About the author:
Saree Makdisi (b. _1964_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964) ) is an American
Professor of English Literature at the _University of California, Los
Angeles_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Los_Angeles)
(UCLA).... received his PhD from the Program in Literature at Duke University in
1993.... is the author of _Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the
Culture of Modernity_
(http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521586046) [and] several books on British _Romanticism_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism) , which is his area of expertise, and he writes on
contemporary _Arab_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab) politics and culture.
Makdisi comes from a lineage that is well-known in _academia_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academia) . He is the grandson of _Anis K. Makdisi_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anis_K._Makdisi&action=edit&redlink=1)
(1885-1977), who was a renowned professor of _Arabic_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_language) at the _American University of Beirut_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_University_of_Beirut) (AUB), and the nephew of the late
_Edward Said_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Said) .
--------
Excerpt from the Los Angeles Times article:
<<...The violence will end, and a just peace will come, only when each side
realizes that the other is there to stay. Many Palestinians have accepted
this premise, and an increasing number are willing to give up on the idea of an
independent Palestinian state and embrace instead the concept of a single
democratic, secular and multicultural state, which they would share equally with
Israeli Jews.
Most Israelis are not yet reconciled this position. Some, no doubt, are
reluctant to give up on the idea of a "Jewish state," to acknowledge the reality
that Israel has never been exclusively Jewish, and that, from the start, the
idea of privileging members of one group over all other citizens has been
fundamentally undemocratic and unfair.
Yet that is exactly what Israel does. Even among its citizens, Israeli law
grants rights to Jews that it denies to non-Jews. By no stretch of the
imagination is Israel a genuine democracy: It is an ethno-religiously exclusive
state that has tried to defy the multicultural history of the land on which it
was founded...>>
---------------------
_http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-makdisi11-2008may11,0,7862060.story
_
(http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-makdisi11-2008may11,0,7862060.story)
Published on Sunday, May 11, 2008 by _the Los Angeles Times_
(http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/suncommentary/la-op-makdisi11-2008may11,0,6491639.st
ory)
Forget the Two-State Solution
Israelis and Palestinians Must Share the Land. Equally.
By Saree Makdisi
>
There is no longer a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Forget the endless arguments about who offered what and who spurned whom and
whether the Oslo peace process died when Yasser Arafat walked away from the
bargaining table or whether it was Ariel Sharon's stroll through the Al Aqsa
Mosque in Jerusalem that did it in.
>
All that matters are the facts on the ground, of which the most important is
that — after four decades of intensive Jewish settlement in the Palestinian
territories it occupied during the 1967 war — Israel has irreversibly
cemented its grip on the land on which a Palestinian state might have been created.
>
Sixty years after Israel was created and Palestine was destroyed, then, we
are back to where we started: Two populations inhabiting one piece of land.
And if the land cannot be divided, it must be shared. Equally.
>
This is a position, I realize, which may take many Americans by surprise.
After years of pursuing a two-state solution, and feeling perhaps that the
conflict had nearly been solved, it's hard to give up the idea as unworkable.
But unworkable it is. A report published last summer by the United Nations
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs found that almost 40% of
the West Bank is now taken up by Israeli infrastructure — roads, settlements,
military bases and so on — largely off-limits to Palestinians.
>
Israel has methodically broken the remainder of the territory into dozens of
enclaves separated from each other and the outside world by zones that it
alone controls (including, at last count, 612 checkpoints and roadblocks).
Moreover, according to the report, the Jewish settler population in the
occupied territories, already approaching half a million, not only continues to
grow but is growing at a rate three times greater than the rate of Israel's
population increase. If the current rate continues, the settler population will
double to almost 1 million people in just 12 years. Many are heavily armed
and ideologically driven, unlikely to walk away voluntarily from the land they
have declared to be their God-given home.
>
These facts alone render the status of the peace process academic.
At no time since the negotiations began in the early 1990s has Israel
significantly suspended the settlement process in the occupied Palestinian
territories, in stark violation of international law. It preceded last November's
Annapolis summit by announcing the fresh expropriation of Palestinian property
in the West Bank; it followed the summit by announcing the expansion of its
Har Homa settlement by an additional 307 housing units; and it has announced
plans for hundreds more in other settlements since then.
>
The Israelis are not settling the occupied territories because they lack
space in Israel itself. They are settling the land because of a long-standing
belief that Jews are entitled to it simply by virtue of being Jewish. "The land
of Israel belongs to the nation of Israel and only to the nation of Israel,"
declares Moledet, one of the parties in the National Union bloc, which has a
significant presence in the Israeli parliament.
>
Moledet's position is not as far removed from that of Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert as some Israelis claim. Although Olmert says he believes in theory that
Israel should give up those parts of the West Bank and Gaza densely inhabited
by Palestinians, he also said in 2006 that "every hill in Samaria and every
valley in Judea is part of our historic homeland" and that "we firmly stand
by the historic right of the people of Israel to the entire land of Israel."
>
Judea and Samaria: These ancient biblical terms are still used by Israeli
officials to refer to the West Bank. More than 10 years after the initiation of
the Oslo peace process, which was supposed to lead to a two-state solution,
maps in Israeli textbooks continued to show not the West Bank but Judea and
Samaria — and not as occupied territories but as integral parts of Israel.
What room is there for the Palestinians in this vision of Jewish entitlement
to the land? None. They are regarded, at best, as a demographic "problem."
>
The idea of Palestinians as a "problem" is hardly new. Israel was created
as a Jewish state in 1948 only by the premeditated and forcible removal of as
much of the indigenous Palestinian population as possible, in what
Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe, which they commemorate this week.
>
A Jewish state, says Israeli historian Benny Morris, "would not have come
into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. … There was no choice
but to expel that population." For Morris, this was one of those "
circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing."
>
Thinking of Palestinians as a "problem" to be removed predates 1948. It was
there from the moment the Zionist movement set into motion the project to
make a Jewish state in a land that, in 1917 — when the British empire
officially endorsed Zionism — had an overwhelmingly non-Jewish population. The only
Jewish member of the British government at the time, Edwin Montagu, vehemently
opposed the Zionist project as unjust. Henry King and Charles Crane,
dispatched on a fact-finding mission to Palestine by President Wilson, concurred:
Such a project would require enormous violence, they warned: "Decisions,
requiring armies to carry out, are sometimes necessary, but they are surely not
gratuitously to be taken in the interests of a serious injustice."
>
But they were. This is a conflict driven from its origins by Zionism's
exclusive sense of entitlement to the land. Has there been Palestinian violence
as well? Yes. Is it always justified? No. But what would you do if someone
told you that there was no room for you on your own land, that your very
existence is a "problem"? No people in history has ever gone away just because
another people wanted them to, and the sentiments of Crazy Horse and Sitting
Bull live on among Palestinians to this day.
>
The violence will end, and a just peace will come, only when each side
realizes that the other is there to stay. Many Palestinians have accepted this
premise, and an increasing number are willing to give up on the idea of an
independent Palestinian state and embrace instead the concept of a single
democratic, secular and multicultural state, which they would share equally with
Israeli Jews.
>
Most Israelis are not yet reconciled this position. Some, no doubt, are
reluctant to give up on the idea of a "Jewish state," to acknowledge the reality
that Israel has never been exclusively Jewish, and that, from the start, the
idea of privileging members of one group over all other citizens has been
fundamentally undemocratic and unfair.
>
Yet that is exactly what Israel does. Even among its citizens, Israeli law
grants rights to Jews that it denies to non-Jews. By no stretch of the
imagination is Israel a genuine democracy: It is an ethno-religiously exclusive
state that has tried to defy the multicultural history of the land on which it
was founded.
>
To resolve the conflict with the Palestinians, Israeli Jews will have to
relinquish their exclusive privileges and acknowledge the right of return of
Palestinians expelled from their homes. What they would get in return is the
ability to live securely and to prosper with — rather than continuing to battle
against — the Palestinians.
>
They may not have a choice. As Olmert himself warned recently, more
Palestinians are shifting their struggle from one for an independent state to a South
African-style struggle that demands equal rights for all citizens,
irrespective of religion, in a single state. "That is, of course," he noted, "a much
cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle — and ultimately a much more
powerful one."
>
I couldn't agree more.
Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA
and the author of "Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation," out this
month from W.W. Norton.
© 2008 Los Angeles Times
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