One state is the only solution

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Noah Richler is the author of What We Talk About When We Talk About War, which was shortlisted for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. He has reported from Israel and the West Bank and in his teens was a volunteer on Kibbutz Nirim.

The challenge is to address the war in Israel and Gaza without using a “but …”

Yes, on Oct. 7, Hamas militants raped, pillaged, kidnapped and murdered – but what did you expect …

Yes, the Netanyahu government’s response has been brutal and unrelenting – but to defeat Hamas …

Here’s the truth of it: History is horrible and in this instance offers no solutions, only pain. If ever there is going to be peace between Israelis and Palestinians, it will come from looking forward, not back. From a total, urgent reimagining of everything, rather than investing in a past replete with death, suffering and an apparently ineluctable cycle of retribution justified by competing histories impossible to reconcile.

And so here we are, again, remembering the past and condemned to repeat it. Politicians, pundits, scholars and activists are totally aware of the hellish sinkhole these rival histories have created and yet the powerful among them machinate for a two-state solution that would effectively institutionalize it. That a two-state solution, imagined as an end in itself, amounts to anything other than a fleeting antidote to present-day grievances is no more than a cruel, mendacious fiction. It is a disingenuous, patently impracticable idea that has next to no legitimacy locally and serves, at best, external governments looking to satisfy their own constituencies living far from the bitterly disputed territory stretching “from the river to the sea.”

A two-state solution would ensure Israeli existential insecurity for as long as it lasts, which would not be long, and Palestinian confinement to an unworkable two pieces of land, the very existence of which is a daily reminder of inequities impossible to ignore, these due to become entrenched in the minds of those who live there as proof of lesser status and de facto stepping stones to the unrealized dream of the greater territory finally recovered.

The two-state solution, nebulous and perplexing in its details – a tunnel (one the Israelis would actually tolerate) connecting the West Bank and Gaza; an Arab peacekeeping force – will still leave Israelis with a precarious authority they do not want, and Palestinians wanting what they do not have, which is unrestricted freedom. It is a plan that has uselessly hovered over the Levantine horizon for longer than Israel itself has existed. Proof of failure, surely. And, note, it is one thing for the United Nations to have envisioned a two-state solution when there was not a television in the whole of the Middle East; another thing entirely to imagine it would be plausible today, when infuriating images of other people’s lives are constantly, irrevocably, posted and streamed to the devices in our hands. Do we not see how this phenomenon has fuelled conflagrations everywhere?

A two-state solution is a concession to implacable points of view. It is a postponement, not a resolution, of the Middle Eastern conflict, and ultimately it will lead to more retribution, more death.

The incredibly difficult reality, the one so much more complicated to engage with, is that only a one-state solution will last. Only in one state, dually possessed, will Israelis and Palestinians – will Jews, Christians and Muslims – know peace and the prosperity that supports it.

How, I hear you say, can you damn the fatal illogic of a two-state solution and then suggest – dream, more like – that a single democracy, one in which Arabs would immediately constitute half the voting populace, is not a dire and lethal threat to Israelis Jews?

Well, I would answer, I do not see a one-state solution working immediately. In fact, not for a very long time. A one-state solution might well need several decades to work, time in which to develop a framework, time for Palestinians and Israelis to learn about and not fear the other. Yet is it not better and more true to work toward a just end that is also sustainable, a society in which enmities can be eradicated, in which there is forgiveness, collaboration and even friendship?

If Germans and Jews can now live together, their histories in abeyance; if Americans, Blacks and whites, previously slaves and slave owners, find their destinies converging; if, in our own country, First Nations and more recently arrived Canadians, to their mutual benefit, are co-operatively working toward a more equitable future, cannot Israelis and Palestinians, Arabs and Jews? Are there not, in Israel, the beginnings of this phenomenon, this urge, already?

Canada has something real to offer here, much more so than the military force we talk up but do not have. If only because we cannot, and have never been, a hard power; we are a soft one and have experience to impart. The governing establishment here, think of it as “settler,” or “white,” if that helps, has been actively ceding agency or finding ways to share power for the sake of the common good since this country’s inception – with francophone Canadians first, and Indigenous peoples later. We have been learning, still are, how to make the whole country, not a schoolroom or a boardroom, a “safe space,” and how to apply these lessons well.

The legal requirement of Indigenous consultation in an increasing number of spheres; the effort, not yet successful, to make health services and education available to all, anywhere, and in more than one language; our Charter’s notwithstanding clause, as abused as it is necessary; or the yielding, even, of rights to land and resources that are the first causes of wars elsewhere, are a few of the measures we have taken to ensure that the views and ways of being of minorities have a disproportionate and appropriate weight in a democracy that in a more elemental form might otherwise have undermined them. We have given the very word “nation” a greater, nuanced significance.

Britain has not done this. America has not done this. France, Germany, India, China, Russia, Brazil have not done this. Even Australia has balked at doing this. Do we not see this is the best way for Canada to contribute?

Perhaps, in embracing this challenge, it helps to look forward and then think backward: to imagine, however distant it may seem, a moment in which a Truth and Reconciliation Commission has already travelled from Khan Younis to the Golan Heights, one in which the Israeli mother whose child was raped and spat upon, her body vilely broken and disrespected on the flatbed of a pickup, or the Palestinian child who, after losing a limb, saw her family crushed beneath the bombed concrete that had been their home, have voiced their heartbreaking grievances and seized the chance of moving on because the past is being rejected, not “weaponized,” and the future is the country being addressed.

A country in which, trite as the practice often seems to the Canadians who started it (we might as well tell ourselves, we’ll never be credited for it), the performance of an Etgar Keret reading, or of a concert by the Al-Aqsa String Quartet, is preceded by a land acknowledgment of this, the traditional territory inhabited by Muslims and Jews since time – well, memorial. A country in which hundreds of billions of dollars is spent on agriculture and science and education, not armaments, their deployment redundant now. Then try and imagine how this new country that was formerly Israel and Palestine arrived at this point, consider the seemingly insuperable hurdles it surmounted, its guarantees, its defences and protocols, the support it needed on such a massive scale from other countries.

This is the only solution.

Not for a moment am I saying it will be easy. I can’t even pretend to know what the steps are. But …