I've said before that the two-state solution for Israel/Palestine is a zombie. Most people acknowledge that the present reality is a single state with a couple of enclaves where some authority is delegated to Palestinians, but their movement is severely curtailed and an occupying military enters to take any action it deems necessary without effective oversight. And that's just the West Bank.
But that isn't what I want to talk about today. I want to discuss why so many people recoil from the one-state solution.
Undoubtedly, many Israelis are deathly afraid of living next to Palestinians. They may have lived through the bombings of the second intifada, and the TV routinely carries voices warning of of blood-thirsty groups bent on killing and conquest.
But many Israelis know that with a just peace, opportunity and equality, an armed Palestinian rebellion will lose steam. They know this because they see that many Palestinians want to live and work in Israel. Israelis also know that if the various Palestinian militia are absorbed into the IDF (as the terrorist groups Irgun and Lehi were in 1948), the risk of renewed armed rebellion goes down even further. And that is not so unthinkable, the Palestinian Authority has been co-ordinating with the IDF for years. Most sensible people know this even if it's only subconsciously.
But there is one other reason to oppose a single state. And that is the fear of coming to terms with the inconsistencies in a cherished story.
The story is of a desperate people arriving in a land of their ancestors as the most terrible event in their collective memory. They find it sparsely populated and embark on an effort to build a homeland for themselves. They are set upon by neighboring states and tribes who covet the land. Through sheer grit and ingenuity, they manage to push back the overwhelmingly superior forces (five armies!). They claim a nation and make the desert bloom. True, if some were pushed aside, or prevented from returning, that was both moral and necessary.
If there is one state with equal rights, a lot of this goes out the window. Firstly because the narrative changes because half the country has a collective memory that contradicts this narrative and can directly refute the pleasant storybook. The Palestinian perspective on the Nakba and the War of Independence could not be ignored.
Even if you continue to cling to the storybook narrative of 1947/48, you will only be able to do it for so long.
Till the day a Palestinian family walks onto your block in West Jerusalem. An old woman carrying a worn set of keys is with them. How would you be able to swallow the lump in your throat when she stops in front of a house on your street and fingers the keys, the keys to the house that her family left or was driven away from 70 years ago. A house that continues to live in their minds, but which none of her grandchildren have seen till now because they could take nothing with them. And what will you tell your children when they asked who that family was, and how it is that they came to leave the house, and how it came to be that another family lives there now.
Or if you live in a kibbutz out in a quiet valley and you see a dozen old men and women get off a bus and walk around the ruins next to your town. They point out every hill, some of the old olive trees. The stop at a ruin and the more devout among them drop to their knees to pray. Then after a picnic meal at the stream they used to play in as children, they shuffle back into their bus and they are gone. When you look around you the next day, when you walk onto the fields your kibbutz has claimed. When you look at the Arabian horses around you, what will you be able to say to the voice that asks where they came from. Were they bought or were they taken? Will you still say that tearing down that village and the memories of those boys and girls was moral. And will you be able to tell yourself it was necessary?
It's much easier to have two states. They stay over there, we stay here.
But without facing these truths and making this kind of reconciliation, will there ever be a just peace?
Changed the title, didn't like the original: "The hesitation over a just one-state solution".