Who's Afraid of a One-State Solution? [View All]

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n light of the ongoing deadlock in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, leaders such as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni have raised the specter of a one-state solution. Their intention, of course, is to scare some sense into Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his intransigent coalition partners. But, as this once-taboo idea becomes a legitimate part of political discussion in the region, some Israeli intellectuals are making the case that this is not something to fear, but a path toward a viable resolution to the region's long-running crisis.

The two-state solution has presented no shortage of obstacles: Negotiations are mired in talks about talks; the settlement policy is splintering what little territory was envisaged for the Palestinian state; and Israelis are becoming increasingly aware that the conflict doesn't stop at the Green Line, but emerges in varying shapes, including unprecedented racism and sectarian rioting within Israel proper. It's little wonder, then, that an increasing number of Israeli voices are beginning to inquire whether the one-state idea is more than just a bogeyman.

The one-state solution has long had advocates among the Palestinian diaspora, from Edward Said to Ghada Karmi and Ali Abunimah. However, there has recently been an exponential rise in mainstream Israeli media of articles that seriously consider the one-state arrangement. Trawling through the online archives of mainstream media, I found just three such articles from 2004 to 2007, but 16 pieces from 2008 to 2010. A 5,000-word essay by former Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Meron Benvenisti, arguing that the binational state is all but inevitable at this stage, was published in January and still sits atop Haaretz's most read and most emailed articles. Now comes the latest installment: sociologist Yehouda Shenhav's book The Time of the Green Line (or, in its Hebrew title, Trapped by the Green Line), released in February by the impeccably mainstream Am Oved publishing house.

Shenhav's book re-examines the very premises on which Israel and its allies perceive the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He suggests that the dispute's fundamental problem is that most Israelis and Palestinians are using two different timelines, with conflicting conceptions of the conflict's "year zero." For centrist or left-wing Israelis, it is 1967: the year when the West Bank and Gaza were occupied and the hitherto small, democratic, idealistic Israel turned sour. "All that I'm trying to do is allow my grandchildren to live in this country as I lived in it during the quietest, most beautiful decade of its life -- 1957 to 1967," Shenhav quotes Yossi Beilin, an architect of the Oslo Accords and the Geneva Initiative, a private follow-up plan, as saying. For the Palestinians, Shenhav says, year zero remains 1948: the year of the mass expulsion of Arabs and the creation of a regime that systematically excluded them from meaningful participation in political and social life.

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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/03/31/whos_afraid_of_a_one_state_solution