Yoav Peled: Normalizing the One-State Reality

Yoav Peled is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Tel Aviv University. In 2016-17 he was a Leverhulme Professorial Fellow in the School of Global Studies, the University of Sussex, and a visiting professor in the Middle East Centre at the LSE. His book, co-authored with Gershon Shafir, Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship (CUP, 2002) won the 2002 Albert Hourani Award of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. He is co-author, with Horit Herman Peled, of The Religionization of Israeli Society (Routledge, 2019) and co-editor, with John Ehrenberg, of Israel and Palestine: Alternative Perspectives on Statehood (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).

On September 15, 2020, Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain signed “normalization” agreements at the White House, bringing to light barely hidden economic, political and military relations that had been going on for several decades. Formalizing these relations, under the auspices of President Trump, is significant, however, because it is yet another manifestation of the abandonment of the Palestinian cause by the Arab countries and of the obsolescence of the two-state solution (TSS) to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Between 1967 and 2000 it was widely believed that partitioning the Land of Israel/Palestine between a Jewish and a Palestinian state, in accordance with several UN resolutions, was the equitable and realistic solution to the century-old conflict between Zionism and the Palestinian national movement. The 1993 Oslo Accords between the two sides seemed to launch a political process through which this solution would come about. These hopes were dashed by the failure of the Camp David summit of July 2000 and the second intifada that ensued.

In a new book, Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One State Reality (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), Ian Lustick argues that, essentially, the TSS, indeed any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was doomed from the very beginning. In reality, one sovereign state has existed between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River for the past 53 years. That state, Greater Israel, is simply too powerful to seriously consider giving up territory it is interested in keeping.

Three sets of power disparities are relevant for understanding what Lustick calls the “one state reality.” First, the disparity between Israel’s power and that of the Palestinians or even all the relevant Arab states combined. Second, the power disparity between moderate Israeli nationalists, who were willing to consider some sort of a TSS, and the extremists who wouldn’t. Third, the power disparity between AIPAC (the Israel lobby) and American politicians who in principle would have been willing to pressure Israel towards a TSS.

1) Israel’s military superiority was clearly demonstrated in 1967. And in 1973, in spite of an “October surprise” and initial military blunders, Israel was able to extract an honorable standoff from the combined forces of Egypt and Syria, which were held back from its sovereign borders (in Egypt’s case, well away from those borders). The Palestinians won the first intifada (1988-1993), not because of their superior power but because Israel’s liberal public opinion prevented the Israel Defense Forces from using their full capacity against them. That victory led to the Oslo Accords. In the second intifada (2000-2004) the Palestinians made the tragic mistake of deploying suicide bombers inside Israel’s 1967 borders, thus legitimating, in Israeli public opinion, the campaign to defeat them by any means necessary and losing the modest gains they had made in Oslo.

2) In 1967 the ruling Labor party was split between (mostly) old moderates and (mostly) young intransigents regarding the disposition of the territories acquired in the Six Day War. That split resulted in paralysis and inaction and the initiative was taken over by militant Religious Zionists, determined to prevent those territories ever being given up by settling Jewish settlers in them. That determination was made into official government policy when Likud came to power in 1977 and began massive settlement of the West Bank by offering generous financial inducements to prospective settlers. By that move Likud succeeded in creating a constituency against the TSS that now numbers 750,000 settlers, in addition to family members, friends, allies, etc., who still live within Israel’s 1967 borders. When Labor came back to power in 1992 and signed the Oslo Accords, its leader, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated in 1995 by a Religious Zionist zealot. When the last Labor Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, came to power in 1999 he was determined to do away with the Oslo Accords, which he had opposed from day one. That he did at Camp David in July 2000. Now the Labor party no longer exists, and the word “peace” has disappeared from the public discourse (except for “peace” with countries Israel never had any conflict with).

3) AIPAC’s hammerlock on U.S. foreign policy has led, according to Lustick, to the paralysis, or defeat, of the few American politicians who were genuinely interested in bringing about the TSS. The source of the lobby’s power is “political funding, rather than votes.” According to Tom Dine, AIPAC’s executive director between 1980 and 1993, “AIPAC-directed contributions comprised roughly 10% to 15% of a typical congressional campaign budget.” AIPAC’s hold on American policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also contributed to the defeat of the Israeli moderates, who had for decades pinned their hopes on American pressure to “save Israel from itself.”

Given the reality of the one state, what kind of state is it and what kind of state can it be? Right now, with about 40% of the population of Greater Israel – the Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza – stateless and denied all rights, there is no way of avoiding its designation as an apartheid state. What can be hoped for is that if and when the occupied Palestinian territories are formally annexed to Israel (by both Israeli and international law they are still under belligerent occupation), and the aim of the Palestinian struggle is shifted from national self-determination to equal citizenship rights, a dynamic in which Jews and Arabs work together towards democracy and civil rights could emerge.

The rulers of the two Gulf principalities boast that their agreement to normalize relations with Israel forestalled the plan to annex the West Bank to Israel. Indeed, according to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the process of annexation was supposed to begin on July 1, 2020, under the auspices of Trump’s “peace plan.” However, expending the resources required for annexation in the midst of an unprecedented health and economic crisis made that move infeasible, with or without the UAE and Bahrain. But formal annexation has been placed on the agenda and will come about sooner or later. With it, one may hope, will emerge a civil rights movement for equalizing the citizenship status of all residents of that old-new political formation.