David C. Unger is a member of The New York Times editorial board specializing in foreign policy. His article,“Maps of
War, Maps of Peace: Finding a Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Question,” appeared in the summer 2002 issue of World Policy Journal.
The Inevitable Two-State Solution
David C. Unger
By 2033, two states, Israel and Palestine,
will be living side-by-side in an uneasy
peace, with the risk of war between them
and terrorism across their common border
diminishing year by year. This two-state
solution will not be imposed by the United
States or the Arab world. It will be freely
chosen by the Israelis and Palestinians
themselves. The growing Palestinian majority living between the Mediterranean and
the Jordan River will continue to insist on
nothing less. And a solid majority of Israelis
will by then have come to see a two-state
partition of Palestine as essential to Israel’s
survival as a tolerable place to live and raise
their families.
That is not the only outcome possible
for 2033. But it is the most likely—and it
is the most attractive one for Israelis, Palestinians and the outside world.
Consider the alternatives.
The safest prediction for anywhere is
normally some version of present realities,
projected forward. But there is nothing safe
or normal about the existing situation in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip. These territories
are neither Israel nor Palestine, and their
unfolding demographic arithmetic assures
that they are not going to evolve into one or
the other without very bold political decisions being taken by both sides.
© 2008 World Policy Institute
Currently, more than five million Jews
live between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River along with somewhat less than
five million Arabs. Because of continuing
changes in the birth rates of both populations and the uncertainties surrounding future inward and outward migration, precise
population estimates for 2033 are impossible. But most experts agree in a quarter century, there will be more Arabs than Jews,
with both totals falling somewhere between
six and seven million.
With no two-state solution, most of
the Arab population would be outside the
“green line,” the boundary between pre1967 Israel and the territory added after
the Six Day War in June of that year.
Much of it would also live outside the new
security fence built to separate mainly
Jewish-inhabited areas from neighboring
Palestinian-inhabited zones, and which in
some areas extends well beyond the green
line. (Currently, about 80 percent of the
Palestinian population lives in East
Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza
Strip.) Palestinian Arabs make up 100 percent of the 1.5 million people now living in
the Gaza Strip and more than 90 percent of
the 2.6 million now living in the West
Bank. In all of Jerusalem, the current numbers are roughly 500,000 Jews and roughly
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250,000 Arabs. Approximately another 1.2
million Arabs now live inside Israel’s 1967
borders, mainly in the Galilee and in areas
near the green line in the Haifa region.
Of course this leaves aside the more
than five million other Palestinians now
living beyond the Jordan River. More than
half of them live in the Kingdom of Jordan
and more than 800,000 are in Lebanon and
Syria. Some 300,000 of the Palestinians in
Jordan, 200,000 of those in Lebanon, and
100,000 of those in Syria are still living in
the United Nations recognized refugee
camps set up after the 1948 and 1967 wars.
And then there are also roughly eight million Jews living outside Israel, some twothirds of them in the United States.
Over the next 25 years, net Jewish migration into Israel is likely fall off and, in
the absence of peace with the Palestinians,
perhaps even reverse. Jews have moved to
Israel for all kinds of reasons. But the
biggest numbers came from three main feardriven migrations. First came the Holocaust
survivors and other displaced Jews of postWorld War II Europe. Soon after came the
hundreds of thousands of Jews forced from
the Arab world after Israel’s creation (and
more recently from Iran, following the Islamic Revolution there). Then, over the past
two decades, hundreds of thousands of more
have grasped at the chance to flee the historic anti-Semitic prejudices and new uncertainties of Russia and other former Soviet
republics.
Those ready pools of the uprooted and
uneasy have, for the most part, been depleted. Roughly half the former Soviet Jewish
population has already emigrated, most of it
to Israel. The rest, numbering a little less
than one million, has chosen to stay put, although it is conceivable that new spasms of
nationalist anti-Semitism could change their
minds. Fewer than 10,000 Jews still live in
Arab countries, less than 40,000 in Iran,
and less than 30,000 in Turkey.
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And the number of Jews now likely to
leave the relative safety and security of the
large diaspora communities of North and
South America and Western Europe for an
increasingly militarized Israel, while not
negligible, might well be smaller than the
reverse flow of comfortable and cosmopolitan Israelis headed for Europe and the New
World. Without significant inward Jewish
migration, the demographic balance in
Palestine is likely to turn even more sharply
in favor of the Palestinian Arabs over the
next 25 years.
Yet in the absence of a comprehensive
two-state solution, there is little chance that
Israel can muster the political will to dismantle vulnerable West Bank settlements
lying well beyond the green line over the
next quarter century. The security barriers
needed to protect them, in the face of an increasingly adverse demographic balance,
will stifle any hope of real economic development in the West Bank. The Gaza Strip,
presumably still under the control of
Hamas or an even more radical successor,
will remain economically blockaded.
Escalating Repression
The nearly seven million Arabs of Palestine
will be poor, desperate, and with little to
lose by 2033. Permanent insurgency, with
terrorist and rocket attacks on Jewish settlements, Israeli soldiers, and Israelis living
across the green line are a certainty. Israel
has the military capability of suppressing an
occupied Palestinian majority indefinitely—
provided three crucial conditions continue
to be met.
First, Israelis would have to continue to
be willing to provide their sons, daughters,
and political support for the kind of all-out
repression that would frequently include
killing children and other innocent civilians, systematic torture, and international
obloquy. Second, in the face of this, Washington and American public opinion would
WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • FALL 2008
©Quique Kierszenbaum
Shortcut to a lasting peace?
have to remain willing to provide the kind
of uncritical diplomatic support and military and economic aid that George W. Bush
has provided the governments of Ariel
Sharon and Ehud Olmert—without regard
to Israeli policies, negotiating positions, or
defiance of American requests.
Third, all or most of Israel’s land
borders—with Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and
Lebanon—would have to remain under the
control of governments willing and able to
deny passage to Palestinian fighters and
arms. (It matters far less whether Iran or any
of Israel’s neighbors would have acquired a
nuclear deterrent, since nothing Israel does
within the confines of the West Bank and
Gaza Strip would likely cross any state’s nuclear red lines and so trigger a credible nuclear response.)
All three of these conditions are subject to change over the next 25 years. In
fact, all three are more likely to change
than not.
The Inevitable Two-State Solution
While the second two conditions are
largely beyond the scope of this examination, the kind of changes likely in Israel absent a two-state solution—the erosion of
democracy and human rights and the declining political influence of the shrinking
proportion of Ashkenazi Jews from Northern and Eastern Europe and the United
States—could also lead to more critical
and nuanced views of Israeli policy from
Jewish and non-Jewish voters in the United
States.
Nevertheless, it’s important to consider
the first condition.
Mounting Costs of Occupation
Every Israeli Jewish (except for the ultra
orthodox, who are exempt), Druse, and
Circassian male serves three years of active
military duty starting at age 18. Women
from these groups serve at least two years.
After that, the men (and some of the
women) are assigned to the reserves.
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Male reservists can be called to duty for
up to one month per year until their 40s.
Reservists can be ordered to serve in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip during periods of
heightened violence or when regular army
troops are engaged in other missions, like
the 2006 invasion of Lebanon. Even when
Israel’s only military operations are against
Palestinians living inside its post-1967
borders, it has had to rely on reserve callups. That’s what happened in the spring of
2002, when 30,000 reservists were called up
during Israeli military operations to reoccupy West Bank towns. At that point, with
Israel engaged in no foreign wars and its only combat or occupation operations confined
to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, almost
one in ten of all Israelis between the ages
of 17 and 49 fit for military service was in
uniform. Failure to achieve a two-state
solution by 2033 would likely require
an even higher state of national military
mobilization.
That could create strains throughout
society as never before. Israel is no longer
a land of self-denying pioneers. It is a consumerist democracy. Its citizens are increasingly rich, comfortable, and more interested
in the individual pursuit of happiness than
the ideological pursuit of Arab-inhabited
territory. Under such conditions, live-andlet-live pragmatism can be counted on
to eventually trump traditional Zionist
ideology.
That includes such deeply embedded
ideological precepts as the claim to Jewish
rights to settle in the entire Biblical land of
Israel. It includes the dream of an indivisible, Israeli-ruled Jerusalem (as defined by
its greatly expanded 1967 boundaries). And
it includes the insistence that almost all of
the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian
refugees who fled their homes in 1948 left
voluntarily, ignoring the increasingly welldocumented historical record of a deliberate
campaign of armed coercion, endorsed by
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the highest levels of Israeli political and
military authority, designed to drive them
out.
Once these three ideological precepts
lose their grip, peace based on pragmatic
compromise becomes an almost irresistibly
appealing alternative. Of course it is not
just ideological stubbornness that makes
many Israelis wary of a compromise peace.
The Arab invasions of 1948 and 1973,
along with decades of terrorist infiltration,
convinced many Israelis that the country’s
pre-1967 borders did not provide adequate
security. Today’s rocket attacks from the
Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, the evident
ineffectiveness of Fatah control in the West
Bank, and the specter of political volatility
and Islamic radicalism throughout the Arab
and Muslim world powerfully reinforce
those anxieties.
Creating an Israeli consensus for farreaching compromise could take a long
time. But eventually, I expect it to come
about. Because if it doesn’t come about,
Jewish democracy in Israel will likely have
to be sacrificed, with some acknowledged or
unacknowledged form of national security
dictatorship taking its place.
Impossible One-state Solution
Theoretically, there exists another choice
besides the two-state solution or indefinite
military occupation. Palestinians, whether
they live inside the green line, in greater
Jerusalem, or in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip, could simply be granted the full
range of legal rights enjoyed by Jewish
Israelis, including the right to live anywhere they choose between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, the right to serve
in the armed forces and the right of those
living anywhere in the diaspora to return
to live in Palestine.
This is what many Palestinian intellectuals claimed to want before Yasir Arafat accepted the idea of a two-state solution beWORLD POLICY JOURNAL • FALL 2008
ginning in the 1970s, though it was not until 1988 that Arafat’s Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) formally recognized
Israel as a Jewish state. And, in the face
of the continued carving up of the West
Bank with Jewish settlements, Jewish-only
access roads, and Israeli military checkpoints
and barriers, and the continued unwillingness of any Israeli government to bargain
seriously about Jerusalem, Palestinian statehood, or refugees, it is what an increasing
minority of Palestinian intellectuals has begun calling for again. There is also a minute
constituency for this one-state approach
among so-called
post-Zionist
Israeli Jewish
intellectuals.
Superficially,
this would seem
the perfect liberal
solution—assuming, and this is a
very big assumption, that a future
Palestinian majority (inevitable by 2033,
giving the demographic realities) would not
impose its own restrictions on the legal
rights of the Jewish minority and the rights
of Jews elsewhere to immigrate to a bi-national Palestine. The record of the Arab
world, indeed of most of the world, is not
very encouraging on this score.
A bi-national state would negate Zionism, even Zionism’s raison d’etre—a Jewish
majority government as a guarantee of Jewish security, Jewish political and civil rights,
and the right of any Jew in the world to resettle in a Jewish-controlled homeland in
Palestine. At best, a bi-national Palestine
would offer the conditions Jews now enjoy
in the United States—a Jewish minority
living in peace, prosperity, and harmony
with its non-Jewish neighbors. At worst, it
would reproduce conditions resembling
those of pre-1939 Poland or present day
“
The Inevitable Two-State Solution
Iran—a Jewish minority living in fear of
mob violence, economic expropriation, and
physical expulsion.
If Israeli Jews are going to commit their
future to that range of possibilities, it is
hard to see much reason for having an Israel
at all. And that is exactly the point. A binational state means the end of the state of
Israel.
Getting There
That leaves a two-state solution as the only
realistic possibility for 2033. But it still
leaves the problem of getting from a here
If Israeli consensus for far-reaching
compromise doesn’t come about,
democracy will likely be sacrificed
with some form of national security
dictatorship taking its place.
”
in which the territorial integrity of the
West Bank keeps receding, communitarian
boundaries in Jerusalem become increasingly scrambled, internal Palestinian political
divisions solidify, and trust between the
population on both sides diminishes; and a
there in which an economically and politically viable Palestinian state emerges and both
peoples agree to live side-by-side in peace
forevermore.
How would the difficult and frustrating
details of Jerusalem, borders, Palestinian
refugees, and Israeli security finally be resolved? And, more fundamentally, how
would Israeli society and Palestinian society
each arrive at their own stable consensus
that whatever deal is finally struck on these
issues is not subject to future reopening, but
is for keeps and thus the legal and legitimate end of their historic conflict over the
land of Palestine?
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Apart from these all-important details,
the broad parameters of a two-state solution
have to some extent already been worked
out. Bill Clinton’s attempt to get Yasir
Arafat and Ehud Barak to agree on final
terms at Camp David in the summer of
2000 broke down in recriminations, followed by the outbreak of the second intifada. But President Clinton persisted, and in
December 2000, he offered a detailed set of
American parameters that can still serve as a
useful starting point for a final status agreement. It provides for Palestinian sovereignty
over 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank (allowing Israel to keep a compact bloc of settlements around the green line). An area
roughly equivalent to what Israel retains in
the West Bank would be ceded to the Palestinians from inside the green line. Israel
would retain sovereignty over Jewish areas
of Jerusalem while Palestine would have
sovereignty over Arab areas. The most religiously significant areas of the Temple
Mount complex would be similarly divided.
Palestinian refugees would have an absolute
right of return to Palestine, but no specific
right of return to Israel.
Over the following few weeks, Israeli
and Palestinian negotiators met in Taba,
Egypt, and tried to fill in some of the details of the Clinton proposals. Both sides accepted the broad parameters, but could not
bridge important differences over refugees
and some aspects of designating respective
sovereignties in Jerusalem. The talks were
broken off in early 2001 shortly before the
Barak government left office, giving way to
the much more hawkish cabinet led by Ariel
Sharon.
The following year, the Arab League
adopted a Saudi plan that offered full Arab
recognition of Israel in return for a two-state
solution based on the 1967 borders, a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem and “a just
solution to the Palestinian Refugee problem, to be agreed upon in accordance with
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section 11 of UN General Assembly Resolution 194.” Section 11 has been around since
its adoption in 1948, and its meaning continuously disputed between Israel and its
Arab neighbors. The text states that
“refugees wishing to return to their homes
and live at peace with their neighbors
should be permitted to do so at the earliest
practicable date, and that compensation
should be paid for the property of those
choosing not to return and for loss of or
damage to property which, under principles
of international law or in equity, should be
made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.”
No one should underestimate the difficulties of turning these overlapping sets of
broadly agreed principles into specific
boundaries and concrete security arrangements, particularly in an atmosphere of
(well-deserved) mutual mistrust. And not
even a mutually agreed framework exists for
resolving perhaps the most emotionally explosive issue of all—the rights and future of
Palestinian refugees.
Israelis believe there can be no concessions—even symbolic concessions involving
the careful readmission of strictly limited
numbers of the now mostly elderly Palestinians who actually lived within the borders of present-day Israel prior to 1948.
Almost all Israelis feel that to do so would
be to deny the essence of the two-states-fortwo-peoples formula, open the door to further Palestinian refugee claims, and impugn
the Israeli national narrative of a sometimes
messy but wholly legitimate Jewish reclaiming of the land of Israel.
Palestinians believe that their refugee
rights have been solemnly enshrined in
United Nations General Assembly resolutions and should not be simply wiped off
the negotiating slate, that an Israel that refuses to recognize the historical injustices
done to Palestinians in 1948 is not an Israel
they can trust to keep its promises today,
WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • FALL 2008
and, perhaps most tellingly, that the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees
now living in squalid camps in Jordan,
Lebanon, and Syria cannot be left to their
present fate. Indeed, there are also nearly
500,000 Palestinians still living in official
refugee camps in Gaza and roughly another
175,000 in the West Bank.
The logic of a
two-state solution
is, of course, that
the state of Israel
should be a homeland for Jews and
that the state of
Palestine should
be a homeland for
Palestinians. But since it is hard to see how
the West Bank and Gaza Strip would be
able to support even that fraction of the
Palestinian diaspora now living in foreign
refugee camps, that logic will not seem very
satisfying to those Palestinians and their unwilling Arab hosts. Needless to say, these
refugees cannot be accommodated in Israel
either, without negating its status as a Jewish state. Still, a two-state solution that provides no solution for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in foreign
refugee camps will not be a very stable solution for anyone.
The two state solution that I see as the
only realistic possibility for 2033 will have
to be accepted not just by Israeli and Palestinian leaders, but by most of the Palestinian diaspora and all, or virtually all, of the
Arab world as a historic end to the morethan-a-century-old conflict over Palestine
and the end to any justification for further
violence over these issues.
“
Stuck in the Present
It is hard to see how the West Bank
and Gaza Strip could support even a
fraction of the Palestinian diaspora now
living in foreign refugee camps.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There is
little point to fleshing out the details of
these 2000–02 near-solutions when none of
them is currently on the negotiating table
The Inevitable Two-State Solution
between Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
Those partial frameworks were thrashed out
between the most dovish elements of the
Israeli and Palestinian political classes.
They have never been accepted by the top
political leadership on either side. And
while polls taken in times of relative tranquility suggest majorities of both societies
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might accept such arrangements in the
abstract—there is a big difference between
being polled about abstract ideas and agreeing to give up land or refugee rights, particularly when there will be no shortage of rejectionist politicians on both sides urging
intransigence.
Even if we want to be optimistic and
assume reasonably congenial conditions—
an extended period of relative tranquility,
courageous leaders on both sides, and broader populations recognizing where their enlightened self-interests might lie—there are
still some major political and constitutional
problems that must be overcome. Where in
the current Israeli and Palestinian political
spectrums, for example, would those leaders
who might seal such a deal come from? And
how they would mobilize the kind of solid
majority support that would be needed from
both peoples?
On the Palestinian side, the most obvious division today is between the moderate
nationalists of Fatah and the radical Islamists of Hamas. Hamas clearly won the
last round of Palestinian elections in 2006,
taking 74 seats to Fatah’s 45. It would most
likely win again if elections could be held
today. Such elections are nowhere on the
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horizon. Hamas is in full control of the
Gaza Strip after defeating an armed Fatah
attempt to crush its power in June 2007.
Fatah, militarily backed by Israel, has imposed an emergency government in the
West Bank.
For the forseeable future, neither party
can seriously pretend to speak on behalf of
all Palestinians or deliver Palestinian consent to any negotiated peace formula. Fatah
has lost much of its earlier legitimacy in
Palestinian eyes, not so much because of its
moderation or cooperation with Israel, but
because of its failures to deliver basic services, its pervasive corruption, and its internal
divisions and rivalries. But while Fatah’s
past willingness to negotiate with Israel is
not the cause of its eroding legitimacy, its
continued cooperation with Israel under the
unequal conditions that now prevail is further undermining Fatah’s standing. Fatah is
becoming less legitimate to Palestinians
even as it becomes more acceptable to
Israelis.
Fatah’s loss of legitimacy would grow
still more acute if it began to compromise
over the next quarter century on sensitive
and long-standing Palestinian national demands like claims to Jerusalem, the rights
of Palestinian refugees, and adjustments
(even equitable adjustments) to the 1967
borders. Whatever Fatah agreed to at the
negotiating table on these issues could well
be violently resisted by large sections of the
Palestinian population—providing Israel
with a perfect (and perfectly reasonable) excuse for backing out of its own difficult
compromises.
This is a seemingly fatal problem for the
current Annapolis round of peace talks that
first assembled most of the Arab world last
year, at least as presently structured. Serious
Palestinian compromises on the most difficult issues will only be possible with much
of Hamas, and its constituency, represented
on the Palestinian negotiating team. This
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cannot be a Hamas that refuses to abide by
past agreements, accept Israel’s legitimacy,
or disavow terrorism, to be sure. But neither
can it be a Hamas that is reshaped to Israeli
specifications in the way that Fatah has been
reshaped since the demise of Yasir Arafat.
Deep political divisions on the Israeli
side also pose huge obstacles to negotiating
a two-state solution. Polls regularly show a
majority of Israelis in favor of a two-state
solution based on something like a return to
the 1967 borders. But there has never been
a stable political majority in Israel for a
peace involving painful compromises and
concessions on Jerusalem or refugees, or
fully turning over security responsibilities
in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the
Palestinians.
Building Confidence in a Vacuum
Because reaching an agreement on the hard
issues is so difficult for both sides, there is
an understandable temptation to fall back
on supposedly easier “confidence-building”
steps, like periodic releases of Palestinian
prisoners, and easily reversible steps that involve the likes of freezing and unfreezing
budget funds, or easing and tightening border checkpoints.
The biggest single lesson of the breakdown of the Oslo peace agreements of 1993
is that such symbolic steps do not build
much confidence if they leave fundamental
grievances on both sides unaddressed, and if
they are not lubricated with visible and
steady progress toward a clearly defined
two-state solution. There is no point going
down that dead-end street again.
For example, Israeli governments like
to reward Palestinian moderation with prisoner releases. These are strongly sought by
groups like Fatah and Hamas (to which the
prisoners usually belong) and are a popular
national cause among the broader Palestinian population. But while these releases
may build goodwill around the negotiatWORLD POLICY JOURNAL • FALL 2008
ing table, they do little to build peace.
Arguably, they lower the threshold for
Palestinian violence by showing those
tempted to attack Israeli targets that even if
caught, they probably will not have to serve
out their full sentences.
What would much more clearly build
peace are steps that
would visibly
change the lives of
ordinary Palestinians—like
dismantling internal security barriers
and roadblocks between West Bank
cities, except for those clearly and directly
related to the security of Israelis living inside the border fence.
The single most important step any Israeli government could take to rebuild
Palestinian faith in progress toward a twostate solution is an absolute freeze on all settlement expansion. The number of Jewish
settlers on the West Bank (excluding East
Jerusalem) has more than doubled since the
Oslo agreements were signed. It has increased by roughly another 10,000 since the
Annapolis talks last November, and is now
approaching 300,000. How can Palestinians
ever be expected to believe that Israel will
agree to a viable two-state solution unless
this process is immediately brought to a
complete halt, and all settlement outposts
created in violation of Israeli law are dismantled?
This is much harder for any Israeli government to do than release prisoners, not
just because of the size and political power
of the settler community, but because such a
decision would rightly be seen by Israelis
and Palestinians alike as the most significant concrete step that could be taken today
“
The Inevitable Two-State Solution
toward preparing the way for a two-state
solution.
Achieving a two-state solution by 2033
means that the current impasses must somehow be overcome. Outside powers, especially the United States, can help, by stepping
in with credible security guarantees, confer-
The single most important step any
Israeli government could take to rebuild Palestinian faith...is an absolute
freeze on all settlement expansion.
”
ring international legitimacy on courageous
and innovative Israeli and Palestinian leaders, and withholding it from time-servers
and obstructionists. Arab leaders can help
by legitimating necessary Palestinian compromises, helping configure internationalized solutions for Jerusalem’s religious sites,
and facilitating the resettlement of Palestinian refugees.
But outsiders can only help. The main
work will have to be done by Israelis and
Palestinians themselves. Ultimately Israelis
will decide their own fate. So will the
Palestinians.
Even long before 2033, however, Israel’s
available options will be reduced to a nation
besieged in continued occupation, a Jewish
population of Palestine submerged in a binational state, or a political agreement between stable majorities of Israelis and Palestinians on a compromise two-state solution.
Both sides will surely see that historic compromise as less than ideal. But they will also
see it as clearly superior to any of the available alternatives for two populations determined to build and defend their homelands
in the same narrow strip of land.
•
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