The illusion of the one-state solution

It does seem at face value that the Libyan leader, Muammar Qaddafi, was generous in his op-ed piece this morning in the New York Times when he proposed a one-state solution to the lingering Palestinian–Israeli problem. Personally I think it’s a mixture of ignorance and cynicism to make such a proposal, which de facto and de jure would mean the end of the Jewish state as we’ve known it since 1948. The ignorance part kicks in when the problem is reduced to its moral and legal aspects, namely that the Palestinians have been dispossessed since 1947–49, and therefore must be given their just rights all over again—let’s call it the restitution argument. What such an argument ignores, however, is the major disadvantage that the Palestinians have been facing ever since encountering the first set of Jewish settlers in the 1880s when the Ottomans were still there administrating the Arab provinces of what later became Palestine under the British. Palestinian “society” was structured back then on the administrative hegemony of its urban notables on one hand, and its impoverished peasantry on the other. As the peasants did the bulk of the labor, paying the “rent” to the urban notables on the top, they were the main source of wealth in society, and also its most dispossessed and impoverished part. The infrastructural weaknesses of Palestinian “society” under Ottoman rule have been well documented by historians, and there’s no need to go over them here. Suffice it to say that such structural weaknesses, which are shared by other societies in Greater Syria, and which have hardened in the last few decades, make it very hard to construct a modern political framework that would institute a leadership that would democratically coordinate its strategies with other groups in society. The current violence in Ghazza is less between Israelis and Palestinians and more internal wars among Palestinians, precisely an outcome of such structural weaknesses. Qaddafi himself is an outcome of such a dysfunctional political and social system which has reduced the modern middle east to a spectacle of moribund kingships and dictatorships, and republics where sons are inheriting their fathers. The one–state solution would not work precisely because the two–state solution would not work in the first place. When Qaddafi says that the two–state solution would create an insecure Israel, he seems to be thinking in terms of Palestinians constantly smuggling weapons into the would-be Palestine and shelling their Israeli neighbors. The real instability, however, comes from the inability of Palestinians to create a viable political framework that really works for them. Only then Israelis and Palestinians would be at peace. In the meantime the one- and two-state solutions seem both improbable. The only alternative for now seems a federation between the Ghazza strip and Egypt on the one, and another one between the West Bank and Jordan on the other. The Palestinians would free themselves from politics and begin to work to improve their society.