Israel–Palestine: One State or Two: Why a Two-State Solution is Desirable, Necessary, and Feasible

Abstract

The recent collapse of the US-brokered peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians and the eruption of violence between Israel and the Hamas show the enormous difficulties for reaching a two-state solution. Given the background of quite a few earlier failures, which sometimes led to bloody confrontations, the current impasse might lead to despair of the possibility of reaching a partition of the Land of Israel/Palestine between the two peoples. Despite this problematic record, this paper will argue that even though a two-state solution is fraught with numerous problems, it is the only possible peaceful solution that is both desirable and necessary. A key argument that buttresses this assessment is that in extreme nationalist conflicts, a partition, despite its numerous problems, is the most desirable solution or the least undesirable one. Over the years observers have introduced alternative conceptions of the character of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as colonial, civilizational, religious, class, realist and civil/ethnic in nature. As I argue elsewhere none of these alternative conceptions is correct. Rather, I show in this paper that the conflict is a severe case of an ethno-nationalist conflict with numerous manifestations of what I call a ‘state-to-nation imbalance.'

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. On the history of the competing ideas of one state versus two states, see Morris (2009).

2. For a theoretical and empirical discussion of these alternative conceptions and for showing that they are less relevant than nationalism to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, see Miller (2015).

3. See Miller (2007) for an elaborate analysis of the state-to-nation balance and the effects of variations in this balance on variations in war and peace.

4. For recent major revisionist histories of the conflict, see Morris (2001), Shlaim (2014), and Pappe (2004).

5. On nationalism and democracy in Israel, see Yacobson and Rubinstein (2003).

6. On the Palestinian state-building, see Robinson (1997) and Frisch (1998).

7. For a discussion of the general conditions for partition, see Miller (2015).

8. For the results of the most recent survey data, see the joint poll by Khalil Shikaki and Ifat Maoz from June 2014: ‘62% of Israelis and 54% of Palestinians support the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, known as the two-state solution and 34% of Israelis and 46% of Palestinians oppose it.’ See http://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/467 (joint poll by Khalil Shikaki and Ifat Maoz).