Last weekend’s Harvard conference raised the profile of a new industry that’s springing up to promote a “one-state solution” to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The idea is that Israel, Gaza and the West Bank should become a single state for both Arabs and Jews.
The one-state solution (let’s call it OSS) isn’t new; rather, it came after decades in which the Arabs favored a “no-state solution” (NSS).
In the early decades of the 20th century, as Jews started migrating en masse to their ancient homeland and building their state, Arabs regarded Palestine (Ottoman provinces controlled by Britain after World War I) as just another chunk of their territory and rejected the idea of a distinct Palestinian people.
Syria claimed that Palestine had always been part of its territory. Iraq sought Palestine for access to the Mediterranean. Egypt believed that, as the most populous Arab state, it should annex Palestine. And Trans-Jordan (later Jordan), a state carved out of the largest chunk of Palestine by Britain for its Arab clients from neighboring Hejaz, hoped to absorb the remainder.
With all these countries coveting the Palestinian territories, the UN’s 1947 proposed partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state met a united Arab rejection front.
The Arab-Israeli war of 1948, in which Egypt, Syria and Jordan seized chunks of the proposed Palestinian Arab state, didn’t kill the no-state solution, but gave it a new dimension. The Arabs supported the NSS until 1974, when they implicitly recognized the Palestinians’ right to a state of their own. Although they didn’t specify the location of the putative Palestinian state, their refusal to recognize Israel implied a desire to see it wiped off the map.
The no-state solution had been built on the hope that Britain could be persuaded to hand the remainder of Palestine to one of its Arab allies. The one-state solution implicitly demands Israel’s destruction to allow for the emergence of a Palestinian Arab state.
The Camp David accords marked the beginning of a slow Arab switch to a two-state solution. With the Oslo accords of the 1990s, even the Palestine Liberation Organization accepted the two-state goal, at least implicitly. Under President George W. Bush, the United States committed itself to working for it.
Yet the old one-state solution found new advocates in Libya, Iraq and Iran. The late Col. Moammar Khadafy and Saddam Hussein and Iran’s “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei argued that the so-called “South African model” could be applied to Israel — a single state of Palestine in which Arabs would form a majority with some “native Jews” allowed to remain as a minority.
The Palestinian Hamas movement, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, committed itself to the OSS in the 1990s.
In Israel, however, support for a two-state solution has risen dramatically in the last decade. Some marginal groups still dream of annexing the West Bank and forcing its Palestinian inhabitants to “transfer” to other Arab countries, but polling shows that a majority of Israelis would vote for a two-state solution.
So why would anyone promote a one-state solution when majorities both in Israel and among Palestinians seek a two-state one?
Because the OSS is not a solution at all: It’s a cover for a hidden agenda to deny Israel’s right to exist and the Palestinians’ right to a state of their own.
The OSS is the political version of a suicide attack — and, as in a suicide attack, those who promote it are never those who carry it out.
The advocates of a one-state solution are in Tehran and in US universities, including Harvard — but not in Israel or the Palestinian territories.
But those who are supposed to implement the OSS — that is to say, commit political suicide — are Palestinians who are invited to abandon their aspirations for statehood in favor of the “wipe Israel off the map” agenda.
The least that OSS advocates could do is to have the decency not to present their conferences as scholarly “quests for peace.”