The Discreet Charm of the Binational Idea

By Caterina Bandini and Thomas Vescovi,

Even as the genocidal war continues in the Gaza Strip, Western chancelleries are busy considering the return of a potential “peace process”. With the obvious failure of the two-state solution, the binational idea is re-entering the intellectual debate, but its contours are not always well understood. And a central question remains: who is in favor of it in the Middle East?

Already in 2008, in a collective work coordinated by the academic Avi Gordon, the political scientist Tamar Hermann noted a “political comeback” of projects for a common state for the two peoples. She developed different causes, such as “the collapse of the Oslo process” or the “change in the Jewish-Palestinian demographic balance west of the Jordan”. If the First Arab-Israeli War of 1948, then the “peace process” of the 1990s made the separation of the two peoples the paradigm of a lasting peace, individuals and organizations within the two societies have never ceased to defend a common alternative. Common state, confederal state, binational state: the political projects differ, but come together on two points. First, the desire to go beyond the paradigm of separation between Palestinians and Israelis. Second, the search for a formula that can ensure equal individual and collective rights for all citizens living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, regardless of their origin and religion.

A Jewish Utopia to Prevent Partition

The binational idea defends the affirmation of the right to national self-determination for both Palestinians and Jews throughout the territory of historic Palestine. The idea was already at the heart of the cultural, spiritual and humanist Zionism that developed within certain Jewish circles in Germany at the end of the 19th century, then in Mandatory Palestine, and which insisted on the need for Jewish-Arab understanding throughout the territory.

The formation of an ideal of Arab-Jewish understanding between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River was almost concomitant with the arrival of the first Zionist settlers at the end of the 19th century. Among them, some were steeped in European and Russian socialism (notably during the second aliyah, 1903-1914), and hoped to free themselves from anti-Semitism by creating, in Palestine, a profoundly egalitarian society. However, like most of the European left, these Jewish Zionist activists are imbued with a colonial and orientalist imagination. Their socialism is associated with a nationalism that sees the nation as a group based on the unity of blood, and is therefore only interested in Jewish society. This positioning is found, in particular, in 1901 within the Po'ale Tzion ("workers of Zion"), founded following the rejection of Zionism by the General Union of Jewish Workers of the Russian Empire. But it is truly embodied by Mapai (mifleget po'alei 'Eretz Isra'el, "the party of the workers of the Land of Israel"), the ancestor of the Israeli Labor Party, founded in 1930, one of whose slogans was: "From the class to the people".

A radical fringe points out the inherent contradiction in this “left Zionism” which is based more on ethnic interests than on social class interests. Thus, in 1919, the Social Democratic Party of Jewish Workers of Eretz Israel, the Palestinian section of the Po’ale Tzion (“Workers of Zion”), saw some of its activists form the Socialist Workers Party, which soon after became the Communist Party, and request its attachment to the Comintern. The new organization, which had around a hundred activists, believed that being a Marxist required working towards the union of Arab and Jewish proletarians. Daniel Averbach, Joseph Berger-Barzilai, Leopold Trepper, symbolize this first line of Jewish activists, in Palestine, questioning the coloniality of the Zionist movement in a land populated overwhelmingly by non-Jews.

Most of the figures of the first Communist Party of Palestine are similar in their political trajectories: they are activists who joined Palestine as Zionists, most often active members of Hashomer Hatzair ("the young guardian"), one of the largest Zionist youth organizations created in the 1910s around the values of scouting and socialism. This represents the radical left of the Zionist movement, in favor at least until 1948 of a single state for all the inhabitants of Palestine. Facing them, David Ben-Gurion or Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who will be respectively Prime Minister and President of the State of Israel, impose themselves at the head of left-wing Zionism, called labor.

The "ethno-racial line" drawn by Zionism even divides the intellectual field. In 1925, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, alongside intellectuals Gershom Sholem, Arthur Ruppin and Hugo Bermann, developed the Jewish organization Brit Shalom ("the alliance of peace") in order to "promote understanding between Jews and Arabs, with a view to a common life in the Land of Israel, and this in a spirit of complete equality of political rights of the two entities". They promoted a binational state "within which the two peoples would enjoy completely equal rights". Buber, like Hannah Arendt later, even advocated for a "Middle Eastern Federation".

Ideas in the air of the time, since in 1923, when the British Mandate took effect, the mandatory authorities did not rule out the founding of a binational regime with a single legislative body whose members were to be elected on a confessional basis proportional to the size of their community of belonging (therefore, at the time, with a majority of Muslims). This project was abandoned by the British at the time of the 1929 revolt, in favor of partition, but remained in the imagination of certain senior officials.

Within the Jewish population of Palestine, lobbying in favor of the binational option continued. However, the binationalists were faced with a refusal from the Arab side, where the binational option was perceived as an opening to Zionist claims on Palestine by recognizing the existence of a Jewish national group. The representatives of the Arab population argued in favor of a single Arab state over all of Palestine bringing together all religious communities. This is what they explained in particular during the hearings of the Peel Commission in 1937.

At the same time, between the extermination of the Jews in Europe and the rise in tensions in Palestine, the Zionist movement grew stronger and managed to rally many binationalists and communists. In 1942 in New York, Ben-Gurion obtained at the Extraordinary Conference of the Zionist Movement the definitive rallying of the entire movement to the project of a Jewish state as the one and only solution to pursue. Being demographically twice as numerous, the Arabs of Palestine paid no attention to the plans to partition their land, even going so far as to boycott the hearings of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), set up in 1947 and which would end up deciding on a hazardous, unequal and unjustified project to divide the territory. For the Arab High Committee, the only viable solution was the formation of a single Arab state over all of Palestine, where Arabs and Jews would coexist. A position reaffirmed during the Bernadotte mediation (1948).

After 1948, the marginalization of binationalism

Between the First Arab-Israeli War and the creation of the State of Israel on 78% of historic Palestine, all Jewish organizations that were alternatives to Zionist hegemony found themselves marginalized.

On the Palestinian side, the shock of the Nakba was followed by the fragmentation of the people into refugee camps outside Palestine or in territories conquered by Arab countries, and submission to the exceptional military government for those who had come under Israeli sovereignty. However, it was from exile that Palestinians made their return to the pages of History. In 1964, the National Charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was published, which brought together the vast majority of Palestinians. The partition of the territory was categorically rejected in favor of an Arab state where “Jews of Palestinian origin” would live as equals.

Palestinian political organizations, for their part, began to integrate the idea of a political compromise from the beginning of the 1970s. Fatah published a document entitled “Towards a Democratic State in Palestine for Muslims, Christians and Jews” which advocated the inclusion of Jews already present in Palestine and those who would immigrate there in the interests of historical reconciliation, an impressive assertion only twenty-two years after the Nakba and three years after the Six-Day War. In 1974, the PLO adopted a “Ten-Point Program”, the first step towards the official acceptance in 1988 of all UN resolutions de facto legitimizing the existence of Israel, reinforced by the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the negotiations within the framework of the “peace process”. In reaction, a Refusal Front was formed, composed mainly of the Palestinian radical left, attached to the idea of a single, democratic and secular state over all of Palestine. As the “peace process” has become bogged down, from the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 to the second Intifada, intellectual positions have multiplied to revive the ideal of a single state. However, these calls have found little echo in societies shaken by the violence of the clashes.

Between the collapse of the Oslo process and the reality of the Jewish-Palestinian demographic balance between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River – 6.9 to 7.1 million Arabs compared to 6.9 million Jews in 2021 – the projects for a single state appear as concrete realities. Although the Palestinian Authority benefits from administrative prerogatives, control of the territory, its resources and its economy remain the exclusive competences of the State of Israel. Until October 7, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians came to work in Israel, constituting a cheap and corvée workforce, while in East Jerusalem and the West Bank more than 700,000 settlers reside illegally in territories that share some daily spaces with the Palestinians. Thus, this mutual dependence of the two societies seems to shape a de facto binational state, taking the form of an apartheid regime, but fueling the renewed energy for the advocates of an alternative to partition.

Single state and binationalism, beware of confusion

Considering that separation into two states is neither realistic nor conducive to equality and peace, or simply opposing partition, are not political projects in themselves. As the academic Leila Farsakh points out in her writings, binationalism poses the problem of reconciling individual rights and national rights. The former include civil rights, including protection against any form of discrimination or the right to vote. The latter include collective political rights recognized to the entire group forming the nation: language used, right to self-determination, to name a few.

The binational project generally takes the form of a State where both peoples are granted national rights, including the right to self-determination, within the framework of a federal or confederal type supra-structure. Conversely, the common or unique State is more akin to a secular and democratic State "of all its citizens", where individuals enjoy the same civil rights but where national, religious and linguistic identities are erased in favor of a sense of civic equality shared by all citizens.

Political scientist Bashir Bashir and sociologist Rachel Busbridge propose to distinguish between this “one-state liberal” solution, in which different affiliations, and national affiliation in particular, would be erased in the “illusion of post-conflict parity and equality”; and a single state that responds to the principles of “binational egalitarian thinking.” This would admit that “nationalism can be simultaneously conservative and progressive depending on the context. Similarly, while proponents of the one-state [liberal] solution believe that “nations,” as relatively recent historical inventions, are malleable and open to significant rearticulations, binationalists are more likely to point to the enduring nature of certain national markers (e.g., language and religion) and the highly affective dimension of national identity.” For Bashir and Busbridge, the affective and emotional charge of these identity markers is what ensures their persistence and should therefore be taken into account in any vision of the future.

In Israel, the legacy of the binationalists of the British Mandate continues, in different aspects, to be preserved and transmitted through several associative structures that remain marginal, such as A land for All or Zochrot, which organized an international conference in Tel Aviv in September 2013 around the concept of a binational state. In 2018, from Haifa, One Democratic State Campaign was launched around a ten-point program intended to constitute a basis for a common political project between the two societies. In the wake of this, the One State Foundation was initiated from Jerusalem around personalities from all over the world.

However, binationalism continues to come up against a major obstacle: if the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel is supported by a minority but real part of Israeli Jewish society, it is because it does not call into question the principle of a Jewish state. How can we bring together a majority of Israelis towards a project that logically calls into question the Zionist enterprise? Furthermore, the latest opinion poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research indicates that 32% of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories support a two-state solution, although the 68% who oppose it are not in favor of a binational project. Among the latter, there is a mixture of those who no longer believe in it in the current balance of power, supporters of the single Arab state and certainly also binationalists. Only 22% of those surveyed support abandoning the two-state solution in favor of a common state for Israelis and Palestinians.

At the same time, supporters of the two-state solution are confronted with the colonial reality: this solution cannot be based on the simple drawing of a border and/or exchanges of territories. Israeli settler colonialism, through the military occupation of the Palestinian Territories, has initiated a process of social and economic dispossession, a radical and often brutal transformation of the landscape: the network of roads connecting the settlements to the main Israeli urban centers is opposed by the fragmentation of Palestinian residential areas and the imbalance of power relations, starting with unequal access to resources and means of production.

Therefore, focusing on the institutional and state framework without first having initiated a redistribution of wealth, particularly natural wealth, and allowing access for all, without discrimination, to institutions and to equal individual and collective rights, leads to an impasse and to the maintenance, in other forms, of structures of domination.

SOURCE: YAANI