Why israel deserves to exist

The settlement enterprise is primarily driven by the annexationist right, their ever-expanding enclaves planned to make an Israeli withdrawal more logistically difficult and politically costly. During the s peace process, the Palestinians had a unified leadership. The Fatah party controlled both the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority, giving its leader, Yasser Arafat, clear authority to negotiate on behalf of Palestinians as a whole. Then, Palestinian elections held in January delivered a split verdict, with Hamas winning a plurality of seats in the Palestinian parliament.

Tensions between the two factions ultimately exploded into a brief civil war, which ended with Hamas in control of Gaza and Fatah in charge of the West bank. Since then, repeated efforts to reconcile the two sides have failed; Abbas, whose term as Palestinian Authority president was supposed to end in , rules indefinitely without a popular mandate.

Hamas, for its part, runs a repressive Islamist regime in Gaza and hopes to extend its laws to the West Bank. As a result, the political unity that once gave Arafat the ability to negotiate with Israel authoritatively no longer exists. Israel would not be forced to evacuate the settlements or come to some kind of negotiated compromise with the Palestinians on borders.

Instead, it could unilaterally grant equal citizenship to everyone living in the territory and open up elections to all — the first step toward a system that would, in theory, deliver a better future than the status quo perpetuated by endless final status negotiations. While one state may sidestep the political barriers to two states, it has its own problems — barriers considerably more serious than those standing in the way of two. The most prominent one-state advocates are, primarily, supporters of Palestine abroad — not Palestinians on the ground.

The official position of Fatah remains support for two states, and Hamas accepts it as the starting point for an end to hostilities. Meanwhile, the nature of the Palestinian factions makes a two-state solution even less thinkable. Israelis see Hamas, with ample evidence, as a group bent on murdering Jewish civilians. Is their armed wing supposed to unify with the Israeli military into a new, jointly administered military?

If not, how do you convince them to disarm? And what about the many other Islamist militant groups in Palestine, like Islamic Jihad? Perhaps if the political reality on the Palestinian side changes radically, these questions might have answers. But in the short term, there is little prospect for Hamas and Fatah to get over their own differences and somehow unite behind one-state advocacy — let alone for Hamas to change so radically that Israelis would be willing to integrate it into their own government and society.

Any one-state solution would also include some version of the right of return, in which Palestinians displaced in and their descendants are permitted to move back to the new binational state. In a one-state arrangement, Arabs would outnumber Jews by a significant margin. The result would be the end of Zionism, the vision of a specifically Jewish state that exists to protect Jews in a hostile world. This is more than unacceptable to Israeli Jewish political leaders and citizens: It would, in their minds, amount to total defeat.

A poll found that a scant 10 percent of Jewish Israelis supported a one-state solution in which Palestinians and Jewish Israelis are equal citizens. By contrast, 42 percent of Jewish Israelis and 59 percent of Arab Israelis supported two states — with much of the opposition among Jews stemming from a sense that two states were not currently achievable rather than a principled unwillingness to compromise. The Israeli commitment to Zionism creates an insuperable political problem for a one-state solution.

While evacuating settlements will be challenging for Israel, it has the capacity to do so. Daniel Seidemann, a leading expert on Jerusalem and the geography of the conflict, told me that Israel would have to withdraw and rehome about , settlers to make a two-state solution viable. This is a logistical challenge but hardly an impossibility: Seidemann points out that, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Israel successfully absorbed roughly a million Jews seeking a new home in Israel.

The politics of evacuating Israelis from settlements are much harder than integrating Jewish immigrants from abroad. And yet they are infinitely easier than those of asking Israel to commit what Jewish citizens see as national suicide.

If forced to choose between withdrawal and destruction by some kind of pressure campaign, Israel would have both the power and the will to choose the former.

Since the split, there have been repeated negotiations between the two sides and several interim agreements on power-sharing. These agreements, of course, broke down. But part of the problem is that the Palestinians were working with limited international support. Support for a one-state solution is born of a justified sense that the two-state paradigm is failing to deliver. But the argument that it is somehow more realistic than two states only works if one ignores the basic realities on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides of the conflict.

One-state advocates are not unaware of these barriers. They believe they can be overcome by the moral force of the one-state democratic vision: an ideal that could galvanize a political movement akin to the South African anti-apartheid struggle, changing the way that people on both sides of the conflict think about themselves and their historic enemies.

And that makes two states not only more feasible than one, but also in certain respects more desirable. Certainly there is no moral case for the existence of Israel.

Israel stands as the realisation of a biblical statement. It would be absurd to call its legitimacy into account. That biblical promise is Israel's only claim to legitimacy. But whatever God meant when he promised Abraham that "unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the Euphrates," it is doubtful that he intended it to be used as an excuse to take by force and chicanery a land lawfully inhabited and owned by others.

It does no good to anyone to brush this fact, uncomfortable as it might be, under the table. But that has been the failing with Oslo.

When it signed the agreement, the PLO made the cardinal error of assuming that you could bury the hatchet by rewriting history. It accepted as a starting point that Israel had a right to exist. The trouble with this was that it also meant, by extension, an acceptance that the way Israel came into being was legitimate. As the latest troubles have shown, ordinary Palestinians are not prepared to follow their leaders in this feat of intellectual amnesia.

Israel's other potential claim to legitimacy, international recognition, is just as dubious. The two pacts which sealed Palestine's future were both concluded by Britain. First we signed the Sykes-Picot agreement with France, pledging to divvy up Ottoman spoils in the Levant. A year later, in , the Balfour Declaration promised a national home for the Jewish people.

This is wrong. Israel does have a right to exist. This right is clearly mentioned in UN Resolutions , and In , the International Court of Justice declared that the wall built by Israel in the West Bank was illegal, but it also declared that Israel had the right to exist.

Second of all, there is no unlimited right of return for Palestinian refugees. Resolution says clearly that the resolution of the refugee issue ought to take into account the right of all states in the region to exist in peace and security. And Resolution takes precedence over other resolutions, because the UN Security Council voted on it, and the General Assembly resolutions have much less legal clout.

Interestingly enough, there would be a way to reconcile the right of return with the existence of Israel, in the form of a confederation with open borders.

Such a framework would allow both Palestinians and Israelis to live and move across the border while remaining citizens of their respective states. However, the BDS movement has condemned this initiative and forced a movement calling for a Palestinian-Israeli confederation to cancel its inaugural event in the West Bank. The Palestinians do not need to change their narrative to do so.

They just need to recognize that the Jews who settled in Palestine did not conquer this land to enrich themselves, which is usually the purpose of a colonial invasion.