely to reemerge. Only when political parties become ethnically diverse does political stability become probable.

 

Confederal Democracy

In this model, à la European Union, two states would be established, Palestinian and Israeli, with a central government managing and mediating interdependence. While this model is not technically a single binational state, it deserves consideration by the advocates of binationalism because of the high level of cooperation and interdependence it entails, with a central governing body acting for the common good of both states. Supporters of this solution generally believe that the one-state solution is idealistic but naïve, and that a single state for both collectivities would result in a South Africa style dynamic – disenfranchisement with a kinder face, with Palestinians continuing to suffer from severe economic inequality.

The strength of this model is that it caters both to the state-builders and the human rights defenders. On the one hand, goes the argument, in a world where power resides in nation-states, the Palestinian movement must have a state to become an equal player at the table. Not only that, Palestinians have been disenfranchised for so long that the emotional need for a state cannot be underestimated. And in this mode, Jews can have their emotional need met for a homeland.

One big question in this model is immigration policy. Tel Aviv University professor Shlomo Sand believes that Israel’s Law of Return, which allows any Jew in the world to automatically acquire Israeli citizenship, should be amended to allow only persecuted and disenfranchised Jews to acquire citizenship.[14] Under this amendment, Russian Jews facing persecution would still have been able to immigrate, for example, as they did in the seventies. However, wealthy and/or politically safe Jews, such as American and Western European citizens who acquire Israeli citizenship out of emotional connection rather than political need, and who often don’t continue to live in Israel because their lives are more comfortable in their places of origin, would no longer be able to immigrate. Parallel legislation regarding Palestinian Right to Return would have to be discussed, prioritizing the needs of the registered refugees. Management and protection of the sizeable minorities within each country would also have to be established, as would a sensible economic policy encouraging interdependence.

 

Federal Democracy

This model, practiced by the United States among others, consists of a “compound sovereign state, in which at least two governmental units, the federal and the regional, enjoy constitutionally separate competencies––although they may also have concurrent powers.”[15] Other hallmarks of federalism include “a written constitution, bicameralism, equal or disproportionately strong representation of the smaller component units in the federal chamber, decentralized government, and the right of the component units to be involved in the process of amending the federal constitution but to change their own constitutions unilaterally.”[16] Key to this structure is the system of checks and balances that keeps the tyranny of the majority at bay and aspires to prevent any single interest group or legislating body from passing discriminatory or unfair legislation.

Federalism describes a model of government that can be applied to any state, while consociationalism prescribes fair management of group representation. So a country can be simultaneously consociational and federative. This happens when collectivities are concentrated into geographic areas with easily-drawn boundaries, as with the Swiss model. The Israeli-Palestinian space, with its relatively complete ethnic separation along the Segregation Wall that separates the state of Israel from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, could rather easily be a consociational federation. Within the state of Israel, where ethnic segregation occurs somewhat more informally, along the lines of American cities and regions, two rather large predominantly Palestinian areas can nonetheless be pointed to, specifically the southern part of the Negev Desert, which is home to forty Bedouin villages that are unrecognized by the Israeli government, and the motellet or “triangle” region in the northern half of the country. If consociational democracy were to be applied to Israel/Palestine, relatively autonomous cantons could be sectioned off according to demographics, local governments could be established, and a central government with limited power could operate in Jerusalem.

***

Any of these three models probably contains more potential than partition does for democracy, conflict resolution, sustainable peace and the restoration of equality to the Israeli-Palestinian space. However, this is just a sketch. A major contribution to the one-state discussion could be had if panels of experts in immigration law, architecture, constitutional law, conflict resolution, and so on, could meet to discuss the nitty gritty of these various options, and put forth tangible and specific proposals that could be assembled into a concrete overarching working plan. In this writer’s view, such a concrete proposal is the next major hurdle toward instituting universal suffrage, democratic participation, and a multiplicity of voices. If such a plan is implemented, perhaps the concept of concitoyenneté (shared citizenship) can include Israel and Palestine among the places where it is practiced.

 

References

Arens, Moshe. “Is There Another Option?” Ha’aretz, 2 Jun 2010.

Gelvin, James. “The Ironic Legacy of the King-Crane Commission.” The Middle East and the United States. Boulder: Westview Press, 1999.

Gresh, Alain. “Problematic Partition of Palestine: A History of Conflict Between Opposing Ideals.” Le Monde Diplomatique, 10 Mar 2010.

Howard, Harry. The King-Crane Commission: An American Inquiry Into The Middle East. Beirut: Khayats, 1963.

Lemarchand, René. “Consociationalism and Power Sharing in Africa: Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” African Affairs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Lijphart, Arend. “Constitutional design for divided societies.” Journal of Democracy 15 (2), 2004.

——“Consociation—and Federation: Conceptual and Empirical Links.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 12 (3), 1979.

Moor, Ahmed. “It's Time for All Palestinians to be Heard.” Al Jazeera English, 23 Aug 2011.

Muslih, Muhammed. “Towards Coexistence: An Analysis of the Resolutions of the Palestine National Council.” Journal of Palestine Studies 19(4), 1990.

O’Leary, Brendan. “What States Can Do With Nations.” The Nation-State in Question. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Pappé, Ilan. A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Pearlman, Wendy. “Spoiling Inside and Out: Internal Political Contestation and the Middle East Peace Process.” International Security 33(3), 2009.

Rivlin, Reuven. “Reuven Rivlin: The land is not divisible.” Ha’aretz, 15 Jun 2010. <http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/reuven-rivlin-the-land-is-not-divisible-1.302140>.

Sand, Shlomo. The Invention of the Jewish People. London: Verso, 2009.

Sayigh, Yezid. Armed Struggle and the Search for a State. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Schnapper, Dominique. La Communauté des citoyens : sur l'idée moderne de nation. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.

Sheizaf, Noam. “Endgame.” Ha’aretz, 15 Jul 2010.

Soueid, Mahmoud. “Taking Stock. An Interview with George Habash.” Journal of Palestine Studies 28(1), 1998.

Yack, Bernard. “Nationalism, Popular Sovereignty, and the Liberal Democratic State.” The Nation-State in Question. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.