The Globe and Mail (Canada), 13th October 2003

The One-State Solution

Paul Adams

It may be time to forget about a Palestinian state. That, at least, is the sentiment increasingly circulating among Palestinian intellectuals and even a few politicians. It is an idea that challenges decades of thinking in the international community as well as the longstanding aspirations of both Israeli and Palestinian moderates.

But it is not hard to see why some Palestinians are re-thinking their goals.

The idea of two states, one predominantly Jewish, the other mainly Palestinian, living side-by-side in peace, probably reached its apogee with the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and the triumphal return of Yasser Arafat to Gaza in 1994. Most people in the region thought - even if the Israelis did not officially say it - that the PA was a embryonic state that would eventually spring into full life, probably sooner rather than later.

But look at the PA now. Mr. Arafat is 74 and in failing health. He hasn't faced an election since 1996 and runs his "presidency" from a bombed-out compound in Ramallah under the ever-present Israeli threat to execute or expel him. He's had two prime ministers in six months and refused to accept either one's choices for key cabinet posts.

And that's not the worst of it. The growing Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories, the "settler roads" that service them, and the gigantic fortified barrier that will soon protect them, have sliced and diced the Palestinian territories to an extent that it is increasingly hard to imagine a viable state being built in them.

Of course there have always been those on both sides who rejected the idea of two separate states. Many religious and right-wing Israelis, including the settlers, have insisted on the establishment of a "greater Israel" that would include Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestinian militant organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad have also rejected the two-state solution, determined to bide their time until the Jews were sent packing.

Still, the polls show that the two-state formula remains the favoured solution to the conflict among both Israelis and Palestinians to this day.

And when U.S. President George W. Bush launched the road-map peace plan earlier this year, that was his template. The aim was to have a sovereign Palestinian state in place by 2005.

But the peace process that seemed to offer at least some hope just four months ago, has now virtually died. The suicide-bombers, who stayed at home for a few weeks this summer have returned. Israel's tanks and missiles are back in full action against the militants too. The two sides are talking only with their ordinance, and the American envoy to the region, John Wolf, has gone home on a "vacation" of indeterminate length.

Now, the support the two-state solution once commanded among Palestinians has begun to erode. In recent weeks, Palestinian leaders as diverse as the leading peace activist, Sari Nusseibeh, and the militant leader Marwan Barghouti (who is on trial in Israel accused of organizing terrorist murders), have suggested that the days of the two-state solution may soon be over.

"If [the Israeli] occupation does not end unilaterally or through negotiations," Mr. Barghouti said in his closing statement at his trial recently, "then there is only one solution: one state for two peoples."

Michael Tarazi, an American-born legal adviser to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, has gone further, arguing that Palestinians should abandon the two-state strategy altogether. Instead, he says they should fight for a single state encompassing both Israel and the Palestinian territories, containing both Arabs and Jews. Instead of striving for an independent state, the argument goes, Palestinians should be campaigning for equal rights as citizens in a bi-national state.

Who in the West, the argument goes, could resist the idea of a democracy based on one-person, one-vote?

Neither the potential power of this appeal - nor its potential danger to the Jewish state - has been lost on Israeli politicians. At the moment, there are about a million Arabs living as citizens in Israel, in addition to about three and a half million in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. That compares with a little more than five million Jews living in the area. Because the Arab population is increasing more quickly, most experts believe it will overtake the Jews in number by 2010.

In a single state, in other words, Palestinians would soon be the majority. Even if there were somehow, miraculously, a smooth transition to a federal state with respect for minority and religious rights, such a state would mark the end of the Zionist dream.

The official Palestinian leadership grouped around Mr. Arafat is too wedded to the Palestinian Authority, even in its much-diminished current condition, to embrace the vision of a single state. Other Palestinian leaders, such as Dr. Nusseibeh, invoke the spectre of a single state largely in the hope of keeping the two-state idea alive. He recently remarked that the tragedy in the deteriorating political situation between Israel and the Palestinians is that it may "make impossible the realization of the national dreams of both sides."

"They'll find themselves, 10 or 15 years down the road compelled to try to find peace within the context of one-man, one-vote," he said.

For many Palestinians, the increasing appeal of the one-state idea arises from the collapse of the hope for Palestinian statehood once embodied in the PA. It also represents resignation to the likelihood of a grim and grinding decades-long struggle ahead.

*Paul Adams is The Globe and Mail's Middle East correspondent.