The Palestinian Solution: One State, or Two?

A provocative question: is the two-state solution dead? Is it now too late for Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace side by side in separate nations? I'm not just talking about the lack of much progress in Condi Rice's summit in Jerusalem today.
The question has an interesting history. The Arab-Jewish struggle for Palestine dates back around a century, to the Zionist project, the Balfour Declaration, Arab opposition and rioting, etc. Various commissions studied the conflict from the 1920s to the 1940s, culminating in U.N. Resolution 181 passed in 1947, which called for the partitioning of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The current conflict flows out of the Arab rejection of 181 and the 1948 war that established Israel as an independent state and created hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees.
It actually wasn't so long ago that Golda Meir said there were no such thing as Palestinians, or that an overwhelming majority of Israelis and Palestinians alike opposed a two-state solution. It was only in 1988 that the PLO in effect recognized Israel and accepted twin states when Yasser Arafat endorsed 181. Even the Oslo Accords of 1993 failed to explicitly spell out plans for an independent Palestine, however. Only since the 2000 intifadeh have Israeli leaders spoken openly about their support for a Palestinian state. President Bush became the first U.S. president, in 2002, to explicitly call for an independent Palestine.
Condi Rice's talks represented a revival of discussions about a final settlement for the first time in six years. But it might be worth asking whether it is now too late, due to various developments:
--In 2000, regardless of the reasons and the blame for failure, the Israeli government and the PLO failed to agree to the terms of a two-state solution. The failure led to the outbreak of a new Palestinian uprising and the collapse of peace talks for six years.
--In 2005, the Palestinians ousted Arafat's Fatah party, which had negotiated for the two-state solution, and elected a parliament led by the fundamentalist Hamas, which favors a one-state outcome that dissolves Israel into an Arab state.
--On the Israeli side, again rightly or wrongly, it seems doubtful that any Israeli prime minister in the near future will agree to conditions allowing for a viable Palestinian state. While Olmert or his successor may speak about a state in theory, in practice they will require conditions--such as the incorporation of settlements, maintenance of security zones and control over Jerusalem--that Palestinians will see as blocking their sovereignty.
--There is now a timetable problem: as a top Arab diplomat put it to me recently, if Rice does not pull a rabbit out of her hat, it may be six years before another major diplomatic effort is made to resolve the dispute. That is assuming that American mediation is essential, and that the next U.S. president will take his/her time, as American presidents have usually done, before getting too embroiled in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. In six years, Palestinians may have tired of seeking a negotiated solution, even if Fatah is still around to argue for it. Ehud Olmert had this to say when he was deputy prime minister under Sharon: "We are approaching the point where more and more Palestinians will say: 'We have been won over. We agree with Liberman. There is no room for two states between the Jordan and the sea. All that we want is the right to vote.' The day they do that, is the day we lose everything. Even when they carry out terror, it is very difficult for us to persuade the world of the justice of our cause. We see this on a daily basis. All the more so when there is only one demand: an equal right to vote. The thought that the struggle against us will be headed by liberal Jewish organizations who shouldered the burden of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa scares me."
--The idea of reverting to a one-state solution has been broached inside Fatah circles going back to at least the first Gulf War. I recall sitting in a coffee shop in East Jerusalem with the late Faisal Husseini, whose father Abdul Khader had died leading Palestinians in the 1948 war. He mentioned to me that the PLO may have made a mistake waging an armed struggle for the "liberation" of all of Palestine. He said they may have done much better after Israel captured the West Bank in 1967 by simply agitating for the right to be Israeli citizens and vote in Israel. In time, he explained, Arabs would be in the majority and Israel would cease to exist. Mandela had just been freed in South Africa and I think Mandela's one-state approach was attracting Husseini's attention.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo