A One-State Palestine or Two Nation-States?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Why is Israel the only country in the world which some people wish to dismantle?

They use the euphemism of a so-called “one-state” solution, by which they mean recreating a supposedly intact pre-1948 Palestine.

They consider the 1947 partition plan endorsed by the United Nations, which was meant to create Arab and Jewish states in the country, to have been an error.

But why does Palestine have to become a single jurisdiction again? Why would anyone prefer a state of two nations to two nation-states?

Palestine has never been a sovereign country. In fact, as part of the Ottoman Empire, it was little more than a geographical expression, hardly distinct from adjacent areas such as Syria and Lebanon. It became a British Mandate after the First World War.

There was nothing sacrosanct about Palestine’s old boundaries, which were only fixed by the League of Nations – and which initially included all of Jordan.

I can think of any number of borders between states that might be erased more easily than the one between Israel and the present Palestinian territories in Gaza and the West Bank.

In the Balkans, Albania and Kosovo are both ethnically Albanian and territorially contiguous. Moldova and Romania, both Romanian, are another example. These states exist as distinct entities due to the vagaries of history and imperial conquests.

Elsewhere in Europe, Belgium and Holland were once a single unit, as were Scandinavian cousins Norway and Sweden and Iberian neighbours Portugal and Spain. Why not undo their separations? And why, for that matter, might Austria not be reunited with Germany into “one state?”

In fact, with the exception of Quebec, Canada and the United States, now divided mainly by an artificial boundary at the 49th parallel, have much in common with each other as well, ethnically, linguistically, and religiously. The division is the result of the American Revolution. Why not reunify the old British North America?

All these countries and peoples get along with each other much better than do Israelis and Palestinians. They certainly haven’t fought wars against each other recently. They should be candidates for single statehood ahead of Arabs and Jews.

The 1947 United Nations partition resolution divided the Palestine Mandate into Arab and Jewish states, precisely because no other solution was practical. Unfortunately, no Palestinian Arab state emerged because those territories were annexed by Egypt and Jordan.

Like Palestine, colonial India was also partitioned in 1947, for the same reason (in this case, into Muslim and Hindu-majority areas) and now comprises three states: Bangladesh, Pakistan and India. Why do we not hear calls to reunite them as well?

The proponents of a bi-national Palestinian state want to pressure two peoples who don’t get along to inhabit one country — like forcing a bitterly divorced couple to once again live under one roof. Maybe we should call this the “Kafka solution.”