The Binational State and the Reunification of the Palestinian People

Joseph Massad teaches modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University. He is the author of Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (Columbia University Press, 2001).

Before the “peace process” that began in Madrid in 1991 and continued with the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993, all representatives of the Palestinians inside and outside the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) agreed that the various interests of the Palestinian people were inherently compatible. The “peace process”, however, has altered this equation radically.

Following the various agreements signed with Israel by the PLO and subsequently by the Palestinian Authority (PA), the interests of the different sections of the Palestinian people effectively were separated and made incompatible, if not outright contradictory. Israeli Palestinians, through their elected leadership, are challenging Israel to shed its Jewish character and become a state of all its citizens, while West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, through their elected leadership, seemed until the beginning of the al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000 to be preparing for the fantasy of a sovereign independent Palestinian state—a goal still actively pursued by the PA and its technocratic and corrupt class of supporters.

To realise this fantasy, the leadership of the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians continued to heed “pragmatic” and “realist” advice on the necessity of waiving the rights of refugee and diaspora Palestinians to return and/or be compensated, and increasingly many of the rights of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians themselves. Indeed, the PA, and the PLO before it, had left Palestinian Israelis to their own fate without any demands that Israel shed its racist character. In turn, diaspora and refugee Palestinians, since the Oslo process began, have been bereft of leadership and have no identifiable goals.¹ Such developments make it essential to chart briefly the course that led to this outcome and assess whether the two-state solution will address the needs and expectations, as well as restore the rights, of the Palestinian people.

The Two-State Solution

The prerequisite for this situation was the 1988 Declaration of Independence proclaimed by the Palestine National Council (PNC) at a meeting in Algiers, which officially endorsed a two-state solution. Until that time, the PLO, at least officially, had sought to create a secular democratic Palestinian state in all of pre-1948 Palestine, a state wherein all Palestinian refugees would be repatriated, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza would end, and the situation of Israeli-Jewish apartheid, under whose yoke Israeli Palestinians live, would be terminated. The secular democratic state was also going to assure Jews of equal rights after terminating their racial and religious privileges.

Unofficially, however, the change occurred much earlier than 1988. Whereas between 1964 and 1974, the PLO had tilted more towards the diaspora in its programme for liberation, from the mid-1970s, pressure from the emerging pro-PLO Palestinian elite in the West Bank and Gaza to accept a two-state solution began to bear fruit (the PLO has always ignored Palestinians living in Israel). The two-state solution, which became more acceptable as early as 1974, was officially understood to be a prelude to the ultimate unification of Palestine. It was also understood that the establishment of a West Bank and Gaza mini-state would not be at the expense of the diaspora and the refugees. Although most groups within the PLO, including leftist groups, had informally accepted that repatriation would be impossible in the context of a two-state solution, officially they all stuck to the position that achieving one did not preclude achieving the other.

In those years, the Palestinian leadership rested with the diaspora, which built, nourished and sustained it. The 1982 defeat of the diaspora leadership in Beirut and its exile to Tunis weakened not only the PLO but also diaspora Palestinians, who had kept alive the hope that the PLO would be able to realise their dreams. The West Bank and Gaza intifada, which erupted in December 1987, jolted the Palestinian people everywhere. Terrified of an independent Palestinian leadership in the occupied territories, the increasingly corrupt PLO sought to undermine it by hijacking the intifada financially and organisationally. But the intifada strengthened the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians’ push for an official unequivocal acceptance of the two-state solution. In that context, the PNC in 1988 declared an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as an expression of the will of the revolt of the Palestinian people against their Israeli oppressors. The declaration itself finally constituted the PLO’s official stamp on the two-state solution, with no mention of the rights of the diaspora or Israeli Palestinians except in the avowal that the independent state shall be the “state of Palestinians wherever they may be”.

The Right of Return

Until that moment, the PLO never referred to United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948, which affirmed that Palestinian refugees wishing to return to their homes should be permitted to do so “at the earliest practicable date”, and that those choosing not to return should be compensated for their property. The 1988 declaration marked the first time in its history that the PLO reaffirmed the Palestinian people’s right of return based on UN resolutions; previously, that right was always affirmed without reference to such resolutions. As Rashid Khalidi explains,

in explicitly accepting the terms of resolution 194 of 1948, the PLO has accepted certain crucial limitations on a putative absolute right of return. The first is that Palestinians who were made refugees in 1948 are offered an option, whereby those “choosing not to return” become eligible for compensation for their property ... Acceptance of the fait accompli of Israel’s creation in 1948 at the expense of the Palestinians has now in effect been legitimized by the PLO ... the politically impossible demand that all Palestinians made refugees in 1948 be allowed to return is dropped, without dropping the principle that such people have certain rights in the context of a negotiated settlement, and without abandoning the reading of history which is the basis of this principle. This also makes the demand for implementation of the right of return a slightly more realistic one, without the PLO appearing to make a concession.²

Moreover, although neither the PLO nor the PA has specified officially the destinations of returning refugees, individuals associated with both have done so. As early as 1989, Nabil Shaath and Faisal Husseini made statements to the effect that most returns would be confined to the Palestinian state-to-be.³ The subsequent peregrinations of Yasser Arafat to satisfy US conditions for speaking to the PLO were exemplified by his pathetic renunciation of armed resistance, coded “terrorism” in Zionist-speak, and his declaration that the now infamous PLO charter was “caduc” (defunct).⁴ Even these humiliating concessions only achieved a short-term dialogue, soon to be terminated by the Americans.

Abandoning the Diaspora

Following the second Gulf War, and the American plan to convene an international conference in Madrid, the Palestinians were not even allowed to participate as an independent delegation. On Israel’s insistence, only Gaza and West Bank (but not East Jerusalem) Palestinians were allowed to participate as part of the Jordanian delegation. As for the PLO, for fear of a competing leadership, it sought to undermine the Palestinians negotiating within the Madrid process by conducting its own secret talks with the Israelis. Its subsequent signing of the Oslo agreement’s Declaration of Principles was premised on its transformation from a diaspora leadership to a West Bank and Gaza leadership which would be willing to forsake the rights of the diaspora and the refugees altogether. It was within the confines of the Declaration of Principles that the PLO leadership was transformed into the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian refugees were relegated to one of the many issues to be discussed during the “final-status talks”, whenever they would materialise.

By separating the interests of the inside (native West Bank and Gaza Palestinians) and the outside (diaspora and refugee Palestinians) and forcing the PLO to accept that separation officially, Israel effectively laid the groundwork for the Oslo process. The two-state solution, therefore, is conceived not as the first step of a phased solution to redress the grievances of all Palestinians harmed by Zionism and the state of Israel, nor as a partial solution that restores the rights of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians who have languished under Israeli military occupation for the last thirty-five years; rather, it is conceived as a deal wherein forsaking the rights of the Palestinian refugees in the diaspora as well as inside the West Bank and Gaza, and legitimating Israel’s rights as a Jewish supremacist state treating its Palestinian inhabitants as third-class citizens, is the price those Palestinians would have to pay in exchange for limited self-rule for West-Bank and Gaza Palestinians. It is this “two-state” solution that the PLO and the PA since 1993 have accepted to resolve the Palestinian question and that Arafat continues to pursue actively.⁵

Given that the last ten years have demonstrated the utter failure of such tactics and strategy, one would think that the PA and its corrupt coterie of consultants would cease and desist from pursuing such a losing course of action. Yet with every passing day, Arafat proves further that the well of concessions of Palestinian rights at his disposal has not yet dried up. Indeed, in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz he went further in his already shameless concessions by asserting his willingness to accept the new Bush plan of a “temporary state” on 42 per cent of the West Bank and also the January 2001 Clinton plan, which denied the Palestinian refugees their right of return. He also conceded Palestinian sovereignty over parts of East Jerusalem.⁶

Who Gains?

Who are the beneficiaries of this peace process that still hope for a two-state solution? Theoretically, native West Bank and Gaza Palestinians are reaping the benefits of a phantasmal state-to-be by forsaking the rights of the refugees and of Palestinian Israelis, just as Zionists, who never included the rescue of European Jews as a priority in their political programme, reaped the financial and political benefits resulting from the murder of these Jews by Nazi Germany.⁷ In reality, however, even native West Bankers and Gazans have been losers, with their political, economic, social, territorial and security situation worsening under PA rule and the only hope awaiting them being an apartheid bantustan solution.

As for the premise that diaspora and refugee Palestinians will be part of the final settlement of the “peace process”, this presupposes that they are one with native West Bank and Gaza Palestinians. Yet all proposed solutions by PA elements and their coterie of comprador intellectuals sacrifice most of the diaspora’s rights in favour of separating the diaspora from native West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, who are the ultimate imaginary beneficiaries of whatever Israeli largesse the PA and its cronies are able to extract.⁸ Palestinian refugees living in the West Bank and Gaza (numbering upwards of 1.2 million people) have been disproportionately impoverished by the PA’s dismal economic performance.⁹ They are also increasingly socially denigrated on the bases of status and class by native West Bankers and Gazans, as the refugees’ role as cannon fodder during the first intifada was no longer needed (until the al-Aqsa intifada became inevitable), being rendered démodé by the PA-Israeli peace process. The al-Aqsa intifada of the last two years increased rather than decreased these tensions.

But if the Palestinian diaspora, which is composed largely of refugees, is not the beneficiary of this “peace process”, why must it acquiesce in it by conceding all its rights? To ask the diaspora and the refugees to sacrifice their rights, hopes and dreams so that some meagre political benefits can accrue to native West Bank and Gaza Palestinians is to ask the diaspora and refugees more generally to commit national suicide. Since those who are now conceding Palestinian diaspora and refugee rights have never been elected to their positions nor ever been given a mandate by diaspora and refugee Palestinians to concede their rights, they perforce have no authority to negotiate on behalf of these Palestinians.

Faced with a similar ignoring of their interests by the PA, Israeli Palestinians, who have their own elected leadership, have been pursuing their own goals and interests separate from the peace process (their main goal being the transformation of Israel from an apartheid Jewish-supremacist state of world Jewry to a state of its own Israeli citizens, Jews and Arabs alike). Moreover, Israeli Palestinian internal refugees, numbering between 120,000 and 150,000 people and constituting one-seventh of Israeli Palestinians, are also seeking compensation on their own from the Israeli government. In March 1995, the Committee for the Defence of the Rights of Refugees in Israel convened a conference to register refugee grievances. The conference was attended by three hundred delegates from forty uprooted villages within Israel proper.¹⁰ The committee was founded in 1992 after the Madrid conference, as according to one of its founders, “the convening of the Madrid Conference convinced us beyond the shadow of a doubt that the PLO and Arab countries had abandoned the Arabs of ’48. Therefore, we decided to take matters into our own hands.”¹¹

The Need for Elections

Since Israel agreed to negotiate in Madrid only with West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, and with the PLO only insofar as the latter transformed itself into the PA and ceased to represent the diaspora, no official body representing diaspora Palestinians has been a party to the Madrid or Oslo processes. This situation makes it imperative, as many Palestinians have recommended in recent years, that free elections be held in the diaspora to choose a new representative leadership that can negotiate with Israel and the international community on behalf of diaspora Palestinians. The diaspora and the refugees must extricate themselves completely from the West Bank and Gaza leadership, effectively seceding from it and from a “peace process” that addresses only native West Bank and Gaza Palestinians. The diaspora and the refugees have nothing to gain from such a process and everything to lose. (Hamid Shaqqura makes the important suggestion that West Bank and Gaza refugees are related to the Palestinian authority not as citizens but as refugees from another country. Therefore, the PA cannot speak for them or simply treat them as citizens.)¹²

As the last ten years have also proved, the “peace process” in reality has been to the advantage only of the PA and its technocratic servants and sycophants. These rule on behalf of Israel and benefit financially alongside a new class of locals and returnees which the “peace process” created to staff all the new non-governmental organisations, whose goal is to further the ends of the “peace process” and not to restore West Bank and Gaza Palestinian rights. Moreover, the mandate of elected PA officials, including the Legislative Council, ran out three years ago and they no longer have any legal standing to rule or represent West Bank and Gaza Palestinians. As Edward Said has suggested, new elections under the supervision of civil society must be held in the West Bank and Gaza to rid the PA of any legitimacy and bring to power a truly representative body.¹³

Israel has succeeded in destroying the political unity of the Palestinian people, a goal whose achievement was formalised in Madrid and then consolidated by the Oslo process. The “peace process” from Madrid to the present has not only deepened the differences between the material interests of various sections of the Palestinian people, it has also rendered them contradictory in an Israeli-dictated and PA-accepted zero-sum game, wherein so-called gains for native West Bank and Gaza Palestinians must be attained at the expense of real losses by the refugees and the diaspora.

A Binational State

However, given the overwhelming evidence that all Palestinians have lost out as a result of the “peace process” and the increasing collaboration of the PA with the Israeli and American logic of conceding Palestinian rights one by one, it becomes clearer every day that only within the framework of a binational state will the rights of all Palestinians be restored and an end to the conflict be attained.¹⁴ It is within a binational, democratic state that Palestinian refugees can be repatriated to their homes, Israeli Palestinians can become equal citizens and the occupation can end. It is only within a binational state that Israeli Jews will become equal citizens and not ones with racial and religious rights and privileges over Palestinians. It is only within a binational state that Israeli Jews will no longer threaten the rights of the Palestinian people and Palestinians will no longer threaten the Israeli-Jewish system of racial and religious supremacy, as that system will have been eliminated.

The only way the Palestinian people can be reunified after having been divided by Israel is through a solution that guarantees the restoration of the rights of all of them, and not only the (severely limited) rights of a segment of the Palestinian people. The PA no longer represents anyone but itself. It should be thrown in the dustbin of history as a collaborator leadership no different from the Zionist leadership, which historically collaborated with the enemies of Jews. Indeed, the PA is now not a representative of any section of the Palestinian people, but rather of Israeli and American security needs and interests as well as of Jewish demographic “needs”, as Arafat himself asserted in a New York Times editorial.¹⁵ It is high time that the Palestinian people replaced the PA with a leadership that truly represents their common interests and can pursue clear and rational objectives to end Zionist oppression and the conflict itself.

Endnotes

1. For a more detailed discussion of the refugee question, see Joseph Massad, “Return or Permanent Exile? Palestinian Refugees and the Ends of Oslo”, Critique, no. 14 (spring 1999).

2. Rashid Khalidi, “Observations on the Right of Return”, Journal of Palestine Studies 21, no. 2 (winter 1992), pp. 35–6.

3. Shaath’s and Husseini’s views are cited in Khalidi, “Observations”, p. 36.

4. Statement by Arafat at a press conference on 14 December 1988, Geneva, reproduced in the Journal of Palestine Studies 18, no. 3 (spring 1989), p. 181.

5. On the Oslo agreement, see Joseph Massad, “Repentant Terrorists, or Settler-Colonialism Revisited: The PLO–Israeli Agreement in Perspective”, Found Object 3 (spring 1994).

6. See Akiva Eldar, “Arafat to Haaretz: I Accept Clinton’s Plan; Peace Is Possible”, Haaretz, 21 June 2002.

7. On Zionism’s policies towards the rescue of European Jews from the Nazis, see Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1983).

8. On the role of Palestinian intellectuals since Oslo, see Joseph Massad, “Political Realists or Comprador Intelligentsia: Palestinian Intellectuals and the National Struggle”, Critique, no. 11 (fall 1997).

9. See Sara Roy, “De-development Revisited: Palestinian Economy and Society since Oslo”, Journal of Palestine Studies 28, no. 3 (spring 1999).

10. See Ahmad Ashkar, “Internal Refugees: Their Inalienable Right to Return”, News from Within 11, no. 8 (August 1995), pp. 14–17.

11. Ibid., p. 17. On internal refugees in Israel, see also Ahmad Ashkar, “1948 Palestinian Refugees: ‘We’ll Return to the Village Alive or Dead’”, News from Within 11, no. 9 (September 1995), pp. 21–4.

12. Hamid Shaqqura, “Refugees and the Palestinian Authority”, News from Within 11, no. 8 (August 1995), pp. 18–20.

13. Edward Said, “Palestinian Elections Now”, Al-Ahram Weekly, no. 590 (13–19 June 2002).

14. See Joseph Massad, “On Zionism and Jewish Supremacy”, New Politics 8, no. 4 (winter 2002).

15. Yasser Arafat, “The Palestinian Vision of Peace”, New York Times, 3 February 2002.