Last week, Gush Shalom hosted a public debate between Uri Avnery and Ilan Pappe on the subject “Two States or One State”. The event took place in a Tel-Aviv hall and attracted much attention. Here follows an edited version of Uri Avnery’s opening remarks:
This is not a duel to the death of gladiators in a Roman arena.
Ilan Pappe and I are partners in the battle against the occupation. I respect his courage. We stand side by side in a joint struggle, but we advocate two sharply opposing goals.
What is the disagreement about?
We have no disagreement about the past. We agree that Zionism, which has made its mark on history and created the state of Israel, also brought a historic injustice upon the Palestinian people. The occupation is an abominable situation, and it must be ended. No debate about that.
Perhaps we also have no disagreement about the distant future. About what should happen in a hundred years. We shall touch upon that later in the evening.
But we have a sharp disagreement about the foreseeable future — the solution for the bleeding conflict during the next 20, 30, 50 years.
This is not a theoretical debate. We cannot say, as the Hebrew expression goes, “May every man live with his own faith”, and may peace reign in the peace movement. Between these two alternatives there can be no compromise — we have to decide, we have to choose, because they dictate quite different strategies and different tactics — not tomorrow, but today, here and now. The difference is fateful.
For example: Should we concentrate our efforts on the struggle for public opinion in Israel, or should we give up on the struggle here and concentrate on the struggle abroad?
I am an Israeli. I stand with both feet on the ground of Israeli reality. I want to change this reality radically. But I want the state of Israel to exist.
Anyone who opposes the existence of Israel as a state that expresses our Israeli identity deprives himself of any possibility to act here. All his activities in Israel are doomed to failure.
A person can despair and say: There’s nothing to be done. Everything is lost. We have passed the “point of no return”. The situation is “irreversible”. We have nothing more to do in this country.
Everyone can despair for a moment. Perhaps each of us has despaired at one time or other. But one should not turn despair into an ideology. Despair destroys the ability to act.
I say: There is no reason at all for despair. Nothing is lost. Nothing in life is “irreversible,” except life itself. There is no such thing as a “point of no return”.
I am 83 years old. In my lifetime, I have seen the advent of the Nazis and their downfall. I have seen the Soviet Union at its zenith and watched its collapse. A day before the fall of the Berlin Wall, no German believed that he would witness that moment in his lifetime. The smartest experts did not foresee it. Because in history, there are subterranean streams that nobody perceives in real time. That’s why the theoretical analyses are so rarely confirmed.
Nothing is lost until the fighters raise their hands and say that all is lost. Raising hands is no solution. Neither is it moral.
In our situation, a person who despairs has three alternatives: (a) Emigration, (b) inner emigration, which means to stay at home and do nothing, or (c) escape to the world of ideal solutions for the days of the Messiah.
The third alternative is the most dangerous at the moment, because the situation is critical, especially for the Palestinians. There is no time for a solution in 100 years. We need an urgent solution, a solution that can be realized within a few years.
It has been said that Avnery is old, he sticks to old solutions, he is unable to absorb a new idea. And I wonder: A new idea?
The idea of One Joint State was old when I was a boy. It flourished in the 30s of the last century. But it went bankrupt. The idea of the Two State solution grew in the soil of the new reality.
If I may be permitted to make a personal remark: I am not a historian. I was alive when it happened. I am an eyewitness, an ear witness, a feeling witness. As a soldier in the 1948 war, as the editor of a news magazine for 40 years, as a Knesset member for 10 years, as an activist of Gush Shalom — I have seen the events from different angles. My hand is on the public pulse.
There are three questions concerning the One State idea:
(1) Is it at all possible?
(2) If it is possible — is it good?
(3) Will it bring a just peace?
As to the first question, my absolutely unequivocal answer is: No, it is not possible.
Anyone connected with the Israeli-Jewish public knows that its innermost desire is the existence of a state with a Jewish majority. A state where the Jews are masters of their fate. That desire trumps all other aims, even the desire for a state in All of Eretz-Israel.
One can talk about one state from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, a bi-national or non-national state — in practice what it means is the dismantling of the state of Israel. The negation of all the nation building that has been carried out by five generations. That must be said clearly, without mumbling and equivocation, and that’s what the public — the Jewish, and certainly the Palestinian — quite rightly thinks it is. What we are talking about is the dismantling of the state of Israel.
We want to change many things in this state, its historical narrative, its accepted definition as a “Jewish and democratic” state. We want to put an end to the occupation outside and the discrimination inside. We want to create a new basis for the relationship between the state and its Arab-Palestinian citizens. But it is impossible to ignore the basic ethos of the huge majority of the state’s citizens.
99.99 percent of the Jewish public do not want to dismantle the state. And that’s quite natural.
The majority of the Palestinian people, too, want a state of their own. It is needed to satisfy their most basic aspirations, to restore their national pride, to heal their trauma. Even the chiefs of Hamas, with whom we have talked, want it. Anyone who thinks otherwise is laboring under an illusion. There are Palestinians who talk about One State, but for most of those, it is just a codeword for the dismantling of the state of Israel. They, too, know that it is utopian.
