It's time to think seriously about the one-state solution for Israel-Palestine

12 September 2024, 08:42 | Updated: 13 September 2024, 11:37

It must seem crazy to make this suggestion when people are still being killed in Gaza, Israel and the West Bank.

We’re dealing with a situation where there are around 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians who live between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River and have every intention of staying rooted where they are. Is there a political formula which could enable them to live peacefully side by side?

Ever since the events of October 7 last year, world leaders have been calling for the two-state solution. But there are three main reasons why many have been arguing that the two-state solution is totally unworkable:

- Israel’s creation of 240 settlements with around 700,000 Jewish settlers on the West Bank during its 57-year occupation make it impossible for a viable, contiguous Palestinian state to be created.

- If a Palestinian state were to be created on the West Bank, it would contain a considerable minority of Jewish settlers, who would inevitably feel that they are second-class citizens – in the same way that the 20% of Israeli citizens who are Palestinian Arabs feel that they are second-class citizens in a Jewish state.

- Recent Israeli governments have made it abundantly clear that they will never accept the creation of a Palestinian state.

So if the present situation is intolerable and the two-state solution is unworkable, there are two main reasons why the only alternative is the one-state solution:

- Most of the world – including most recently the International Court of Justice – believes that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 is illegal in international law.

- By its continuing occupation since 1967 Israel has already in effect created one single state. Three reports in 2023 – by the United Nations Human Rights Agency, Amnesty International and B’tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation – argued that it’s appropriate to use the word ‘apartheid’ to describe this situation.

The one-state solution would mean a single state, a bi-national state or some kind of federation. Of course it’s easy to rehearse all the reasons why this must sound utterly ‘naïve, utopian and unattainable’.

But perhaps it’s only when we’re prepared to recognise that the status quo is intolerable, and that the two-state solution is unworkable, that we may be willing to think about the one-state solution.

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Colin Chapman is former Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Near East School of Theology, Beirut, Lebanon. He is the author of Whose Promised Land? The Continuing Crisis Over Israel and Palestine, Christianity on Trial and The Case for Christianity and Islam and the West: Conflict, Co-existence or Conversion.

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