“The two-state solution is very near death”, said Alon Pinkas, Israel’s former consul general to the US back in February. In reality, the two-state solution never really lived as a viable solution to the decades old Israel-Palestine conflict in the first place. From before Israel’s inception, the idea has always faced vigorous opposition from one or other of the two sides and usually both. The original partition plan was unanimously opposed by the six Arab countries represented at the UN when it went before the General Assembly on 29 November 1947. When the plan was agreed upon by the UN in spite of this, fatal violence instantly followed. By 16 February 1948, the UN’s Palestine Commission reported that but for British security forces “the two communities [Jews and Arabs] would by now have been fully engaged in internecine slaughter.”

David Ben-Gurion’s declaration of Israeli independence on 14 May 1948 prompted an invasion by no fewer than seven Arab armies, four of them rolling into Israel the very next day. Their publicly declared intention was “the creation of a United State of Palestine” in place of the two-state plan.  The Arab defeat did not, however, herald an acceptance of a two-state solution by either side. The 1949 armistice agreements ceded the West Bank to Jordan, which had never gone into the war to destroy Israel so much as to annex as much Palestinian territory as possible, whilst he Gaza Strip was occupied by Egypt.

The history of the succeeding decades up to the present day has been one in which neither Israelis nor Palestinians accepted the other’s right to exist, or as has been the case more recently,  neither side has been willing to concede enough so as to make a two-state solution workable. At the same time, and further complicating matters, major elements on both sides still do not accept the other’s right to exist.

One of the most fundamental problems is that the physical space being fought over just isn’t big enough to accomodate the wants and needs of both sides. Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip between them comprise barely 26,000 sq km, fully half of which is made up of the inhospitable Negev desert in the south. In that space are expected to live peacefully and prosperously 11 million of some of the most acrimonious people on earth. As Israel’s former National Security Council chief Giora Eiland put it, the “pie” is just too small. “In terms of political survival, the maximum that any government in Israel can agree to offer the Palestinians is less than the minimum that any Palestinian government can agree to accept. The conventional two-state paradigm has become a zero-sum game, providing insufficient incentive for both sides to take the necessary risks and move forward.”

The failure of the 1993 Oslo accords - the first direct, face-to-face agreement between Israelis and Palestinians - failed because they deliberately left to a later date agreement on the fundamental issues, namely the question of Israeli settlements, the final status of Jerusalem, the right of return of Palestinian refugees, borders and security. When attempts were subsequently made to address those issues, the result was predictable enough: failure. The first serious attempt to address these issues, at Camp David in 2000,  fell down because neither side was willing or able to make the necessary levels of compromise. The closest both sides have come to an agreement was undoubtedly at Taba in January 2001, yet set against the onset of the Al-Aqsa intifada that followed the collapse of the Camp David summit, the election of Ariel Sharon as Israeli Prime Minister in February saw the accords thrown out and the violence escalate.

Yet even if, by an almost unfathomable miracle, these issues could all be resolved, few people seem to have considered the actual viability of a Palestinian state. From where has the assumption come that if and when a Palestinian state is finally created, it will be able to live peacefully and prosperously alongside Israel? The truth is that the animosity between Israelis and Palestinians runs too deep, and the violence has become too personal for any deal to be adhered to for long. No better evidence of this exists than the spectacular fallout following the withdrawal of Israeli forces and settlers from the Gaza Strip in September 2005. Instead of electing a government that could or would work with Israel, the Gaza Palestinians elected Hamas, an organisation whose founding charter states “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it”. In part, the election of Hamas was borne of an abiding resentment amongst Palestinians over perceived corruption in the Fatah party, but it was also borne of a conviction that Hamas was the better group to represenent Palestinian interests. The result has been a devastating blockade of the entire strip by Israel, culminating most recently in the Israeli invasion and occupation of Gaza from 27 December 2008-18 January 2009, during which time some 5,000 people were killed.

There is precisely nothing to say that a fully fledged Palestinian state would not likewise elect a government overtly hostile to Israel, nor that Israel would tolerate such hostility. Aside from the enormous political and economic cost of shifting the 350,000-odd religious fundamentalists that are the West Bank and East Jerusalem settlers, one of the main things stopping Israel from pulling out of the West Bank is a very real concern that if it does so, the region will quickly be taken over by Hamas. This is an outcome that Israel simply will not allow. In addition to the group’s commitment to the destruction of Israel and its militant Islamist ideology, Hamas also enjoys Iranian sponsorship. Allowing Iran, which is establishing itself as one of the Middle East’s strongest powers, still further influence on Israel’s border would be absolutely unacceptable to the Israeli government. A potentially volatile and Hamas-led Palestine would also be highly objectionable to both Jordan and Egypt, the two other countries with which Palestine would share a border. Neither country wishes to see a militant, Iranian-backed state on their borders any more than Israel does.

In addition to this, one has to look at the geographic and economic reality of any future state of Palestine and ask whether such a state would be truly viable in those terms. The answer once again is no. Neither the West Bank nor the Gaza Strip have any natural resources to speak of, and the country would be dependent upon Israel for its economic survival. The geographical separation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip also poses a serious issue for the integrity of any future Palestinian state. The agreed solution at present would be one or two land corridors connecting the territories running through the heart of Israel. Should the Palestinians elect an overtly hostile government, or as is even more likely, should any Palestinian government find itself unable to control the militant elements that would undoubtedly still exist within the country, then Israel could and very likely would strangle Palestine.

The truth is, however, that even this unhappy scenario is still a pipe-dream at present, still more so following the recent election of Binyamin Netanyahu as Israeli Prime Minister, a man who has described the entire peace-process as “a waste of time”. The pie is too small, the disagreements too severe and the stakes too high for a workable agreement on any of the major obstacles to be forthcoming in the near future. What then, is the solution?

Perhaps the two-state solution needs to be ditched altogether. The idea that the two-state solution might seriously need to be dropped will not come easily to large swathes of the international community, and global publics generally, who have come to see it as the only acceptable and indeed thinkable solution to the region’s problems. Yet maybe it is time to take a step back and realise that “justice for the Palestinians” might not necessarily be the same thing as a state called Palestine. Some have put forward the idea of a single, unified Israeli state encompassing the entire area, in which both Jews and Arabs would enjoy equal rights and opportunities. This notion is antithetical to the notion of Israel as a culturally Jewish state, not least because, with higher birth-rates, the number of Arabs in the area (5.2 million) is soon set to surpass the number of Jews (6.2  million). Netanyahu’s Likud government is already working on ways to counter this “threat” and there is little chance that the two communities would live either peacefully or equally side-by-side in a unified Israel.

The most viable and workable solution would in fact seem to be the so-called “three-state solution”, which would see the Gaza Strip annexed to Egypt, and the West Bank annexed to Jordan. Neither Egypt, whose border with Gaza has remained predominantly closed since the Hamas takeover in 2006, nor Jordan have given any sign that they would give this idea serious consideration at present. However, the very real possibility of a militant, Hamas-led Palestine may well make this idea of greater appeal to the Egyptians and Jordanians than it has been in the past. Without question, this solution would have to come with massive levels of international aid to help rebuild infrastructure and compensate Egypt and Jordan for the cost of taking in almost 4 million of among the world’s most impoverished people. However,  the short and long-term security benefits for both countries, as well as Israel, are evident. Not only would this sollution nullify the potential of further Iranian influence in the area, it would also go a long way towards dealing with the wider issue of Middle Eastern terrorism generally, which is in large part the result of the very real and perceived injustices endured by the Palestinians. There is no guarantee that an independent Palestinian state would be an end to these injustices, because of the weakness of such a state and its utter dependence upon Israel. Poverty, resentment and terrorism all go hand in hand.

The three-state solution would also be to the benefit of the large numbers of Palestinians who simply wish to live a peaceful and prosperous life, free from Israeli occupation. The exact form of the solution will not matter so much so long as it delivers upon these objectives. The potential for peace and prosperity, free from Israeli interference, would be considerably higher under the three-state solution than in a weak and politically vulnerable Palestine. Moderate Palestinians would rather live under Egyptian and Jordanian rule than under a militant and Islamist Hamas. Furthermore, even in a politically stable Palestine, the aformentioned weakness of the economy and the geographic limitations mean that Palestinians would be afforded far fewer economic opportunities than they would under an Egyptian or Jordanian aegis, replete with the full economic and political backing of those respective governments. The main losers in such a scenario would of course be the Palestinian leaderships, which is possibly why more of this idea has not been heard already. For them of course, the only acceptable solution is a fully independent Palestine, but the point needs no ellaboration that what is in the best interests of a people and what is in the best interests of their leaders are very often not the same thing.

If a solution to the Palestinian problem were simple, then it would have been arrived at long ago, with many thousand fewer lives lost. Yet one of the principle reasons that the conflict has continued to drag on for as long as it has, with so little progress towards a solution, is because the solution being pursued is quite simply unworkable. Neither side is willing to give enough to make it workable; indeed, neither side has enough it can realistically give, and the prospects for peace and stability even if they did are very small for the reasons already outlined. If peace is ever to be achieved in Palestine, then there is going to need to be a radical rethink of what the right way forward actually is. The three-state solution might just be it.

Tags: Israel-Palestine

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Middle East. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.