The Stupidity of the Oslo Two-State Solution and How to Do it Better
This blogpost is a continuation of previous blogposts which discuss Israeli-Palestinian peace. It is written deliberately at a time when such peace is becoming increasingly unlikely, rooted in the deeply Jewish conviction that it is always darkest just before the dawn.
Amidst this darkness, we hear time and again the Oslo-Style Two-State Peace framework heralded as the ‘only solution to peace in the Middle East’. In this blogpost, I wish to challenge this false and dangerous premise.
To be clear, as anyone who has read my blogs would know, you can oppose the Oslo Two-State Peace without being opposed to the idea of peace itself.
Similarly, you can champion aspirations for peace without being naive to believe it can happen without prior transformations in attitudes and reframing of narratives. This was the subject of my previous blogpost, and I encourage readers to keep this in mind before leaping to their keyboards.
Finally, you can set out ideas for peace which challenge prevailing orthodoxies while holding authentic, Torah-centered views about the nature of the Jewish connection to the Land, and the religious obligations that spring therefrom.
So, what is wrong with the Oslo Two-State Peace Framework?
In a sentence, it is as if all the lessons have never been learnt from that quaint but devastating colonial tendency to take a pencil to a map, draw artificial borders, and create artificial countries. The consequences of this tendency live with us to this day, 50, 70, or 100 years later, piling up the dead in their hundreds of millions, or more.
In a word, it is reductive.
There are two peoples in the Land. Both peoples have attachment to the whole land, not just a part of it. The Land – every pore of it – oozes with religious, historic and geographic significance. This significance is not in the least bit hidden – the Bible and the Quran are arguably the world’s two best-selling books. To say that Jews and Palestinians love the land is an under-statement – we are completely obsessed by it.
[As an aside, if we could ever build sufficient momentum for a new and better peace process, one of the first confidence-building measures should be the formation of an Israeli-Palestinian Geographic Society. The one thing we share most in common is our love of the Land and its produce.]
Not only that, both peoples still live across the entire Land, and in the future fervently desire to continuing to do so. The manifestation of those desires – both by Jews and by Palestinians – has been widely vilified, not because of any morally defensible principle, but mainly on the basis it threatens the future materialization of achieving the Oslo-style Two-State Solution.
So my principle beef is that not only does the Oslo-style Two-State Solution run contrary to the undefeatable attachments and desires of both Jews and Palestinians, it also manufactures its own bottlenecks.
As if this is not obvious enough, Scripture itself (Islamic Hadith, as well as the Jewish/Christian Book of Prophets in I Kings) presents us with the Judgement of Solomon – considered the very epitome of wisdom, when the King took the sword and threatened to split the baby – which may be seen as a prophetic caution against the kind of solution that Oslo prescribes for our Land.
I want in this blogpost to address just one of many fallacies with the Oslo-style Two State thinking – a fallacy which centers around the relationship between demography, territory and self-determination.
Specifically, I wish to demolish the – on the surface logical, but actually dangerous and counter-productive – premise that self-determination for each party requires two states based on territories in which each has a majority.
It is this premise that generates the greatest but most needless of opposition to Oslo (i.e. Oslo manufacturing its own bottlenecks): among Jews, the fear they will be uprooted and perpetually excluded from the most significant parts of their ancestral Land (i.e. the destruction of the settlements and the ‘judenrein’ nature of the proposed Palestinian state); and likewise by Palestinians fearing they too will be perpetually excluded from specific locations where their ancestors dwelled (i.e. the outright rejection of a Palestinian right of return).
Let me try to set out the logic as clearly as I can:
- The Oslo-style two-state solution – splitting the land in two – has a long heritage, going back to the British Mandate era. It is not new.
- It is founded on the premise that demography is central to self-determination.
- Therefore, in the Oslo thinking, two states are required – one based on territory with a Jewish majority, one based on territory with a Palestinian majority – in order that each party achieves self-determination.
- This thinking is correct but it is partial and not the whole story. Jews and Palestinians, authentically as Jews and Palestinians, are not interested only in self-determination. Self-determination at the cost of mass displacement and perpetual exclusion is not acceptable to significant majorities on each side. Arguably, it is the reason why the Palestinians turned down Israel’s offer in the Oslo grand finale at Taba (Egypt) in 2001.
- What we need to do therefore is to look for alternative models.
- When the Oslo-style Two State Peace was first formulated, the European Union did not yet exist (at least, not in its current form).
- In the European Union, we see that EU citizens have complete freedom of movement. They can establish residence, take up employment, travel, pray, holiday, etc, wherever they want within the EU.
- However they cannot vote in national elections wherever they want, simply by moving from Country A to Country B. If their nationality is with Country A, that is where they vote, even if they move to Country B and live there a long time.
- Applying this to the Israel-Palestinian context, one could imagine a similar arrangement. Yes there may be two states (or even three states, if one includes Jordan, but let’s not get sidetracked on that for now). And there can also be an EU-like arrangement between them. Call it a confederation, for sake of argument – it need not be an exact replica of the EU, which is by no means an ideal type – but it must at minimum provide some kind of coordinating mechanism.
- It means Jews and Palestinians can maintain their attachment to the whole land, not just a part of it. And that, both peoples can still live across the entire Land in the future, as they wish. And yet each can have a state through which they self-determine – be it on the basis of the 1967 borders, or whatever. The borders issue is largely defanged in this arrangement.
- How is self-determination guaranteed? Israelis will always vote in a Jewish state wherever they happen to live. Palestinians always vote in a Palestinian state wherever they happen to live. All kinds of issues that arise with Oslo – future demographic trends, the number of settlers or returnees, the regulation of marital arrangements – become moot.
- Importantly, there is no need to uproot or prevent Jews from living anywhere they want in their ancestral Land. The right of Palestinian return becomes less problematic. Two principal sources of opposition to Oslo are addressed.
I want to emphasize, the argumentation in this blogpost does not culminate in an exposition of the full solution I have in mind – for that, please see this link. Some of the missing ingredients not addressed here include security, religious-based sovereignty claims, wider Middle East regional integration dynamics, and – as emphasized above – the need for prior transformations in attitudes and reframing of narratives.
But the important point I wish to emphasize is that by consistently pushing Oslo, with the fears of mass displacement and perpetual exclusion it engenders, world leaders are making it harder not easier to ‘sell peace’ to two deeply traumatized peoples not ready for the further traumas that an Oslo approach needlessly entails.
There is a better way.