Establishing a unitary Israeli-Palestinian state would end Israel’s ideological essence and its functional existence.
I note this in light of Peter Beinart’s argument on Wednesday in favor of such a state formation. Writing in the New York Times, Beinart suggests that a unitary state is now the only way to match moral justice to the enduring cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace. This is necessary because “about 640,000 Jewish settlers now live in East Jerusalem and the West Bank,” Beinart says, “and the Israeli and American governments have divested Palestinian statehood of any real meaning.” This means that “it’s time to imagine a Jewish home that is not a Jewish state.”
I don’t doubt Beinart’s sincerity, but his plan would be a terribly painful mistake.
One cannot just wish away the ideological and governmental differences between the Israelis and Palestinians. Beinart attempts to use history to defend his case that a unitary state or confederation would proffer peace. He references the Northern Irish conflict between Britain and Catholic Republican rebels and the conflict’s great dilution with the 1998 Good Friday Accords. “When Catholics became equal political partners, the violence largely stopped,” he writes. “It’s the lesson of South Africa, where Nelson Mandela endorsed armed struggle until Blacks won the right to vote. History shows that when people gain their freedom, violence declines.”
This is not so.
History shows that violence declines when warring peoples embrace a mutually respected political enterprise. There are no indications that anything remotely like this could be possible in any sort of unitary Israeli-Palestinian state. Israelis support a democratic state bound to the secular rule of law. Many and perhaps most Palestinians (and certainly all of the ones in power) seek a state that subordinates democracy to an enshrined Sunni Islamist theological identity.
These two ideals are probably mutually exclusive. This was not the case in South Africa, where a unitary state already existed and could be changed to end an injustice. Nor was this the case in Northern Ireland, where enough former rebels and loyalists shared a basic belief in a secular democratic system.
Oddly, Beinart tries to discount these concerns by referencing opinion polls. He suggests that “increasingly, one equal state is not only the preference of young Palestinians. It is the preference of young Americans too.”
So here is a word of caution that will ring clear to many Israelis. At my alma mater, the School of Oriental and African Studies, and many universities like it, the preference of young students would be slightly less pleasant to Israeli interests than Beinart presents. This speaks to a broader point.
Israelis have learned, through the Holocaust and two wars of annihilation waged against them, that their existence depends on the paradigm of a well-defended democracy supported by a citizenry that is willing to bear arms in its defense. The particular Jewish identity of Israel matters instrumentally here. Israel, ultimately, is both a home of the Jewish people and a state structured explicitly around that object. Introducing Palestinian politics, Hamas or Fatah, to the Israeli state would be to end that state as it is and was designed to be.
In short, I remain convinced that the best and only way to achieve enduring Israeli-Palestinian peace and prosperity is on the basis of a two-state solution predicated on reciprocal land swaps, recognition of Palestinian sovereignty in areas of East Jerusalem, and the right of both peoples to live in peace.
