The Donkey of the Messiah
It reminds one of Mark Twain’s oft quoted words: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
By now this has become an intellectual fad. To advocate the two-state solution means that you are ancient, old-fashioned, stale, stodgy, a fossil from a bygone era. Hoisting the flag of the “one-state solution” means that you are young, forward-looking, “cool”.
Actually, this only shows how ideas move in circles. When we declared in early 1949, just after the end of the first Israeli-Arab war, that the only answer to the new situation was the establishment of a Palestinian state side by side with Israel, the “one-state solution” was already old.
The idea of a “bi-national state” was in vogue in the 1930s. Its main advocates were well-meaning intellectuals, many of them luminaries of the new Hebrew University, like Judah Leon Magnes and Martin Buber. They were reinforced by the Hashomer Hatza’ir kibbutz movement, which later became the Mapam party.
It never gained any traction. The Arabs believed that it was a Jewish trick. Bi-nationalism was built on the principle of parity between the two populations in Palestine – 50% Jews, 50% Arabs. Since the Jews at that time were much less than half the population, Arab suspicions were reasonable.
On the Jewish side, the idea looked ridiculous. The very essence of Zionism was to have a state where Jews would be masters of their fate, preferably in all of Palestine.
At the time, no one called it the “one-state solution” because there was already one state – the State of Palestine, ruled by the British. The “solution” was called “the bi-national state” and died, unmourned, in the war of 1948.
What has caused the miraculous resurrection of this idea?
Not the birth of a new love between the two peoples. Such a phenomenon would have been wonderful, even miraculous. If Israelis and Palestinians had discovered their common values, the common roots of their history and languages, their common love for this country – why, wouldn’t that have been absolutely splendid?
But, alas, the renewed “one-state solution” was not born of another immaculate conception. Its father is the occupation, its mother despair.
The occupation has already created a de facto One State – an evil state of oppression and brutality, in which half the population (or slightly less than half) deprives the other half of almost all rights – human rights, economic rights and political rights. The Jewish settlements proliferate, and every day brings new stories of woe.
Good people on both sides have lost hope. But hopelessness does not stir to action. It fosters resignation.
Let’s go back to the starting point. “The two-state solution is dead”. How come? Who says? In accordance with what scientific criteria has death been certified?
Generally, the spread of the settlements is cited as the sign of death. In the 1980s the respected Israeli historian Meron Benvenisti pronounced that the situation had now become “irreversible”. At the time, there were hardly 100 thousand settlers in the occupied territories (apart from East Jerusalem, which by common consent is a separate issue). Now they claim to be 300 thousand, but who is counting? How many settlers mean irreversibility? 100, 300, 500, 800 thousand?
History is a hothouse of reversibility. Empires grow and collapse. Cultures flourish and wither. So do social and economic patterns. Only death is irreversible.
I can think of a dozen different ways to solve the settlement problem, from forcible removal to exchange of territories to Palestinian citizenship. Who believed that the settlements in North Sinai would be removed so easily? That the evacuation of the Gaza Strip settlements would become a national farce?
In the end, there will probably be a mixture of several ways, according to circumstances.
All the Herculean problems of the conflict can be resolved – if there is a will. It’s the will that is the real problem.
The one-staterslike to base themselves on the South African experience. For them, Israel is an apartheid state, like the former South Africa, and therefore the solution must be South African-like.
The situation in the occupied territories, and to some extent in Israel proper, does indeed strongly resemble the apartheid regime. The apartheid example may be justly cited in political debate. But in reality, there is very little deeper resemblance – if any – between the two countries.
David Ben-Gurion once gave the South African leaders a piece of advice: partition. Concentrate the white population in the south, in the Cape region, and cede the other parts of the country to the blacks. Both sides in South Africa rejected this idea furiously, because both sides believed in a single, united country.
They largely spoke the same languages, adhered to the same religion, were integrated in the same economy. The fight was about the master-slave relationship, with a small minority lording it over a massive majority.
Nothing of this is true in our country. Here we have two different nations, two populations of nearly equal size, two languages, two (or rather, three) religions, two cultures, two totally different economies.
A false proposition leads to false conclusions. One of them is that Israel, like Apartheid South Africa, can be brought to its knees by an international boycott. About South Africa, this is a patronizing imperialist illusion. The boycott, moral and important as it was, did not do the job. It was the Africans themselves, aided by some local white idealists, who did it by their courageous strikes and uprisings.
I am an optimist, and I do hope that eventually Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs will become sister nations, living side by side in harmony. But to come to that point, there must be a period of living peacefully in two adjoining states, hopefully with open borders.
The people who speak now of the “one-state solution” are idealists. But they do a lot of harm. And not only because they remove themselves and others from the struggle for the only solution that is realistic.
If we are going to live together in one state, it makes no sense to fight against the settlements. If Haifa and Ramallah will be in the same state, what is the difference between a settlement near Haifa and one near Ramallah? But the fight against the settlements is absolutely essential, it is the main battlefield in the struggle for peace.
Indeed, the one-state solution is the common aim of the extreme Zionist right and the extreme anti-Zionist left. And since the right is incomparably stronger, it is the left that is aiding the right, and not the other way round.
In theory, that is as it should be. Because the one-staters believe that the rightists are only preparing the ground for their future paradise. The right is uniting the country and putting an end to the possibility of creating an independent State of Palestine. They will subject the Palestinians to all the horrors of apartheid and much more, since the South African racists did not aim at displacing and replacing the blacks. But in due course – perhaps in a mere few decades, or half a century – the world will compel Greater Israel to grant the Palestinians full rights, and Israel will become Palestine.
According to this ultra-leftist theory, the right, which is now creating the racist one state, is in reality the Donkey of the Messiah, the legendary animal on which the Messiah will ride to triumph.
It’s a beautiful theory, but what is the assurance that this will actually happen? And before the final stage arrives, what will happen to the Palestinian people? Who will compel the rulers of Greater Israel to accept the diktat of world public opinion?
If Israel now refuses to bow to world opinion and enable the Palestinians to have their own state in 28% of historical Palestine, why would they bow to world opinion in the future and dismantle Israel altogether?
Speaking about a process that will surely last 50 years and more, who knows what will happen? What changes will take place in the world in the meantime? What wars and other catastrophes will take the world’s mind off the “Palestinian issue”?
Would one really gamble the fate of one’s nation on a far-fetched theory like this?
Assuming FOR a moment that the one-state solution would really come about, how would it function?
Will Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs serve in the same army, pay the same taxes, obey the same laws, work together in the same political parties? Will there be social intercourse between them? Or will the state sink into an interminable civil war?
Other peoples have found it impossible to live together in one state. Take the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia. Serbia. Czechoslovakia. Cyprus. Sudan. The Scots want to secede from the United Kingdom. So do the Basques and the Catalans from Spain. The French in Canada and the Flemish in Belgium are uneasy. As far as I know, nowhere in the entire world have two different peoples agreed to form a joint state for decades.
No, the two-state solution is not dead. It cannot die, because it is the only solution there is.
Despair may be convenient and tempting. But despair is no solution at all.
Read more by Uri Avnery
- No, We Can’t! – May 5th, 2013
- Obama in Palestine: In Their Shoes – April 7th, 2013
- After Bibi’s Apology, Reflect on the Idiocy of Attacking the Gaza Flotilla – March 29th, 2013
- The Riddle of the Israel Lobby – February 24th, 2013
- Welcome, Chuck – January 11th, 2013
Zephyr Global Report 1/13/2013 | Zephyr Global Report
May 12th, 2013 at 10:23 pm
[...] The Donkey of the Messiah by Uri Avnery [...]
Duglarri
May 12th, 2013 at 10:54 pm
Thank you, Mr. Avnery, for once again casting this very old conflict in a new and undeniably accurate light.
You are correct; there is very good reason to never support a one-state solution.
All we may be left with, though, is the same thing without the third word. We will in fact end up with one state, but no solution.
Curious
May 12th, 2013 at 11:27 pm
Alexander the Great told the Greeks that they must help defeat Persia because of the burning of Athens. As long as Islam exists there will be Muslims out to conquer Jerusalem and to avenge their Palestinian brothers if a solution cannot be found now. The Israeli right may remove every Palestinian off the land they want but they are surrounded by Muslims who will know the history of the conflict. There might not be a sympathetic power out there strong enough (the West) or willing (BRIC) to support Israel in the future. If the Israeli right gets its way the only thing Sunnis will have to occupy themselves with is Israel after the fall of the Shia Crescent. I think Israeli colonialism will end badly. If neither can agree on a two state solution then is a bi-national state preferable to a conquered sliver of territory surrounded by a billion enemies who pump the blood of the global economy? Israelis would be at a complete disadvantage politically if they are conquered. Would the conquerors turn the other cheek?
Rebel Identity
May 13th, 2013 at 2:41 am
I respect Mr Avnery's historical contribution to peace deeply, but I do not agree with his analysis. He seeks to attack and rubbish the 'one state solution' above at every opportunity, because I'm afraid to say, despite his courage and sincerity, at heart he is a Zionist. He cannot acknowledge that the one state solution is just as based on sound arguments and realism as the two state solution is. For him it must be rubbished as the absurd dream of 'liberal academics' in an ivory tower. Such a critique is a slanderous and divisive rhetorical device, a technique deriving from Stalinism in fact, and it does no justice to his own intellect.
Mr Avnery is full of contempt for the idea of two peoples living in the one state, and cites the likes of eastern Europe or Belgium as an example. But there are just as many examples that can be turned around to argue the opposite, including one which bears some similarity to the Israel/Palestine one, the Northern Ireland example. The truth is that Mr Avnery has an 'idee fixee' about the nation state, an idea that is increasingly under question in the modern world, despite its still prevailing traction in ideological circles. But it is Mr Avnery's preconception of identity which is built on despair, not that of the 'misguided idealists' he castigates.
Mr Avnery rubbishes the one state solution as 'unworkable', citing several examples that, standing alone, do make effective counter-arguments. But he cannot acknowledge that one could isolate elements of the two state solution in exactly the same way and make laughing stock of these too. Let us ask some of these questions to turn his 'one state' objections on their head: in the two states, what will happen about water supply, for example? This is quite a basic question. What about the joint sacred sites is another. Or how exactly is Gaza to be connected to the West Bank? What about the massive transfers of population that would be required, in both directions? How would these be achieved without horrific violence and ethnic cleansing, especially within Israel? What about the Palestinians in Israel, who would no doubt be ejected to 'make room' for the 'returning' settlers, but who despite their current second class status are happier with the limited choices they have in Israel, rather than being part of some third world 'Palestinian' state, run by Hamas and the PLO? And what about the people in both political entities who do not closely identify with one national identity or the other, or that have other chosen identities which are more important to them? The tens of thousands of young Israelis for example, who prefer the freer life choices of Berlin (yes, Berlin!) than the ones they would have to make in the warped matrix of their supposed 'native land'. In the modern world of international communication and multi-faceted, complex identities that cross over increasingly with each other, this number of 'unclassifiable' (predominantly young) people are growing every day. So, Mr Avnery, I'm afraid your article is not a rational discussion of pros and cons, but is instead an ideological attack on just one position from a polemical point of view.
Mr Avnery is right about the central problem being a lack of will. But as shown above this is a critique that one could make of either proposed 'solution'. Personally, I don't care what solution is reached, as long as it is one which offers justice to the Palestinians. My personal ideals are different to all of the above, and I don't care which one achieves the goal. My preference would be for a 'no state' solution, because every single 'nation state' is at heart an artificial ideological mould, a concentration of power forged in violence and bureaucracy that simply enables abusive manipulation by corrupt elites. But I'm not going to impose my 'ideal solution' on anyone as the only correct one – if people are going to get there, then they'll have to realise it themselves.
Answer that, Mr Avnery, because I think you should.
Johnny in Wi.
May 13th, 2013 at 4:48 am
Good comments Rebel. Uri's heart is in the right place but he is wrong. Better a one state solution, with equal rights for all, with large reparations paid to the Palestinians for all the crimes committed against them. This welfare queen of country has to be able to get along with it's neighbors. We can't carry their water anymore.
Articles for Monday » Scott Lazarowitz's Blog
May 13th, 2013 at 6:39 am
[...] Uri Avnery: The Donkey of the Messiah [...]
Tuyzentfloot
May 13th, 2013 at 12:54 pm
It's not an honest article. Avnery should have mentioned that a one-state solution would mean the end of his zionist dream of a jewish state and he has never been able to accept it even in principle. I particularly enjoy the argument that in South Africa a one state solution could work because black and white had so much in common, while in Israel the parties involved have very little in common.
Still his motivation aside, if he brings a reasonable argument it's a reasonable argument, and how someone is going to sell one-state to the jewish public I have no idea. As far as jewish Israelis are concerned the current situation preferable by far, and nothing's compelling them to do otherwise. Palestinians are just a nuisance in the background.
john g
May 13th, 2013 at 1:32 pm
Oh well. Just as well I have broad shoulders to bare the burden.
All this ad hominem against the left is getting a bit tiresome. We have no power, no influence, no friends in high places, ut somehow, we're still in part at least, to blame for all the world's ills.
Augustbrhm
May 13th, 2013 at 4:17 pm
It is PALESTINIAN land for 1192 years the zionist had it for 160yrs built the temple they are on occupied land and are there to keep an eye on their arab nation and to control them with nuclear weapons.
Augustbrhm
May 13th, 2013 at 4:23 pm
It should happen to you to starve,torture,murder,rape,bulldoze your home in the dead of winter you will carry their water as long as the zionist control america and send you to murder men,women,children babes in arms "YOU DUNCE"
Uri Avnery’s Specious Attack On The One State Solution | Ramy Abdeljabbar's Palestine and World News
May 15th, 2013 at 3:16 am
[...] West Bank and support for a “two state solution.” Avnery’s latest piece, “The Donkey of the Messiah,” will, with its feigned concern for “being realistic” and specious [...]