A few days ago, Stephen Walt asked an unsettling but very important question: what should the United States do if the notion of a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine dispute collapses? This issue has been on my mind a lot lately, as both Israeli and Palestinian societies seem to inexorably radicalize without taking any coherent steps toward a workable solution to their conflict. U.S. interests are now so thoroughly enmeshed in this dispute that we can't simply walk away, but we may also be incapable of engineering a real solution that satisfies Palestinian demands while keeping our commitments to Israel. Such impasses call for at least examining other options.
Before I go any further, I want to be clear that I am very much in favor of a two-state solution to the conflict in the Levant. I believe that the only way for both Israelis and Palestinians to express their national aspirations is to live in truly sovereign national communities in which they enjoy the full range of political rights and liberties afforded to citizens of free nations. I also believe that a two-state solution is still possible, though that belief is constantly tested by the metastatic growth of both Israeli settlements and political radicalism on both sides of the conflict. I still firmly believe, though, that the policy of the United States ought to be to encourage a resolution based on sovereign Israeli and Palestinian states, and that it is in America's clear strategic interest to exert real pressure on both sides to make this happen.
I also think, though, that if a two-state solution is not possible, the only plan that is ethically permissible is a "one-state" resolution, wherein all residents of what used to be mandate Palestine have full political rights. This wouldn't be ideal for a whole host of reasons. On a practical level, as Walt notes, consociational multi-ethnic states have a terrible track record, particularly those that emerge from serious inter-ethnic conflict. I've also argued that the notion of a "bi-national state" is something of a misnomer, as it implies a level of social cohesion between national groups that almost certainly wouldn't exist in the Levant. Rather, if history is any guide, you'd get an unstable Palestinian state with a large Jewish minority. Furthermore, the radically different national narratives of the citizens of some future 'Israestine' would make it all but impossible for the apparatuses of state power and control - a military, a unified education system - to be coherently constructed. This would leave the state not only internally divided, but subject to the incessant depredations of outside powers, following in the footsteps of Lebanon.
Given all these problems, why would this state of affairs be preferred? Because the other options - the overt ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the occupied territories or the institution of a permanent apartheid state - are simply beyond the pale, and are nothing that the United States could countenance without severely blackening its conscience.
Many of the responses to Walt's post have taken issue with his bleak assessment of the two-state solution's prospects, or with his assertion that the United States would eventually turn away from an Israel that made the occupation of the territories permanent. I'm actually more of Walt's mind. I think that eventually, an apartheid Israel would lose the support of both the American public and its political elites. If anything, I have a hunch that the Bush Administration's serial indulgence of Israel's worst instincts has seeded the ground for a more balanced and serious discussion of American regional interests. Absent some noticeable changes in Israeli policy, I don't see that discussion turning out well for Tel Aviv.
It has always struck me that elite consensus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems to come ten years too late. Few profited from Israeli-Egyptian enmity once the Six Day War ended, yet peace between those actors didn't emerge until 1979. The necessity of a Palestinian state should have been obvious to everyone involved by the end of the 1980s, yet it didn't emerge as the "consensus" until the end of the Clinton era, when facts on the ground made its implementation immensely more difficult. Without negating my desire to see the two-state framework rescued from its current moribund state, I'd like for our national conversation on this issue to get back in front of the eight ball.*
I would like to briefly turn, then, to the kicker of Walt's piece; namely, the formulation of American policy in the event that a two-state solution collapses. Before doing that, though, we have to get to some kind of basic definition of what such a situation would look like. How will we know when a two-state solution has "collapsed?" It's not a simple question. If you believe anyone who writes for the Electronic Intifada, it was a stillborn concept in the first place. If you believe some in the conservative press, it's always out there on the horizon, available for the taking once Palestinians see the light and get their house in order. The problem is that global political elites will almost certainly continue to talk about implementing a two-state solution long after it has left the realm of possibility. It is also true that, for the United States, abandoning the notion of a two-state solution will present a stark and immediate choice of supporting an apartheid Israel or abandoning Israel altogether. Such a break would be historic and cause seismic shifts in global politics. Thus, American leaders will almost surely have to implicitly move beyond a two-state framework long before they can do so explicitly, in order to prepare the ground.
I would suggest that we may consider the two-state solution defunct when most or all of the following variables are present:
- There is no political faction in Israel of significant influence that publicly supports the establishment of a genuinely sovereign Palestinian State;
- There is no Palestinian political organization of significant influence that shows signs it will countenance the establishment of a separate Palestinian society for any length of time (notice I'm not requiring that all factions "recognize Israel," which in my view is a symbolic concession of less practical importance than is commonly assumed);
- So many Israeli settlers live in the West Bank that removing enough of them to create a coherent state is beyond practical imagination.
Should we decide that surgery is no longer practical (I'll stop with the medical analogies here I promise), the question is what steps U.S. policymakers ought to take while maintaining the fiction of a two-state framework before abandoning it more officially. I'd suggest:
- Making economic and military aid to Israel contingent on real progress in rolling back settlement activity. For too long we've treated Israeli settlements as legitimate bargaining chips, rather than elements of a criminal and strategically counterproductive policy that has no justification irrespective of Palestinian actions. Making it clear that settlements represent a significant bone of contention between Israel and the U.S., rather than the international equivalent of jaywalking violations, would be a good pivot around which U.S. policy could slowly shift.
- Making it clear U.S. policy for all people in the Levant to be able to choose the leaders of their sovereign government. This would have the advantage of theoretically working within the framework of a two-state solution, while laying the groundwork for supporting Palestinian political rights in an environment where such a solution has failed.
- Implementation of political and economic sanctions against an Israeli regime that is unwilling to budge from an apartheid stance. This would be the most controversial and difficult, and could not happen without a sea change in U.S. public opinion that is probably still decades away (again, assuming events on the ground in the Levant do not improve).
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