The two-state solution, in ignoring the economic life of the Palestinian people, effectively would consign Palestinians to perpetual neo-colonial poverty, writes Lama Abu Odeh* The movement for a one state solution in Palestine has been acquiring momentum and appeal, not least evidenced by growing conference meetings in Europe and the US inviting conferees to discuss the idea. The move by activists and academics to confidently put the idea on the table corresponds with the growing appeal of the one state solution among Palestinians both in historic Palestine and in the Diaspora. As foreign policy gurus, diplomats and experts, puzzle over the intentions of the Obama administration vis-à-vis the Israel/Palestine issue, with various parties proposing ways to move forwards what is conventionally known as the "peace process", the "one-staters", as it were, proceed with a different agenda, pushing the discourse in a different direction. Most people are familiar with the two-state solution as it is the more conventional one that has thus far framed the demands of Palestinians and their negotiating representatives. One way of articulating the contrast between this more conventional approach and the emergent one state solution would be to say that while the "two- staters" treat the national aspirations for a separate homeland entertained by both Palestinians and Israeli Jews as the moral engine behind the idea of a two-state solution, the one-staters offer domestic justice as the moral background to their proposed strategy. The difference in the two moral approaches has a parallel difference in the legal framing of Palestinian demands. Whereas the legal framework for the two-staters is international law (international resolutions, truces, the rights of refugees, etc), the one-staters shift attention to domestic Israeli law. The latter position proceeds from the realist assertion/insight that Palestinians are already inhabitants of the state of Israel. The deep penetration of settlements and connecting highways into the occupied territories, the control of the Israeli military of the skies above the territories, the condensed network of checkpoints on the ground turning Palestinian areas into patches of population centres, the total control of all borders and, most importantly, the complete linkage of the Palestinian economy to that of Israel, are all facts that scream for calling a spade a spade: that Palestinians are inhabitants of the state of Israel, they exist in a regime of de facto annexation, consequently not awarding them Israeli citizenship given Israel's complete and thorough domination of their lives is a form of discrimination . In a nutshell, the fact that under current arrangements the occupied areas produce great revenue for the state of Israel, very little of which is shared with the Palestinians, makes Palestinians the poor inhabitants of Israel who produce wealth for the Israeli Jewish state but get little services or investments in their areas in return. What revenue is transferred enters the coffers of the Palestinian Authority (PA) whose sole function under the current arrangements is to police Palestinians in their entrapment in poverty so they don't rebel against their police gendarmes (the PA) and its employer masters, the Israelis. I should say that while I am a proponent of the one state solution as an alternative to the more common two-state one, I don't do so on the basis that Israel has created facts on the ground that are irreversible. I believe that Jewish settlements, the apartheid wall and land confiscations are all reversible, if sufficient political will in Israel exists. Rather, I am a proponent of the one state solution from the critical point of view that the supporters of the two-state solution reify the form of the "state" and exaggerate its emancipatory power for the Palestinians; not simply because the two-state solution, once the bargaining chips are on the table, would produce an emasculated form of a state for Palestinians with substantive trade-offs in land and population, but also because of the glaring absence in the two-state solution agenda of proposed economic arrangements that would rescue the Palestinian territories from their current situation as an economic dependency of Israel in the most extreme form. The absence of an economic agenda, let alone an emancipatory one, I would argue, amounts to the Achilles' heal of the two-state position. In other words, due to such absence, the transition to two states, even in its most pristine form (West Bank plus Gaza, plus East Jerusalem as capital, plus no settlements) promises to transform the relationship with Israel from a formally colonial one to a neo-colonial one. The absence of an emancipatory economic agenda from the two-state solution discourse is the result of two factors. The first conceptual, as the obfuscation of the economic is the classical sin of those who forefront nationalism in their political agenda as the two-staters do. Second, historic, for the appetite of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) -- the historic national representative of the Palestinian people -- to rule has proven so insatiable (since Oslo) that it seems quite happy servicing the Israeli agenda in the occupied territories in return for domestic power over the bodies of Palestinians located in some form of a national entity (the PA). However, it is only by retiring the homo nationalis to the background (and consequently the PLO itself) that the homo economicus (the Palestinians themselves) is centred, allowing us the insight that at the end of the day, and on balance, it is better for Palestinians to be poor, marginalised and discriminated against citizens of a post-industrialised, wealthy democratic state (Israel), with possibility of advancement within a democracy, than being the stalemated citizens of an underdeveloped Third World state led by a tyrannical elite (the PLO), as their fellow Arab citizens find themselves in the rest of the Arab world. The demand for citizenship in the state of Israel provides a golden opportunity for Palestinians to make the PLO/PA historically redundant, and through the discourse of citizenship lay claim directly to the wealth they produce for the Israeli state. Such struggles have to be civil rights oriented, persistent while shunning violence. There is nothing more disarming of Israel than the scream by Palestinians: 'We want to be citizens of the state that governs our lives, taxes our wealth, and annexes our land and gives nothing in return.' There is nothing more disarming of the PLO than the scream: 'Go back to Tunis, enough is enough.' I should not be taken, however, to be idealising the Israeli state as the better locus for Palestinian citizenship. The predicament of Israeli Palestinians is well known, and the Jewish nationalist cabal that has ruled Israel historically is not exactly morally superior to the PLO. The former's sadistic and voyeuristic appetite has no match in modern times: subjecting Palestinians to an open, slow unyielding death for over a century now, with no promise of respite. There is absolutely no reason to expect it to welcome new Palestinian bodies into the state of Israel, or indeed to treat them any differently if such an entry were possible. Nor should I be taken to be de-reifying the two-state solution only to be reifying the one state solution. Looked at closely, sovereignty (what makes a political entity a state) is nothing more than an ensemble of powers and privileges. Different political entities have different distributions of such an ensemble depending on the political compromise reached among their domestic constituencies. Such compromises are typically expressed in constitutional arrangements. So there are federal states like the US, multicultural ones like Belgium, con-federal ones like Switzerland, etc. Palestinian progressive intelligentsia, especially lawyers, acting as the organic intellectuals of the one state solution would be expected to propose constitutional arrangements that would satisfy or split the difference between the competing economic, cultural and historic needs, fears and attachments that the Jewish and Arab constituencies would have in this future Israel. Topics of negotiations between the two constituencies, Jewish and Arab, would include taxes, linguistic/cultural autonomy, freedom of movement, rights of residence, political representation, etc. At the end of the day, the outcome might look like a bi-national one state that might approximate a two state solution. However, the difference would be that if the background assumption against which negotiators work is the one state solution, the problems that would be forefront would include vital economic ones like revenue allocation and distribution, especially taxes. For the two staters, it would be borders, land and population swaps and military/security arrangements. It is because the one state solution, if adopted by Palestinians as their political strategy for resistance to Israeli domination, has the power to forefront economy over borders that I support the one state solution. * The writer is a Palestinian-American professor and author teaching at the Georgetown University Law Centre.
