Power-Sharing and Partition amid Israel–Palestine

Abstract

This paper reviews the deep difficulties entailed in achieving a two-state solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. It shows that there are equally deep difficulties in seeking to achieve standard power-sharing prescriptions in the region. The status quo, however, is neither acceptable nor likely to be stable in the medium term. A power-sharing perspective may, however, productively assist in making a two-state solution work better, and, paradoxically, may also assist the credibility of those who advocate a one-state solution.

Notes

1. For a proposal to define the terms of a just partition, in the abstract, see Lijphart (1984). Secessions and partitions are adjacent but not functionally equivalent phenomena (O’Leary, 2007; O’Leary, 2011).

2. See Gelvin (2005). No writer demonstrates continuous millennia-long conflict in historic Palestine between Arabs and Jews. Primordial perspectives on conflict between the groups reflect myths rather than accurate history—see, for example, Sand (2011). Arabs, however defined, became significantly present in Palestine after the Islamic defeat of the Byzantine Empire. The record of Muslim–Jewish relations throughout the world since the seventh century CE is mixed, with phases of coexistence punctuated by periods of intolerance—see contrasting assessments in Ye’or (1985) and Braude and Lewis (1982).

3. On post-Zionism, see Nimni (2003). Earlier discussion of the binational state may be found in Tutunji and Khaldi (1997) and the UN Special Committee on Palestine of the 1940s reprinted in 1987. For a thoughtful response by a troubled Zionist, see Beinart (2012).

4. ‘Historic Palestine’ here refers to mandate Palestine, the space confined by Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and Lebanon. There have, of course, been many territorial definitions of Palestine, Israel and Judah in ancient times.

5. Under its law of return Israel embraces as potential citizens all those who would have been defined as Jews under the Nazis’ Nuremberg laws.

6. Settler colonialist analysis proper starts with Rodinson (1973); for a typical Palestinian perspective on expulsions, see Masalha (1997); for rival versions of national self-determination, see the essays by Yael Tamir and Muhammed Ali Khalidi contained in Kapitan (1997). For a secular argument that Israel has moral worth as a Jewish state, see Gewirth (1997). For a comparative collection on settler colonialism, see Elkins and Pedersen (2005).

7. Frisch (2005) identifies religious transformations in Arafat’s discourse. Consider the earlier reminder about the religious dimension of the Zionists’ choice of homeland (Klausner, 1960).

8. Fundamentalist Jews differ significantly; many are not nationalistic as well as being pacific. Haredi Jews, for instance, differ from those mobilized to settle the West Bank.

9. Israeli negotiators merely committed themselves to ‘permanent status negotiations’ after the first elections to the Palestinian Authority.

10. Camp David I refers to the 1978 negotiations that resulted in a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.

11. Sometimes ‘water’ is added as a critical issue for negotiations, especially by the Palestinians. The citizenship rules for both states after a final status agreement, to my knowledge, have not been extensively negotiated.

12. Most of these arguments have been absorbed through osmosis and listening on visits to the region. The works of Ian S. Lustick, are a crucial resource, especially his major comparative work 1993, but ‘hegemonic analysis’ is not followed here. The late Marianne Heiberg was a friend who gave me several accounts of the Oslo negotiations.

13. The Northern Ireland process was often deemed a failure prematurely and wrongly, see for example, Peatling (2004) and Maney, Ibrahim, Higgins, and Herzog (2006). For reviews, see Taylor (ed.) (2009) and Mitchell, Evans, and O’Leary (2009). South Africa’s peace process is often described as a ‘small miracle’ (Friedman & Atkinson, 1994).

14. William’s Zartman’s concept is always easier to apply in retrospect (Zartman, 2001).

15. CIA World Factbook, Israel, latest online edition: the figure is a 2011 estimate. The same source citing 2010 data, separately estimates that there are over 185,000 settlers living in East Jerusalem.

16. Former Prime Minister Olmert has called Prime Minister Netanyahu’s spending related to Iran ‘adventurous fantasies’ based on ‘military delusions,’ see, for example Haaretz, February 14, 2013.

17. Khalidi (2013) argues that the US has acted as Israel’s lawyer, not as an honest broker. Non-Palestinians also maintain that the US Congress is heavily influenced by pro-Israeli lobbies, and that US Presidents therefore cannot operate an autonomous or realist(ic) foreign policy on Israel/Palestine, see Mearsheimer and Walt (2006).

18. My summary suggestion may, perhaps be questioned by readers of Segev (2000), who has been criticized by Karsh (2001). My judgment was initially shaped by reading Fraser (1984).

19. What follows, derived from O’Leary (1989), synthesizes the sometimes vituperative literature devoted to the subject of the formation of consociations (see Bogaards, 1998; Pappalardo, 1981; Van Schendelen, 1984), and successful conflict regulation (Nordlinger, 1972).

20. Legal advice rendered to the Israeli Prime Minister after the 1967 war suggested that building and settling on the lands captured in 1967 would violate international law, especially the Geneva conventions.

21. Tullberg and Tullberg (1997), their critics include Lustick (1997), McGarry and Moore (1997), Rothchild (1997), and Ryan (1997).

22. The UN Subcommittee that considered alternatives to the partition of Palestine in 1947, comprised primarily but not entirely of Arab or Muslim majority states, argued for a unitary democratic state, with minority rights (for Jews). They observed that the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, dominated by Western and European states, whose deliberations eventually led to UN resolution 181, would grant the then Jewish minority of 37% of historic Palestine, 55% of its land, of which less than 10% was owned by Jews. Palestinians, in short, did not reject a fair partition in 1947. For reviews of general arguments on partitions, see O’Leary (2007) and O’Leary (2011).

23. For insightful discussions of many of the issues related to Jerusalem and Al-Quds, see Chazan, Moughrabi, and Khalidi (1991), Amirav and Siniora (1991–1992), Bollens (2001), Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information (1992), Khalidi (1996, 2000), Lustick (1996) and Margalit (1991).

24. For an appraisal of the history of Israeli policy in the occupied territories since 1967, see Zertal and Akiva Eldar (2007), who show how every Israeli government since 1967 (with the qualified exception of the Rabin cabinet), and its legal and military institutions, have aided the settler infusions.

25. On this subject see Ghanem (1998, 2000), and the older book from his doctoral thesis by Lustick (1980), which inspired his widely cited article on control, 1979. See Ron (2003) for an astringent comparison with Serbia’s treatment of Albanians, and see the debates initiated by Smooha’s work (1980), Smooha (1990). Yiftachel (2006) has also been a major contributor in these discussions, as have Peled, (1992) and Shafir and Peled (1998).

26. In a fuller paper, it would be necessary to show how power-sharing within each of the two states would make it easier to ensure cooperation between them, but perhaps that would be deemed too forward looking.

27. Bleaker long-run scenarios are of course imaginable (e.g. one in which either one community or the other is wholly expelled from historic Palestine, or in which both are substantively destroyed in a conventional or nuclear war).