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MAKING IT WORK FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA  
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Matthew Teller
February 26, 2024
New Lines Magazine
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_ For Israel and Palestine, security depends on equal treatment now
that the ‘land for peace’ formula has failed _

A man walks past a section of Israel’s separation barrier in
Bethlehem, painted with a portrait of Marwan Barghouti., Hazem
Bader/AFP via Getty Images

 

 

 

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21 min
 
One could reasonably argue that religious identity does not, in and of
itself, drive people to oppress others and commit heinous acts.
Politics does that. Palestine is a political problem.

Yet for almost a century, governments and others have parroted the
idea of a two-state solution based on ethnic and religious partition
as the best, and indeed often the only, way forward. Partition is old
and discredited. The people who will have to live under it — and
since this century’s wars have starkly demonstrated the
interconnectedness of our globalized world, not only them — deserve
better than to be putting their children’s hopes into our
grandparents’ basket.

It is true that there is not much desire to share. Israelis, enjoying
vastly superior power, remain maximalist, Palestinians slightly less
so. Both seek national self-determination on their own terms. But the
plain reality is that they cannot both have it, because — rightly or
wrongly — they both seek it in the same place. For them both to be
able to achieve true and lasting national self-determination, they
must do so not in 2D, cartographically, but in 3D, holographically.
Say hello to nonterritorial autonomy, a long-standing but
little-discussed method of managing diversity within a state by
granting dispersed groups self-government on the basis of identity
rather than land, while also retaining a broader structure of power
sharing.

Overlaying two nations on one country sounds like science fiction, but
that is testament to the corrosive power of the nationalist thinking
that drives the two-state solution. Partition says more about the
preoccupations of the chiefly American and European politicians who
cling to it than it does about the aspirations or real lives of the
people who will have to live in the resulting states. What, in truth,
are the arguments justifying a solution that permits one population to
continue dominating another, whether as occupier or neighbor? What are
the arguments against equal opportunity for all? What are the
arguments against democracy and universal suffrage, and equal
application of the law?

We must unlearn some of the conventions we grew up with. Partition has
failed almost everywhere it has been attempted. Ireland is perhaps the
starkest example, but we might also consider India and Pakistan in
1947, Pakistan again and Bangladesh in 1971, Korea, Vietnam, Cyprus,
Yugoslavia, Sudan and a fistful of others. Partition has perpetuated
conflict and embedded trauma down the generations. Millions have died
thanks to the idea that separating supposedly irreconcilable
populations solves everything.

The “land for peace” formula was a failure. The challenge now is
to decouple peace from land, to recognize that future security for all
depends not on the acquisition of territory, but on equal treatment. A
yearning for justice — for universal civil, political and human
rights under the rule of law — is what drives the one-state
solution.

Decoupling false conflations is becoming vital everywhere. The
historically wide gaps between Jewish communities, whether between
Israel and the diaspora, secular and observant or even between streams
of observance — their separate outlooks and priorities, their
differing levels of influence and mutual respect — are today vast.
It will take immense skill and bravery from people all across the
Jewish world to successfully detach the spiritual and cultural bond
between Jews and Zion (meaning the Land of Israel) — a formative
tenet of Jewish identity — from the destructive, discredited idea of
supremacist governance inherent in Zionism.

All of this demands more than a 20th-century style partition.

First, a truism: Christians can get on with Muslims. Muslims can get
on with Jews. Jews can get on with Christians. Israel’s nationalist
schemer Avigdor Lieberman may have told The New York Times in 2006
that “[e]very country where you have two languages, two religions
and two races, you have conflict,” but decent folk need not go along
with him. As much as the region’s history is marked by spasms of
religiously inspired violence, it is also underpinned by long
centuries of not just tolerance but productive coexistence.

The 10th-century geographer al-Muqaddasi — who was born in Jerusalem
and self-identified as Palestinian — reflects the reality of urban
pluralism where he writes of the excessive influence of Jews and
Christians in his city. The writings of the Jewish traveler Benjamin
of Tudela, 200 years later, reveal broad social diversity as he
crisscrosses “the Land of Israel,” describing Muslim and Christian
rituals and holy places as carefully and dispassionately as his own.

In 1394, a Muslim woman, Qutlumalik bint Abdallah, lived in an
apartment she owned in a house in which Jews also lived in
Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter. It is unlikely such a setup was unique.
In 1656, a Christian woman named Maryam bint Eid was confident enough
in her rights under the law to stand up in Jerusalem’s Islamic
courts and speak against her husband. She won.

We have 19th-century accounts of Muslims, Jews and Christians
descending steps on the Mount of Olives to a subterranean tomb
dedicated to Rabia al-Adawiyya or Hulda or Saint Pelagia while praying
side by side. The Orthodox Christian diarist Wasif Jawhariyyeh wrote
in the early 20th century of his family friendships and close working
relationships with Muslim and Jewish neighbors, and how Jerusalemites
would celebrate religious festivals together across confessional
lines.

Of course, there were also pogroms aplenty. Yet while we should
strongly resist the fantasy of Palestine as paradise, we should also
acknowledge that, at least until about a century ago, people generally
lived the daily reality of sharing limited space more or less
amicably. Two-state approaches to peace rest on the creation of
single-ethnicity, religiously defined states, an Israel for Jews and a
Palestine for Muslim and Christian Arabs. But sectarian exclusivity is
not a Middle Eastern ideal. It is European.

Persecution in the 1880s killed many in Russia’s deeply rooted
Jewish communities and displaced millions more, including my
great-grandparents. They fled for their lives and ended up in the
slums of London, forced to start again. European antisemitism —
never far below the surface — erupted with the Dreyfus affair in
France, the Hilsner affair in Bohemia, antisemitic policy in Poland
and Romania, the proto-Hitlerian mayor of Vienna Karl Lueger,
Britain’s racist Aliens Act and more.

It was against this backdrop that a group of European Jewish
journalists and political pundits, seeking safe havens, borrowed from
evangelical Christian millenarianism to promote the novel idea that
Jews were a nation and so deserved self-determination in a state of
their own.

This was political Zionism, an ideology contrasting sharply with the
spiritual longing for Zion expressed in Jewish liturgy, and it emerged
in a vicious era. Civilization was understood to be an achievement of
white Europeans. Its apogee, the summit of human enterprise, was the
advanced ability of white people to create nation-states. They
governed best, and it was the natural order for everyone else to be
governed.

British politician Arthur Balfour — famed for endorsing Zionism on
behalf of the British government in 1917 — was able to glide
effortlessly from stating that “the white and black races are not
born with equal capacities” to the idea that a Zionist state in
Palestine would “mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western
civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body [the Jews] which
is alien and even hostile.”

Zionism fit into Balfour’s worldview of racial supremacy and the
social ideal of what we would now call ethnic cleansing. Its
exceptionalism also led, as the historian Avi Shlaim has written, to
another key assumption — that Jews and Arabs occupy exclusive and
antagonistic ethnic categories. Shlaim himself asserts the falsity of
that assumption in his self-identification as an Arab Jew, as do other
notable figures including journalist Rachel Shabi, academic Ella
Shohat, author Sasson Somekh and art curator Ariella Azoulay.

In his recent book “Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew,” Shlaim
wrote: “The Zionist movement was in origin and in essence a European
movement led by European Jews who wanted to create a Jewish state for
European Jews. … By its very nature, [it] deepened divisions [and]
actively worked to erase our common past, our intertwined histories
and our centuries-old heritage of pluralism, religious tolerance,
cosmopolitanism and co-existence. Above all, Zionism has discouraged
us from seeing each other as fellow human beings.”

Moshe Dayan, Israel’s defense minister during the war of 1967, is
reported to have said after the Israeli army conquered the Egyptian
Sinai that it was better to have Sharm el-Sheikh without peace than to
have peace without Sharm el-Sheikh. In the end, of course, he had
neither, but Zionism’s zero-sum outlooks have long driven Israeli
policy and were also long mirrored on the Palestinian side. But the
past few years have seen a shift in Palestinian opinion away from
older generations’ lingering trauma around lost land to a new focus
on attaining equality of rights wherever grossly unjust conditions
prevail under Israeli control.

This has illuminated a long-standing slogan of liberation: “From the
river to the sea” (with or without “Palestine will be free”
appended). Some — wildly mistaken — choose to interpret the
sentiment as genocidal, a call for the erasure of Jewish presence.
Public prosecutors in Germany even tried (and failed) to criminalize
it.

The phrase is not new: It has been said for 60 years or more by
Palestinians and Israelis alike who oppose the reality of partition.
Its new urgency comes in response to Israel’s legislative and
bureaucratic division of Palestinian society into eight separate
categories of people, each granted fewer rights than the last. At the
top are Palestinian citizens of Israel, evasively defined in Israeli
rhetoric as “Arab Israelis.” They hold Israeli passports and they
enjoy freedom of movement and economic activity, access to Israeli
healthcare and education and the right to vote, but they also face
institutional discrimination and widespread racism in Israeli society.

Below them are the Palestinians of Jerusalem. They may apply for
Israeli citizenship, but Israel can — and often does — refuse it.
Most are stateless. They cannot vote in national elections and
although Palestinian districts of Jerusalem hold around 35% of the
city’s population, they receive between 5% and 12% of funding from
the municipal budget. Israel’s separation wall isolates two such
districts, Kufr Aqab and Shuafat Camp, which — uniquely — are
inside the city but physically separated from it. Palestinian
officials may not enter and Israeli ones refuse to. Despite for the
most part paying Israeli taxes, people live there in overcrowded
anarchy: stateless, abandoned, in substandard housing, with
nonexistent services and no law enforcement.

Next come Palestinians in the West Bank, who are not citizens and who
have no representation in the authorities that govern their lives.
Their movement is controlled by Israeli military checkpoints and
surveillance, and threatened by armed Israeli settlers. If arrested,
they face trial in Israel’s military courts, which convict in more
than 99% of cases. Palestinian residents in the West Bank’s
Oslo-imposed subdivisions of Areas C, B and A live under progressively
greater restrictions.

Then there are the Palestinians of Gaza. Even before the current
horror, they lived trapped in what is effectively a concentration
camp, with no rights and no freedom of movement, under continuous
hostile surveillance, with every aspect of their lives controlled by
Israel.

The lowest layer in the cake is made up of the 50% of Palestinians who
live elsewhere in the world. They may visit their homeland only as
tourists, applying to Israeli authorities for a short-stay visitor
visa and then, should one be granted, often facing punitive
immigration controls.

Faced with such absurd cruelty, “From the river to the sea” is
simply a plea to be rid of it. It seeks to sweep away the divisions,
to reclaim equality. It is an uncomplicated rejection of Israel’s
laws of classification and segregation and an assertion of the most
basic right to dignity in one state. It highlights that partition
represents calamitous political failure.

Only a few of partition’s flaws in the specific context of Palestine
and Israel can be addressed here. The standard proposal sees
conversion of the 1949 armistice lines into international borders
between two new states. But those lines apportion 78% of the land to
Israel. Even with land swaps and other adjustments taken into account,
supporting a “solution” that hands four-fifths of the available
territory to one party seems naive at best.

On those lines, the borders of a future Palestine would lie less than
five miles from major centers of Israeli population and 10 or 11 miles
from downtown Tel Aviv. Two states would embed insecurity in already
fearful Israelis.

In the same way, 700,000 Jewish Israelis live in the West Bank, many
armed and violent, often acting as informal auxiliary militias for the
Israeli army. Even in its strictest practicable form, partition
envisages half a million of them remaining in place. Two states would
likewise embed insecurity in already fearful Palestinians.

Palestine would be militarily indefensible, as would Israel. Questions
would arise about airspace, water rights and other transnational
issues. Any partitioned Israeli state that did not include the West
Bank, which Israel refers to with the biblical names Judea and
Samaria, would be unlikely to gain consent from its own population.
But, as the lawyer and Jerusalem expert Daniel Seidemann has
identified, a minimum of 200,000 Jewish Israelis would have to be
displaced from the West Bank in order to ensure the territorial
viability of a Palestinian state. Short of a land incursion by
international forces and a yearslong deployment of peacekeeping
troops, such an operation is inconceivable.

Similarly, any partitioned Palestinian state would have to include
Gaza. When “safe passage” across the 30 miles separating Gaza from
the West Bank was written into the Oslo II agreement, dreamers
advocated all kinds of schemes for bridges, tunnels, corridors, roads
and rail lines. Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Barak proposed an
elevated highway in 1999, and 20 years later U.S. President Donald
Trump imagined a tunnel. Either is achievable in terms of engineering.
Neither is viable in terms of security.

International law grants refugees who were expelled in 1948 the right
to return to their homes inside what is now Israel. The current
Israeli state denies them this right, with impunity. Partition would
endorse this illegality.

Two million Israeli citizens, roughly 20% of the population, are
Palestinian Arabs. Some, or many, might accept citizenship in a
partitioned Israeli state, were it to be offered. But an offer is by
no means certain. If — as many in Israel want — the new state
decides it has no room for Arabs, are these millions to be driven
across the border into Palestine, as Muslims and Hindus were driven
across the newly drawn India-Pakistan border in 1947? Should we
consent to the repeated moral outrage of ethnic cleansing as conflict
resolution?

Then there’s Jerusalem. Barring inchoate and unprecedented
international custodianship, partition requires division of a city
that Israeli politicians have characterized since 1949 as their
“eternal capital” and since 1978 as “indivisible.” The Clinton
Parameters of 2000 even imagined frontiers of sovereignty cutting to
and fro across the alleyways of Jerusalem’s historic Old City.
Nobody wants this.

Partition has its creative adaptations. Various ideas exist around
confederation, which envisages two sovereign entities devolving powers
upward to an overseeing authority for mutual benefit: The Israeli and
Palestinian governments, drawn from their respective parliaments,
share power with a common third government that is elected separately
by both populations, while national vetoes and legislative majorities
provide balance. A proposal called “A Land for All” develops
confederation into a kind of Schengen association, with open borders,
mutual residency rights and so on.

Yet the underlying flaws remain: The inequalities of territory that
resulted from the 1948 war are made permanent. Intolerance becomes the
basis for state-building. Segregation becomes the only possible
future. Is that the best we can do? Do two-staters imagine that the
dispossessed Palestinians in Amman will simply write off Jaffa and
al-Ludd (Lod) as gone forever?

Nonterritorial autonomy has a long pedigree, extending back centuries
in different contexts. It could exist in, for instance, a federal
structure, where a jointly representative federal government shares
power with Palestinian and Israeli governments that are autonomous but
not tied to specific territories. A federation of this kind, founded
on democracy, equal rights and the rule of law, and stretching between
river and sea, would respect the national aspirations of all, since it
would have an Arab character with Arabic as its official language and
be named “Filasteen,” and it would also have a Jewish character
and Hebrew as its official language and be named “Yisrael.”
Inasmuch as any state has a right to exist, Israel and Palestine are
on an equal footing. We can consign them to unending battles over
ownership of every pebble, or we can enable both to exist
simultaneously in the same space — to coexist.

The key there is “we.” Coercion is going to be essential. In
Northern Ireland in the 1990s, public weariness with fighting helped
pave the way for agreement. Today, though, Palestinians and Israelis
remain as determined as ever. We, the outside world, must therefore
demand accountability and force a sustainable resolution. One lesson
from Irish partition that is being learned, though too slowly, is that
there will be no military victory. That must now be understood
everywhere, in Washington, London and Brussels as well as across
Israel, Palestine and beyond. The only way forward will be political.
But decades of evidence suggest that this movement is not going to
come from within. We, the outsiders, will have to intervene. Nathan
Thrall wrote compellingly in his 2017 book “The Only Language They
Understand” about how every peace proposal has failed because,
ultimately, Israel has always preferred the status quo to any other
outcome. Two-state solutions would also favor Israel, on land area
alone. So, for the sake of peace, we must worsen the status quo for
Israel — and if the U.S. continues to refuse to impose sanctions,
and the Gulf kakistocrats continue to offer deals on arms and tech,
that means we must erase the Green Line.

Some visions of a single state between the river and the sea belong to
the extremists, plotting ethnic cleansing to rid “us” of
“them” once and for all; the power asymmetries mean that Israeli
eliminationists, who promote annexation and demographic engineering to
perpetuate Jewish supremacy, enjoy far more traction than their
counterparts in southern Lebanon and Tehran. But a politically viable,
morally acceptable one-state solution does not involve driving anyone
into the sea. It is attainable, down to wonk-pleasing details of
subsidiarity and centripetalism — but the point at this stage is the
big idea, to move public opinion away from the zero-sum game of
drawing borders and seeing partition as a panacea.

Ethnic and cultural diversity is a core human good. It is moral, it
benefits societies, it boosts economies, and it is worth supporting.
Nonterritorial autonomy would do what the judgment in Brown v. Board
of Education did: It would enable Israelis, Palestinians and the many
other minorities to be integrated for the good of all whether they
like it or not, protected from themselves and one another, represented
by their own linked administrations, governed within a single
territory. It is progressive. It takes us from zero-sum to win-win.

On Oct. 24 last year, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin
Patriarch of Jerusalem, wrote in a wartime letter to his diocese:
“It takes courage to be able to demand justice without spreading
hatred. It takes courage to ask for mercy, to reject oppression, to
promote equality without demanding uniformity, while remaining
free.”

There was a historical injustice committed. We have the chance to
right the wrong, or to embed the wrong in perpetuity. Planting justice
and restoring the land’s lost pluralism is the best hope for future
generations to sit in the shade of peace, at last. But it will take
the cardinal’s courage to get there.

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* Palestine; Israel; One State;
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