Beyond the Two-State Solution
A Jewish Political Essay
1. Edition September 2012
256 Pages, Hardcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
For over two decades, many liberals in Israel have attempted, with
wide international support, to implement the two-state solution:
Israel and Palestine, partitioned on the basis of the Green Line -
that is, the line drawn by the 1949 Armistice Agreements that
defined Israel's borders until 1967, before Israel occupied
the West Bank and Gaza following the Six-Day War. By going back to
Israel's pre-1967 borders, many people hope to restore Israel
to what they imagine was its pristine, pre-occupation character and
to provide a solid basis for a long-term solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;" />
In this original and controversial essay, Yehouda Shenhav argues
that this vision is an illusion that ignores historical realities
and offers no long-term solution. It fails to see that the real
problem is that a state was created in most of Palestine in 1948 in
which Jews are the privileged ethnic group, at the expense of the
Palestinians - who also must live under a constant state of
emergency. The issue will not be resolved by the two-state
solution, which will do little for the millions of Palestinian
refugees and will also require the uprooting of hundreds of
thousands of Jews living across the Green Line. All these obstacles
require a bolder rethinking of the issues: the Green Line should be
abandoned and a new type of polity created on the complete
territory of mandatory Palestine, with a new set of constitutional
arrangements that address the rights of both Palestinians and Jews,
including the settlers.
Acknowledgments xviii
Introduction and Overview: The Crisis Facing Zionist Democracy 1
A line drawn with a green pencil 3
Time and space 6
The degeneration of the 1967 paradigm 7
The Zionist-liberal left and the peace accords 15
The liberal new nostalgia 22
Separation 26
The settlers 29
The political rights of the Jews 32
1 The Roots and Consequences of the Liberal New Nostalgia 35
The "no partner" approach 35
Chasing the yellow wind 38
The academic and intellectual discourse 52
2 Was 1967 a Revolutionary Year? 55
The "inevitability" of the 1967 Occupation of Palestinian territories 55
The denial of political theology 60
3 The "Political Anomalies" of the Green Line 68
The refugees of 1948 68
The Arabs of 1948 74
The Jewish settlers 92
The Third Israel and its political economy 106
4 1948 and the Return to the Rights of the Palestinians 116
The Nakba 117
Eradication and denial 122
The present time of the Palestinian Nakba 131
A shared time 140
5 The Return to the Rights of the Jews 146
Post-Westphalian sovereignty 149
The possibility of sharing one space 154
A comment on the role of intellectuals in times of crisis 164
Notes 169
Index 230
"Poses interesting historical insights and assessments of present-day Israel." (Morning Star)
"Offers a meaningful critique to the ideology that the state has become undemocratic only because of the Six Day War." (Jerusalem Post)
"Finding it timely and noteworthy for its original insights into Israeli society, Palestinians in Ramallah promptly translated into Arabic this political commentary on the precarious state in which Israel finds itself. This updated version now appearing in English promises to further widen the circle of those who are beginning to realize that relevant political paradigms have undergone radical change, that a classical two-state solution to the conflict is a fantasy (and perhaps always has been), and that new realities require new ideas. This work certainly belongs to a new genre of writing on the conflict."
--Sari Nuseibeh, Al-Quds University
"Yehouda Shenhav makes an unusual and unsettling argument ... what appears on its face a 'progressive' position on the question of Israel and Palestine, is in fact censorial and duplicitous. The Israeli left's sanctimonious insistence in the face of the Jewish settlers of the West Bank that the settlements were illegal and that the proper borders of Israel are those of 1967, is nothing short of an ideological manoeuver. The purpose of the manoeuver is to obfuscate the fact that Israel itself is nothing short of a huge settlement project that was founded upon the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the systematic expropriation of the land they left behind."
--Lama Abu Odeh, from the foreword
"Shenhav does not accuse sides for the ongoing conflict, but is rather willing to offer peaceful alternatives in hopes of overcoming jingoist or chauvinist attitudes. In a very logical and clear way, he examines the reasons for the political struggle and contends that they lay deeper than just the foundation of the Israeli nation state itself." (Human Rights Review, 2015)
Dimi Reider is an Israeli journalist and blogger, co-founder and contributing editor at +972 Magazine and occasional contributor to the New York Times, Foreign Policy, the New York Review of Books and the Daily Beast website.
