RAMALLAH: Prominent Palestinians are lighting a fire under Israel’s feet by proposing a peace in which there would be no separate Palestine and Israel, but a single state with equal rights for all.
The recent talk of a binational state of Arabs and Jews may be little more than a Palestinian pressure tactic fed by frustration over the failure of talks on a two-state solution, but it has set Israeli leaders on edge. Such a merger of Israel with the West Bank and Gaza Strip would quickly result in the Jews being outnumbered by the faster-growing Arab population. For most Israelis it would result in a nightmare choice: Give the Arabs full voting rights and lose Israel’s Jewish character, or deny them equality and be branded an apartheid state.
This reality is not lost on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. He created a stir last November when he told an Israeli newspaper that “the state of Israel is finished” unless each side gets a state of its own.
Last week, he pressed his case to his Cabinet. Israel, he said, has no choice but to abandon the lands it captured during the 1967 war.
“Forty years after the Six-Day War, the international community’s willingness to accept Israel as a binational state is growing,” he said. “Some day, sooner than we think, we will long for the solutions that some of us reject today.”
Olmert, the target of a corruption investigation, submitted his resignation letter to President Shimon Peres yesterday. His likely replacement, Tzipi Livni, shares Olmert’s opinion that dividing the land is in Israel’s supreme interest. “We decided that time is against us,” she recently told foreign journalists.
Opinion polls show only minority support on both sides for a single state. But the idea is gathering important Palestinian adherents. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, in an editorial published in The Wall Street Journal, predicted “the parameters of the debate are apt to shift dramatically” if the sides don’t reach a deal for two states soon. “Israel’s continued settlement expansion and land confiscation in the West Bank make physical separation of our two peoples increasingly impossible,” he wrote.
Ahmed Qorei, the Palestinians’ chief peace negotiator, speaks openly of the possibility of a binational state, and 27 Palestinian notables recently circulated a document urging their leaders to impose a deadline on current peace talks and, if missed, begin a South Africa-like struggle for equal rights in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.
In essence — and it may sound counterintuitive — what they are saying is that in order to achieve statehood, Palestinians should give up on it.
