Benny Morris down on both a one-state and two-state solution in Middle East
... [Benny] Morris, a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, argues [in his new book, “One State, Two States” ] that Arab rejectionism is so profound a force that only the terminally obtuse could believe that Palestinians will ever acquiesce to a state comprised solely of the West Bank and Gaza.
Morris is equally dismissive of those who believe that a so-called one-state solution might work in place of a two-state solution. Muslim anti-Semitism and the deep cultural divide that separates Arab from Jew, among other realities, make this notion a fantasy. In this short book Morris asserts there is no one-state solution to the Middle East crisis, and no two-state solution. Morris does promote the possibility of a Palestinian confederation with Jordan, but he makes the case anemically and cursorily.
This is not to say that Morris isn’t convincing at times, for instance when he says that one-staters, like the constitutional scholar Daniel Lazar and the historian Tony Judt, who envision a utopian post-Zionist future, in fact are calling for Israel to be eliminated.
Yet Morris, like Judt, has an almost irretrievably dark vision of Israel’s future as a Jewish-majority state. The difference is that Morris does not believe that Israel’s mistakes — even the settlement movement that colonized the West Bank — are what might doom it. The culprit is the implacable fanaticism of Arab Islamists, who are unwilling to accept a Jewish national presence in what is thought of as Arab land, a position that hasn’t changed since the meeting of the third Palestine Arab Congress, in 1920, which rejected Jewish claims to the land since “Palestine is the holy land of the two Christian and Muslim worlds.” Subsequent events that seemingly contradict this belief — most notably, the P.L.O.’s ostensible recognition of Israel in 1988 — have been staged for the benefit of gullible Westerners, Morris writes.
Morris has had a strange and tumultuous career. He is a onetime debunker of Zionist mythology, the father of Israel’s “new historians,” who have dismantled the romantic narrative of Israel’s founding and replaced it with more complicated truths, such as that during Israel’s War of Independence, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, essentially ordered the forcible “transfer” of many thousands of Arabs from territory that would become Israel.
As a result, Morris was denounced as an anti-Zionist, considered too radical for employment in the Israeli academy (in 1996, Israel’s former president, Ezer Weizman, finally arranged for him the teaching job at the university named after the man he exposed as a “transferist”). And he went to jail in 1987 rather than serve as an army reservist in the occupied territories. He was thoroughly a man of the left. But the failed summit at Camp David in 2000 prompted Morris to re-examine the assumptions of Israeli liberals, who believed that it was their own side’s intransigence that perpetuated the conflict. In “One State, Two States,” Morris argues that Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister in July 2000, offered unparalleled concessions but that Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, rejected them all and made no counteroffer. By December of 2000, Israel had accepted President Bill Clinton’s “parameters,” offering the Palestinians all of the Gaza Strip, 94 percent to 96 percent of the West Bank and sovereignty over Arab areas of East Jerusalem. Arafat again rejected the deal.....
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Morris is equally dismissive of those who believe that a so-called one-state solution might work in place of a two-state solution. Muslim anti-Semitism and the deep cultural divide that separates Arab from Jew, among other realities, make this notion a fantasy. In this short book Morris asserts there is no one-state solution to the Middle East crisis, and no two-state solution. Morris does promote the possibility of a Palestinian confederation with Jordan, but he makes the case anemically and cursorily.
This is not to say that Morris isn’t convincing at times, for instance when he says that one-staters, like the constitutional scholar Daniel Lazar and the historian Tony Judt, who envision a utopian post-Zionist future, in fact are calling for Israel to be eliminated.
Yet Morris, like Judt, has an almost irretrievably dark vision of Israel’s future as a Jewish-majority state. The difference is that Morris does not believe that Israel’s mistakes — even the settlement movement that colonized the West Bank — are what might doom it. The culprit is the implacable fanaticism of Arab Islamists, who are unwilling to accept a Jewish national presence in what is thought of as Arab land, a position that hasn’t changed since the meeting of the third Palestine Arab Congress, in 1920, which rejected Jewish claims to the land since “Palestine is the holy land of the two Christian and Muslim worlds.” Subsequent events that seemingly contradict this belief — most notably, the P.L.O.’s ostensible recognition of Israel in 1988 — have been staged for the benefit of gullible Westerners, Morris writes.
Morris has had a strange and tumultuous career. He is a onetime debunker of Zionist mythology, the father of Israel’s “new historians,” who have dismantled the romantic narrative of Israel’s founding and replaced it with more complicated truths, such as that during Israel’s War of Independence, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, essentially ordered the forcible “transfer” of many thousands of Arabs from territory that would become Israel.
As a result, Morris was denounced as an anti-Zionist, considered too radical for employment in the Israeli academy (in 1996, Israel’s former president, Ezer Weizman, finally arranged for him the teaching job at the university named after the man he exposed as a “transferist”). And he went to jail in 1987 rather than serve as an army reservist in the occupied territories. He was thoroughly a man of the left. But the failed summit at Camp David in 2000 prompted Morris to re-examine the assumptions of Israeli liberals, who believed that it was their own side’s intransigence that perpetuated the conflict. In “One State, Two States,” Morris argues that Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister in July 2000, offered unparalleled concessions but that Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, rejected them all and made no counteroffer. By December of 2000, Israel had accepted President Bill Clinton’s “parameters,” offering the Palestinians all of the Gaza Strip, 94 percent to 96 percent of the West Bank and sovereignty over Arab areas of East Jerusalem. Arafat again rejected the deal.....