Beyond the Two-State Solution

A Jewish Political Essay

Yehouda Shenhav, Dimi Reider

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745660295, 9780745660288
• eBook ISBN: 9780745662947
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

For over two decades, many liberals in Israel have attempted, with wide international support, to implement the two-state solution: Israel and Palestine, partitioned on the basis of the Green Line - that is, the line drawn by the 1949 Armistice Agreements that defined Israel's borders until 1967, before Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza following the Six-Day War. By going back to Israel's pre-1967 borders, many people hope to restore Israel to what they imagine was its pristine, pre-occupation character and to provide a solid basis for a long-term solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

In this original and controversial essay, Yehouda Shenhav argues that this vision is an illusion that ignores historical realities and offers no long-term solution. It fails to see that the real problem is that a state was created in most of Palestine in 1948 in which Jews are the privileged ethnic group, at the expense of the Palestinians - who also must live under a constant state of emergency. The issue will not be resolved by the two-state solution, which will do little for the millions of Palestinian refugees and will also require the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Jews living across the Green Line. All these obstacles require a bolder rethinking of the issues: the Green Line should be abandoned and a new type of polity created on the complete territory of mandatory Palestine, with a new set of constitutional arrangements that address the rights of both Palestinians and Jews, including the settlers.

1

THE ROOTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE LIBERAL NEW NOSTALGIA

THE “NO PARTNER” APPROACH

One of the main flaws of the 1967 paradigm is its basic premise of the lack of a Palestinian partner. We tend to identify the “no partner” approach with former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and the Camp David talks, but Barak wasn’t the argument’s main architect; he merely put it to a test, which produced the desired result. The “no partner” approach was the axis of the geopolitical strategy of Ariel Sharon, who had done more than anyone else for the elimination of the Palestinian partner and the establishment of a policy of Israeli unilateralism.

The circular conception of “no partner” has guided many politicians and journalists over the years. One of the more vocal among them, Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit, reported with great empathy and conviction on the disengagement plan and endorsed its unilateralism: “There will be no possibility to reach a peace agreement that will end the conflict in the next decade. This should be the working assumption of the partition project, which means partitioning Western Eretz Israel even without peace.”¹ And he concludes:

The idea of partitioning the country along the 1967 borders … requires Israel to withdraw to the 1967 border and the Palestinian not to demand anything beyond the 1967 border. So long as the Palestinians insist upon the right of return, they do not accept the entire 1967 [approach]. So long as this is the situation, we cannot expect Israel alone to remain committed to the idea of 1967.²

In a different article several years later, Shavit offers a frustrated reading of the uselessness of speaking to the Palestinians, playing on the popular leftist slogan, “It won’t be over till we talk”:

Even if we talk, it won’t be over. The fact is that we spoke at Oslo and it wasn’t over, we spoke at Camp David and it wasn’t over, we spoke at Annapolis and it wasn’t over. We talked and we talked and we talked and all this talk didn’t produce a thing. Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni offered the whole world to the Palestinians, and the Palestinians were not satisfied.³

Shavit reinforces the same fundamental assumptions put forth by the historian and former Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami during the Camp David talks; his perception of time is rooted in the “secular” political ideology of Jewish liberals ready to digest the violence of the Jewish and “democratic” state sovereignty model and to legitimize it through convoluted justifications. One result of the distorted political horizon of the 1967 paradigm was the gradual mental colonization of the occupied territories by the liberal left. This was the process by which the 1967 paradigm was formulated and put into practice in terms of “separation,” without a concrete geographic border. Over time, the Green Line transformed from a thin and narrow border to a wide and consistently expanding strip of land, and the “separation,” divorced from a specific territorial line, became a floating marker for the term “Green Line.” The supporters of separation express fear of the opening up of the space, of the erosion of the European cultural model that Jewish Israel has aspired laboriously to construct, of losing the monopoly over the political economy and land economy, and, finally, of losing the cultural hegemony. But the eradication of the Green Line has unabashedly brought forth the question of opening up the space between the river and the sea, a question which the Zionist left has not yet found the courage to confront. Shavit formulates this paradigmatic confusion as follows:

We urgently need a novel idea. The paradigm of the right is outdated. But the paradigm of the center-left is also no longer relevant. Two states for two peoples is the right slogan, but it’s no working plan. It cannot be immediately implemented, not in the real world. Instead of repeating and reiterating the model like a religious chant, it’s time to review its fundamental premises … it’s time to think outside the box. It’s time to think outside both boxes.⁴

And indeed, the time has come to think outside both of these boxes. We can begin by acknowledging that we already live, even today, in a bi-national reality.⁵ Ben Gurion University geographer Oren Yiftachel describes this reality as “an ethnocratic apartheid” – an apartheid based on the domination of one ethnic group (rather than on skin color, as in South Africa)⁶ – and invites us to revisit the question of the sovereignty established in 1948. I agree with Yiftachel, and I suggest we begin rethinking the question of sovereignty and the obvious implications of asking this question in a bi-national reality: creating new spheres of overlapping political, communal, municipal and theological sovereignties. This kind of thinking just might produce creative new solutions that are not rooted in the paranoia and racism that saturate the “new nostalgia”.

A new political theory must be grounded in a new sovereign structure that I call “post-Westphalian”: a structure that rejects the traditional definition of sovereignty as an exclusive monopoly of territory, and the “need” to homogenize identity over that territory, in favor of a more appropriate model of joint intersecting sovereignties organized in a manner reflecting the complexity of actual communal existence and heterogeneity of populations. We need first to examine the problems associated with the “new nostalgia”.

CHASING THE YELLOW WIND

David Grossman’s 1987 collection of essays The Yellow Wind is an important landmark in the new nostalgia of imagining Israel as a liberal democracy prior to 1967 and of yearning for the political morality that ostensibly characterized Israel in its first two decades. In this form of consciousness, occupation of Palestinian territories only began in 1967: “I belong to the generation that celebrated its Bar Mitzvah during the Six Day War. Then, in 1968, the surging energy of our adolescent hormones was coupled with the intoxication gripping the entire country: The conquest, the confident penetration of the enemy’s land, his complete surrender, breaking the taboo of the border … Afterwards, everything happened.”⁷

“Afterwards, everything happened,” Grossman writes. The “Afterwards” traces a path to a “beginning,” the beginning of a new time:

I could not understand how an entire nation like mine, an enlightened nation by all accounts, is able to train itself to live as a conqueror without making its own life wretched. What happened to us? … So I also became an artist of sublimation. I found myself developing the same voluntary “suspension” of all questions about ethics and occupation … like the walls of a penitentiary I built around a reality I do not want to know … like jailers I stationed in order to protect myself from a grey world now repugnant to me … It turns the matter of the territories from an immoral matter to an amoral matter. It corrupts and anesthetizes us. One day we will wake up to a bitter surprise.⁸

When Grossman writes about the time of The Yellow Wind he actually introduces the time of the Green Line as the wind’s diametric opposite; and any discussion of the immorality of the time of the yellow wind is also a discussion of the morality of the time of the Green Line that preceded it. The position is expressed directly in another book by Grossman, the Present Absentees: “Our identity fills up the Green Line borders of the State of Israel in its full validity and force, and there we have moral strength as well – and there the collective message radiating from us is unequivocal.”⁹ As if the conflict between Jews and Palestinians only began in 1967, as if there existed a mutually agreed border before 1967, as if this border was impenetrable, as if occupation and colonialism were irrelevant terms before 1967, as if occupation was not practiced within the land of the Green Line. Here is how Grossman phrases his position: “Giving up the territories will bring the Israeli Jews into the authentic experience of their identity, the true feeling of true Israeliness of the new era. For the first time in years, there will be an overlap between the political borders and the borders of identity.”¹⁰

This fragmented perception of time relies on a historical disconnect between the question of 1948 and the 1967 paradigm. The formulation offered by Grossman marks the moment of completion for the 1967 paradigm and the cementing of the Green Line in a culture of nostalgia – exactly as if it became a kind of a zombie category, a walking dead: something that doesn’t exist on the ground anymore but is forever there in the collective memory.¹¹ Grossman cuts, as if with a surgeon’s knife, the historical continuity between the Arabs of 1948 and the Palestinian Arabs living in the West Bank, Gaza and the diaspora, as if 1967 was the first year of encounter between Palestinians and Jews. One clear testimony comes from Orly Yadin, daughter of the acting Chief-of-Staff of the IDF in the War of 1948, Yigal Yadin: “Up until the Six Day War my generation never even knew there was such a thing as Palestinians. We grew up in a country that had Arabs, but before 1967 I never met a Palestinian and didn’t even think that it was strange.”¹²

Orly Yadin echoes the Jewish discourse in which the Arabs of 1948 were not perceived as part of the larger Palestinian people. Even Gideon Levy’s important work in documenting the wrongs of the Occupation leans on a position that marks 1967 as the year the Occupation began. In 2004, he collected his reports for the daily Haaretz into a book called Twilight Zone, which opened thus: “For 15 years I’ve traveled to the Occupation [sic] territories … drawn like a moth to the flame to where the greatest story of the State of Israel since its establishment is taking place … the state has lived with the Occupation for two-thirds of its life and there’s hardly a day when the Occupation is not on the agenda.”¹³ Levy’s positions are established firmly in the ideological infrastructure and the epistemology of the Green Line: he calls the areas beyond that line “Occupation Land,” arbitrarily distinguishing “there” from “here,” which sanitizes the greater story of the Occupation of the country in 1948, and reproduces its historical denial and the new nostalgia.

This nostalgic approach is a secular liberal epos on what Edward Said would have called a “beginning.” The beginning is a secular idea created by secular thought in theological clothing. Walter Benjamin wrote of the “beginning” that it determines the form in which “the idea confronts time and again with the historical world, until it arrives at its full historical perfection.”¹⁴

We may argue that in 1967 the idea of the Green Line had arrived at its historical perfection, with the forgetting of 1948 resting underneath it as an unbreakable principle. The two-state solution is a product of that thought. This kind of moral approach is a natural sequel to Soldiers Talk, a book of testimonies by the veterans of the 1967 campaign released soon after the war; the liberal discourse canonized the book as proof of the morality of the Israeli army before 1967, and held it up for decades as a moral standard for the Labor Zionist movement. Similarly, former MK and historian Meir Pa’il wrote of the Israeli just state “which was disrupted after the Six Day War.”¹⁵

The fundamental premise of the time of the Green Line as a “beginning” also predetermines the end result: a return to the Green Line would solve the conflict, ending the “bad phase” in the Jewish–Arab relationship. This is the moral stance of the liberal left, fed by ignorance and blindness forced on the Israeli public for decades in regard to the history of 1948, and by the international support for the political model created in 1949.¹⁶ Marking 1967 as the turning point and as a political crisis seals the questions of 1948, while ignoring the question of the Palestinian refugees, the anomalous status of the Israeli Arabs, and the anomalous status of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The spatialized time of the Green Line presupposes the conflict as extraneous to Israeli society, and therefore as a matter of fate; as historian and journalist Amos Elon puts it in his seminal book The Israelis: “Sorrowfully … the Israelis awaited the next war, like one awaits the visit of a tiresome, bothersome mother-in-law.”¹⁷

Another stark example of the new nostalgia consciousness can be found in a book by former Meretz leader, minister and long-time Haaretz columnist Yossi Sarid, one of the key figures of the moderate left. The book, entitled And So We Gather Here: An Alternative History, offers a biographical narrative, partly imagined, partly told through other characters, which begins with the foundation of the state in 1948 and ends, bowing to the genre, in 1967. For Sarid the problems started only in 1967: “The second decade of the state was a decade of normality … who would believe in 1965 that soon, in less than two years, the country would lose its mind.”¹⁸

But 1967 is cast here as a dramatic year from yet another perspective: the beginning of the end of the “secular” state.¹⁹ Even when looking at events that happened after 1967, Sarid holds them up against the model of secular liberalism. He uses the character of Ben Gurion in his book to express surprise at the appearance of

Jewish Jihadists, reminiscent of the fanatics of the second temple that brought about its destruction. This was the first time he [Ben Gurion] met face to face with the wild weeds that sprang on the flowerbeds of religious Zionism. He didn’t know they were like that – devoted, messianic. He wasn’t aware of the underground currents that trickled for years in the depth of the religious nationalism, and are now threatening to break forth in all their might, like simmering lava; the stream of secular Zionism will soon merge into a greater river.²⁰

The new nostalgia, which outsources moral questions to beyond the Green Line, is also a form of Ahskenazi, white, identity politics, founded on a demographic struggle against the “other” within, the Mizrachi Jews – a demographic struggle waged by the same elite who holds up the time of the Green Line as a political horizon.²¹ In 1966, on the eve of the Six Day War, author Shabtai Tevet warned for all to hear: “The greater the part of the sons of those who come from Africa and Asia in [our] population, the lower the level of education will drop and the gap w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword: Yehouda Shenhav’s Beyond the Two-State Solution, Lama Abu Odeh
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction and Overview: The Crisis Facing Zionist Democracy
• 1 The Roots and Consequences of the Liberal New Nostalgia
• 2 Was 1967 a Revolutionary Year?
• 3 The “Political Anomalies” of the Green Line
• 4 1948 and the Return to the Rights of the Palestinians
• 5 The Return to the Rights of the Jews
• Notes
• Index