By convening the 132-member Palestinian Parliament on July 11, well aware that there would be no quorum, President Mahmoud Abbas took a step toward declaring the emergency Cabinet he formed last month as a “caretaker” government until fresh elections are held.
Hamas boycotted the meeting, arguing that convening the Parliament without consulting the majority group at a time — when 39 of its MPs from the West Bank (out of a total of 74) were in Israeli jails without charges — was “an attack on Palestinian legitimacy.”
The month-old defeat of Fatah by Hamas in the Gaza Strip is turning the Palestinian territories into Hamastan and Fatahland (in the West Bank) — a situation which both Israel and the United States want to see perpetuated.
Their governments think that this would provide Abbas, head of Fatah, with an opportunity to assert his authority and widen his popular base by relieving the wretched existence of West Bank inhabitants while the suffering of Gaza residents increases.
That is all in the future. Meanwhile, the hardening division among Palestinians along geographical and ideological lines has dimmed any chance of the bilateral peace process being revived — all the more so because of the weakness of the Israeli government led by an unpopular prime minister, Ehud Olmert.
It is unrealistic to visualize his administration taking the hard decision to evacuate the Jewish settlers from most of the 130-plus settlements in the West Bank as part of the peace deal.
Such a gloomy scenario in turn has led many commentators to declare that the two-state solution to the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict is dead, and that serious effort should be made to revive the idea of a single bi-national state.
But the path to a bi-national state is strewn with many barriers and pitfalls. For starters, what name would such a state carry — Israel-Palestine, or Palestine-Israel? The best solution would be to choose the name in a referendum. But will the seven million strong Palestinian Diaspora be allowed to participate in the vote?
Allied with this issue is the future of the Palestinian refugees. In the case of a two-state deal, the most practical and realistic solution lies in allowing the refugees from the present Palestinian territories to return home and for those originating from the area comprising pre-1967 Israel to accept compensation.
Such an arrangement will become redundant if the final settlement ends up with a single state. In that eventuality, all the Palestinian refugees would be entitled to return to their places of origin. Even if a bare majority did so, the Jews would be reduced to a minority.
As it is, the birth rate in the Palestinian territories is so much higher than Israel’s, that in the event of a single state, Palestinians will form a majority within the next 10 to 15 years. That was the main reason why the government of hard-line Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to evacuate Gaza, thereby shedding 1.5 million Palestinians from the joint populations of Israel and the Palestinians territories.
But that will postpone the day when Palestinians — including Israeli Arabs, now 1.3 million strong — become a majority in a future Israel-Palestine by perhaps a decade. In that case, given the democratic foundation of Israel-Palestine, Palestinians will run the government. If so, the future Palestinian prime minister of Israel-Palestine will hold the key to the country’s arsenal of at least 200 nuclear bombs.
Such an outcome could only be avoided by disenfranchising the Palestinians or stipulating in the constitution that a Palestinian was barred from becoming the chief executive. Are those advocating a single bi-national state prepared to choose one or the other option?
This dilemma was aptly captured by Arye Naor, an Israeli political scientist whose father fought in the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization), which struck Arab and British targets during the British Mandate on Palestine. “There are three ideological goals for families like mine: Greater Israel, a Jewish state and democracy. Well, it became clear you could have any two of them, but adding a third condemned the enterprise.” By “Greater Israel” he meant Palestine under the British Mandate from 1922 to 1948.
In other words, the Jews could maintain Greater Israel (also called Eretz Israel) as a Jewish state only by discarding democracy and thus depriving the Palestinians of their political rights. If Greater Israel remained a democratic state it would no longer be a Jewish state as the Jews would be reduced to a minority. So the only way to have a Jewish state and democracy is by abandoning the plan to create Greater Israel.
That brings the argument back to a two-state solution. Whatever the hurdles to that goal at present, it remains the only viable solution to the world’s longest running dispute, dating back to 1936 when there was an Arab uprising against the British Mandate committed to creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
