Israel-Palestine Division

Beinart and Shenhav Debate One State Versus Two

09.18.13 7:45 PM ET

In a spirited debate about the relative merits of a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, versus the creation of a single bi-national entity, Peter Beinart and Yehouda Shenhav addressed issues of ethics and ethnicity, historicity and history, pragmatism and idealism. The event was held at Columbia University on Monday night. Shenhav, an Israeli sociologist who teaches at Tel Aviv University, recently published Beyond the Two-State Solution. Beinart's article The American Jewish Coccoon, which addresses the failure of the Jewish establishment to include Palestinians in the debate about Israel-Palestine, was published in the most recent edition of the New York Review of Books.


The history of bi-nationalism, pointed out Beinart, was not an inspiring one. It had failed in Czechoslovakia and “barely worked” in Belgium. Besides, the Jewish people had a legitimate right to self-determination, particularly given their history.

Meanwhile, he said, no-one had answered the practical questions about how the army, police force and education system wound function in a bi-national Palestinian-Israeli state. The ideas of the left were beautiful in theory, he concluded, but did not “take into account the realities on the ground.” Even Marwan Barghouti, the jailed Palestinian leader, had said in a recent interview that the two-state solution was “the only possible solution.”

In his response, Shenhav made two salient points: That the two-state solution would “never happen,” and that there were more options than one or two states to explore. It was Israel's moral responsibility, he insisted, to look at all options. Furthermore, he said, for Palestinians and Israelis there was an unbridgeable gap between their basic perceptions of the conflict. Israelis who talk about the peace process do so from the perspective of the 1967 boundaries. But for Palestinians, this is about 1948—the Nakba, or Catastrophe, when the refugees, now over 6 million, were created.



This sounds, perhaps, a bit obvious and didactic. And I wish I could think of a more elegant or subtle manner to make my point. But I can only think about people like Bassam Abu Rahmeh, who died in 2009 when an Israeli soldier fired a tear gas canister directly at his chest. Abu Rahmeh was unarmed; the army decided there was insufficient evidence to charge the soldier with misconduct, even though the incident was recorded on video. Or Mustafa Tamimi, who died when a soldier shot a tear gas canister directly at his face from only a few yards' distance. I also think about Ofer Military Prison, a bleak place of muddy paths and barbed wire, where Palestinians stand trial in front of Israeli military judges, who convict them at a rate of over 99 percent, even when they know the evidence or confessions were coerced. Ofer is where teenage boys get sentenced to a year or more in prison for the crime of throwing stones at fully armed soldiers wearing riot gear.

One state or two states? It's a theoretical argument at this point, and that will probably be the case for a long time. But it is fact that 2.5 million Palestinian residents of the West Bank live under military occupation, without basic rights like freedom of movement, access to sufficient water and due process in a court of law. This is what needs to change first—and urgently. Then we can talk about sharing or dividing the land.