Israel to get its way with one-state solution

by Gwynne Dyer   

“Everybody knows how this will end,” wrote Nahum Barnea, one of Israel’s best-known journalists, in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot recently. “There will be a bi-national (state).” The “two-state solution” is dead; long live the “one-state solution”.

The two-state solution, promised by the Oslo Accords of 1993, envisaged the creation of a Palestinian state in the one-fifth of the former colony of Palestine that did not end up under Israeli rule after the war of 1948. That Palestinian mini-state, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, would live alongside Israel in peace, and the long, bitter struggle over Palestine would end happily.

But that Palestinian state is no longer a viable possibility, mainly because half a million Jewish settlers now live amongst the two million Palestinians in the West Bank and former East Jerusalem. “I do not give up on the two-state solution on ideological grounds,” wrote Haaretz columnist Carlo Strenger in September. “I give up on it because it will not happen.”

The greatest triumph of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his predecessor, Ariel Sharon, has been to make the two-state solution impossible. Both men pretended to accept the Oslo Accords in order to ward off foreign pressure on Israel, but both worked hard and successfully to sabotage them by more than tripling the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank in only 20 years.

Now the job is done, and even the most pro-two-state Palestinians can read the writing on the wall. As Ahmed Qurei, who led the Palestinian delegation that negotiated the Oslo Accords, wrote recently: “We must seriously think about closing the book on the two-state solution.”

In a sense, the single state already exists: Israel has controlled the West Bank militarily since the conquest of 1967. Almost 40 percent of Israelis already support a solution that would simply incorporate the West Bank into Israel permanently.

But what would Israel do with those two million extra Palestinians? Combine them with the million and a half Palestinians in Israel, the descendants of those who were not driven out in 1948, and there would be 3.5 million Palestinians in a one-state Israel that included almost all the land west of the Jordan River.

This is precisely why an increasing number of Palestinians favour the one-state solution. They have tried guerilla war, to no avail. They have tried terrorism, which didn’t work either. They tried negotiation for twenty years, and that didn’t work. So maybe the best tactic would be to change the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from an international problem to a civil rights problem.

So Palestinians should just accept the permanent annexation of the West Bank by Israel, argue the one-staters. Indeed, they should actively seek it. In practice, they have already been Israeli subjects for 45 years. If they became Israeli citizens instead, then the question of their status would become a civil rights issue, to be pursued politically and non-violently.

But a new public opinion poll in Israel by the Dialog polling group reveals that almost 70% of Israeli Jews would object to giving West Bank Palestinians the vote even if Israel annexed the territory they live in. The only alternative is an apartheid-style state where only the Jewish residents have rights, but most Israelis seem quite relaxed about that. The Palestinians are probably heading up another blind alley.

But then, all the alleys are blind.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

http://www.lfpress.com/2012/11/09/israel-to-get-its-way-with-one-state-solution