One-state Solution - Arguments For and Against

Arguments For and Against

Support among Israeli Jews, and Jews generally, for a one-state solution is very low. Israelis see a one-state solution as a demographic threat that would overturn the prevailing Jewish majority within Israel.

Proponents of a one-state solution argue that it ensures the equal rights of all ethnicities in the greater Israel and Palestine area (Israel, West Bank, Gaza), by abiding in the rights granted to all people found in the original Israeli Declaration of Independence:

...it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

Other arguments for a one-state solution include that it would unite all people of Palestine into a powerful, secular state similar to Turkey. It would remove the whole Palestine area from the criticism and ostracism of the modern world.

Critics primarily point to the fact that it would make Israeli Jews an ethnic minority in the only Jewish country. The high fertility rate among Palestinians accompanied by a possible return of Palestinian refugees, would quickly render Jews a minority. The organization StandWithUs explains that Israel is the only country with a Jewish majority, while there are 56 Islamic majority countries, 122 Christian majority countries, 10 Buddhist majority countries, and 5 Hindu majority countries.

Critics have also argued that Jews, like any other nation, have the right to self-determination, and that due to still existing antisemitism, there is a need for a Jewish national home. Ethnically homogeneous nation-states are common around the world, including in Europe. They also argue that most of the Arab World is composed of entirely Arab and Muslim states, with many countries not granting equality for ethnic or religious minorities.

Critics argue that a one-state solution is supported by anti-Israel advocates and pro-terrorist supporters who seek Israel's destruction, and view this as a way to achieve their goal. In an op-ed for the Jerusalem Post about the March 2012 Harvard University's Kennedy School students conference on "Israel/Palestine and the One State Solution", Dan Diker, the Secretary General of the World Jewish Congress writes that:

"Keynote presenters include Ali Abunimah, author of the Israel-bashing online “Electronic Intifada” and an enthusiastic Hamas supporter who, as some may remember, publicly branded former prime minister Ehud Olmert as a murderer guilty of war crimes and prevented him from speaking at a 2009 University of Chicago forum. The conference also features Dianna Buttu, former legal advisor for the PLO and another Hamas supporter who, as Middle East scholar Richard Cravatts noted recently, “denied that thousands of Hamas rockets fired from Gaza into Israel actually had warheads on them, unlike Israeli weaponry.”

The Reut Institute expands on these concerns of many Israeli Jews and says that a one-state scenario without any institutional safeguards would negate Israel's status as a homeland for the Jewish people. When proposed as a political solution by non-Israelis, the assumption is that the idea is probably being put forward by those who are politically motivated to harm Israel and, by extension, Israeli Jews. They argue that the absorption of millions of Palestinians, along with a right of return for Palestinian refugees, and the generally high birthrate among Palestinians would quickly render Jews an ethnic minority and eliminate their rights to self-determination. The destruction of Israel as a Jewish state is seen by some critics as a threat to Jews who live in Israel, as it would require assimilation with what they fear would be an extremely hostile Muslim population, who would become the ruling majority.

Some critics argue that unification cannot happen without damaging or destroying Israel's democracy. Most Israeli Jews as well as Israeli Druze, some Israeli Bedouin, many Israeli Christan Arabs and even some Israeli Muslim Arabs fear the consequences of amalgamation with the mostly Muslim Palestinian population in the occupied territories, which they perceive as more religious and conservative. (Israeli Druze and Bedouin serve in the Israel Defense Forces and there are sometimes rifts between these groups and Palestinians.) One poll found that, in a future Palestinian state, 23% of Palestinians want civil law only, 35% want both Islamic and civil law, and 38% want Islamic law only. (Currently Israeli law is a combination of civil and religious, including Islamic, law.) This negative view of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza prompts some critics argue that the existing level of rights and equality for all Israeli citizens would be put in jeopardy with unification.

Imagining what might ensue with unification, some critics of the one-state model point to violence during the British Mandate, such as in 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1936-1939. In this view, violence between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews is inevitable and can only be forestalled by partition. These critics also cite the 1937 Peel Commission, which recommended partition as the only means of ending the ongoing conflict. Critics also cite supposedly bi-national arrangements in Yugoslavia, Lebanon, and Pakistan, which failed and resulted in further internal conflicts. Similar criticisms appear in The Case for Peace. Rather than a powerful secular democracy, critics fear that the high Palestinian birthrate and the return of millions of refugees will give the land a majority of religiously observant Muslims, many with deep anti-Semitic feelings.

Students of the Middle East, including former New historian Benny Morris, have argued that the one-state solution is not viable because of Arab unwillingness to accept a Jewish national presence in the Middle East. In his book One State, Two States, Morris wrote that a one-state solution would probably cause a mass exodus of Israeli Jews to the West, arguing that most would prefer life as a minority in the West, where they would enjoy its relative freedoms and openness, to the "stifling darkness, intolerance, authoritarianism, and insularity of the Arab world and its treatment of minority populations". He argued that most Israelis would flee, leaving behind only those incapable of finding new homes and ultra-Orthodox Jews "bound to the land out of deep religious conviction".

In 2012 the UN envoy to the Middle East, Robert Serry, denounced Israeli settlement construction and said that unless the parties achieve a two-state solution, the region would move toward a "one-state reality" and further from a peaceful solution.