In discussing ‘solutions’ for Israel/Palestine, it may be salutary to recall the famous assertion of the Communist Manifesto—that its theoretical conclusions ‘are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes’. From the outbreak of the first Intifada in December 1987, the real historical movement of the Palestinian liberation struggle has been directed towards the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. The plo adopted this goal officially in 1988, but it was widely known that, despite its rhetoric, the two-state solution had been its real aim at least since 1974. The first Intifada resulted in the Oslo agreement between Israel and the plo, which launched a process often believed at the time to be leading towards the fulfilment of this goal. That process ended in failure, as we now know, for reasons that are still widely debated among observers and participants alike.footnote¹

While the first Intifada was an unarmed popular struggle, the second Intifada, which marked the end of the Oslo process in summer 2000, encountered a deliberately violent over-reaction by the Israeli military and turned into an armed rebellion.footnote² In Israeli popular consciousness it has been characterized mostly by the suicide bombings of civilian targets inside Israel’s 1967 borders. This has caused a shift in the public mood of the Jewish-Israeli middle class—away from supporting the efforts to achieve security through peace and towards seeking security at all costs—and, in the eyes of some, legitimated Sharon’s brutal reoccupation of the West Bank in April 2002. Although Sharon was officially committed to something called the Road Map—a commitment maintained by his heir apparent, Ehud Olmert—and in spite of the continuing charade called the Palestinian Authority, the prospects for a viable, sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza are practically non-existent (if they ever existed at all). As a result, the old plo programme, of establishing one secular, democratic state in the entire territory of Mandatory Palestine has been revived, primarily among Palestinian intellectuals inside and outside the region.footnote³

The merit of Virginia Tilley’s The One-State Solution is to lay out, in a systematic way, many of the problems attendant upon the two-state plan.footnote⁴ Tilley’s aim is to advance the discussion of the one-state solution in the us.footnote⁵ She attempts to do so by making two major arguments: (1) that the two-state solution is no longer a viable option, if it ever was, and (2) that the one-state solution ‘would resolve the entire conflict in one magisterial gesture’. It would have to be magisterial indeed, because Tilley wants to see a state that would not only ‘serve all its citizens equally’, but also ensure that ‘the Jewish national home can find a new and more secure configuration no longer requiring a Jewish majority or Jewish ethnic domination over the state’.footnote⁶ In other words, Tilley sets out to show not only that the one-state solution is the only option for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also that it should not be seen as a threat to the basic aim of Zionism—establishing a national home for the Jews in Palestine.

Tilley’s argument proceeds by elimination. She considers all hypothetically available options—ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by Israel, continuation of the status quo, and several versions of the two-state solution—and, showing their deficiencies, concludes that the one-state solution is the only remaining option. She bases her conclusion about the impossibility of the two-state solution on two concrete premises:

As Tilley documents, the ‘settlement grid’ includes not only the settlements themselves—a few of which are already fair-sized towns—but a whole network of connecting roads reserved for Israeli citizens only and, most recently, the Separation (in Afrikaans, apartheid)Wall as well. The grid was designed, in terms of its density and territorial dispersion, to make the occupation irreversible by fragmenting the territory of the potential Palestinian state and making the removal of the settlements impossible. The settlements are inhabited by over 200,000 people, plus another 200,000 in the area that Israel has already annexed as ‘Jerusalem’. The half-million or so settlers are backed, politically, by a hinterland of supporters that is several times as large. Many of these supporters are relatives of the settlers or people who aspire to improve their economic conditions by moving to the West Bank, the only part of the Israeli ‘control system’ where the welfare state still exists.

Settling the Occupied Territories with Jews has been the major national project carried out by the Israeli state since 1967. In terms of its legitimation, there have been three phases: military, between 1967 and 1974; religious, between 1974 and 1977, when Gush Emunim was created in the wake of the 1973 Arab–Israeli war; and free-market, since Likud came to power in 1977.footnote⁷ All Israeli state institutions, including Jewish national organizations like the Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund, have participated in the settlement project, sometimes under various guises in order not to violate too openly the terms of American economic assistance or the tax-exempt status of American Jewish organizations. (It would be extremely naïve to believe that the American state was fooled by these disguises, but aside from President Bush Senior no us president has dared challenge the settlement activity.)

Tilley neglects to mention one of the most important institutions with a vested interest in the continued occupation, the Israeli military. Since 1967 the idf (renamed iof—Israel Occupation Forces—by some Israeli peace groups) has been, formally and effectively, the sovereign power in those parts of the Occupied Territories that have not been fully annexed to Israel. Managing these territories, with their millions of Palestinian residents, has required, in addition to intelligence and operational forces, a large civil affairs bureaucracy, sustained by huge budgets, where many military careers have been made. Relinquishing control over these territories would mean a great diminution of the military, even in strict numerical terms. Moreover, every advance towards peace, beginning with the accord with Egypt, has led to lower military spending relative to gnp, loss of military contracts and a reduction of the standing army. During the Oslo period there was talk of abolishing the draft and turning to a professional force, and even the idea of privatizing major military functions was raised. Finally, the prestige of the military, and the motivation to serve in it, experienced a marked decline.footnote⁸