There was a time, not so long ago, when the terms “one-state solution” and “Jordanian option” were anathema to moderates seeking a fair and workable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum.
A bi-national, democratic “state of all its citizens” encompassing Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip was code-speak for the end of the Jewish state, since Palestinians would outnumber Jews within a decade or so – less if there were an immediate influx of refugees. (For those who never saw the need for a Jewish national polity anyway, the question remained: Why should a Jewish minority entrust its safety and rights to an Arab majority?)
One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict
, by Benny Morris, Yale University Press, 229 pages, $33.95
The “Jordan is Palestine” option seemed equally extreme, whether Israel or Jordan were to annex the West Bank. The first scenario would mean expelling West Bank Arabs to Hashemite-ruled Jordan, where Palestinians were already a majority.
Alternatively, Jordan would reassert sovereignty over the West Bank, taking it off Israel's hands. Either option implied a redefinition of Palestinian and Jordanian national identities that was imposed by Israel's need to remain demographically Jewish. Both were considered non-starters, especially the one involving ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.
But with the death of the Oslo peace process of 1993-2000, the more logical two-state solution – still official U.S. policy – has become so remote that few Israelis or Palestinians believe in it any more. The one-state solution – not discussed seriously for five decades – has recently become the thesis du jour for a respectable swath of academics and intellectuals in the West.
Now, controversial Israeli historian Benny Morris has stepped forward to counter that movement with his new book, One State, Two States , which endorses the more benign version of the Jordanian option – in effect, a federation of Jordan and the Palestinian territories.
“Given current realities, this would seem the only logical – and possible – way forward,” Morris writes, concluding a 200-page essay on the non-viability of all other options, including the two-state solution that envisions Israel in something like its 1967 borders beside a Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza.
Morris may offend some readers with his view that 'authoritarian and religious' Arab values make meaningful co-existence with Israeli Jews impossible within one state
Benny Morris (no relation to this reviewer) rose to prominence in 1987 when he published The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem . He was hailed as the dean of the “new historians,” whose unvarnished look at Israel's founding years debunked several myths cherished by Israelis and pro-Zionists abroad. Among them was the idea that Israel was “a land without a people for a people without a land,” and that the Palestinian exodus in 1948 was caused not by Israel but by Arab leaders who urged Palestinians to leave their homes until they could return triumphantly as neighbouring armies – Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Jordan – pushed the Jews into the sea.
Morris was among a younger generation of Israeli historians and journalists who exposed evidence that Israeli forces did commit atrocities against Palestinian civilians and demolished many villages to prevent their return. They also found records showing that early Jewish leaders had accepted the 1947 United Nations Partition plan as a tactical compromise, not a final acceptance of a Jewish state without Jerusalem and the West Bank (which holds far more biblical history than the Mediterranean coastal plain).
Morris's work made him the darling of pro-Palestinian intellectuals and was incorporated into an outlook known as post-Zionism, which also abandoned the notion that Diaspora Jews would inevitably immigrate to Israel. Instead, the Jewish state was to be viewed as just one part of international Jewry.
Then came the al-Aqsa uprising of 2000-2004, with its string of suicide bombings, the 2006 Palestinian election of Hamas, an Islamic movement that rejects Israel's right to exist, and the threat of a nuclear Iran. All three developments pitched Israel back into a state of existential uncertainty. Morris, like many others among Israel's moderate mainstream, no longer believes that there is a partner for peace on the Palestinian side, or even that Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization was ever genuinely committed to settling for a mini-state in the West Bank and Gaza, alongside Israel.
In a revealing 2004 interview in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Morris said he never was a post-Zionist and his readers were wrong to presume any agenda beyond an intellectually honest approach to the facts. Morris, the dispassionate, neutral historian, spoke out as Morris, the Israeli Jew: “When the choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it is better to destroy,” he told the interviewer. In his well-researched historical assessment, it indeed came down to such a choice for Israel in the past – and it still does.
Which brings us back to Morris's new book. It opens with a rebuttal of the one-state solution, an idea that New York University history professor Tony Judt relaunched in a 2003 article in The New York Review of Books. Other thinkers then expanded on Judt's arguments, which Morris discusses and dismisses as unrealistic: Neither Israelis nor Palestinians would relinquish their drive for national sovereignty.
Later in the book is where Morris may offend some readers with his view that “authoritarian and religious” Arab values make meaningful co-existence with Israeli Jews impossible within one state, and that Hamas in particular has “no respect for what are accepted in the West as civilized values.” Further, Arabs “proportionally commit far more crimes ... and lethal traffic violations” than do Jews and place a “completely different” value on human life and the rule of law, he says.
“The mindset and basic values of Israeli Jewish society and Palestinian Muslim society are so different and mutually exclusive as to render bi-national statehood tenable in only in the most disconnected and unrealistic of minds,” Morris writes.
Similarly, Morris's 120-year summary of Israeli and Palestinian history leads him to conclude that prospects are “very bleak” for a two-state solution of the type proposed at Camp David in July, 2000, by Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak, and now revived by Barack Obama. Why? “Palestinian Arabs, in the deepest fibres of their being, oppose such an outcome, demanding, as they did since the dawn of their national movement, all of Palestine as their patrimony,” Morris writes.
The book's strength is its midsection, in which Morris traces the history of the various one-state and two-state solutions from the points of view of both the Jewish nationalist and Palestinian nationalist movements. He is equally caustic toward Jewish and Arab leaders who pursued their own interests in a way that, history shows, has so far allowed Israel to prevail. His amoral tone is a delight and effectively drives home the point that nothing has really changed since the beginning of Zionism in the Middle East.
“The years 1937, 1947, 1978 [when Arafat opposed the self-rule plan in the Begin-Sadat Camp David Agreement] ... and 2000 were all of a piece, with no real movement or change in final objectives.”
Less satisfying is Morris's treatment of the past 15 years. Scant mention of the role continued Israeli land confiscations, military checkpoints, settlements and road building in the occupied territories played in the erosion of Palestinian trust. There is no questioning of the American-Israeli view that Arafat was exclusively responsible for the collapse of the 2000 Camp David talks.
Most frustratingly, Morris waits until the final three paragraphs to unveil his main thesis: that Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian government should negotiate a Palestinian-Jordanian federation. He never subjects that idea to the same rigour he applies to all the other “solutions.” No doubt its chance of coming to fruition is also bleak and its future outlook also violent. If anything, One-State, Two States confirms how tragically intractable the conflict is at its core. In the end, groundbreaking historian Benny Morris has elegantly proved the maxim that history will belong to the victors.
Nomi Morris is a writer and lecturer and formerly a Middle East correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers (now McClatchy).
