One-state solution?

As two-state approach fails to accomplish a final agreement, Palestinians are showing interest in a one-state solution

Both, the US President Donald Trump and the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knew in their heart of hearts that the so-called ‘realistic two-state solution’ they were announcing on Tuesday was a non-starter and if at all, it perhaps had a treacherous plot embedded within it to make settlements in West Bank ‘legal’ after four years. However, the timing of the announcement rather than the plan has betrayed the real purpose of the two for hogging world attention at this particular juncture. It was simply to divert world attention from impeachment proceedings being faced by the US President and indictment by the Israeli PM for fraud, bribery and breach of trust.

As expected an official with Hamas said Trump’s statements on his Mideast plan were “aggressive” and his proposals for Jerusalem were “nonsense”. And rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah were set to meet in the West Bank to discuss a response.

Pakistan on Wednesday routinely backed Palestine’s demand to make Jerusalem the capital of its independent state on the basis of pre-1967 borders.

The Turkish President lambasted Trump’s plan as “absolutely unacceptable”.

The plan prompted only a lukewarm response from Europe and the UN, and a furious rebuke from key Muslim countries who denounced it as a betrayal of the Palestinians.

The Trump Plan: Israel will stop building new settlements on the West Bank for four years, if the Palestinian Authority recognises Israeli sovereignty over the existing settlements. If not, the Zionist state will after four years begin an open-ended renewal of the process of building new settlements in Palestinian territory. During the ‘freeze’, Palestinian statehood will be ‘negotiated’ with its capital in eastern Jerusalem provided the Palestinian people take steps to become ‘self-governing’. The plan condones Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people and underwrites the Jewish state’s unending violations of international treaties — to most of which America is a party.

Interestingly, in April 2016, US Vice President Joe Biden had said that because of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy of steady expansion of settlements, an eventual “one-state reality” with Israeli Jews no longer in the majority was the likely outcome. That is perhaps the reason why the Trump plan proposes a four-year hiatus in forcible settlements – to allow Israel to forcibly push Palestinians out of the state so as to be able to rule with an artificially created Zionist majority in the self-created ‘one-state’.

As the two-state approach fails to accomplish a final agreement, lately more and more Palestinians are showing a keen interest in a one-state solution before any change is forcibly brought about in the demography. Indeed, many Palestinians increasingly see the one-state solution as an alternative way forward.

The one-state proposal refers to a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the creation of a unitary, federal or confederate Israeli-Palestinian state, which would encompass all of the present territory of Israel, the West Bank including East Jerusalem, and possibly the Gaza Strip and Golan Heights with citizenship and equal rights in the combined entity for all inhabitants of all the three territories, without regard to ethnicity or religion.

Such a state would be similar to pre-World War II Mandatory Palestine which is sought out from a demand to end Israeli occupation, as well as 19th and 20th-century Zionist settlement. It is widely viewed among supporters of the one-state solution as a form of colonialism.

Depending on various points of view, a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is presented as a situation in which Israel would ostensibly lose its character as a Jewish state and the Palestinians would fail to achieve their national independence within a two-state solution or, alternatively, as the best, most just and only way to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

However, Israel fearing that in such a state the population of the two, which would be almost similar in proportion, is resisting the proposal. But those in Israel who believe in peace and democracy are expected to soon see the light at the end of the tunnel and extend their support to the idea. 

Published in The Express Tribune, February 1^st, 2020.

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