One state, two states

Matthew Teller came to Stroud and spoke at a packed meeting at St Lawrence’s church, with the Bishop of Gloucester also on the platform. The meeting, entitled “Paths of Hope: seeking justice and compassion for Palestinians and Israelis” was chaired by CSSD member Judith Large.

Matthew spoke movingly about his own background and how he’d come to move away from support for Israel and Zionism. He spoke a bit about the origins of Zionism, particularly the strand that had its beginnings in Protestant Christianity and the hope that the re-establishment of a Jewish state in “the Holy Land”, and the “ingathering of the exiles”, will be a fulfillment of prophecy and lead to the Second Coming of Jesus. He had less to say about the origins of Jewish Zionism, and in particular how Zionism went from being a weird minority political current at the beginning of the twentieth century to being, by the middle of the twentieth century, the unquestioned and unquestionable dominant ideology of most mainstream Jewish communities.

Mostly he spoke about two-state vs one-state solutions in Israel-Palestine. He pointed out all the things that were weak and bad about the two-state solution - the unfairness of the proposed boundaries, the way in which the proposed Palestinian state is already slashed to pieces by Israeli settlement blocks, the real possibility that the Israeli right would use the establishment of a small, powerless, Palestinian state to expel some or all of Israel’s Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. 

Nothing he said here was wrong, though he didn’t dwell on the fact that lots of progressives in both Israel and Palestine do support this approach, at least as an interim. And since one of the demands of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign is for governments to recognise Palestine as a state, then it too implicitly supports this approach.

And then he outlined his preferred option, the one-state solution. It’s probably worth pointing out that his version of this is - to say the least - a bit unusual. He’s actually proposing a binational state, with two national entities co-existing in and jointly ruling over the same territory, each with some degree of state authority and sovereignty. The proposed state would have two names - it would be Israel for the Israeli-Jewish component of the population and Palestine (or Falastin) for the Palestinian-Arab component. 

This is not the same as the “decolonial” one-state solution, in which Palestine has an Arab identity with some tolerated minorities, and (in some versions) Israelis “return to their countries of origin”. Teller didn’t explicitly say that he rejected this, which meant that people who did believe in exactly this could pretend that they liked what he was saying.

The other thing he didn’t say was that his ideas have a history, and it’s mainly an unhappy one. There was a current in the Second International that favoured non-territorial national self-determination. It was particularly pronounced in the Austro-Hungarian empire before WW1, partly as an idea as to how to reconcile conflicting national claims where nationalities didn’t occupy contiguous blocks of territory. The people who proposed it were called Austro-Marxists, and other people in the Socialist movement despised them on the grounds that they appeared to want to preserve the empire as well as its multinational character.

It was also an important part of the political ideology of non-Zionist Jewish organisations in Eastern Europe. The Bund, the General Union of Jewish Workers, advocated what it called National Personal Autonomy.  So did the Fareynikte, the United Jewish Socialist Workers Party.

It was briefly implemented in some Eastern European countries - especially the briefly-independent Ukraine, and the slightly less briefly-independent Lithuania and Esthonia. I’ve not heard anyone ever mention this, let alone point to it as a roaring success. 

And it was proposed, though never implemented, in Palestine during the British Mandate, as an alternative to partition. It has been supported, at times, by various currents among Zionist Jews, from the “socialist-Zionist” Hashomer Hatzair and some of the “Labour Zionist” Ahdut HaAvoda, and the liberal Zionist Brit Shalom and Ihud parties. There are even elements among right-wing Israelis that are prepared to countenance political rights for Palestinians in an expanded Israel that includes the Occupied Territories.

So…it’s not as if the idea of a one-state or a bi-national solution is self-evidently wrong. Personally I think it would be great if Palestinians and Israelis were ready and willing to share the same state structure, and could find a way to get there that didn’t involve either people oppressing the other. Because I’m not a Zionist, it wouldn’t matter to me that the resulting political entity was not “the” Jewish state, or a “a” Jewish state, especially not in the sense of being the state for all the Jews in the world. I’d be just fine with it being a state for all its citizens. 

But it seems disingenuous to pretend that the “two-state solution” is impossibly problematic and that any route to this one-state solution doesn’t have at least as many problems. Right now there’s a lot of hate between Palestinians and Israelis. So while I’d be happy with a future that ultimately included a single unitary or bi-national state, I think that the route to getting there might include two states. It might not, I’m open to suggestions.

And since no solution at all is actually on the table with Netanyahu’s government still in place, it’s important that people who want to stand against Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians - the brutality of the occupation, the land confiscations and the ethnic cleansing, the apartheid rules and practices - don’t fight among themselves about what the ultimate resolution of the conflict needs to be.