Mike Phipps reviews One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel, by Ghada Karmi, published by Pluto

This book is based on Ghada Karmi’s previous work, Married to Another Man, published in 2007. That book focused on “Israel’s unresolved dilemma of how to reconcile the existence of Israel as a state for Jews with the presence of a large, non-Jewish, Palestinian population in the country. The book argued that it was an irresolvable problem, and the way forward was the creation of a shared state to include Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs.”

That shared state, she argues in this new book, is not just desirable but inevitable. Israel will oppose it, but will be powerless to prevent it happening. Karmi’s optimism is rooted in the divergence between the ‘official’ position on Palestine shared by most Western states – “no Western government has ever formally supported the Palestine cause” – and the increasingly popular support the issue enjoys among ordinary people.

The Palestinian struggle today enjoys a global level of support unprecedented in its history, argues Karmi. It has become the emblem of anti-colonial struggles and anti-racist protests, and under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership was openly espoused by Britain’s official Opposition. But the process began earlier: in response to Israeli bombardments in 2014, in which over 2,000 Palestinians were killed, public sympathy for their cause doubled in Britain. Comparable rises in support have been measured elsewhere.

The commitment to a shared state is also based on the irreconcilability of the positions of both Israel and the Palestinians. “If ordinary Israelis were asked how they would like to see the conflict end, they would almost certainly wish for a magical disappearance of the Palestinians in their midst,” she writes. “And if ordinary Palestinians were asked the same question they would wish to put back the clock to a time before Israel’s creation, when Palestine was their undisputed country. Neither wish can be granted.”

But she concedes that a single-state solution may be some way off: “Before it happens, there will be more struggle and suffering as Palestinians fight against increasing Israeli oppression and expulsion, tacitly and overtly supported by Western inaction.”

It’s difficult to share Ghada Karmi’s optimism. The creation of the state of Israel was based, as she explains, on the uprooting and expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians. Its trajectory since then has been one of expansion and dispossession. The single-state solution that the author advocates looks far from inevitable in this light.

But if a one-state solution looks utopian at present, the prospect of a two-state solution looks equally far-fetched. There seems to be an elite consensus, notes Karmi, “on what Palestinians can legitimately hope for: that Israel may be expected to ease its occupation and that the end of the process can be a Palestinian state of sorts in the post-1967 territories. The latter is regarded as the pinnacle of Palestinian ambition, with any claim to the land that was lost to Israel before 1967 totally excluded from the equation.” Such a scenario “implies that Palestinians can delete the past and their own grievances.”

Abandoning the right of return and recognising Israel as a Jewish state simply conflicts with the aspirations of most Palestinians, whatever strategic calculations their leaders may have made at the time of the Oslo Agreement thirty years ago.

The way that Agreement has played out reinforces this. The process which the Palestine Liberation Organisation leadership under Yasser Arafat believed would open the way to a Palestinian state gave the Palestinians the trappings of statehood with none of the associated power. Karmi is withering about the consequences: “The pursuit of this policy drew the Palestinian leadership into a downward spiral of ever greater retreats, giving up more and more of their previous conditions for the sake of some settlement with Israel, and developing an abject dependence on the good offices of its powerful patron, the United States.”

The impasse brings Karmi back to the one-state solution: the creation of a single entity of Israel/Palestine in which the two peoples would live together without borders or partitions. Although it is often dismissed as fanciful, the idea of Arabs and Jews sharing the land has a longer pedigree than the two-state solution. The author unearths some interesting history of this – there were even secret negotiations exploring the feasibility of a bi-national state before the creation of Israel.

More current, and emanating from the Palestinians themselves, is the idea of a single non-sectarian democratic state. The proposal has gradually gathered international momentum: Karmi documents the literature on the idea and how it has entered mainstream debate. One recent highlight is Jeff Halper’s book, Decolonising Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State (Pluto 2021), reviewed at the time on Labour Hub.

Halper argues that the PLO’s move to a two state ‘solution’ constituted a “self-defeating shift in the Palestinian struggle from that of liberation and decolonization to conflict resolution.”  It accepted Israel’s framing of the issue as a “conflict” of two nationalisms.

He characterises the Israeli project as settler colonialism and suggests that nothing short of decolonisation will be necessary. Drawing on lessons from the struggle against apartheid South Africa, he calls for “a complete transformation.  New institutions must be created that ensure collective as well as individual equality. Each citizen must enjoy equal access to the country’s land and resources. Membership in society, civil rights and access to economic resources must be deracialized. A new civil identity must be forged.”

The reality today, argues Karmi, is that the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is already effectively one state, run by Israel, with Palestinian control of the West Bank and Gaza increasingly illusory. Western permissiveness towards Israel has ensured the limited rights granted to Palestinians in these territories have been persistently curtailed. The issue is how to move from an apartheid state to one based on democracy and equality for all its citizens.

The options are stark: a continuation of the present set-up, including the cycle of land-grabs, uprisings and repression; an expansive Israeli state and a collection of Palestinian enclaves with no real sovereignty – a pretence of two states; or a single democratic shared state. The first two offer no road to a lasting peace and must therefore be considered untenable. However distant the third possibility looks, in the long run there really is no alternative.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.