One-State Solution
The slaughter in Israel and Gaza continues to rattle us: shocking images of death and destruction, the suffering of captured women and children. Still I am no less shaken by the cataclysm that has struck the intellectual world of New York.
All things considered, the chasm between the pro-Palestine and pro-Israel camps and between antisemites and anti-Muslims is just as striking as the hatred that infects these two populations, which have historically been at each other’s throats. The left as I knew it no longer exists. Young radicals at Columbia University are being condemned by their elders. The more traditional leftists are outraged by the support some of their activist students show toward Hamas and its brutal methods.
The two open letters signed by different factions of the Columbia faculty deserve special attention in order to understand just how divided the intelligentsia is in the face of the horrors unleashed by Hamas’s surprise terrorist attack on October 7. Signed by 170 professors, the first letter supports a previous one signed by students who, according to these teachers, tried to “recontextualize” the events of October 7 as a “military response on the part of a people who has endured crushing and unrelenting state violence from an occupying power over many years.”
Published the following day, the second letter was signed by 495 professors who, despite claiming to be aware of the “miserable conditions in Gaza,” wrote that, “We are horrified that anyone would celebrate these monstrous attacks or, as some members of the Columbia faculty have done in a recent letter, try to ‘recontextualize’ them as a ‘salvo,’ as the ‘exercise of a right to resist’ occupation, or as ‘military action.’”
For a long time now, my sympathies have been with the more than 700,000 Palestinians who were driven from their lands in 1948 by Zionist militants–despite my visceral sympathy for the more than 100,000 Jews who survived the Holocaust, were trapped in displaced-persons camps, and who broke through the British blockade in 1945-1948 to enter Palestine and help establish the state of Israel. Today, I feel isolated, not unlike two writers whom I consider to be my guiding lights on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I.F. Stone and Edward Saïd, who were also isolated because of the positions they took.
Stone, a brilliant journalist, wrote Underground to Palestine, a masterful, essential text for understanding the founding of Israel and its moral justification. Even before the war of “independence” that established the Jewish state in 1948, Stone was already advocating for a single and “binational” country that would respect both “nations,” Arab and Jewish, and two languages, Arabic and Hebrew, without taking into account a majority that could change over time. A left-wing Jew, Stone suffered many insults, including that of “self-hating Jew.”
Saïd, a great literary scholar from a wealthy Palestinian-American family, pushed me further in my respect for the demands of his exiled people. An English professor at Columbia, Saïd influenced an entire generation of students through his mastery of modern British literature and his cultural critique of imperialism. I met him in 1977 when I was a student at Columbia and a freelancer for a major newspaper that had sent me to interview him during his appointment to the Palestinian National Council, a kind of “parliament in exile,” as he called it.
At the time, there was talk of appointing him the Palestinian representative at a possible resumption of Middle East peace talks in Geneva. When Saïd opened the door to his apartment, I was stunned to see a beautiful grand piano, black and shiny, because I had no inkling of his musical talents. Cosmopolitan, elegant, and Protestant, no spokesperson for the Palestinians could differ so greatly from the caricature of the bearded, Muslim terrorist.
During the twenty-six following years, during which Saïd regularly wrote in Harper’s Magazine, my admiration for him, especially his independence and insight, grew greater. It was as if his powers of concentration on a novel like Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo had been transferred to the Gordian Knot of Middle Eastern politics. In retrospect, it is remarkable how right Saïd was to treat as a capitulation Yasser Arafat’s adherence to the 1993 Oslo Accords and the creation of the Palestinian Authority.
Saïd had understood that Oslo was a ploy that would mark “the end of the peace process,” rather than progress toward a Palestinian state. Like I.F. Stone, his unorthodox point of view earned him attacks from his Arab compatriots, supported by President Clinton, whom Saïd described as “a twentieth-century Roman emperor shepherding two vassal kings through rituals of reconciliation and obeisance.”
The Oslo Accords provided no agreement on the status of Jerusalem; no curbs on illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza; no recognition of Palestinian sovereignty. What were the accords for if not for the construction of a weak and corrupt government of seven disconnected enclaves under Israeli stewardship? Arafat ended up banning Saïd’s books in his strongholds, and Saïd ended up adopting I.F. Stone’s ideal: “the one-state solution.”
Absurd? Utopian? Not more so than “the two-state solution,” which has become a cynical trap advocated by hypocrites. No matter what, Arabs and Jews intermingle demographically–there are already 2 million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens. No other practical solution appears to be within sight. Where are the Stones and Saïds of our day to provide us with realistic and principled points of view? Who is there to reach out to across this bloody trench?
