PETER BEINART- A REVIEW OF PADRAIG O’MALLEY’S BOOK “THE TWO STATE DELUSION”
Padraig O’Malley’s “The Two-State Delusion” is an impressive and frustrating book. It’s impressive because O’Malley, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston who has written extensively on South Africa and Northern Ireland, has done a tremendous amount of research about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He’s not only delved deeply into its literature; he’s also interviewed dozens of participants on both sides. The result is a book so packed with information that it will reward even the reader so dedicated that she consumes the Israel-Palestine stories buried on Page A17 of The Times.
O’Malley, for instance, considers at length the potential economic viability of a Palestinian state, something often overlooked by American commentators. He notes that not only does public sector employment constitute more than 50 percent of the Palestinian Authority’s budget but also that “the tax base is small” and tax “collection practices are lax.” He observes as well that a Palestinian state would most likely be unable to desalinate water and thus “would almost necessarily have to import water from Israel, which has the necessary resources and expertise in the field, but water dependency devalues sovereignty.”
O’Malley is not only knowledgeable; he’s also honest. He vividly captures the brutality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. According to pro-Palestinian activists, Israel has cut down more than 800,000 Palestinian olive trees since 1967, which, O’Malley observes, is “the equivalent of razing all of the 24,000 trees in New York City’s Central Park 33 times.” And according to the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, he tells us, 90 percent of Palestinian complaints against Israelis in the West Bank never result in an indictment, and in the rare circumstances “when convictions are made, Israeli citizens involved in such violent acts are handed light sentences.”
But if O’Malley apportions more blame to Israel, as the far stronger side, for the fact that millions of Palestinians lack basic rights, he is hardly romantic about Palestinian politics. While acknowledging that Hamas is not the only major party to the conflict that rejects the two-state solution (the most recent Likud platform does too), O’Malley endorses Israeli Jews’ fears about the group’s long-term agenda. After interviewing Hamas leaders, he writes: “Israeli Jews have a right to question whether a free-standing Palestinian state with an ‘end of claims’ agreement is not the end of the conflict but the beginning of Palestinian preparation for the next phase of ‘liberating’ all of Palestine. If the Israelis take seriously — and they do — the unequivocal declaration by Hamas’s leaders that Hamas’s goal is to reclaim all of Palestine, they are perfectly justified in hesitating before embracing a two-state solution.”
O’Malley doesn’t think much of the two-state solution either. As its title suggests, his entire book is devoted to proving that it constitutes a “delusion.” He dismisses polls showing that majorities or near majorities of Israelis and Palestinians support the idea by noting that the two sides mean something very different by it. The Palestinians he interviewed generally “envisage a state along the lines of the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital . . . enjoying full sovereignty.” By contrast, the Israeli Jews he spoke to support a Palestinian state only if it has Israeli troops on its soil (at least initially); cedes some control over its borders, airspace and telecommunications spectrum to Israel; and accepts “an Israeli settler city, Ariel, at its heart.”
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O’Malley denies that the two parties have ever been close to a deal. At Taba in January 2001, he notes, six months after the failure of the Camp David summit between Ehud Barak and Yasir Arafat, “both sides fielded their most dovish teams, which worked in an environment that allowed the players more give-and-take latitude, free of the many constraints imposed by formal negotiations,” and yet “the Taba negotiators still could not come up with” a final status agreement (F.S.A.). Similarly, although some commentators have lauded Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas for the concessions they made at the Annapolis conference in November 2007, O’Malley insists that “many barriers to a final status agreement had not been dismantled and no F.S.A. was in the offing.”
Although O’Malley makes his case well, he discounts some contrary evidence. Olmert has said “we were very close” at Annapolis, and according to Abbas, the two leaders were “two months” away from a deal. (Negotiations ended following a corruption investigation that forced Olmert from office.) What’s more, former Israeli and Palestinian negotiations reached a model agreement at Geneva in 2003, although as O’Malley says, the accord “found no takers.” He is right that the kind of agreement both sides could support would require each to make compromises — Palestinians on refugee return and Israel on Jerusalem, in particular — that would foment furious domestic opposition. But such is always the case in conflicts this bitter and longstanding.
What makes O’Malley’s book frustrating, however, is not his critique of the so-called two-state delusion. It’s his refusal to offer an alternative. Page after page, chapter after chapter, I kept waiting for him to proffer a solution of his own. I’m not the only one. Near the book’s end, O’Malley admits that “friends who read the manuscript” objected that “you can’t just end the book and leave the reader with no alternative to a two-state solution if you are so sure one is delusional.” O’Malley’s reply: “Why should I be so presumptuous as to dare to provide a vision for people who refuse to provide one for themselves?”
This is weak. If O’Malley feels entitled to declare the two-state solution a delusion, why isn’t he entitled to provide an alternative? Presumptuousness isn’t the issue. O’Malley’s real problem is that offering a credible alternative to the two-state solution is extremely difficult because the same factors that make it so hard to agree on how to divide Israel/Palestine into two countries make it even harder to agree on how Israelis and Palestinians should live together in one. Binationalism, the most commonly suggested alternative to the two-state solution, barely works in Belgium. The Czechs and Slovaks opted for divorce. To imagine that Israelis and Palestinians can live together peaceably and freely in one country (let’s call it “Israstine”), you have to believe that the “Israstine” army, composed of joint Jewish-Palestinian brigades, would hold together under enormous stress because its members are more loyal to “Israstine” than they are to being Jewish or Palestinian. That’s even more delusional than the two-state solution. More likely, “Israstine” would be civil war under a common flag.
In 2013, Marwan Barghouti, who according to polls is the most popular Palestinian politician alive, told Al-Monitor that “if the two-state solution fails, the substitute will not be a binational one-state solution, but a persistent conflict that extends based on an existential crisis — one that does not know any middle ground.” Calling the two-state solution unachievable is easy. Answering Barghouti’s fears about the alternative is hard. Given all the effort O’Malley has poured into his subject, it’s disappointing that he doesn’t even try.
THE TWO-STATE DELUSION
Israel and Palestine — A Tale of Two Narratives
By Padraig O’Malley
493 pp. Viking. $30.
Peter Beinart is an associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York and a columnist for The Atlantic and Haaretz.
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