A left-wing historian predicts a grim future
Benny Morris, once the leading historian of Israel’s left, has cast a dark cloud over the prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
His new book, “One State, Two States,” begins by dismissing the recent academic trend of promoting a bi-national state between the two peoples. Morris identifies a 2003 essay by British Professor Tony Judt as the catalyst for the movement. Judt bases his call for a one-state solution on the assertion that Israel’s claim of ethnic nationalism is “an anachronism.”
For a Western-Centric intellectual, this might appear a reasonable argument, but a look around the world shows its fallacy, and Morris too rejects Judt’s claim. The ethnic violence following Nigeria’s election in 2007 and the bloodshed in places like Iraq, Lebanon and the Balkans demonstrates that in most of the world, ethnically diverse states are a recipe for violence and instability.
Morris then analyzes the historical attitudes of the Zionists and the Palestinians toward a two-state solution, noting that at their founding both the Zionist and Palestinian national movements were exclusionary, aiming to establish a state in all of mandatory Palestine. As Jewish security in the West deteriorated after World War I, the Zionists began to appreciate their need to take whatever state they could get in order to offer refuge to the Jews of Europe.
Palestinian resistance to the Jewish national project was also becoming violent, making it clear that the window to establish a state would not stay open indefinitely. The Zionist mainstream began to compromise on their objectives, accepting the two-state solutions proposed by the international community.
The milieu from which Zionism rose, late nineteenth century Europe with its “countervailing ethos characterized by the rise of liberalism, democracy, socialism and modernization,” had given it the ability to compromise. The Palestinian national movement, Morris asserts, was “born in largely agrarian societies dominated by Islam, with its exclusionist attitude to all religious ‘others’ and resistance to change.” As a result, Palestinian nationalism has never been able to reform its original goals and assume a more conciliatory posture based on compromise.
While Morris is right to focus on the cultural differences between western-oriented Israel and Islamist Palestine, he does not take into account the difference in how each movement related to the land. The Zionists came to Palestine from Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East with the goal of establishing a homeland. As such, even if that homeland did not, in the end, cover the entire land they believed to be rightfully theirs, they could still view the existence of a truncated country as a victory. The Palestinians, already living on the land, would inevitably view any loss of territory as a defeat.
This dynamic, that a two-state agreement inherently means victory for Israel and acceptance of defeat for the Palestinians, is a major factor in why Israel, on the one hand, views such a solution as an end of the conflict and why some Palestinian groups view it as a stepping stone towards further liberation of land.
Morris succeeds in documenting the true attitude of the Palestinian leadership toward a two-state solution during the period up to Yasir Arafat’s death. He does not, however, provide an in-depth account of the views of the current Palestinian leadership, which Hamas, in part, controls.
The “moderate” wing of Fatah has become preeminent in the West Bank but Morris dismisses them as irrelevant as they lack popular support. While Abbas and his cadre may not be popular, they are in the process of consolidating their grip on the West Bank with the help of the US and Israel.
Morris also asks how the new leadership views a two-state solution. Abbas rejected a comprehensive peace offer saying that the “the gaps were too wide” and has failed to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
The paramount issue is whether or not the “moderate” Palestinian leaders favor a two-state solution as a means of ending the conflict or as a tactical stepping stone towards liberating all of Palestine. Morris, who believes the latter, is left without the option of conducting negotiations toward a peace agreement. Policy makers in Israel and the US cannot end their analyses at this point as it dooms Israel to perpetual struggle.
Morris, once celebrated by the left for exposing the darker aspects of Israel’s War of Independence, has now written a book questioning the very utility of a peace process. For Morris, the primary reason that there is not peace is “the stifling darkness, intolerance, authoritarianism, and insularity of the Muslim world,” a reality that makes any solution a dim prospect.
