Who is still aiming for two states?
Costas Lapavitsas is Professor of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies andconvenor at European Research Network on Social and Economic Policy. He is the lead author together with the EReNSEP Writing Collective of “The State of Capitalism: Economy, Society, and Hegemony” that was published in December. Read our Book Review HERE
Samer Jaber is a PhD researcher specialising in political economy at Royal Holloway, University of London
The brutal events of 7 October 2023, when Hamas militants broke out of the perimeter of the Gaza Strip, opened a new chapter in the decades-long conflict between Israel and Palestine. The violence meted out by the Israeli state in the ensuing twelve months is without precedent. Israel has conducted a genocidal war in Gaza, greatly expanded its long-standing policy of extrajudicial murder of resistance leaders, systematically tried to provoke Iran into armed conflict, bombed Syria, and is now heavily bombing and invading Lebanon.
Throughout this period Israel drew on the unconditional military and political support of the USA as well as on the slightly more tempered backing of major European powers. The ruthlessness of its aggression made most of the rest of the world recoil in horror, but the steady supply of US ordinance and the reassuring presence of Western navies and airpower easily outweighed the diplomatic damage.
Despite the fury of its response, the strategic objectives of Israel remain unclear. Even the ability to achieve its more immediate aims is in doubt. Hamas is still active amidst the ruins of Gaza, its leadership is in the tunnels, and the captive Israelis remain in its hands. The military strength of Hezbollah in Lebanon is not seriously degraded. A full attack on Iran – with US support – would be extraordinarily reckless and its implications egregious.
Amidst this strategic confusion, it is remarkable that mainstream politicians in the West continue to refer to the two-state solution as a viable framework for resolving the conflict. Equally striking, and instructive, is that Israeli politicians never do.
The two-state solution has been promoted for decades through a “peace process” occurring under the auspices of the US and supported by the UN and EU countries. After all these years, Israel continues to stand as the only state in the former British Mandate of Palestine exercising sovereignty between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The “peace process” has been no more than a façade allowing it to entrench a range of virulent social, economic, and political realities on the ground.
These realities leave no room for two independent states in the region. But as long as they remain unchanged, they also preclude any possibility of long-term peace and coexistence between the two communities in Palestine. This is the terrible impasse that the events of the last year have made clear.
The conflict in Palestine remains at the core of the instability in the Middle East and it cannot be resolved through military action alone. Any fresh political initiative would require an alternative strategic direction, and that necessarily turns on the single state that exists between the River and the Sea.
Realities on the ground
Historically, the two-state solution was supposed to allow Israel to maintain sovereignty over 78 percent of the land of Palestine, while Palestinians would establish a state over the remaining 22 percent. In practice, the “peace process” gave Israel time and resources to consolidate its sole sovereignty. An apartheid regime has gradually emerged, which deploys colonial settler methods of control across the territory meant for the Palestinian state.
Currently, fourteen million people live between the River and the Sea, split in half between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. The Palestinians are divided into five major categories:
Nearly two million are citizens of Israel, but with limited democratic rights.
About 400,000 live in Jerusalem with residency status but no citizenship.
Three million live in the West Bank in segregated communities demarcated by walls and guarded by military checkpoints.
Two million live in the Gaza Strip, 80 percent of whom are refugees expelled from their homes during the Nakba of 1948. The Strip is effectively an open-air prison that now lies destroyed after a mass bombing campaign.
Seven million live in a diaspora created after the state of Israel came into existence.
Since the war of 1967, the colonial policies of the Israeli state enabled the establishment of over 700,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Presently, the state of Israel controls 93% of the land in its pre-1967 territory, most of which originally belonged to Palestinian refugees. Part of that land is administered by the Jewish National Fund, which allocates it exclusively to Jewish people. In the territories occupied after 1967, Israel has confiscated land for its settlement enterprise, now controlling 60% of the land of the West Bank and all of Jerusalem.
The steady dispossession of land has gone together with the creation of a broader economic framework under the Oslo Accords and the Paris Economic Protocol of the early 1990s. A Palestinian economy has gradually taken shape that is subservient to that in Israel.
The Israeli state collects both direct and indirect taxes on behalf of the Palestinian authority in the West Bank (though not in the Gaza Strip). Fiscal policy is largely dependent on Israel transferring the required funds. The primary currency for transactions in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is the Israeli shekel, and thus monetary policy is also largely in the hands of Israel. At the same time, the “shekelisation” of the Palestinian economy has encouraged the growth of banking – connected to Israeli financial institutions – and boosted household debt.
Under these conditions, the independent development of Palestine is impossible, even with some foreign aid flowing in. In agriculture alone, the extraction of water is under full Israeli control and, together with the loss of land, the difficulty of movement, and the depredations of the settlers, it has made even the production of food very difficult for Palestinians. Moreover, Israel dominates exports and imports, and only allows a limited number of Palestinian workers to obtain employment in its economy.
Dependence is manifest and runs only in one direction. In this environment, corruption was fostered, and locally powerful economic “godfathers” have emerged, often operating in close collaboration with Israeli interests. There is no chance of a viable state being established on these grounds.
Thinking of an alternative
A two-state solution is impossible but at the same time the currently existing single state is unable to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians. The causes of that monumental disaster are to be found mostly in the actions of the Israeli state, the dominant actor in the region.
Israel is far from immune to the disaster it has created. The more that it persists with establishing an apartheid regime, the less viable becomes its own existence. There can be no long-term future for a sovereign state in which half the population lacks democratic rights and has no real prospect of economic advancement. There is even less of a future when that state is surrounded by hostile neighbours, and most of the world looks aghast at its conduct.
Indeed, things are even worse. It is well known that oppressing others is the surest way to poison one’s own society, and the transformation of Israel since the Oslo Accords is well attested. The Israeli far right is heavily religious, openly racist, and closely related to the armed settlers. Its interpenetration with the Israeli deep state and its active presence in government have made it a hugely powerful force. This political outcome is not what European Zionists imagined when they put their ethnocentric dreams into practice more than seven decades ago.
An alternative is necessary in Palestine, and it is hard to think of what that could be other than a single democratic state based on the principle of equal citizenship for all. Is such a prospect realistic, especially in view of the terrible events of the last year? Certainly not for the foreseeable future.
And yet, it is too easy to be dismissive and cynical when faced with the intractable Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The reality remains that Israel lacks a strategy and dispenses murderous military violence without a clear purpose. But there is no purely military solution for the problem. Political answers are required, and these call for a rational foundation if they are even to begin to take shape. What other rational foundation could there be in contemporary Palestine except a single democratic state?
The theoretical merits of the notion are, of course, indisputable. One democratic state would provide an opportunity to address the historical injustices inflicted on Palestinians, since it would allow for the implementation of UN General Assembly Resolution 194, which calls for the right of return for Palestinian refugees. This is a core element of the Israel-Palestine conflict. One democratic state would further remove any special rights based on ethnocentric characteristics, especially the right to possess land under the law. That would mean that Israeli settlers could remain in their communities but without exclusive rights to water, use of roads, and privileged security. Such a state, finally, would begin to address the profound economic disparities between the River and the Sea.
Theoretical merits are, however, one thing, political reality quite another. Reality requires that the notion should be gradually accepted by the warring parties and begin to guide their political actions.
For the Palestinian people the leap is great but not impossible. They have no option but to resist Israeli domination and there is no doubt that they will continue to do so indefinitely. Their national objectives are essentially democratic, aiming for the right to return to their homeland, the right to self-determination, and the establishment of their own state.
All these aspirations are rooted in the principle of equal citizenship. The Palestinian National Charter already acknowledges that the Jews who lived in Palestine before 1917 are considered normal Palestinian citizens. It is far from impossible to extend that to others if exclusive rights were abolished.
Even Islamic-nationalist groups, such as Hamas, which has led the resistance in the Gaza Strip, do not reject outright the concept of a political settlement based on one democratic state. Indeed, Hamas has engaged in negotiations with the Palestinian Authority regarding joining the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the umbrella organisation representing Palestinian political factions. The charter of the PLO calls for the establishment of a democratic state, a concept that most Islamic-nationalist political groups do not oppose. These groups are not against the existence of a Jewish community in Palestine but oppose the state of Israel as an entity that aims to obliterate the national and civil rights of the Palestinian people.
Hard as it is for the Palestinians, the real difficulty lies with the Jewish community. It is for Jewish Israelis to come to the political realisation that their exclusive rights and privileges are untenable in the long run. The dominant community must confront the terrible predicament that its ethnocentric Zionism has created for others and for itself.
This is currently impossible as public opinion in Israel is shaped by talk of a clash between “civilisation” and “barbarism” or even between “people” and “animals”. The necessary realisation will require major events and external political and economic pressure.
At present, such a prospect appears nonexistent. But the unrelenting violence of the last year, far from resolving the problem, has made things worse, since military preponderance is not the same thing as achieving one’s strategic aims. A decisive strategic failure could occur without suffering defeat on the battlefield, as the USA discovered in Vietnam. The turning of the page after 7 October means that Israel, despite its enormous military power, faces the prospect of strategic failure.
Perhaps such a failure would open a crack in the wall of ideology that prevents Israelis from differentiating between the Jewish community, which has existed in historic Palestine for generations, and the state of Israel, an experiment in apartheid based on exclusive rights for Jews. This is the only hope that some political progress toward resolving the conflict might become possible.
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