The right touts a one-state solution

Alternatives to the two-state paradigm are gaining traction.

By LESLIE SUSSER
In late June, with US Secretary of State John Kerry doing his utmost to get the two sides to sit down and talk, President Shimon Peres tried to give the Israel-Palestine two-state solution a boost. “There is no alternative to two states for two peoples. All the rest is nonsense,” he declared. “You can’t have peace in a country that has two different peoples. That’s a recipe for continuing the conflict, not for starting the peace.”
The fact that Peres felt he needed to make such a plea shows just how much right-wing alternatives to the two-state paradigm are gaining traction. The more Kerry makes progress towards two states, the more the right-wingers will flag their proposals in a bid to stop him. And if he fails, they will be there to fill the vacuum. Especially if the young Likud hawks now clawing their way to the top gain control of the party and the Likud with its right-wing allies retains power. This potent combination – radical ideologues with ideas the Palestinians will almost certainly resist and the international community scorn – could be disastrous for Israel’s future.
The most important right-wing alternative doing the rounds calls for a one-state solution: annexing the entire West Bank to Israel and granting the Palestinians there full Israeli citizenship, including the right to vote for the Knesset. First mooted five years ago by journalist Uri Elitzur, (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bureau chief in the late 1990s), it is now being actively promoted by Deputy Transport Minister Tzipi Hotovely, and it has been making serious inroads among Likud ministers, in the Likud Knesset faction and beyond.
For the right, the plan’s advantages are obvious: Israel keeps all Jewish settlements and biblical heritage sites; exercises total security control over the West Bank and does all this in the context of a one-manone- vote democracy its advocates say the world should applaud.
Demographically, the plan gained a modicum of feasibility through two events in 2005-6: Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza took 1.5 million Palestinians out of the equation and a population census by the right-tending American-Israel Demographic Research Group (AIDRG) conveniently found one million Palestinians fewer in the West Bank than previously thought. Hotovely claims this means that after annexation Jews would outnumber Palestinians by around 7 to 3, and the Jewish majority in the new Israel- West Bank unitary state would not be under threat.
But, according to the Israeli Civil Administration in the West Bank and the Central Bureau of Statistics the ratio is closer to 6 to 4. And, if Gaza is included – as the Palestinians would probably demand – there is already virtual parity. These figures The Jerusalem Report july 29, 2013 9 are confirmed by leading Israeli experts, including Sergio Della Pergola of the Hebrew University and Haifa University’s Arnon Sofer, who found no less than 21 flawed assumptions in the AIDRG census.
Demographics aside, the plan is not as pristinely democratic as first meets the eye. For example, Hotovely would introduce legislation enshrining Greater Israel as a Jewish state, irrespective of whether or not it retains its Jewish majority; Israel would revert to policing Palestinian towns and cities and it would also oversee the Palestinian educational curricula.
More significantly, citizenship for Palestinians would not be automatic. Under some versions of the plan there would be a five-year naturalization process, followed by Hebrew language and Israeli culture tests and the swearing of a loyalty oath. This is no different from what is required of immigrants to the US, the plan’s advocates maintain. Except that immigrants move to America of their own free will, whereas Palestinians are locally born, will not willingly have become part of the new Greater Israel and cannot reasonably be expected to identify with people they see as their oppressors.
Moreover, apparently not fully confident of their demographic data, some of the plan’s advocates would further limit the impact of the Palestinian vote in the Knesset. Housing Minister Uri Ariel of Bayit Yehudi suggests a transition from proportional representation to constituency style elections – and then gerrymandering the constituencies to ensure an overwhelming Jewish majority. For example, by incorporating urban Palestinian areas in more populous Jewish ones – say by adding Jenin to the Afula region, Nablus to the Gush Dan Coastal Plain, Ramallah to Greater Jerusalem and so on.
Hotovely, too, seems anxious about the demography and urges boosting the Jewish majority through stepped-up aliya. The goal, she says, should be one million Jewish immigrants within a decade. But where would they come from? And what about concomitant Palestinian refugee immigration? How would Greater Israel justify denying their right to enter the West Bank, seen as their putative homeland-inthe- making for decades? 
There are other internal contradictions. For example, after undergoing naturalization and swearing loyalty, would Palestinians be expected or allowed to serve in the IDF? More likely they would reject the naturalization process out of hand, leading to continued, possibly violent sectarian struggle, with Palestinians arguing in the international arena that Israel was simply perpetuating its occupation under another name. 
Israel would almost certainly be blamed for any ongoing conflict, find itself open to further delegitimization, facing growing economic sanctions and pressed by the international community to move toward one-man-one-vote with no strings attached, leading eventually to Palestinian majority rule. The very nightmare scenario the two-state solution is meant to avoid.
Other right-wingers are more circumspect. Acknowledging that the one-state solution would threaten Israel’s Jewish majority and humanitarian standing, Economics Minister Naftali Bennett proposes a seven-point plan for managing, not solving, the conflict. Under what the Bayit Yehudi leader calls the “Israel Stability Initiative,” the government would annex area C, which accounts for 61 percent of the West Bank, and contains virtually all the 300,000 plus Jewish settlers and only 50-100,000 Palestinians. The relatively few Palestinians in area C would get full civil rights in Israel without it making any significant demographic difference; the remaining two and half million would get full autonomy under the Palestinian Authority in the remaining 39 percent of the land. There would be a free flow of people and goods throughout the West Bank and massive investment to promote coexistence. Israel would retain full security control of the West Bank and no Palestinian refugees would be allowed to return to any part of the land.
But like the one-state solution, Bennett’s plan would be strongly opposed by the Palestinians and the international community. After all that has happened since Oslo, no one would agree to the Palestinians getting only 40 percent of the land; moreover, in irreversibly annexing area C, the “Stability Initiative” undermines any chance of a viable Palestine at peace with Israel in a two-state paradigm.
To avoid some of these inherent pitfalls, Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon, the newly elected chairman of the Likud Central Committee, proposes what he calls the “Three State Solution,” involving Israel, Jordan and Egypt. In this variation, Israel annexes area C, with the remaining 40 percent going to Jordan, and Gaza reverting to Egypt. For Danon, the big advantage of his plan is that there would be no Palestinian state. But that is precisely its biggest weakness – because it ensures that there would be no takers among the Palestinians, the Jordanians, the Egyptians or the international community.
A far more sophisticated proposal involving Jordan and Egypt by Maj.-Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser, was first outlined in the run-up to the 2005 Gaza withdrawal. Eiland argues that for many reasons the two-state solution is a pipedream that cannot be realized. The parties are too far apart and even if they could agree, the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean is too small to accommodate two viable states. Eiland also maintains that an interim solution like the Bennett proposal is not feasible – because the Palestinians would never accept it; nor is it in the Israeli interest – because international pressure on Israel to make further withdrawals towards the June 4, 1967 lines in a fixed time frame would become intolerable.
So he proposes two regional solutions, in both cases increasing the available land.
A Jordanian-Palestinian Federation – The central government would be in Amman, and the West Bank, Gaza and Transjordan would be federal states along the lines of the US model. In such an arrangement, the Palestinian entities aligned with Jordan would be more viable than in the two-state model, and Israel would be able to annex more West Bank territory because it would not be at the expense of a single small Palestinian state.
Territorial exchange involving Egypt, Israel and Palestine – In this model, Egypt transfers 720 sq. kms. in Sinai to Gaza, tripling its size. Palestine cedes 12 percent (around 720 sq. kms.) of the West Bank to Israel. Israel cedes 720 sq. kms. to Egypt in the Paran region of the southwest Negev. Israel authorizes the building of a tunnel in the Negev joining Egypt to Jordan, giving Egypt an outlet to the Red Sea and a direct land route to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.
The obvious problem with all this is that it is most unlikely that the Jordanians, Egyptians or Palestinians would be ready to countenance anything like either of these options or any combination of the two. 
What this shows is that for all its so-called “out-of-the-box” thinking, the right has been unable to come up with any practical proposals. On the contrary, on the face of it, its plans seem more like self-delusional recipes for self-inflicted disaster.
Despite all its inherent difficulties, the two-state paradigm remains the only feasible game in town. With Kerry on the brink of getting talks restarted, Peres is simply urging Israelis to give it their best shot.
It is not a case of a president overshooting his brief and interfering in politics as his critics on the right suggest; rather it is a case of a highly experienced and deeply concerned statesman warning his people of the existential consequences of failure to rise to the occasion. He would have been remiss not to.