19 September 2010
I think there's a degree of wishful thinking in the positive reaction from some pro-Palestinian one-staters to recent suggestions by a few Israeli rightists that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be resolved by gradually offering citizenship of a Jewish state of Israel to some of the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories. The wishful thinking lies in the assumption that "we" are talking about one state, and "they" are talking about one state, so regardless of the differences in the details we're all to some extent reading off the same page.
I don't think there's any basis to that assumption at all. What the Likud's apparent "converts" mean by the one state solution is that there will be no Palestinian state, only an expanded Jewish state encompassing Israel and the West Bank. Some of the West Bank Palestinians may be granted citizenship in the Jewish state, so long as they formally accept Zionist supremacy and don't expect to become citizens in the sort of numbers that would make them a "demographic threat" to Zionist rule. Meanwhile, the Gaza Strip and its inhabitants can fulfill Yitzhak Rabin's dearest wish, and sink into the sea.
What does all this have to do with the "one state solution" as traditionally understood by its secular left advocates? Not much. The basis of their one state solution is full citizenship and equal rights for all the inhabitants of Israel-Palestine, regardless of ethnic-religious background. In contrast, the Likud single state plan is based on preserving the ethnic-religious privilege that currently prevails, but preserving it in a way that attracts less foreign condemnation that the current situation. It's not really proposing anything very different from the situation that currently exists in Israel and the Occupied Territories minus Gaza, which is effectively already one state where the benefits of democracy are rationed out in accordance with one's degree of Jewishness. In the Likud single state solution, the annexation of the West Bank would be formalized, instead of surreptitious, and some of the Palestinians who currently enjoy no rights at all would be promoted to the second-rate citizenship of Palestinians within Israel's 1967 borders, but those are hardly revolutionary changes.
So, if the concept the Zionist Right is describing when it uses "one state" vocabulary is nothing like what the pro-Palestinian one staters envisage; if it's based on an underlying ideology they fundamentally oppose; and if it envisages an outcome on the ground that they would never settle for in a million years; how much does it really matter that the concept is wrapped up in sympathetic vocabulary? We might all be using the same words, but we're not talking about the same thing at all.
This is a phenomenon we've already seen with "two state solution" terminology. Throughout the peace process years, we've been told that Palestinians and Israelis overwhelmingly support a two state solution, and that "everybody knows" what the final parameters of the two state settlement will be. And yet, 17 years on from the signing of the Oslo Accords, the two state solution - which everyone apparently supports and knows what to expect of it - still doesn't exist. One of the reasons why the two state solution doesn't exist is that those who claim to want it don't even mean the same thing by it.
Read on HERE: http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs...
