Equal rights: two nations, two states

Submitted by AWL on 25 May, 2021 - 6:11 Author: Martin Thomas
Palestinian and Israeli flag

Kenan Malik’s column in the Observer of 23 May starts by arguing that the slogan “from the river to the sea” is a sectarian dead-end in both current variants.

“In the hands of Hamas, it is a call for the driving out of all Jews from the region”; in the hands of Netanyahu, it has “blocked any workable two-state solution”.

There are two nations in the area. The Israeli Jews have recent historical experience of their parents and grandparents being massacred in Europe, denied refuge worldwide, and expelled from Arab states; the Palestinian Arabs, of expulsions and of mistreatment under Jordanian, Egyptian, Syrian, Israeli, and other rule.

Because of those imprints of history, neither nation will be anywhere near the first in the world to become so confident in neighbouring nations’ goodwill that it can happily shelve its right to a state of its own and instead trust in life as a minority under a majority of another nation.

So: two nations, two states. Malik seems to agree: “the aspirations of the 6.9 million Jews now living in the region cannot be ignored. Nor is corralling Palestinians into their own territories while denying them control over their lives any ‘solution’.”

But then his last sentence is unclear: “‘Self-determination’ in that piece of contested land that is Israel-Palestine can only be the self-determination of all the people who live there, Palestinians and Jews, in a single shared future”.

He is right if he means that the single demand of self-determination for both nations is much less than a whole programme — that a socialist programme also includes minimum walling-off and maximum cooperation between two states, minority rights and democracy within states, broader federal link-ups, and social levelling-up and socialism.

He is wrong if the word “only” is to be taken literally, as meaning that neither nation should recognise self-determination for the other until confident of harmony in a “single shared future”; that we should give up on the Palestinians’ right to a state of their own alongside Israel until guarantees of harmony; or that the Israeli Jews have no rights until that harmonisation is already won.

Some on the left “support” two states with provisos to relegate it to a hypothetical later stage: two states only if both are already socialist, or both are democratic, etc. That comes down to saying: our answer to the national conflict is to suppose that it has already been solved, by everyone becoming socialist, democratic, etc., and thus bypassing the need for mutual recognition of national rights. “Two states” is part of a programme, not a whole programme. But an operational part, and immediately, to win workers’ unity; not something tagged as becoming operational only after the rest of the programme has (by some other agency than workers’ unity) already been achieved.

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