Menarik juga.
Bila idee "one state solution" ini sudah tidak jadi taboo lagi dan hak orang
Palestina untuk kembali ke kampung halamannnya diakui, maka pemecahan dan
penyelesaian masaalah Palestina bisa diharapkan..
UPDATED ON:
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
11:41 Mecca time, 08:41 GMT
FOCUS: OPINION
Israeli right embracing one-state?
By Ali Abunimah
Proposals to grant Israeli citizenship to Palestinians in the West Bank are
being pushed by some prominent activists among the West Bank settler movement
[GALLO/GETTY]
There has been a strong revival in recent years of support among Palestinians
for a one-state solution guaranteeing equal rights to Palestinians and Israeli
Jews throughout historic Palestine.
One might expect that any support for a single state among Israeli Jews would
come from the far left, and in fact this is where the most prominent Israeli
Jewish champions of the idea are found, although in small numbers.
Recently, proposals to grant Israeli citizenship to Palestinians in the West
Bank, including the right to vote for the knesset, have emerged from a
surprising direction: Right-wing stalwarts such as knesset speaker Reuven
Rivlin, and former defence minister Moshe Arens, both from the Likud party of
Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister.
Even more surprisingly, the idea has been pushed by prominent activists among
Israel's West Bank settler movement, who were the subject of a must-read
profile
by Noam Sheizaf in Haaretz.
Unlikely advocates
IN depth
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Their visions still fall far short of what any Palestinian advocate of a single
state would consider to be just: The Israeli proposals insist on maintaining
the
state's character - at least symbolically - as a "Jewish state," exclude the
Gaza Strip, and do not address the rights of Palestinian refugees.
And, settlers on land often violently expropriated from Palestinians would
hardly seem like obvious advocates for Palestinian human and political rights.
Although the details vary, and in some cases are anathema to Palestinians, what
is more revealing is that this debate is occurring openly and in the least
likely circles.
The Likudnik and settler advocates of a one-state solution with citizenship for
Palestinians realise that Israel has lost the argument that Jewish sovereignty
can be maintained forever at any price. A status quo where millions of
Palestinians live without rights, subject to control by escalating Israeli
violence is untenable even for them.
At the same time repartition of historic Palestine - what they call Eretz
Yisrael - into two states is unacceptable, and has proven unattainable - not
least because of the settler movement itself.
Some on the Israeli right now recognise what Israeli geographer Meron
Benvenisti
has said for years: Historic Palestine is already a "de facto binational
state,"
unpartionable except at a cost neither Israelis nor Palestinians are willing to
pay.
'Horse and rider'
The Israeli rights' vision of a one-state solution falls far short of
Palestinian aspirations [EPA]
The relationship between Palestinians and Israelis is not that of equals
however, but that "between horse and rider" as one settler vividly put it in
Haaretz.
>From the settlers' perspective, repartition would mean an uprooting of at
>least
tens of thousands of the 500,000 settlers now in the West Bank, and it would
not
even solve the national question.
Would the settlers remaining behind in the West Bank (the vast majority under
all current two-state proposals) be under Palestinian sovereignty or would
Israel continue to exercise control over a network of settlements
criss-crossing
the putative Palestinian state?
How could a truly independent Palestinian state exist under such circumstances?
The graver danger is that the West Bank would turn into a dozen Gaza Strips
with
large Israeli civilian populations wedged between miserable, overcrowded walled
Palestinian ghettos.
The patchwork Palestinian state would be free only to administer its own
poverty, visited by regular bouts of bloodshed.
Even a full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank - something that is not
remotely on the peace process agenda - would leave Israel with 1.5 million
Palestinian citizens inside its borders. This population already faces
escalating discrimination, incitement and loyalty tests.
In an angry, ultra-nationalist Israel shrunken by the upheaval of abandoning
West Bank settlements, these non-Jewish citizens could suffer much worse,
including outright ethnic cleansing.
With no progress toward a two-state solution despite decades of efforts, the
only Zionist alternative on offer has been outright expulsion of the
Palestinians - a programme long-championed by Israeli foreign minister Avigdor
Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu party, which has seen its support increase steadily.
Israel is at the point where it has to look in the mirror and even some cold,
hard Likudniks like Arens apparently do not like what they see. Yisrael
Beitenu's platform is "nonsensical," Arens told Haaretz and simply not "doable".
If Israel feels it is a pariah now, what would happen after another mass
expulsion of Palestinians?
Lessons from South Africa
Given these realities, "The worst solution ... is apparently the right one: a
binational state, full annexation, full citizenship" in the words of settler
activist and former Netanyahu aide Uri Elitzur.
This awakening can be likened to what happened among South African whites in
the
1980s. By that time it had become clear that the white minority government's
effort to "solve" the problem of black disenfranchisement by creating nominally
independent homelands - bantustans - had failed.
Pressure was mounting from internal resistance and the international campaign
of
boycott, divestment and sanctions. By the mid-1980s, whites overwhelmingly
understood that the apartheid status quo was untenable and they began to
consider "reform" proposals that fell very far short of the African National
Congress' demands for a universal franchise - one-person, one-vote in a
non-racial South Africa.
The reforms began with the 1984 introduction of a tricameral parliament with
separate chambers for whites, coloureds and Indians (none for blacks), with
whites retaining overall control.
Until almost the end of the apartheid system, polls showed the vast majority of
whites rejected a universal franchise, but were prepared to concede some form
of
power-sharing with the black majority as long as whites retained a veto over
key
decisions.
The important point, as I have argued previously,is that one could not predict
the final outcome of the negotiations that eventually brought about a fully
democratic South Africa in 1994, based on what the white public and elites said
they were prepared to accept.
Once Israeli Jews concede that Palestinians must have equal rights, they will
not be able to unilaterally impose any system that maintains undue privilege.
A joint state should accommodate Israeli Jews' legitimate collective interests,
but it would have to do so equally for everyone else.
Moral currency devalued
This shift in position may see the Israeli right and left face off in
unexpected
ways [EPA]
The very appearance of the right-wing one-state solution suggests Israel is
feeling the pressure and experiencing a relative loss of power. If its
proponents thought Israel could "win" in the long-term there would be no need
to
find ways to accommodate Palestinian rights.
But Israeli Jews see their moral currency and legitimacy drastically devalued
worldwide, while demographically Palestinians are on the verge of becoming a
majority once again in historic Palestine.
Of course Israeli Jews still retain an enormous power advantage over
Palestinians which, while eroding, is likely to last for some time.
Israel's main advantage is a near monopoly on the means of violence, guaranteed
by the US.
But legitimacy and stability cannot be gained by reliance on brute force - this
is the lesson that is starting to sink in among some Israelis as the country is
increasingly isolated after its attacks on Gaza and the Gaza Freedom Flotilla.
Legitimacy can only come from a just and equitable political settlement.
Perhaps the right-wing proponents of a single state recognise that the best
time
to negotiate a transition which provides safeguards for Israeli Jews'
legitimate
collective interests is while they are still relatively strong.
Transforming relationships
That proposals for a single state are coming from the Israeli right should not
be so surprising in light of experiences in comparable situations.
In South Africa, it was not the traditional white liberal critics of apartheid
who oversaw the system's dismantling, but the National Party which had built
apartheid in the first place. In Northern Ireland, it was not "moderate"
unionists and nationalists like David Trimble and John Hume who finally made
power-sharing under the 1998 Belfast Agreement function, but the long-time
rejectionists of Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party, and the nationalist
Sinn Fein, whose leaders had close ties the IRA.
The experiences in South Africa and Northern Ireland show that transforming the
relationship between settler and native, master and slave, or "horse and
rider,"
to one between equal citizens is a very difficult, uncertain and lengthy
process.
There are many setbacks and detours along the way and success is not
guaranteed.
It requires much more than a new constitution; economic redistribution,
restitution and restorative justice are essential and meet significant
resistance.
But such a transformation is not, as many of the critics of a one-state
solution
in Palestine/Israel insist, "impossible." Indeed, hope now resides in the space
between what is "very difficult" and what is considered "impossible".
The proposals from the Israeli right-wing, however inadequate and indeed
offensive they seem in many respects, add a little bit to that hope. They
suggest that even those whom Palestinians understandably consider their most
implacable foes can stare into the abyss and decide there has to be a radically
different way forward.
We should watch how this debate develops and engage and encourage it carefully.
In the end it is not what the solution is called that matters, but whether it
fulfills the fundamental and inalienable rights of all Palestinians.
Ali Abunimah is author of One Country, A Bold Proposal to End the
Israeli-Palestinian Impasse and co-founder of The Electronic Intifada.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily
reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Source: Al Jazeera
Topics in this article
People
* Moshe Arens
* Benjamin Netanyahu
* Uri Elitzur
* Meron Benvenisti
* Ian Paisley
* Avigdor Lieberman
* John Hume
* Ali Abunimah
* David Trimble
* Reuven Rivlin
* Noam Sheizaf Country
* Israel
* Palestine
* South Africa
* Northern Ireland
* United States City
* Gaza Organisation
* Knesset
* African National Congress
* National Party
* Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu party
* Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party
* Sinn Fein
* Democratic Unionist Party
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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