This is a guest post by Michelle Sieff of the American Jewish Committee.
What do former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton and Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi have in common? They both argue that the two-state solution is impossible.
In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Bolton writes:
Given this landscape, we should ask why we still advocate the “two-state solution,” with Israel and “Palestine” living side by side in peace, as the mantra goes. We are obviously not progressing, and are probably going backward. We continue poring over the Middle East “road map” because that is all we have, faute de mieux, as they say in Foggy Bottom.
His solution? A three-state solution, where Gaza is returned to Egyptian control and the West Bank reverts to Jordanian sovereignty.
A certain degree of bleakness is understandable given current events, but it is an exaggeration to claim that the two-state solution is dead. And the bigger problem is that those who claim that a two-state solution is impossible are often those who don’t support it in the first place. I suspect Bolton doesn’t really believe in the moral necessity of a Palestinian state, living side by side, peacefully, next to Israel.
Bolton’s arguments resemble the arguments of scholars, such as Professor Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University, who also argues that a two-state solution is impossible. In an article in The Nation in May 2008, Khalidi opined:
Such a resolution will not be simple, because the now universally applauded two-state solution faces the juggernaut of Israel’s actions in the occupied territories over more than forty years, actions that have been expressly designed to make its realization in any meaningful form impossible.
But Khalidi admits that the alternatives-such as the one-state solution-are also deeply flawed. Yet his deep ambivalence about the possibility of a two-state solution, to my mind, suggests that he is also ambivalent about the moral importance of achieving it.
I say no to Bolton and no to Khalidi. No to the three-state solution and no to the one-state solution. Any person with moral intelligence understands that the only solution to the crisis remains a two-state solution. Though it is tremendously difficult to achieve, it is not impossible. But arguments like Bolton’s and Khalidi’s are dangerous, because they allows extremists on both sides to cling to a fantasy world in which either Jewish or Palestinian national aspirations can be sacrificed.
What Khalidi rightly argues is that Israeli settlement policies have stymied any progress toward a two-state solution - he is not expressing “ambivalence” about the objective itself. It’s quite a leap to lump him in with Bolton.
Two state and three state solutions are comatose and improbable, not dead. By contrast, Khalidi’s one state solution is a quixotic, tragi-comic farce conceived upon absurdist multi-culti “foundations.” Khalidi has also shown himself to be an arch propagandist in the “Orientalist” mold; he doesn’t inhabit the Edward Said chair at Columbia for nothing.