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."
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