For some Palestinians, one state with Israel is better than none

By Richard Boudreaux and Ashraf Khalil
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

May 8, 2008

JERUSALEM — Frustrated by years of on-and-off peace talks with Israel, Palestinians are losing hope for an independent homeland, and some are proposing a radically different cause: a shared state with equal rights for Palestinians and Jews.

A "two-state solution" has been the basis for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for nearly 15 years and remains the declared aim of both groups' highest elected leaders and the Bush administration. But its advocates are increasingly on the defensive, and not just against militant Islamists and Jewish settlers who have long opposed partitioning the land.

Majorities on both sides dismiss the current U.S.-backed peace talks as futile. And a small but growing number of moderate Palestinians contend that Israel's terms for independence offer less than they could gain in a single democratic state combining Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

As a result, the 60th anniversary this month of Israel's birth is a time of insecurity and flux. Conventional wisdom about the long-standing formula for peace is being turned on its head.

No Israeli leader accepts the idea of sharing power with Palestinians; nor has such a plan been offered to the Israeli government. But a collapse of the two-state effort would leave Israel in de facto control of a region where by the next generation, Jews probably will be a minority.

That scenario inspires Hazem Kawasmi, who recently gave up on the two-state ideal and runs brainstorming workshops in the West Bank on single-state proposals.

Sooner or later, the former Palestinian Authority official predicts, the growing burden of occupation and threat of Islamic extremism will make Israelis receptive to the idea of a bi-national system that protects the rights of Jews.

"Israel cannot be a dominating power forever," Kawasmi, 43, said between puffs on a water pipe in a cafe in Ramallah, the West Bank's administrative center. "Time is on our side."

Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 Middle East War, but efforts to incorporate the territories by encouraging massive Jewish settlements fell short. It took a generation after the war for Israeli and secular Palestinian leaders to recognize each other and start discussing statehood for the occupied territories.

The Palestinians' rethinking of that goal has been influenced by Hamas' ascendancy. Its rise has unnerved moderate Palestinians who don't want to be ruled by the militant Islamic group and made many in Israel, which Hamas refuses to formally recognize, more averse to a two-state accord.

The near-daily rocket attacks from Hamas-controlled Gaza have turned Israel's defense minister into a powerful critic of a peace process he once led.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, struggling to propel peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority led by the secular Fatah movement, warned last week that the lack of progress was causing younger Palestinians to give up on the goal of an independent state.

"Increasingly, the Palestinians who talk about a two-state solution are my age," said Rice, who is 53.

The U.S. revived the peace talks in November with the aim of an accord by the end of President Bush's term, but disillusionment set in quickly. Hebrew University and the Palestine Center for Policy and Survey Research reported that three-fourths of the Palestinians and just over half the Israelis they polled in March said the talks serve no purpose and should be halted. Other polls show that at least one-fourth of Palestinians favor a single state.

"The number of people who believe in two states for two peoples is decreasing, and that worries me," said Yasser Abed-Rabbo, a Palestinian official involved in the talks. "And I'm talking about a circle of rational intellectuals, people with an open mind. On the street, the two-state idea has become a joke."

Fatah's leadership has begun a quiet, informal debate of its options if talks for an independent state fail.

The emergence of one-state proposals, said Kadura Fares, a member of Fatah's revolutionary council, are "a sign that the current strategy has been exhausted and it's time to rethink all our goals."

Ali Jarbawi, an independent West Bank political scientist who advises the Palestinian leadership, has urged Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to resign and abolish the government, which would oblige Israel to take direct responsibility for managing the West Bank and Gaza and paying public employees.

"I would say, 'Be my guest. Continue your occupation. But we're going to declare this is all one state and ask for equal rights. Are you going to be able to keep us under control for another 40 years?' " Jarbawi said.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert cited just such a scenario last year to make the case for shedding the territories quickly, while the Palestinians still have leaders who want their own state.

Israel, he warned, faces a demographic threat. There are 5.7 million Jews and 1.4 million Arab citizens in Israel and its West Bank settlements, according to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics; the bureau's Palestinian counterpart tallies nearly 3.8 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

By 2025, Israeli demographer Sergio Della Pergola predicts, Jews will make up no more than 46% of the people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, an area slightly smaller than Maryland.

Rid of the territories, Olmert told reporters in November, Israel would have a sustainable Jewish majority within its borders, enabling it to preserve its Jewish character within a democracy.

"If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, the state of Israel is finished," he said.

But resistance to a two-state accord has risen not only from right-wing allies of Olmert who support continued Jewish settlement in the West Bank but also from Ehud Barak, who leads the dovish Labor Party.

As prime minister in 2000, Barak made Israel's first concrete offer of a Palestinian state. (Yasser Arafat rejected his terms.) Now defense minister, Barak has privately dismissed the current talks as "a fantasy."

Until Israel upgrades its missile defenses, which could take several years, Barak says, he favors keeping troops in the West Bank and continuing frequent incursions into Gaza. Israel withdrew its army bases and civilian settlements from Gaza in 2005.

Many Palestinians take Barak's shift as a sign that independence is unattainable.

Kawasmi, the former Palestinian Authority official, said his moment of disenchantment came last year in June during an encounter with Israeli peace activists at an unofficial Middle East forum in Italy.

The Jerusalem native had been campaigning 15 years for an independent Palestinian state. The dream had brought him home from studies in England in 1994 to help the newly created Palestinian Authority set up a ministry of economy.

But the Israeli peaceniks dismissed two cherished Palestinian aspirations. Like Olmert's government, they wanted to avoid talk of giving Palestinian refugees and their families the right of return to homes in Israel that they fled in 1948 or of sharing Jerusalem as capital of both Israel and a Palestinian state.

At that moment, Kawasmi said, he realized "there is zero chance" for a two-state solution. He didn't sleep well for months. Then he embraced the single-state option, which had been debated for several years among Palestinians living abroad, and set out to create a buzz for it in the territories.

Several dozen intellectuals and activists are engaged in the debate, in books, newspaper articles, seminars and discussions on such websites as Electronic Intifada. Some call for a power-sharing government, others for a federation with separate administrations for Palestinians and Jews.

Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al Quds University in Jerusalem, suggests that many Palestinians would feel more at home in a democracy shared with Israelis than in a Palestinian state run by Hamas.

A bi-national system, Nusseibeh said, would "need to come about by consent and not by force; it will need a complete new strategy and thinking."

Perhaps after decades of fruitless bloodshed, he said, "we might find ourselves having no option but to coexist within one state."

A single state, other proponents say, would resolve disputes that have long bedeviled peace talks. Jews could keep their settlements, the thinking goes, but Palestinians, now restricted to a disproportionately small area, could live and travel anywhere the country. So could returning Palestinian refugees.

Most Israelis dismiss single-state proposals as recipes for dystopia or tactics in a Hamas-guided scheme to overrun the Jews and impose Islamic rule.

"Such an idea of one country with two peoples, it will never happen," said Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the infrastructure minister. "Bloodshed will happen. The Arabs will not accept us. We will not accept them."

But Palestinians who favor the idea say they would have no problem living with Jews as equals. If Jews were to give up their superior status and allow Palestinians the right to vote and move about the country, they say, Islamic extremists would lose their appeal.

"I'm envisioning a state where Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities live equally with full rights," Kawasmi said. If Israelis cannot accept that, "it's up to them to face an Islamic power that will not accept them."

It might be months or years, he acknowledges, before Palestinian leaders embrace the single-state vision and another generation before Israelis take it seriously. He plans to spend the year hammering out a detailed proposal and getting it launched by a political party, even if he has to start one himself.

Israelis, meanwhile, are weighing the choices that will shape the country's seventh decade if the two-state talks fail: Israel could declare that the wall it has built along the length of the West Bank is now a border and retreat behind it, unilaterally defining an Israel with a Jewish majority but exposing itself to rocket fire. Or it could try to prevent the attacks by occupying the territory more thoroughly, and re-occupying Gaza, with the risks of long-term fatigue and international condemnation.

Either option could mean years of conflict, an outlook that weighs on Israel as it celebrates 60 years of national rebirth and achievement.

Meron Benvenisti, a historian and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, is one of the few prominent Israelis who see a way out by sharing a state with the Palestinians.

He has proposed that Israeli Jews start debating the shape of such a state. They could best protect Israel's gains and the haven of a Jewish homeland, he suggests, by opting for a federal system with autonomous administrations for Jews and Palestinians.

"Israelis and Palestinians are sinking together into the mud of 'one state,' " he writes. "We need a model that fits this reality. . . . The question is no longer whether it will be bi-national, but which model to choose."

http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/itsonlyfair/latimes0277.html

 

A Federal Republic of Israel and Palestine?

I support it.

very difficult, because of religion

That's ridiculous !

why stick together ,just seperate lah

Possible.

Already Israeli Arab population number 20% and rising.

In fact, it is more realistic.

Forget the two-state solution

By Saree Makdisi

http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/itsonlyfair/latimes0284.html

I support Israeli occupied territories of Palestine incorporated into state of Israel to form Federal Republic of Israel and Palestine.

I think that is a fair political arrangement to resolve the issue.

Fact: 20% of Israeli citizens are palestinians.

So why not one state solution?

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3246096,00.html

If Jews afraid that Palestinians will flood their jewish cities, they can have an arrangement to restrict arabs to only Palestinian area of the federal republic.

Originally posted by Poh Ah Pak:

Forget the two-state solution

Israelis and Palestinians must share the land. Equally.

By Saree Makdisi

http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/itsonlyfair/latimes0284.html

I support Israeli occupied territories of Palestine incorporated into state of Israel to form Federal Republic of Israel and Palestine.

I think that is a fair political arrangement to resolve the issue.

Fact: 20% of Israeli citizens are palestinians.

So why not one state solution?

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3246096,00.html

If Jews afraid that Palestinians will flood their jewish cities, they can have an arrangement to restrict arabs to only Palestinian area of the federal republic.

There's no such a thing as Palestinians. Arabs, you mean?

If Palestinians is a myth, shouldn't someone inform the palestinians about it?

They call themselves palestinians.

Originally posted by Poh Ah Pak:

If Palestinians is a myth, shouldn't someone inform the palestinians about it?

They call themselves palestinians.

Way back on March 31, 1977, the Dutch newspaper Trouw published an interview with Palestine Liberation Organization executive committee member Zahir Muhsein. Here's what he said:

The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism.

For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.

Zuhair Mohsen is perhaps most widely known in the West for having made the following statement in a March 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw^[1]:

The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism.

For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.

While this contravened the PLO charter, which affirms the existence of a Palestinian people with national rights, it was in line with al-Sa'iqa's Syrian-Ba'thist ideology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuheir_Mohsen

 Zahir Muhsein a follower of Baathist ideology?

As-Sa'iqa's political agenda is identical to that of Ba'thist Syria, i.e. Arab socialist, nationalist and strongly committed to Pan-Arab doctrine. While this reflects its Ba'thist programme, it has also used Pan-Arabism as a means of supporting the primacy of its sponsor, Syria, over the Arafat-led PLO's claim to exclusive representation of the Palestinian people. Thus, it rejected "Palestinization" of the conflict with Israel, insisting on the necessary involvement of the greater Arab nation. This occasionally went to extremes, with as-Sa'iqa leaders denying the existence of a separate Palestinian people within the wider Arab nation (quote).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As-Sa%27iqa#Ideological_profile

Al-Sa'iqa

(Arabic) Literally means "The Storm." It is a "Palestinian" armed group created by Syrian Ba'ath party in 1966. It is a commando group formed by (and mostly consisting of) Syrian Ba‘thists officially in Sept 1966. It became operational only in Dec 1968 to rival Fatah and to support Salah Jadid in his power struggle with Hafez Assad for Syrian leadership. The original leadership consisted of Yusuf Zu’ayyin, Mahmud al-Ma‘ayta (from November 1970); but these were replaced with Assad loyalists after the Nov 70 coup. The pro-Jadid branch remained active in Jordan until Jun 71, when its were leaders arrested and Zuhayr Muhsin was appointed Secretary General. It was an early supporter of the 'national authority' proposal in 1974, and was a co-sponsor of the 1974 Palestine National Council Resolution.

It is strictly Pan-Arabist, denying a Palestinian identity except as a tactical maneuver...

http://www.mideastweb.org/Middle-East-Encyclopedia/al-sa'iqa.htm

 

googoomuck, you a follower of As-Sa'iqa movement?

 

 

 

I repeat, there's no such thing as Palestinians.

An Arab Zahir Muhsein has declared.

....and Arafat was an Egyptian, never a 'Palestinian'.

If Arafat an Egyptian, than Hitler must be Austrian.

I prefer Hitler's "Final Solution" but SAF is a good buddy of MOSSAD so I'll just keep quiet

IMHO 1 state solution could spark a civil war in the future...because the Palestinians are not going to give up their Palestinian identity just like that. The same thing that the Jewish population will not accept their Palestinians fellow citizens as equal.

In an ideal world that would work but we don't live in an ideal world.

What the Jewish and the Palestinian people need is a commmon enemy LOL. That would surely forge their unity. A common enemy that is so powerful and frightening that would threaten the very existence of each of the faction i.e Jewish and Palestinians.

Any country want to play this role? LOL. They need a Hitler type leader with hatred for both the Jews and Arabs.

They need ALIENS. The little wicked green biologic  with a thrift to exterminate Jews and Arabs. And with the mind, technology and firepower to do what it takes.

A state with buried nuclear devices ready to go off at any moment's notice should be drafted into the constitution when they form that 1 state to force coercion and harmony through mutual destruction of not just the state of Israel and Palestine , but the whole of middle east.

Israel is 60, Zionism is Dead, What Now?

http://tonykaron.com/2008/05/08/

It is time for Federal Republic of Israel and Palestine.

20% of Israeli citizens are palestinians.

Palestine under Israeli occupation for over 40 years.

It is time to end zionism.

 

Return israel to christendom...end of the story

Originally posted by Poh Ah Pak:

If Arafat an Egyptian, than Hitler must be Austrian.

It's historical fact

USA give billions of dollars to Israel annually so why not give the same amount to the Palestinian Arabs for them to develope then take away the $$$ whenever they fight..Only when they stop fighting for a common reason can they start to become friends

it should be a 1 state nation namely israel.as for palestine..u will understand by reading this.

arafat and sharon were discussing peace talk.before they start, sharon started with a story.

during the time of the exodus.Moses went to have a bath and some kids took his clothes away. when Moses had finish his bath, he was furious to find his clothes missing and asked who were the culprits. those nearby immediately said it was the palestines.

to this arafat immediately states: "there was no palestines at that time."

Early History of the Region

Before the Hebrews first migrated there around 1800 B.C., the land of Canaan was occupied by Canaanites.

 

“Between 3000 and 1100 B.C., Canaanite civilization covered what is today Israel, the West Bank, Lebanon and much of Syria and Jordan...Those who remained in the Jerusalem hills after the Romans expelled the Jews [in the second century A.D.] were a potpourri: farmers and vineyard growers, pagans and converts to Christianity, descendants of the Arabs, Persians, Samaritans, Greeks and old Canaanite tribes.” Marcia Kunstel and Joseph Albright, “Their Promised Land.”

The present-day Palestinians’ ancestral heritage

 

“But all these [different peoples who had come to Canaan] were additions, sprigs grafted onto the parent tree...And that parent tree was Canaanite...[The Arab invaders of the 7th century A.D.] made Moslem converts of the natives, settled down as residents, and intermarried with them, with the result that all are now so completely Arabized that we cannot tell where the Canaanites leave off and the Arabs begin.” Illene Beatty, “Arab and Jew in the Land of Canaan.”

The Jewish kingdoms were only one of many periods in ancient Palestine

 

“The extended kingdoms of David and Solomon, on which the Zionists base their territorial demands, endured for only about 73 years...Then it fell apart...[Even] if we allow independence to the entire life of the ancient Jewish kingdoms, from David’s conquest of Canaan in 1000 B.C. to the wiping out of Judah in 586 B.C., we arrive at [only] a 414 year Jewish rule.” Illene Beatty, “Arab and Jew in the Land of Canaan.”

More on Canaanite civilization

 

“Recent archeological digs have provided evidence that Jerusalem was a big and fortified city already in 1800 BCE...Findings show that the sophisticated water system heretofor attributed to the conquering Israelites pre-dated them by eight centuries and was even more sophisticated than imagined...Dr. Ronny Reich, who directed the excavation along with Eli Shuikrun, said the entire system was built as a single complex by Canaanites in the Middle Bronze Period, around 1800 BCE.” The Jewish Bulletin, July 31st, 1998.

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/history/origin.html#early

Canaan

http://i-cias.com/e.o/canaan.htm

 

Look look look...this is even better

It would be good for Syria to unite with Iraq after USA withdraws.

A bigger state can balance Iran.

This is a useless debate. The land will go to whoever has the power. Joshua ordered the Israelites to wipe out the entire population of Jericho, the first major city they conquered in the West Bank. The Israelites were to kill everything that had breath, from the baby in his mother's arms to the calf in the manger. Israel was to drive away every single inhabitant in the land so that the Israelites could occupy that land (read it...it's in the bible).

Israel could not drive away every single inhabitant or the land nor kill everyone there. Neither can the Palestinians today drive away the jews or kill every jewish child with their rockets or suicide bombers. The current state of affairs will continue long after we are all gone...