For at least three reasons, I now believe the one-state model should be abandoned. In the first place, the “undeclared binationalism” under Sharon is untenable, unjust, and a recipe for perpetual conflict. In the second place, a hefty majority wants to go with the two-state alternative, which makes it impossible for any government to endorse a single-state solution. And thirdly, the annexation of the territories would inevitably lead to a hardening of attitudes along fundamentalist lines. In short, pushing for a single state could well lead to scenarios that are far worse than those imaginable under a two-state solution.
It also seems to me that Israeli one-staters have yet to take themselves and their alternative very seriously. To do so they would have to provide hard answers to hard questions. Who would control and serve in the army? How would taxes be collected and apportioned? Where would synagogues and minarets be built and where would religious institutions be prohibited? What flag, what calendar, what justice system, what health-care system, what kinds of schools and what dress codes would be legislated? So far, most of these questions have scarcely been raised, let alone answered.
And yet there are still two good reasons not to dismiss altogether the vision of a single, secular state. In my view it is, paradoxically, the only model that has currency over the long term. I believe that any partition that separates Israelis and Palestinians needs to proceed with the outside possibility that one day, perhaps only after this desert generation dies and is buried, the walls will come down and the land that the Zionist thinker Tabenkin thought could never be divided will in fact grow together in some real and organic fashion. A less dreamy way of stating the same thing would be to say that any partition plan should be understood as an interim agreement, a mere separation and not a final divorce.
The more pragmatic reason for keeping the single, secular-state option from fading is that separated, Israel and Palestine would be two ethno-religious entities – a Jewish and an Arab state. And such entities are, by definition, undemocratic. This is one reason why thoughtful Israelis worry about losing sight altogether of the one-state solution: it is only through the democratic potential of this alternative that Israel will be able to retain its ideological link with the West. The move away from democracy entailed in the two-state solution would probably go unremarked by the current American administration, but there is no guarantee that the same will hold true for future administrations. It makes sense, therefore, to keep the one-state option alive as a beacon of hope for the future and as a reason, now, to insist that any surgery cut only along demarcation lines that may eventually grow together.
One of the few times I felt the limnings of hope on my visit to Israel in November was during a lengthy conversation with a slight, fifty-two-year-old Orientalist and professor of political science at BarIlan University, Dr. Menachem Klein. Klein lives in Bak’a in Jerusalem and he is an expert in that city’s labyrinthine topography. In 2001, he joined a team of negotiators headed up by the former Israeli Justice Minister, Yossi Beilin, and Arafat’s former Information Minister, Yasser Abed Rabbo. They spearheaded a citizens’ initative, later called the Geneva Accord, to complete the Clinton-sponsored Taba negotiations that were smothered by what Klein calls the “wholly avoidable” intifada, and then snuffed out entirely by the February 2001 election, which Barak lost to Ariel Sharon.
Dr. Klein believes the one-state solution will never happen. “Even if the Palestinians raise up their hands and say, ‘Take us!’, what will happen is something I call Spartheid. By that I mean Israel will definitely deny [Palestinians] the vote. And then what will happen? The Palestinians will revolt. In favour of what? Replacing it with a two-state solution. . . . I prefer to go at this stage [directly] to a two-state solution because this is what the two peoples want.”
As Klein tells it, the initiative began at a conference where Yossi Beilin met the Swiss political scientist Alexis Keller. Beilin had served as Barak’s chief negotiator in Taba and he had always retained the hope that, had Taba gone into its “8th day” – in other words, had it been allowed more time – there would have been a settlement. Keller was moved by Beilin’s convictions, and decided to fund the first stages of that unfinished business.
According to Beilin, Keller’s funding amounted to no more than making his Swiss chalet available to the Palestinian and Israeli negotiating team. “We needed to be somewhere for a week,” he told me, “and Keller had this place. It was the Japanese and Swiss governments, and the European Union, that provided the money.”
Lots of money was in fact needed. The Palestinians could not get permission to enter Israel and the Israelis could not travel to the West Bank. The team had to convene in Jordan or London or Switzerland. They had to hire statisticians and land surveyors, acquire aerial photographs and maps of villages that were no longer in existence.
For two-and-a-half years the group – which included former high-level political and military personnel, several sitting members of Israel’s parliament, ex-chiefs of national security, and so on – met routinely and engaged in an exercise intended to simulate the real thing. “We did not pretend we were authorized by the government to negotiate on behalf of the people,” Klein told me, “but we did always act as though this was the real thing – because at the end of the day we wanted to prove to ourselves and to both the nations that it could be done and that it had been done and that there was now, extant, an agreement that could serve as a reference point in all future negotiations.”
