Could Palestinians reject Palestinian state?
The settlement enterprise is changing Palestinian attitudes, but not in the direction Israel would like
The transfer of Jewish Israelis from Israel to the West Bank has led to massive building of road infrastructures. These create separate and unequal transportation networks that enable Israeli settlers to live in the heartland of the West Bank yet feel as if they are living within the State of Israel proper.
The argument follows, as a result of the integration of the West Bank into Israel there is an emerging demographic crisis whereby within a short period (10-20 years) there will be a Palestinian majority in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. This argument has done much to change Israeli public opinion very rapidly over the past decade in support of the two-state solution, as most Israelis do not want to live in the same state as Palestinians and are therefore willing to make territorial concessions on the homeland, previously thought to be impossible, in order to ensure a significant Jewish majority within the State of Israel.
Palestinian shift
Over the past two decades, Palestinian public opinion has also shifted significantly. The difficulties of physically separating Israel from the West Bank are having a significant impact on Palestinian public opinion. In the past, Palestinians supported a “one-state option,” meaning a secular democratic state in all of Palestine.
But the aggressive Israeli settlement agenda in the West Bank has had an impact on Palestinian public opinion that has led Palestinians to accept the two-state option as a way of getting Israel out of the West Bank and Gaza. The drive to change public opinion was led by Palestinian intellectuals, who, after the mid 1970s, came to the conclusion that the Palestinian national movement should recognize Israel and accept the two-state solution.
The failure of the Oslo process, Israel's continued aggressive settlement policy, believed by many Palestinians to be on the rise, and the post-Gaza disengagement situation are now the driving forces behind a new intellectual discourse amongst many Palestinian intellectuals.
Return to a one-state solution
That discourse is now heading back to the one-state option. The discourse is taking place behind the scenes and the wider public is not yet engaged. The wider public is still supporting the two-state option, but the intellectual discourse supporting the one-state option is gaining steam, and if there is no political movement towards the implementation of the two-state solution, the trend is sure to spillover from the intelligentsia to the Palestinian street.
The time frame limitation of the two-states-for–two-peoples-option is largely linked not only to the physical viability of the Palestinian state in the face of Israeli settlements, but also directly to the possible future shift of Palestinian public opinion influenced by the intellectuals who today are campaigning for the one-state option. If the conflict once again heats up and violence and repression increase, Palestinian public opinion will be influenced rapidly by the intellectual one-state discourse.
The argument of this discourse is very compelling to many Palestinians because it removes completely the need for Palestinians to grant moral recognition to the rights of the Jewish people to have a state of their own. It also moves the political agenda and the struggle to tried and successful platitudes of “one man, one vote,” democracy-type arguments that the entire world understands and remembers from the struggle against Apartheid.
This will be the argument put forward by the intellectuals who reject the two-state solution. These intellectuals will not share with the public that part of the discourse that recognizes the likelihood of even increased suffering and violence that will follow this strategy.
Once the shift of public opinion in favor of the one-state option of the mainstream Palestinian leadership occurs, the two-state solution will lose its validity amongst the Palestinian public. Once this occurs, Israeli public opinion will awaken to a new dawn where they alone are interested in the creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel.
This process may take a decade, it may take more, and it may take less. The trend has begun and the longer it takes to reach real permanent status negotiations and agreements, the more viable will become the one-state option in Palestinian public opinion.
Reprinted with permission of Common Ground News Service
