Against two states

Submitted by Anon on 13 August, 2006 - 5:37

By Paddy Dollard

Socialist Worker has come out against a two-state solution to the Jewish Arab conflict (Alex Callinicos, SW 5 August).

Calinicos argues that two states would not be a solution because compared with Israel a Palestinian state would be very weak. He lists a range of problems, difficulties and obstacles in the way of two states being a solution. In the very last paragraph he announces the solution — “The only way out — lies in… a single secular and democratic Palestinian state, in which Jews and Arabs, Christians and Muslims live together on the basis of equality” — but gives no reason for thinking this very desirable solution is remotely feasible.

His case against two states is:

• It “cannot work”, because of “the imbalance of powers between the two sides.” That argument would have excluded seeking self-determination for vast swathes of the people of the ex-colonies throughout the world! For Ireland, for instance, a puny 26 county state of — for most of its history — around three million people, side by side with Britain.

• The Palestinian state would depend on outside finances, which could be withheld, as it recently was to pressure Hamas.

• Israel can only live with a weak “Palestinian Authority”, not anything more substantial because it need(s) to preserve the security of the Jewish state”.

• Israel is a “settler colonial state” seized and “occupied by privileged outsiders”. It has the problem of “all settler states” — that the “dispossessed” will “take the country back” — as “they did in” South Africa, Rhodesia, Algeria..

• The “Zionist colonisers drove out millions of Palestinians.” In fact 700,000 Arabs left or were driven out, so soon, were 600,000 Jews from Arab countries.

• Israel cannot make peace without “allowing the millions of Palestinian refugees to return” which would “destroy the basis of Israel as an exclusively Jewish state.”

How does Callinicos “solve” these difficulties? Proposes a common Jewish-Palestinian state in which, he implies, the social and economic differences between Israel and the West Bank would — what? Disappear?

In reality, one of two things: either Israel will agree to dismantle itself as a state in order to have a common state with those with whome it has been at war for over half a century — and it won’t do that: no state has ever done that, or anything like it! Or Israel will have to be forced, that is defeated in war by Arab states overwhelmed and subjugated. That would involve the killing and driving out of much of the population of Israel. The “secular democratic state” was always just a “nice” way of presenting the proposal to conquer Israel; a programme of Arab and Palestinian war until Israel is conquered. It is only the latest sign of the SWP adaptation to the worst Arab and Islamist chauvinists in the Middle East.

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