13. No 2-state solution

Israeli workers adding barbed wire to the wall in the West Bank village of Al-Ram, between Jerusalem and Ramallah city - AFP.

by Isabel Kershner, 

Jerusalem:  Even among the most moderate Palestinians, the credo of a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is beginning to erode.

Hamas, an Islamic group that refuses to recognize Israel, has already taken over Gaza, one of the two territories earmarked for a Palestinian state.

Now, with hopes fading for an agreement on statehood by the end of the year, leading pragmatists in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the last bastions of Palestinian secular nationalism, are calling for a fundamental reassessment of their leadership's strategies and goals.

A growing number propose dismantling the internationally funded Palestinian Authority as a first step to expose the reality of Israel's continued occupation of territories it conquered in the 1967 war and to make Israel bear the direct responsibility and cost until a political solution is found.

Prominent mainstream Palestinians are increasingly warning that if they fail soon to achieve the kind of state they want - sovereign and independent, with East Jerusalem as its capital - they will favor instead a one-state solution based on a long-term fight for equal rights within the state of Israel, along the lines of the South African struggle.

In the past, one-state ultimatums have usually been intended as a pressure tactic to wring concessions out of Israel. Granting equal voting rights to millions of Palestinians in the territories would ultimately spell the end of the Zionist project of Jewish self-determination and a Jewish state.

But now these ultimatums also reflect an urge for a genuine reappraisal within the dwindling Palestinian nationalist camp as it despairs of achieving the kind of state it had envisaged and questions its own ability to survive.

"It is less of a scare tactic and more of trying to shake the traditional Palestinian leadership into strategic forward thinking," said Sam Bahour, an American-born Palestinian businessman who moved to the West Bank and invested heavily there after Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed their first accord in 1993.

One of the first to articulate the shift was Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al Quds University and one of the most committed and cogent proponents of the two-state solution for the past 20 years.

"I know that people assume the sun will rise tomorrow, that it will always be possible to arrive at two states," he said at a briefing here in July. "But I don't think so."

If the Israeli and Palestinian leaders failed to sign an agreement on Palestinian statehood in the coming weeks or months, he said, "We will have to prepare ourselves for the next stage."

That, he said, meant "trying to cover the next few decades with the least pain" by fashioning "some kind of coexistence" in a single state.

In August, Ahmed Qurei, a veteran leader of the nationalist Fatah movement and the chief of the Palestinian negotiating team, said at a meeting of his party in the West Bank city of Ramallah that if Israel continued to oppose the Palestinians' terms for an independent state, then they would demand a binational state.

The past few days have seen a flurry of statements, articles and reports. One, by the Palestine Strategy Study Group, a diverse collection of personalities from the West Bank and the Palestinian diaspora who were funded by a European Union grant, laid out possible scenarios including the one-state option, concluding: "Palestinian alternatives to a negotiated agreement are difficult but possible. They are preferable to a continuation of the status quo."

The Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, a well-established organization long dedicated to promoting the two-state solution, issued a paper on Monday examining possible policy options for the Palestinian Authority - including the one-state solution - should the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations end without producing a deal.

Bahour, a participant in the Palestine Strategy Study Group, said it was essential to put a deadline on what he called the "never-ending peace process" that has spluttered along for the last 15 years.

That process has been hampered by bouts of violence that culminated in the deadly Palestinian suicide-bombing campaign in the years after 2000 and Israel's subsequent military re-invasion of all the Palestinian Authority-controlled cities of the West Bank.

Then there is the complexity of the issues on both sides.

Israel has profound concerns about security. There are also considerable gaps between the sides on the most sensitive issues, like sovereignty over Jerusalem, with its sacred Jewish, Muslim and Christian sites, and the Palestinian demand for the right of return for refugees of the 1948 war and their descendants, now numbering millions, to their former homes in what is now Israel.

But what Palestinians view as the main obstacle to the realization of the two-state solution is Israel's continued settlement construction in parts of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, strengthening a 40-year-old enterprise that was designed to guarantee a permanent Israeli presence and control.

"Where will the Palestinian state rise up?" asked Qaddurah Fares, a grassroots Fatah leader in Ramallah, in an interview this summer. "The Israeli nation is inside us already," he said.

In 2003 Fares signed onto the Geneva Accord, an unofficial blueprint for a two-state deal. "I am still for a two-state solution," he said. "You don't change visions every day. But it is not realistic."

Palestinian public opinion polls show a clear majority still favors a two-state solution and the Fatah establishment remains committed to it, according to Khalil Shikaki, a well-respected political analyst in Ramallah.

But the binational threat of the chief negotiator, Qurei, "gave an indication of where Fatah might go," he said.

Parts of Fatah are already coming over to binationalism, particularly among the frustrated Fatah young guard, now in their mid to late 40s, who are using the reassessment as a way of asserting themselves.

Still, says Mahdi Abdul Hadi, who directs a research institute in East Jerusalem, "Nobody is spelling it out. They are not endorsing it publicly because of the absence of leadership and consensus."

Meanwhile, nobody is willing to put a date on ending the peace process and nothing much has actually changed.

"No one will decide," said Ghassan Khatib, a lecturer in cultural studies at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank. "There is lots of debate, but few new ideas or conclusions."

Encapsulating the Palestinian predicament, Fares, the Fatah leader in Ramallah, said that if Israel gave him the choice of a state in the 1967 territories or of living together in peace, "I'd choose the latter. But we don't have the choice, not of this and not of that." - IHT.