The Two State Solution Academic Fantasy : An even greater threat to Palestinians than to Israelis

 Most observers, when debating the pros and cons of a two-state solution, focus exclusively on its potential impact on Israel and its Jewish citizens. Much less attention is paid to the solution’s potential impact on the Palestinians. Leftists, right-wingers, conservatives and liberals all tend to assume that two states would naturally be in the Palestinians’ interest. Think again.

As was apparent at the recent Paris conference, the world refuses to acknowledge that the two-state solution has already failed the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority (PA), established in 1994, came to rule over all of Gaza in the summer of 2005 after the complete Israeli withdrawal and destruction of Israeli settlements. The PA also had exclusive control over the major cities in Judea and Samaria/the West Bank and their environs, comprising some 95 percent of these territories’ population.

However, that unified Palestinian entity, which was supposed to be the Palestinian side of the two-state equation, proved extremely short-lived. Within two years of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas took over Gaza completely. In the summer of 2007, after several rounds of fighting that began soon after Hamas’s electoral victory in 2006, the Islamist group established its own exclusive government in Gaza.

Thus, the Palestinians partitioned themselves into two bodies: an autocratic entity headed by Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, and a Hamas theocracy in Gaza. Almost unnoticed, the two-state solution had given way to a three-state solution.

European states – like France, for example, which convened the Paris conference – will no doubt clam that that was all in the past, and the past can always be corrected.

It is certainly true that the Palestinians are always allowed by the international community to have yet another chance. But a two-state solution is simply no longer feasible.

A relatively bloodless civil war has been raging between the two entities day in and day out since their bloody 2007 confrontation, offering a constant illustration of why there cannot be a single Palestinian state. If the two sides were to attempt to reunite, that war would become very bloody indeed. The Palestinians themselves realize this, which explains the succession of failed attempts to bring the sides together.

As separate entities, the two sides make do by utterly subduing the opposing group. The cost of this suppression has been relatively low so far: several deaths of tortured political prisoners in Hamas and PA prisons, a few extrajudicial killings, and the occasional closing down of professional or charitable organizations linked to the opponent. The PA, the economic clout of which is financed by the international community, has blocked projects like the creation of a new Israeli electric grid line into Gaza and the creation of a modern port that would considerably improve Gazans’ standard of living.

Ironically, Hamas supports the new Israeli grid line, even it means greater dependence on the Israeli enemy it has vowed to destroy. For Hamas, waging civil war with the PA over electricity (in addition to many other areas) is more important than increasing its own dependence on the enemy.

For Abbas’s PA, the three-state solution, or, more precisely, the current status quo, is even more essential for its security. The Hamas network of sympathizers, activists, and terrorists in the PA is huge – far greater than the threat Abbas’s Fatah organization poses to the Hamas government in Gaza. The presence of Hamas in the PA is so substantial that the PA is able to contain it only with significant help from the IDF. For the PA, civil war might lead to the same outcome in Ramallah that it experienced in Gaza in 2007.

Even worse, Hamas as an organization has proven adept at maintaining unity. This is not true of Abbas’s PA and Fatah, its ruling party and militia, which have excelled in their divisiveness. This problem is made only graver by Abbas’s refusal to appoint a deputy and potential successor. In this state of affairs, civil war could give way to several more unresolved and bloody Palestinian partitions.

There is an Israeli angle to Palestinian partition and civil war. Israel’s clear historical right to settle the Land of Israel has been flagrantly challenged, partially on the basis that it would undermine the two-state solution. The argument goes that it would turn the future Palestinian state into a discontinuous state geographically – a Swiss-cheese configuration that is assumed to be inherently dysfunctional. The international community forgets that it was the Palestinians themselves who initiated the process of discontinuity, and they are likely to make it worse as the fight over Abbas’s successor intensifies.

At the end of the day, there are only two available options: 1) A Swiss cheese configuration that remains bloodless due to Israeli state expansion through settlement, which keeps the Palestinian opposing sides at bay; or 2) a prolonged and bloody Palestinian civil war between two or more Palestinian entities.

The Zionist movement, and later the State of Israel, have been waiting a hundred years for the Palestinians to be both sufficiently flexible to live side by side with the Jewish state and sufficiently unified to remain intact as a state. In the face of Palestinian failure to do either, Israel has every right to pursue its legitimate rights in settling Judea and Samaria. This should include annexation of area C, the blocs around Jerusalem and in Samaria where almost no Palestinians live, or anywhere else Israel sees fit.

Caroline B. Glick, The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for. Peace in the Middle East, New York: Crown Forum

Caroline B. Glick, The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for. Peace in the Middle East, New York: Crown Forum

The Israeli Solution is a  radical break with current thinking that has a chance to completely change the conversation for the betterment of Israel and America…Glick proposes that given an enemy that has been dedicated to nothing less than the annihilation of Israel, in order to defend its borders and continue to flourish, Israel must claim its sovereignty over Judea and Samaria and grant all Palestinians, subject to Israeli law, with permanent residency and the ability to apply for full citizenship…Every person who cares about the fate of the West, regardless of political orientation, will gain something from reading Glick’s lucid, thoroughly researched and thought-provoking book

The Israel Solution by Caroline C. Glick is a manifesto that exposes the flaws in the two-state policy of the United States toward Israel and the Palestinians and offers a direct and powerful call for Israeli sovereignty in the region.

 The reigning consensus in elite and academic circles is that the United States must seek to resolve the Palestinians' conflict with Israel by implementing the so-called two-state solution. Establishing a Palestinian state, so the thinking goes, would be a panacea for all the region's ills. It would end the Arab world's conflict with Israel, because the reason the Arab world is anti-Israel is that there is no Palestinian state. It would also nearly erase the principal cause of the violent extremism in the rest of the Middle East. In a time when American politics are marked by partisan gridlock, the two-state solution stands out for its ability to attract supporters from both sides of the ideological divide. But the great irony is that it is one of the most irrational and failed policies the United States has ever adopted. 

Between 1970 and 2013, the United States presented nine different peace plans for Israel and the Palestinians, and for the past twenty years, the two state solution has been the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy. But despite this laser focus, American efforts to implement a two-state peace deal have failed--and with each new attempt, the Middle East has become less stable, more violent, more radicalized, and more inimical to democratic values and interests. 

In The Israeli Solution, Caroline Glick, a Senior Contributing Editor to the Jerusalem Post, examines the history and misconceptions behind the two-state policy, most notably:

• The huge errors made in counting the actual numbers of Jews and Arabs in the region. The 1997 Palestinian Census, upon which most two-state policy is based, wildly exaggerated the numbers of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.
• Neglect of the long history of Palestinian anti-Semitism, refusal to negotiate in good faith, terrorism, and denial of Israel's right to exist. - Disregard for Israel's stronger claims to territorial sovereignty under international law, as well as the long history of Jewish presence in the region.
• Indifference to polling data that shows the Palestinian people admire Israeli society and governance. 

Despite a half-century of domestic and international terrorism, anti-semitism, and military attacks from regional neighbors who reject its right to exist, Israel has thrived as the Middle East's lone democracy. After a century spent chasing a two-state policy that hasn't brought the Israelis and Palestinians any closer to peace, The Israeli Solution offers an alternative path to stability in the Middle East based on Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria

Glick's solution to the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria (often improperly called “the West Bank”) is to follow actions taken by Prime Minister Begin who placed the Golan Heights and Jerusalem under Israeli law in the 1980’s.  Although technically those areas were not annexed to Israel, placing them under Israeli law was a de facto annexation.  They were no longer administered by the military.   

Palestinian Arabs, and many Western journalists seem to think that Israeli military presence means territories are “occupied,” but it does not.  The military is there to protect Israeli interests while the disputed territories are engaged in ‘dispute resolution’ with interested parties.  Once Israeli law is put into effect, Israel would be unilaterally affirming the end of ‘dispute’ and settling the question of control.

With passion and care, the author reviews the pros and cons of taking such a step.  She expresses a great deal of concern about the European reaction to such a move.  Also, there would certainly be fallout from increasing the number of Arab permanent residents and/or citizens as part of Israeli demographics.  Yet, this big step will give relief from the cul-de-sac Israel now finds itself in, where she endlessly negotiates for a two-state solution that the Palestinian Arabs do not want.  

The endgame for Mahmoud Abbas is the destruction of Israel.

The Israeli Solution projects an alternative to the dangerous gamesmanship and perpetual war we have witnessed in the quest for a so-called two state solution.  Yet, is it really wise to try to absorb a fiendish population – people mired in rage, mental instability, and rigid ideology – into one’s country?  Their co-Arabs have kicked them out of three different countries (Jordan, Lebanon, and Kuwait), so it seems unlikely they can be absorbed, even on a gradual basis, into the legal structure and fabric of Israeli society.

The expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs from Judea and Samaria, although not suggested in Glick's book, would be much more effective in bringing peace to Israel.  Yet, before doing so, an aggressive public relations campaign against the Palestinian Arabs is needed to counteract Arab and Soviet-era propaganda about Israel.  This campaign would put the moral onus where it belongs – on the attitudes, beliefs, and behavior of the Arabs, who were and still remain, an implacable enemy.

Benny Morris on Palestinian Refugees, Arab Infiltation , the Zionist -Arab Conflict and Glubb Pasha

Norman G. Finkelstein photo

The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949,[1.1]
Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–1956: Arab infiltration, Israeli retaliation, and the countdown to the Suez war,[1.2]
Righteous Victims: A history of the Zionist-Arab conflict, 1881–1999,[1.3]
 The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews[1.4]

Israeli historian Benny Morris played a pivotal role in molding the current scholarly consensus on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Until his generation of scholars came along (the so-called new historians), the dominant depiction of the conflict, even in academia, amounted to little more than a footnoted version of Leon Uris’s potboiler,Exodus. The current consensus casts Israel since its founding in a much darker light. During the past 15 years, however, Morris has been given to lashing out at, and defending the old orthodoxy against, critics of Israel.

An unorthodox new historian not too long ago, Benny Morris in effect reinvented himself in recent times as an orthodox old historian. The process has been incremental, the quantitative degeneration becoming at a certain point qualitative. Although disfigured in ways small and large by ideological bias, Morris’s earlier works, such as The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949,[1.1]Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–1956: Arab infiltration, Israeli retaliation, and the countdown to the Suez war,[1.2]Righteous Victims: A history of the Zionist-Arab conflict, 1881–1999,[1.3] and The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews[1.4] brought to light a wealth of novel information. The body of his subsequent major work, 1948: The first Arab-Israeli war,[1.5] preserves a standard of scholarly rigor, but his conclusion crosses the threshold to crude distortion. His last major work, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict[1.6]lacks any redeeming value and reeks of rancid propaganda.

Whereas he did not break new conceptual ground, Morris did roam the archives and cull revealing documents on the Israel-Palestine conflict that he then collated into a fresh, compelling narrative of the past. Once an industrious clerk, Morris has metamorphosed into a raging kook. In all fairness to him, it is of course arguable that Morris has honestly come to reconsider his former conclusions on the basis of new evidence; to discover that, however deficient their scholarship, the conclusions of the old historians were right after all. The problem is that Morris does not adduce new evidence to support his return to the old orthodoxy, but rather whites out the findings of his own pioneering research. This genre might be called doing history not by accretion but by subtraction.

The conclusion of Righteous Victims, Benny Morris’s sweeping “history of the Zionist-Arab conflict,” opened with a quote from Zionist leader (and Israel’s future first prime minister) David Ben-Gurion. The “conflict”with the Arabs, Ben-Gurion said in 1938, “is in its essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves.” Morris then observed: “Ben-Gurion, of course, was right. Zionism was a colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement. . . . Zionist ideology and practice were necessarily and elementally expansionist.” Insofar as “from the start its aim was to turn all of Palestine . . . into a Jewish state,” he went on to elaborate, Zionism could not but be “intent on . . . dispossessing and supplanting the Arabs.” Or, as Morris formulated it earlier on in his book, “Jewish colonization meant expropriation and displacement” of the indigenous population.[2.1] These consequences of Zionism, and the Arab resistance they inexorably generated, would figure as signature themes in Morris’s scholarly corpus.

A fundamental challenge for Zionism was how to create a Jewish state, which meant minimally a state whose population was overwhelmingly Jewish, in an area whose population was overwhelmingly not Jewish. One novelty of Morris’s original scholarship was to point up the centrality of “transfer”—a euphemism, as Revisionist Zionist leader Zeev Jabotinsky put it, for “brutal expulsion”[2.2]—to resolving this dilemma. Insofar as orthodox Israeli historians had treated it, they consigned the idea of transfer to a footnote, downplaying it as incidental to the Zionist enterprise.Thus, Shabtai Teveth purported that the Zionist movement only “here and there” and “briefly” contemplated transfer, while, according to Anita Shapira, the Zionist movement conceived transfer merely as a “good thing”that it could just as well “do without.”[2.3] But Morris contended in his groundbreaking study, Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, that, on the contrary, from the mid-1930's “the idea of transferring the Arabs out . . . was seen as the chief means of assuring the stability of the ‘Jewishness’ of the proposed Jewish State,”[2.4] while in Righteous Victims he wrote that “the transfer idea . . . was one of the main currents in Zionist ideology from the movement’s inception.”[5] In another seminal essay, Morris documented that “thinking about the transfer of all or part of Palestine’s Arabs out of the prospective Jewish state was pervasive among Zionist leadership circles long before 1937.”[6]In a greatly expanded version ofBirth, [2.7] Morris gave over fully 25 densely argued pages to documenting the depth and breadth of “the idea of ‘transfer’in Zionist thinking.” His conclusion merits full quotation:

“[T]ransfer was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism—because it sought to transform a land which was ‘Arab’ into a ‘Jewish’ state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population; and because this aim automatically produced resistance among the Arabs which, in turn, persuaded the Yishuv’s leaders that a hostile Arab majority or large minority could not remain in place if a Jewish state was to arise or safely endure.”[2.8]   

Thus, in Morris’s temporal-logical sequence of the conflict’s genesis, Zionist transfer was cause and Arab resistance effect in an ever-expanding spiral. He put forth a sequence of succinct and copiously documented formulations on this crucial point in Righteous Victims: “The fear of territorial displacement and dispossession was to be the chief motor of Arab antagonism to Zionism down to 1948 (and indeed after 1967 as well)”; “In the 1880's there were already Arabs who understood that the threat from Zionism was not merely a local matter or a by-product of cultural estrangement.‘The natives are hostile towards us, saying that we have come to drive them out of the country,’ recorded one Zionist settler”; “[T]he major cause of tension and violence . . . was . . . the conflicting interests and goals of the two populations. The Arabs sought instinctively to . . . maintain their position as [Palestine’s] rightful inhabitants; the Zionists sought radically to change the status quo . . . and eventually turn an Arab-populated country into a Jewish homeland. . . . The Arabs, both urban and rural, came to feel anxiety and fear.”[9]In the conclusion of Righteous Victims, Morris reiterated that the Arabs’trepidation and ensuing opposition were “solidly anchored in a perception that [Zionist] expansion . . . would be at the expense of their people, principally and initially those living in Palestine itself.”[2.10] As Morris originally reckoned it, Arab fear was rational—because transfer was “inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism”—and Arab resistance natural—because it sprang“automatically” from the Zionist goal of transfer. He located the root of the conflict in a historical clash between Zionism and the indigenous Arab population of Palestine and the historical (if not moral) onus for engendering the conflict was placed squarely by Morris on the shoulders of the Zionist movement.[2.11]

When Benny Morris was still a historian (the “old” Morris), he anchored the resistance of Palestine’s indigenous population in its rational fear that Zionist settlers intended to “transfer”—i.e., ethnically cleanse—it (see Part 2). The “new” Morris, however, has a very different story to tell. He drastically reduces the salience of transfer in Zionism; locates the genesis of the conflict in “Islamic Judeophobia”; and reckons transfer as a Zionist reaction to this Islamic Judeophobia and the “expulsionist” tendency inherent in it. Cause and effect have magically been reversed: expulsionist Judeophobia—which is inevitable and inbuilt into Islam—is the cause, Zionist transfer—which automatically springs from Islamic Judeophobia—the effect. The onus for engendering the conflict is now placed by Morris squarely on the shoulders of the Arabs, while Zionists are depicted as the innocent victims of a lethal Muslim intolerance towards Jews.

According to this new Morris, transfer initially figured as but a “minor and secondary element” in Zionism; “it had not been part of the original Zionist ideology”; key Zionist leaders only “occasionally” supported transfer “between 1881 and the mid-1940s”; and “its thrust was never adopted by the Zionist movement . . . as ideology or policy” until the late 1940s.[3.1] Whereas the old Morris asserted that “the logic of a transfer solution to the ‘Arab problem’ remained ineluctable” for the Zionist movement, and “without some sort of massive displacement of Arabs from the area of the Jewish state-to-be, there could be no viable ‘Jewish’ state,”[3.2] the new Morris alleges that “the Zionist leaders generally said, and believed, that a Jewish majority would be achieved in Palestine, or in whatever part of it became a Jewish state, by means of massive Jewish immigration, and that this immigration would also materially benefit the Arab population.”3.[3]

If Zionists eventually came to embrace transfer, according to the new Morris, it was only in reaction to “expulsionist or terroristic violence by the Arabs,”[3.4] “expulsionist Arab thinking and murderous Arab behavior,”[3.5] which were “indirectly contributing to the murder of their [the Zionists’] European kinfolk by helping to deny them a safe haven in Palestine and by threatening the lives of the Jews who already lived in the country.”[3.6] Transfer has inexplicably metamorphosed from an “inevitable and inbuilt” component of Zionism—which is what Morris had written when he was still a historian—into a response “triggered”[3.7] by expulsionist Arab threats and assaults, not to mention Arab complicity in the Nazi holocaust. Indeed, in the narrative frame crafted by the new Morris, the indigenous population of a country has metamorphosed into expulsionists. Many cruel and unforgivable things have been said by American historians about our native population, but it took a peculiarly fecund Israeli mind to pin the label “starkly expulsionist”[3.8] on an indigenous population resisting expulsion. To document this “expulsionist mindset,”.[3.9] Morris cites the testimony of a Palestinian delegation before a foreign commission of inquiry: “We will push the Zionists into the sea—or they will send us back into the desert.”[3.10] Insofar as the Zionists were intent on “transferring the Arabs out,” it is unclear how this statement manifests malevolence. Doesn’t an indigenous population have the right to resist expulsion?

The new Morris alleges that “Arab expressions in the early years of the twentieth century of fear of eventual displacement and expulsion by the Zionists were largely propagandistic.”[3.11] He seems to have forgotten that he himself pointed up this fear as the “chief motor of Arab antagonism to Zionism” and that he rationally grounded this fear in Zionist transfer policy. Morris now purports that the Arabs’ resistance to Zionism sprang from their thralldom to the notion of “sacred Islamic soil”; was “anchored in centuries of Islamic Judeophobia”; and reached into “every fiber of their Islamic, exclusivist being.”[3.12] After Israel’s establishment, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion conceded, “If I was [sic] an Arab leader, I would never make [peace?] terms with Israel. That is natural: We have taken their country.” The new Morris alleges, however, that, because of his ignorance of the Arab world, Ben-Gurion failed to grasp that this rejection of Israel was not “natural” but rather rooted in Islamic “abhorrence” of Jews.[3.13] Insofar as Morris is not known for his expertise on Islam, and insofar as he used to be known for not speculating a hair’s breadth beyond what his sources showed, it might be expected that he would copiously substantiate such gross generalizations. But Morris’s elucidation of 14 centuries of an allegedly hate-filled “Muslim Arab mindset” and “Muslim Arab mentality” consists of all of one half paragraph of boilerplate.[3.14]

[1.1]New York: 1987.

[1.2]New York: 1993.

[1.3]New York: 1999.

[1.4]London: 2003.

[1.5]New York: 2008.

[1.6]New Haven: 2009.

[2.1] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A history of the Zionist-Arab conflict, 1881-2001(New York: 2001), pp. 652-54, 61.

[2.2]Shabtai Teveth, The Evolution of “Transfer” in Zionist Thinking (Tel Aviv: 1989), p. 17.

[2.3]Ibid., pp. 2, 6. Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist resort to force, 1881-1948

(Oxford: 1992), pp. 285-86.

[2.4]Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949(Cambridge: 1987), p. 25.

[2.5]Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 139.

[2.6]Benny Morris, “Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948,” in Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim, eds.,The War for Palestine: Rewriting the history of 1948(Cambridge: 2001), p. 40. The British proposed in 1937, and the Zionists seconded, transfer alongside partition to resolve the Palestine conflict.

[2.7]Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge:

2004).

[2.8] Ibid., p. 60.

[2.9]Morris, Righteous Victims, pp. 37, 46, 49.

[2.10] Ibid., p. 653.

[2.11]It could still be argued, and it is Morris’s contention, that although creating a Jewish state necessarily entailed the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the establishment of a Jewishstate was nonetheless a greater moral good. Even in his original, liberal phase, Morrisput both moral and historical culpability for the creation of the Palestinian refugeeproblem on the Arabs because, inter alia, they rejected the UN Partition Resolution

[3.1] Benny Morris, 1948: The first Arab-Israeli war (New York: 2008), p. 407; Benny Morris, “Fallible Memory,” New Republic (3 February 2011).

[3.2] Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited(Cambridge: 2004), p. 43.

[3.3] Benny Morris, “And Now for Some Facts,” New Republic (28 April 2006).

[3.4] Morris, 1948, p. 407.

3.[5] Morris, “Fallible Memory.”

[3.6] Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict (New Haven: 2009),p. 68.

[3.7] Ibid., p. 67.

[3.8] Ibid., p. 105.

[3.9] Morris, 1948, p. 409.

[3.10] Ibid., p. 408.

[3.11] Morris, One State, p. 179.

[3.12] Morris, 1948, pp. 393, 394; Morris, One State, p. 90. In one place he does grant albeit grudgingly that Arab opposition to Zionist settlers resulted not only from the “threat to the ‘Arab-ness’ of their country” but “perhaps, down the road, to their very presence in the land” (ibid., p. 37).

[3.13] Morris, 1948, p. 393.

[3.14] Morris, One State, pp. 188-89.