It's Official: Two-State Solution Declared Dead

Last week I posted a piece called "The Two-State Solution on Its Deathbed." I argued that the pervasiveness of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, combined with the realities of Israeli politics, left only a slim and rapidly diminishing chance that a two-state solution could be salvaged.

Apparently I was being too optimistic. Only hours after I posted the piece, the two-state solution was pronounced dead by someone who knows a lot more about this than I do--Gideon Levy, columnist for Haaretz, a.k.a. "the New York Times of Israel." Levy wrote, "It's time to raise the white flag, to admit publicly that the two-state solution has been foiled." It was doomed, he says, by "the plundering settlers, the establishment that embraces them and the majority of Israelis, who do not lift a finger to stop them."

In Levy's view, this leaves only one long-term option--the "one-state solution," as the boundaries of Israel are officially expanded to encompass the occupied territory. Levy notes the irony that all those who have abetted the settler movement will have thus advanced a goal traditionally associated with Israel's extreme left.

Actually, though, there are two versions of the one-state solution, one on the left and one on the far right. In the left-wing version, Palestinians are given the vote and full citizenship, and Jews and Arabs live (one hopes) harmoniously in a greater Israel that, given demographic trends, would presumably feature a majority Arab population before long. In the far-right version, the boundaries of Israel are officially expanded but Palestinians who live beyond the 1967 "green line" are never given the vote, so you wind up with an apartheid state.

But this schema may be too simple. Levy writes of a "handful of settlers" who have started talking about giving West Bank Palestinians full Israeli citizenship. This meshes with something I heard when I was in Israel this summer: Some religious settlers in the West Bank are, as it was put to me, "more attached to the land than to the state" and would rather surrender Israel's officially Jewish identity than surrender their settlements. So, conceivably, you could wind up with a coalition of people on the religious right and the human-rights left who support the left-wing version of the one-state solution.

In any event, I expect to see more and more discussion about the forms that a one-state solution could take, and how you would structure the resulting state to maximize the chances of harmony between Arabs and Jews.

In a way, supporters of a two-state solution should actually welcome that discussion. One of the few things I can imagine delivering a shock to Israel's political system sufficient to salvage a two-state solution is the tangible prospect of a one-state solution.