Well-informed and reasoned analysis of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict is no longer as rare as unicorns in North American academia, although it continues to shock broader public discourse. Bernie Sanders's supporters regarded his declaration—in a debate with Hillary Clinton on the eve of the 14 April 2016 New York presidential primary no less—that, “In the long run if we are ever going to bring peace to that region which has seen so much hatred and so much war, we are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity,” as an act of great political bravery. While Sanders's comment was mild and self-evident, few other major US political figures have been willing to say as much.
In this context, The Impossibility of Palestine is a welcome retelling of the history and present circumstances of Palestine/Israel based on broad reading and intelligent interpretation. Like Sanders's debate comment, it too is ahead of the curve of political discourse, not only in the United States, but also in the international diplomatic community. Mehran Kamrava argues that while a Palestinian nation endures, the window of opportunity for establishing a Palestinian state has closed. The two-state solution to the conflict, which the international diplomatic consensus (with the notable exceptions of the United States and Israel, which came along belatedly and half-heartedly) has embraced since the 1980s, is no longer a viable option.
Kamrava supports his argument by summarizing the account of the conquest of Palestine by Zionist settlers culminating in the destruction of Palestinian society in the nakba of 1948. He goes on to reiterate how, since completing the conquest of Palestine in 1967, Israel has erased any semblance of the geographic unity of historic Palestine and imposed an array of control mechanisms to police Palestinians and segregate them from Israeli society and from each other. Consequently, Palestine as a coherent geographic entity that might become a sovereign state no longer exists.
Kamrava views the 1993 Oslo Accords as the critical juncture when the PLO embarked on a path-dependent process that culminated in closing off the possibility of statehood (pp. 17–18). Israel never saw the Oslo Accords as heralding the establishment of a territorially contiguous, economically viable, sovereign Palestinian state. Indeed, the text of the accords contains no language clearly affirming that this is the desired outcome of the negotiating process they prescribed. The Palestine Liberation Organization accepted a form of municipal administration (i.e., control over the domestic affairs of what became Area A in the 1995 Taba Accords, or Oslo II) and the role of security subcontractor for the continuing Israeli occupation. In return, Israel permitted a limited number of Palestine Liberation Organization cadres to return to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from Tunis, where they had become progressively irrelevant to the political struggles in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, as the UN dubs them. They largely displaced a more democratically inclined and more competent local professional middle class that became internationally prominent during the First Intifada.
The 1994 Paris Economic Protocol, which remains in force although it was supposed to expire after five years, enshrined Israeli control over the Palestinian economy. It encouraged the formation of monopolies (p. 180). The Palestinian Authority's control over these monopolies deepened its corruption and autocratic control. The middle classes were consequently transformed from a national to a comprador bourgeoisie (these are the problematic categories Kamrava uses) while Palestinian society was depoliticized and nongovernmental organization (NGO)ized (p. 135). Kamrava regards Israel's reoccupation of the West Bank in 2002 during the Second Intifada as marking the end of the possibility of a viable Palestinian state (p. 168). Therefore, the Palestinians need to redefine their assessment of the current situation and options for the future.
In my judgment, the likelihood of establishing a sovereign Palestinian state has been asymptotically approaching zero for over a decade. I concur with many of Kamrava's explanations for this trajectory. But, unlike Kamrava, I do not believe that any social science method can definitively “prove” the death of the two-state solution. Moreover, while The Impossibility of Palestine is a well-informed summary of the history and dynamics of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, beyond the useful theoretical discussion of the distinction between a nation and a state in the introduction, it offers little that is empirically or analytically new to those who follow developments in Israel/Palestine.
As early as the mid-1980s, former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti began arguing that the advance of the post-1967 settlement project meant that the partition of historic British Mandate Palestine into two states was no longer possible. Palestinian poet laureate Mahmud Darwish, who authored the 1988 Palestinian declaration of independence that enshrined the two-state solution as Palestine Liberation Organization policy, veteran Fatah leader Shafiq al-Hut, and Edward Said all rejected the Oslo Accords as a betrayal of Palestinian national aspirations that would not lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state. Darwish and al-Hut resigned from the Palestine National Council in protest. Said had resigned two years earlier. His essays relentlessly criticizing the Oslo Accords and their aftermath were collected and republished as The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (New York: Vintage, 1996).
The depoliticization and NGOization of Palestinian society and the corruption of the Palestinian Authority have been criticized by Reema Hammami, Sari Hanafi, Jamil Hilal, Islah Jad, and others whose works appear in Kamrava's bibliography.
Following in Said's footsteps, other scholars have argued, albeit in publications of very uneven quality, that the two-state solution is defunct. Among them are: Tony Judt, “Israel: The Alternative” (The New York Review of Books, 23 October 2003); Virginia Tilley, The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli–Palestinian Deadlock (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2005); Jamil Hilal, ed., Where Now for Palestine? The Demise of the Two-State Solution (London: Zed Books, 2007); Padraig O'Malley, The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine—A Tale of Two Narratives (New York: Viking, 2015). The most conceptually original and thought provoking contribution to this literature is Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2012).
Thomas Friedman has also proclaimed the death of the two-state solution (“The Many Mideast Solutions,” New York Times, 10 February 2016). It appears that many who consider Friedman a wise oracle on Middle East matters despite his numerous inaccuracies and erroneous predictions have not seriously considered this pronouncement. Little that the New York Times had previously published about Israel/Palestine would have prepared them for it.
The most common version of the two-state solution, and the only one acceptable to most Israeli Jews willing to countenance any form of repartition of historic Palestine, is defined by the slogan popularized by the two former Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak: “Us here, them there.” They and their acolytes envisioned a “divorce” between a future state of Palestine and the State of Israel. Even in the increasingly unlikely event that it could be realized, this is an unappealing segregationist vision that would leave the inhabitants of a Palestinian state subordinated to Israeli military and economic power. Moreover, in an unreconstructed Jewish state, Palestinian Arab citizens (now about 20 percent of the total) would remain forever structurally unequal.
A process of decolonization culminating in a constitutional structure providing equality, dignity, and justice for both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs is the only viable basis for a stable peace. In theory several different political arrangements might meet these criteria. But no such version of either a one- or two-state solution is on the agenda for the near future.
