It seems, however, that we can always get too much of a bad thing, and generally we do. The Arab one-state solution has returned from the land of the dead, and has now morphed into a Jewish one-state "solution" proposal, initiated by figures of the Israeli right, as presented recently in a Haaretz article. It sounds really attractive at first:
It's an idea for solving the conflict that sounds like a vision of the end of days: Grant Israeli citizenship and equal rights to all the Palestinians in the West Bank. And who is proposing the one-state solution? Right-wingers and settlers.
When you read the fine print however, it seems quite a bit like the Israeli Hell described in the old joke: The citizenship won't be citizenship and the rights won't be rights exactly and the one state will not be one state. Sure enough, Uri Elitzur, former chairman of the Yesha Council of Settlements, told Haaretz: "I want us to look for the solutions on the other side of the scale, which lies between the existing situation and the annexation and naturalization of all the Palestinians.
They talk about a process that will take between a decade and a generation to complete, at the end of which the Palestinians will enjoy full personal rights, but in a country whose symbols and spirit will remain Jewish.
Not exactly "full personal rights." "A process that will take between a decade and a generation to complete" means "never." Being an Arab citizen in a country in which the symbols and spirit will remain Jewish means there will not be "full personal rights." Some people will be more equal than others. "Full personal rights" means everyone's vote is equal. If a majority vote to put a green crescent on the flag and change the national anthem to "Biladi, Biladi" then that becomes law. "Full personal rights" means that if Abdullah from Nablus or Fathi from Nazareth marries Nisreen from Damascus, Syria, Nisreen can become a citizen of Israel. There are a lot of Nisreens and Fatimas in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. There will be a lot of relatively prosperous Abdullahs in Israel. Inevitably, most of the newlyweds will make their home in Israel. The Arab population will grow and one day they will be a majority. That is clearly not what Reuven Rivlin or Tzipi Hotoveli or Uri Elitzur have in mind.
Proponents of the scheme argue that Jewish birthrate is now higher than that of the Arabs in the West Bank, according to their own special right wing demographic figures (see here for example). That may be true temporarily. The Jewish "one staters" forgot that their solution is supposed to be permanent. Can they really predict the demography trends 50 or 100 years from now? Are they certain there will not be an Arab majority? There are a lot of ultraorthodox (Haredi) Jews right now, and they have children in large numbers. But history shows that the children of Haredim are usually no longer Haredim. If they remain Haredim then Israel will eventually consist only of Arabs and Haredim in any case, and would not be viable as a Zionist Jewish state.
The economy of the West Bank is not doing well. The Arab birthrate in the West Bank may increase if prosperity returns. The same demographers claim that the Palestinian population figures are swollen by false reporting and by counting Palestinian Arabs who live abroad. That may be so, but if Israel gives Palestinians citizenship rights, those Palestinians living abroad may return. What is true now may not be true in 50 years. A constitution cannot be based on temporary demographic trends or the current proportion of various groups. That mistake was made in Lebanon. Even if the Arab population of Israel is "only" 30 to 40% of the total, it is difficult to imagine that such a large minority would acquiesce in a Jewish state that allows only immigration of Jews and does not taken account of Palestinian Arab national aspirations in any way.
The "equal" Palestinian Arab citizens of the new state will flock to live in green line Israel, to live where their memories are and to be in the more prosperous areas of the country. They will flock to the cities, to Haifa and Beisan (Beit Shean to you) and Majdal (Ashkelon to you) and Isdood (Ashdod to you) to reclaim their lost lands.
When describing the harmonious idyll that will obtain in the Jewish one-state solution, its proponents conveniently forgot about the history of internal Arab-Jewish violence in Israel. That history goes back to the Ottoman Turkish mandate, before there was Israel, before there was Palestine. It is no secret that Israeli Arabs and Jews do not dwell together in peace and harmony. There are not many integrated schools in Israel.. In the Galilee and elsewhere, Bedouin and other Arabs are reportedly busy encroaching on Jewish land and stealing farm equipment and animals. That activity is bound to intensify in the Jewish one-state "solution. It is a convenient way of combining profitable theft with "nationalism.
Two years ago there were riots in Acco on Yom Kippur. Three years ago there were Druze riots in Peki'in. The history of Arab violence in Palestine during mandatory times and Ottoman times is well known(see for example: Safed plunder of 1834,Arab uprising). Everyone in Israel is aware of these unpleasant facts. Even the right-wing politicians like Tzipy Hotoveli and Reuven Rivlin certainly know about them. How will the one-state "solution" produce an idyll of peaceful coexistence? They claim that the process will be slow, and that Israeli Arabs must be integrated first. But the Arabs of Israel have not been integrated in 62 years. It is unlikely that they will be integrated in 10 years or 10 decades, and the situation is getting worse, not better.
The proponents of the one-state "solution" also forgot about Gaza. Gaza will not go away. It is impossible to imagine that one million or 1.5 million Arabs will stay pent up in a kind of limbo territory, and that their friends and relatives, free citizens of Israel, will show no interest in helping them join their prosperous state, where the per-capita GDP is perhaps 30 times larger than that of Gaza.
The Jewish one-state "solution," like the Arab one-state "solution," is an attempt to square the circle. These people are either fooling themselves or trying to fool everyone else. One state solutions are always going to cheat Jews or Arabs or both of their rights. They must end in one of several undesirable solutions: A state that belongs to a new joint nationality, depriving both the Jewish people and the Palestinian Arabs of their right to national self-determination, an Arab one-state "solution," such as the genocidal Arab state advocated by the Hamas groupies of the MSU in Irvine and San-Diego, California, or a real apartheid state dominated by the Jews. In the Arab state, the Jews will presumably "go back to Poland (Auschwitz)" as Helen Thomas put it. If we don't, then something similar may be arranged locally. In the Jewish one-state "solution," the Arabs will not remain silent forever.
Ami Isseroff
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