Democracy, or the Two-State Solution?

“Better an Imposed Peace / Than a Voluntary War”

– Gush Shalom advertisement, Haaretz, April 2, 2010

Salam Fayyad is the West’s favorite Palestinian. He’s mild-mannered, received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Texas, and served stints at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund before becoming Finance Minister under Yasser Arafat. Following the great Palestinian schism of 2007, Fayyad was appointed Prime Minister in the reconstituted West Bank government of Mahmoud Abbas. His proposals to build the institutions of a Palestinian state in two years have earned his government billions of dollars in foreign aid, not to mention multiple plaudits from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (a dubious honor).

But Fayyad, perhaps more than anyone else, embodies the tensions and contradictions of the two-state solution.

Having come to power through a suspension of the democratic process, Fayyad’s popular support leaves much to be desired. According to a poll released last month, only 26 percent of Palestinians consider his government the PA's legitimate successor (slightly less than the Gaza-based Hamas regime of Ismail Haniyeh). Fayyad himself lacks any real constituency outside the international donor community. His political party attracted only 2.5 percent of the vote in the most recent parliamentary election (which brought Hamas to power), and he’s been known to outrage other Palestinian factions with what they perceive as overly conciliatory gestures to Israel, including his apparent renunciation of the Palestinian “right of return” during an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz last Friday.

While, for the West, Fayyad’s crowning achievement has been the creation of a durable Palestinian security force capable of waging war on Hamas (something I described here), his Palestinian detractors understand these developments in radically different terms.

“Fayyad aims to project an image of a competent Palestinian administration,” writes Ali Abunimah. “But what is really taking shape in the West Bank today is a police state, where all sources of opposition or resistance — real or suspected — to either the PA regime, or the Israeli occupation are being systematically repressed by US-funded and trained Palestinian ‘security forces’ in full coordination with Israel.”

Khaled Amayreh, a noted Palestinian journalist, observed this week that "Human rights and civil liberties are virtually non-existent [in the West Bank] as the PA security agencies exercise absolute control over all aspects of life. People are unceremoniously fired from their jobs at the slightest suspicion regarding their political or ideological orientations. And the justice system is in a state of chronic paralysis due to the often wanton interference by the security apparatus."

All of this speaks to a fact little acknowledged by pundits and analysts but tacitly recognized by the United States government — at least when it comes to the Palestinians — as early as 2006, when the Bush administration began orchestrating the overthrow of the elected Hamas government: namely, that the two-state solution as envisioned by the U.S. and the international community will never be implemented voluntarily, and can only be imposed by force on a resisting population (a fact that applies in equal measure to Israelis and Palestinians).

Which is not to say that the two-state solution is undesirable. It may in fact be the only alternative to perpetual warfare and apartheid-like conditions given Israel/Palestine’s zero-sum reality. But despite ideologically-motivated attempts to portray it otherwise, it's not a popular solution, and it won’t come about democratically. Polls have long purported to show broad, mutual support for a two-state solution among Israelis and Palestinians. But this is a deception. Cheery journalistic framing almost always conceals irreconcilable differences that emerge upon closer examination.

"The results of these kinds of surveys depend a lot on how the question is asked," Jamil Rabah, Director of the Ramallah-based polling group Near East Consulting, told the Jerusalem Post. "The Israeli and Palestinian definitions of a two state solution are very different. Whenever we ask this question, the idea of a two state solution is strongly supported but only if the border is the 1967 border and refugees are given the right of return. So the question is not whether or not people support a two-state solution, but what type of two state solution?”

Take a study conducted last year by the OneVoice Movement and reported under the headline “Poll: Most Palestinians, Israelis want two-state solution.” Indeed, the poll reveals that a majority on both sides accept territorial partition in principle. But when respondents were asked to evaluate a range of potential solutions to the problem of Jerusalem, majorities on both sides rejected every known compromise.

On the equally insoluble issue of refugees, a 2008 poll from the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion found that nearly 90 percent of Palestinian respondents rejected a solution that would require them to “waive” the Palestinian right of return, “even if the price would be the non-conclusion of an agreement” with Israel. Israelis, for their part, refuse to entertain even a symbolic recognition of Palestinian suffering as proposed by the Clinton Parameters, no less the limited repatriation of refugees that a pragmatic accommodation demands (see the OneVoice survey).

For proponents of the two-state solution, then, the problem is democracy itself. And with Palestinian democracy now extinguished and replaced — at least in the West Bank — with an increasingly efficient “two-statist” hegemony under Salam Fayyad, the international community has turned its attention to Israel, where the reactionary political forces that subverted Ehud Barak’s peace agenda in 2000 are rattling their sabers once more.

Recent calls for an “imposed solution” to the conflict reflect a growing recognition that Israel’s fractious democracy may be incapable of generating the political will necessary to negotiate — no less implement — an unpopular two-state solution. Exploding ultra-orthodox birthrates and a recent poll that reveals the predominately right-wing inclinations of Israeli youth signal a further descent into the abyss. After 17 years, the contradictions of voluntary “peace processing” are finally coming to a head. But unlike in Palestine, snuffing out democratic choice to serve the two-state agenda is simply not an option in the Middle East's "only democracy."

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons