A one-state solution is best for Israel and the Palestinians. Here's why.
The two-state solution is an ignorant idea because it will not afford Israel security, not bring peace, and not liberate Palestinians from dictatorship. It fails on all counts.
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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of Moral Clarity.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The so-called two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an ignorant idea.
We should be looking at other options. Unfortunately, the antisemitic double standard that plagues discourse about Israel always derails the discussion.
While the real obstacle to peace — which is Islamism and a Palestinian refusal to live with and/or alongside Jews, cannot be solved easily — the constitutional arrangements are not as unsolvable as supposed.
Obviously, it should be one state, Israel, with some degree of Palestinian self-governance. The fine print would need to be negotiated.
At this point, the usual objections start getting trotted out. If Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) and even Gaza were part of Israel, the Palestinians there would have to be given citizenship and voting rights and then Israel would cease to be, or soon cease to be, a Jewish state. There is no way Israel would accept that, so it cannot work.
The anti-Israel mob would also start bloviating about how it would be an undemocratic state, an apartheid state, and all sorts of other deeply tiresome nonsense.
This objection is based on a flawed and ultimately racist premise that Israel must be a perfect democracy. It does not.
Simply granting the Palestinians permanent residency (with citizenship of Jordan or other Arab states, or travel papers) and granting them all other rights is entirely viable and just.
People who have residency status but not citizenship are common in many countries.
There are 3.2 million people in the unincorporated U.S. territory of Puerto Rico who are not U.S. citizens, cannot vote in national elections, and enjoy more rights than most people on Earth.
About 1.2 million people in Australia have permanent residency status, meaning they enjoy full rights except the right to vote, and no one considers that an outrage or human rights violation.
The number in Canada: a whopping 8 million, which is ironic given that Canada, under its current uninspiring and unprincipled Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, has collapsed into a hotbed of antisemitism and become a staunch critic of Israel and its alleged transgressions.
Britain’s ruling Labor Party has two thirds of the seats in the House of Commons, despite it winning only a third of the vote. How is that for democracy?
It does not happen often, but in the U.S. a candidate can win the presidency through the electoral college without winning a majority in the national vote. It happened in 1824, 1876, 1888, and more recently in 2000 and 2016.
No one demands that these states be the perfect democracies. Discussions are limited to things such as voting reform, which never happens because various interests are too entrenched.
The world is also okay with no one having a vote in mainland China, or in the Arab world, or the way apartheid against half the population — women — is the norm in many Muslim states. Only Israel is held to the democratic ideals of a political science textbook.
The arguments against granting Palestinians residency in Israel on democratic grounds are not as strong as they first appear. The real reason for these objections is that Palestinians and their thuggish supporters in the West want a single state in which the Jewish State of Israel is subsumed into an Arab state of “Palestine.”
It is nothing more than their usual desire to destroy Israel, only they are hiding this goal under the cloak of democracy, about which they do not care at all. This is part of the Palestinian strategy of shrouding its genocidal intentions to destroy Israel in the modern Western language of human rights. No thinking person should fall for this.
Palestinians with residency in Israel would have more rights than any other Arabs, except Israeli Arabs. This should be a welcome fact. Hamas and the Palestinian Authority run dictatorships in Gaza and Judea and Samaria, respectively, so a Palestinian state would be just another Middle Eastern dictatorship, and an unstable one at that.
Palestinians are rightfully angry about the lack of democracy under the Palestinian Authority, with 76 percent of Palestinians saying that they want President Mahmoud Abbas to resign and new elections to be held, polling from the Palestinian Center of Policy and Survey research shows.
It seems democracy matters to them more than it does to their shrimp-brained supporters in the West, who are happy to consign them to life in just another autocratic Arab state in the name of “peace.”
It is bizarre that people can oppose a single Israeli state on the grounds that it is not a pristine democracy yet be perfectly okay with an undemocratic Palestinian state under a two-state model.
Palestinians could vote in regional and local elections, and be integrated into the technological and economic powerhouse that is Israel’s economy. They could contribute to and enjoy the fruits of Israel’s success. Full normalization with the Arab and Muslim world and prosperity would follow. The peace dividend would be enormous.
If you asked the average punter to define democracy, winning a majority of the vote would be their first criterion. Yet, that alone is majoritarianism, not democracy. There are other features of democracy such as free expression, freedom of association, freedom of worship, the rule of law, and protection of minority rights, among many others.
These are just as important as majority rule, given the vagaries that different political and voting systems produce. This is what helps make a society decent and liberal (in the classical sense).
The Middle East is not part of the West and does not share its political and democratic norms, so there is no reason Israel should be held to an impossibly high standard, let alone one that is alien to a tribal region.
Israel is singled out as the only state that must be an unadulterated democracy so Jew-haters can apply their usual double and even triple standards. Only Israel is required to be a perfect democracy.
Other examples of this double standard are:
Israel being expected to allow its enemies to fire rockets at it but not allowed to respond with enough force to stop it
Israel being required to minimize civilian casualties more than any other nation
Israel being made the only country in history required to provide humanitarian aid to an enemy during warfare
Israel has a unique and complex history, so bringing peace between it and the Palestinians is going to require some imagination and a bespoke solution that works for the people’s betterment and welfare.
Granting Palestinians residency is how Israel can remain a Jewish state where Jews — a post-Holocaust people — have security and control of their destiny, and where Palestinian Arabs have rights, dignity, and a path to prosperity.
Palestinians who do not like it should be free to leave to one of the other 21 Arab countries, or anywhere else, while any Jewish supremacists who do not want to live with Arabs would also be free to leave.
While the orthodox thinking among “pro-Palestinians” is that, when any Palestinian leaves it is tantamount to Israel having displaced them, that is utterly wrong. As anyone from Communist Europe could attest, the freedom to leave is no small thing.
The two-state solution is an ignorant idea because it will not afford Israel security, not bring peace, and not liberate Palestinians from dictatorship. It fails on all counts.
A confederation is one alternative, to which the political scientist in me is partial, but a one-state solution in which Palestinians are residents with extensive rights is not some impossible, crazy, and unjust idea.
Do not let any of anti-Israel propagandists tell you otherwise.
The problem I see with this is that the Palestinians will work against any solution that doesn’t give them the entire region. If they are given their own state it will fail because it’s almost impossible to create a workable government amongst them without corruption. And the factions and their inability to compromise will ultimately lead you to failure. If they have their own state then only that state will fail. But if we try to establish one state with 2.3 million people that hate Jews, the entire state will fail.
What about the suicide bombing?