Israels+two-state+solution+is+dead,+Sparks,+Star



=Israel's two-state solution is dead=


 * The Star, Johannesburg, September 21, 2005**


 * By Alistair Sparks**

As Ariel Sharon began Israel's withdrawal of Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip last month, anxious voices wondered whether he might regard this as enough of a concession to the Palestinians and take no further steps to dismantle the much larger settlements in the West Bank.

Such a ploy would stymie the prospect of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has formed the basis of all attempts to craft a settlement to that protracted struggle, from the Oslo Agreements to George Bush's "roadmap".

The common thread through all these proposals is that, with a few border adjustments, the Palestinians should have a national homeland in Gaza and the West Bank in return for their recognition of Israel's right to exist. Sticking points have been the status of Jerusalem, which both claim as historically theirs, and the Jewish settlements inside the putative Palestinian state.

Now the 9 000 settlers have been removed from Gaza with much emotional fanfare and praise for Sharon's political boldness, but the 250 000 Jewish people living in the West Bank settlements remain. Will the prime minister remove them? Has it ever been his intention to do so, or was the Gaza removal just a public relations act?

Reporters put the question bluntly to Sharon during his visit to Washington last weekend, and his reply spoke volumes. He said he could not conceive of taking a similar step in the West Bank any time soon.

"There are about a quarter-million Jews living in these areas," he said. "There are many children there, religious families with many children. What am I supposed to say, 'You cannot live there any more? You were born there. You were born there!' "

Asked whether he would allow the West Bank settlements to continue expanding, Sharon responded: "What am I supposed to do, legislate that they are not allowed to have babies?"

It was a disingenuous reply. The expansion of the West Bank settlements is not just a matter of natural population increase; ever since the Israeli occupation in 1967, successive Israel governments have subsidised and encouraged more and more people to establish and enlarge the settlements. None more so than Sharon himself.

So the West Bank settlements won't be removed. Nor is the US going to pressurise Israel into doing so. As Sharon also noted, President Bush has acknowledged in a letter to him that "demographic facts on the ground" will have to be taken into account when determining the border between Israel and a future Palestinian state.

What this in fact means is that the two-state solution is dead. Like South Africa's bantustan policy it was a nice idea in theory: to separate rival groups living in one country so that each can have its own national homeland sounds like a moral solution - provided the separation is fair and the homelands are viable.

In South Africa neither condition was attainable, so the policy remained one of naked oppression and ultimately had to be abandoned. I remember 40 years ago, Laurence Gandar, then editor of the Rand Daily Mail, writing powerful editorials pointing out that even if the most optimistic dreams of the apartheid planners were realised, by the end of the century there would still be a massive black majority in so-called "white" South Africa. The "facts on the ground" would have to be faced and an integrated society established.

Fortuitously, a new book has just been published arguing that Israel now faces the same tough decision - that the two-state solution is dead and the reality of a one-state solution will have to be faced, with Gaza, Israel itself and the West Bank integrated into a single secular state.

The author, Virginia Tilley, an American academic who has steeped herself in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the past 20 years, does not minimise the difficulty and painfulness of this decision, for it would involve a major revision of the Zionist dream of establishing a "Jewish state" - a concept with powerful emotional and spiritual content.

But Tilley argues that the facts on the ground make the decision inescapable. The alternatives, as John Vorster might have put it, are "too ghastly to contemplate".

It is not only the settlements that render the two-state solution unworkable, though they are themselves sizeable towns and even cities with major shopping malls and cinemas, school systems, recreation centres, parks, synagogues, cultural centres and adjacent industrial zones with factories representing hundreds of millions of dollars in investments. But along with the settlements is an extensive network of interlinking highways bounded by high security fences that criss-cross the countryside, cutting the proposed Palestinian state into twisted fragments of land - in other words, bantustans.

The economic, political and demographic weight of this "settlement grid", as Tilley calls it, makes it an immovable object, at the same time rendering the fragmented Palestinian state hopelessly unviable.

To cram the expanding Palestinian population into tiny, claustrophobic ghettos under a government unable to meet the needs of its population, she believes, would lead to a catastrophic explosion.

Alternatively, to hope that their misery might trigger a mass Palestinian exodus across the Jordan River into other Arab countries, would destabilise the whole region. Such enforced "ethnic cleansing" would also be morally destructive of Israel itself.

That leaves only the "One-State Solution", which is the title of Tilley's book, published in the US by the University of Michigan Press but not yet available in South African bookshops. It is a brave book, for Tilley is keenly aware of the sensitivity of the issues she raises. But it is important that someone has at last pioneered a debate that has been stifled for too long precisely because of those sensitivities.

The Israel-Palestinian conflict is fuelling anti-Western passions among Islamic radicals who see the Palestinian plight as a crime. It is no longer a threat to the people of that region alone; the terrorist threat inherent in it is now global. That makes it everybody's business.

The point, as Tilley stresses, is that the Zionist vision of the "Jewish state" requires that it should always have a Jewish majority, yet in a single secular state that would not be sustainable.

So the questions pile up. Is the requirement of a permanently entrenched ethnic majority not in conflict with Israel's commitment to democracy?

In discussing these and related questions, Tilley refers repeatedly to the South African experience in abandoning apartheid for non-racial democracy.

Has that meant South Africa is no longer a homeland for the Afrikaners, or whites generally? Would a negotiated settlement for a one-party state not defuse the destructive antagonisms between Israelis and Palestinians as it has done in South Africa, and in doing so make Israel a much safer homeland for Jews than it is now?

It is an important debate, courageously initiated.


 * From: http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=2884899