Mouin Rabbani: Many of those who favor a one-state solution see it as the antithesis of the two-state solution, yet you seem to be suggesting a continuum.
Noam Chomsky: I don’t know of any other sensible way that has been proposed to move towards a binational, or one-state, solution other than accepting the world as it is and then taking the next step, which has been pretty clear for thirty years. There’s an overwhelming international consensus behind the two-state settlement essentially along the internationally recognized borders. I think it’s a rotten solution but I think it’s a stage towards a better solution, and I don’t know of any other approach.
IOA Editor: Finkelstein’s treatment of Palestinian rights reflects the limitations of relying exclusively on international law in the defense of Palestinian rights. Rather than forcing 100 years of history and a national liberation struggle into a legal brief, Finkelstein will do well to reconsider the implications of his focus on the “destruction of Israel” — a regional nuclear superpower — presumably by BDS activists, rather than focusing on 1948 Palestinian refugee rights and those of Palestinian citizens of Israel. As he must know, most Palestinians do not compartmentalize their national history as he appears to be doing.
Norman Finkelstein: “They don’t want Israel… They think they’re being very clever. They call it their three tiers… We want the end of the occupation, we want the right of return, and we want equal rights for Arabs in Israel. And they think they are very clever, because they know the result of implementing all three is what? What’s the result? You know and I know what’s the result: there’s no Israel.”
Using phrases that imply Israel is conducting a policy of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Area C, the report notes the Palestinian population has shrunk dramatically to only 150,000, compared to as many as twice that number in the Jordan Valley alone in 1967. The Jewish population in the settlements, meanwhile, has grown to 310,000, tripling in less than 20 years.
Ma’aleh Adumim Mayor Benny Kasriel has demanded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explain reports that he had secretly promised the US that Israel would not build new neighborhoods in E1, a controversial area which connects Jerusalem to the nearby settlement.
A conversation with Noam Chomsky on Palestine/Israel, covering Zionism, the nature of statehood, bi-national / one-state / two-state solutions, the right of return, and the BDS movement – its actions, and their impacts on the Palestinian people. Filmed September 2nd, 2010.
UN special rapporteur, Richard Falk: “[The Occupation] is presently a de facto annexation. The creation of a single state would give the arrangement a more legalistic cover. It would seek to resolve the issue of occupied territory without the bother of international negotiations… The effect is to fragment the Palestinian people in such defining ways as to make it almost impossible to envision the emergence of a viable Palestinian sovereign state… The longer it continues, the more difficult it is to overcome, and the more serious are the abridgements of fundamental Palestinian rights.”
Saeb Erekat: “We are in a situation where we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. There is a cost if we agree [to direct talks] and a cost if we don’t.” Mr Erekat stressed the dismay among ordinary Palestinians over the lack of diplomatic progress. Supporters of a two-state solution like himself were losing legitimacy, he added.
Ethnic cleansing can be carried out dramatically (as in this country in 1948 and in Kosovo in 1998) or in a quiet and systematic way, by dozens of sophisticated methods, as is happening now in East Jerusalem. But there cannot be the slightest doubt that this is the final stage of the one-state vision of the rightists. The first stage will be an effort to fill the entire country with settlements, and to demolish any chance of implementing the two-state solution, which is the only realistic basis for peace.
We should not romanticise these Likud converts. They are not speaking of the “state of all its citizens” demanded by Israel’s tiny group of Jewish non-Zionists. Most would require that Palestinians accept life in a state dominated by Jews.
IOA Editor: Indeed, we shouldn’t. In the words of an important Beitar song – penned by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the Israeli Right’s spiritual leader – “two banks has the Jordan [River], this one is ours and so is the other.”
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.
Meron Benvenisti: “The whole notion of a Palestinian state now, in 2010, is a sham… The entire discourse is wrong. By continuing that discourse you perpetuate the status quo. The struggle for the two-state solution is obsolete… For the last 20 years I have questioned the feasibility of the partition of Palestine and now I am absolutely sure it is impossible… Or, it is possible if it is imposed on the Palestinians but that will mean the legitimisation of the status quo, of Bantustans, of a system of political and economic inequality.
With renewed American interest in delivering a two-state reality, the leaderships in both Jerusalem and Ramallah appear to share one common goal: finding a comfort zone, a place where the peace process can continue ad infinitum, and hard decisions can be avoided.
But in any event, discussion about a binational state should not be of interest only to the radical left. For if the two-state option melts away, the burden of coping with a binational reality will fall on all of us.
