The Narcissism of Small Differences

It isn’t exactly a secret that leftist activism suffers from a chronic tendency toward infighting and sectarian division.  As the recently deceased Irish journalist Alexander Cockburn put it, “one of the problems with the left is [that] it tends to form a small tight circle with the guns pointing in and then they fire.” 

Within the Palestine solidarity movement this autoimmune disorder has manifested in recent years in the form of a debate over whether the movement should be advocating for a one-state or two-state approach to addressing the grievances of the long stateless Palestinian people. 

The rough contours of the debate are as follows. 

Advocates of the two-state solution generally frame their position in terms of international law as it bears on the grievances of the Palestinians against Israel.  They point out that there has been an international consensus on how to effect a “Peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine” since the mid-1970s and that this consensus is grounded in the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter.  The quintessential articulation of this position’s juridical bedrock is an International Court of Justice advisory opinion from 2004 that addressed the four “final status issues” upon which past attempts to broker a settlement between the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships have foundered.  The ruling stated unequivocally that the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem are occupied Palestinian territory, the Palestinian refugees have a right to return to the homes they fled during the Six Day War, and both the Israeli settlement project in the occupied territories and the separation wall that Israel built in the wake of the Second Intifada are in direct violation of international law.  The political upshot of this is that the Israelis must cede sovereignty over the Occupied Territories to the Palestinian leadership, dismantle the separation wall, and honor the refugees’ right of return by either facilitating their repatriation inside Israel or through substantial monetary compensation.

Supporters of a one-state framework typically reject this position for one or both of the following reasons. 

Facts on the ground have rendered a two-state settlement impossible.  While it may have seemed plausible in the 1970s that the territories Israel occupied in June 1967 could be forged into a sovereign Palestinian state in exchange for peace and recognition, the intervening decades of aggressive Israeli settlement and infrastructure projects in the West Bank have created an insurmountable obstacle to a full withdrawal.  These Israeli development projects have brought with them an extensive Israeli security apparatus that operates in close cooperation with the Palestinian Authority, which is, in effect, little more than a subcontractor for Israeli state power.  The punch line of these observations is that the whole of Israel-Palestine is already encompassed by a de facto one state situation.  Given the way this line of thought brings into relief the apartheid-like situation of Palestinians in the territories, who lack Israeli citizenship while living under what appears to be permanent Israeli control, solidarity activists should eschew fantasies of two-state solutions and advocate instead for equal Palestinian rights and inclusion in a revised version of the polity they're already sharing with the Israelis.

Two-state solutions are built on outdated nationalist ideology and fail to address the problems faced by Palestinian citizens of Israel.  The gist of this objection can be easily gleaned from the following remark made by John Spritzler in a forthcoming interview:

For me the overriding issue is that the two-state solution says there should be an exclusively Jewish state in which people who are not Jewish—namely, the Palestinians-- are either not allowed to return from refugee camps to their homes in the state or are made second class citizens, and that next to it there should be a “Palestinian state”. That’s Klu Klux Klan thinking. “Let’s have a white state.” “Let’s have a Jewish state.” It’s racist thinking.

And indeed, personal experience has mercilessly taught me that to defend the two-state position can be an invitation to accusations of racism from radically-inclined activists.  Needless to say, this sort of hair trigger inclination to label fellow activists as bigots is, if nothing else, not conducive to constructive debate.  

To my mind, there is no better illustration of the toxic effect this debate is having on the movement than the backlash to Norman Finkelstein’s recent criticisms of the BDS movement’s implicit one-state orientation.   

Despite decades of relentless advocacy and sacrifice for the Palestinian cause, it only took one youtube clip of Finkelstein voicing some characteristically polemical criticisms of recent trends in the solidarity movement for him to be labeled a “Zionist” and a “traitor” and summarily dismissed as an ally, virtually overnight.  However one feels about Finkelstein’s arguments, it should be clear that a movement which would turn its back on someone who has given so much for the crime of expressing some cranky dissenting views has lost perspective.  

Are we fighting for justice or are we playing a game to see who can most sanctimoniously outflank their allies to the left?  US citizens who decidedly support the Palestinian cause represent a tiny fraction of the population.  To think that one can sow division and enmity between them with self-righteous posturing and inflammatory rhetoric without betraying that cause is to help ensure that we will continue repeating the self-destructive mistakes of our leftist forbears.