Israel-Palestine is already a de facto single state

by Antony Lerman

Critics of the one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict see it, at best, as utopian and unachievable, and at worst, as the dismantling of Israel, the denial of the right of Jewish self-determination and the ultimate expression of the new antisemitism.

The idea certainly doesn't find favour among the Palestinian and Israeli populations, as the One Voice survey results showed. The two-state solution, despite the failure of years of peace negotiations to bring it about, still seems to be the preferred option of significant majorities on both sides.

Nevertheless, there are increasing doubts that it will ever come about, even though it is the choice of the international community, and more voices are now calling for a "one-state" solution as the only way of protecting the human rights of the Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank. And as such voices are heard more often, so too are the critics' predictions that it would spell national suicide were the single state to be adopted.

There's something surreal about all of this, about both the fulminations of the critics and the theoretical scenarios of the advocates. And that's because we're already there: one state exists.

It has not been formally proclaimed. It has no legal status. No one wants to acknowledge it. But it's hard to see Israeli control of the area of the pre-1967 state, the West Bank and Gaza as constituting anything other than one, de facto state.

First, look at control of territory, security and administration. The 1995 Oslo Accords divided the West Bank into three areas. On paper, Palestinians have full responsibility for civilian and security matters only in spaces designated as Area A. "The territorial space of Areas A and B is not contiguous," says the World Bank.

Everything in these areas "is surrounded by Area C, which covers the entire remaining area, is the only contiguous area of the West Bank, and includes most of the West Bank's key infrastructure, including the main road network. Area C is under full control of the Israeli military for both security and civilian affairs related to territory". As for Gaza, Israel continues to maintain complete control over the air and sea space of the Strip.

In terms of the size of the three areas, 59% of the West Bank is under Israeli civil and security control; 23% is under Palestinian civil control, but Israeli security control. The areas of Palestinian Authority (PA) control are mainly located in Palestinian urban areas – the population centres where much of the fast-growing population lives. These take up 8.5% of the West Bank.

"Israel continues to control the joint Gaza Strip-West Bank population registry", even though formal authority for administering the population registry was transferred to the PA under the second Oslo Agreement of 1995. "By controlling the population registry," says B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, "Israel continues to determine who is a 'Palestinian resident' and who is a 'foreigner'."

Second, the nature of the settlement enterprise reinforces this control. The eastern strip of land running north-south between the mountains and the Jordan river is included within the area of two regional councils, Arvot Hayarden and Megillot.

Settlements in the mountain strip area to the east more or less "block the potential for urban development in the major Palestinian cities situated along the mountain ridge". And the settlements on the western hills "interrupt the territorial contiguity of the Palestinian villages and towns located out along this strip". B'Tselem says the Israeli administration has applied most aspects of Israeli law to the settlers and the settlements, thus effectively annexing them to the state of Israel.

Settlement activity in and around Jerusalem has involved the expropriation of extensive areas of privately owned Palestinian land, severed the West Bank in two, and "blocke[d] urban development of Bethlehem and isolate[d] it from Palestinian communities", according to B'Tselem.

Moreover, official plans to build thousands of housing units in settlements indicates that the confirmation Israel gave at the 2007 Annapolis conference to stick to its Road Map commitment to freeze settlement activity, including natural growth, is worthless.

Third, while it's true that "the economies of the two territories are not intertwined with Israel's", in reality, Israel exerts a virtual stranglehold on their economic development. It has maintained its system of economic restrictions in the West Bank that discourages or restricts private investment, and has established six commercial crossing points in the separation barrier, which serve as yet another barrier to Palestinian trade.

In general the physical obstructions Israel maintained in the West Bank, which increased from an average of 459 in 2007 to an average of 537 in the first nine months of 2008, contributed to the steep decline in GDP since 2000. This was all part of Israel's policy of controlling access to land, water, ability to travel and residency for the Palestinian population.

The wall tells the world that Israel wants to separate itself from the Palestinians in the occupied territories, yet the facts on the ground show the Palestinians being separated from each other and from Israelis within the civil, military and administrative structure Israel has imposed on the territories, and which is inextricably linked to Israel in its pre-1967 borders.

Any quasi-autonomy is negated by the encircling and overlapping forms of control and restriction Israel has created. Notwithstanding that the Palestinians live on what's left to them of their own land, to all intents and purposes they are trapped in this de facto single state.

If the secular, democratic one-state solution is a utopian fantasy, its mirror image is like an all too real evil twin, created by a country "which defines itself as a democracy" but, as the Association for Civil Rights In Israel says, "presides over several million people who are denied their rights under military occupation in which no rights are guaranteed: not the right to life, personal security, or freedom of movement, not the right to earn a livelihood, to freedom of expression, or to health".

Seeing the current reality as one state is meant to send a stark message to the advocates of the two-state solution that time is running out. And by no means the least of the tasks to be done to prevent the clock from stopping is to confront the question of how this structure can ever be dismantled to allow self-determination for Jews and Palestinians in two separate states. This may be what the people want, but by the way they have voted recently, they may well have decided that it's no longer possible.

This is not intended as a plug for the one-state solution based on justice and equality. I have mused on the eventual evolution of a federal version of this as a way of guaranteeing the human rights of Israelis and Palestinians in the long term, but believe that it could only ever happen from a position of two states first and only with the consent of both peoples.

So, to concentrate minds everywhere on achieving a two-state arrangement means admitting frankly and openly that the illiberal one-state is here, and that debates full of righteous indignation over the secular, democratic one-state idea are, today, just a distraction.