Saturday, March 03, 2012

Question for anyone who liked Ahmed Moor's WaPo editorial

Moor writes:
Our work has been informed by the uncontroversial view that all people are created equal. Assessing an environment in which Israel controls the lives of 4 million people and deprives them of basic human rights, we ask whether there is an alternative: Can the one-state solution deliver equal rights to everyone?
Doesn't sound like he is proposing big demographic changes in the country, does it? The rest of the article seems fairly clear that he is opposed to the idea of Israel as Jewish homeland and he defines "Mandate Palestine" as "Israel, the West Bank and Gaza." Supposing a one-state solution was pursued by merging the West Bank and Israel without Gaza? The present government of Gaza often denounces negotiations towards any sort of settlement, and Hamas's parent movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, has made all sorts of recent gains in many parts of the Arab world. It is hard to imagine Hamas abandoning its approach up until now, just as its star is rising.

So practically, that is what a one-state solution would involve: a merger of Israel and the West Bank. The newly-created egalitarian entity would have a solid Jewish majority and I suppose safeguards would be built into the arrangement to protect the political rights of the Arab citizens, but surely the new entity would be free to have whatever immigration policy it wanted. The Jewish majority would not support anything obviously detrimental to its interests, and that means, almost certainly, no right of return. If you approve of Ahmad Moor's WaPo editorial, would you support this?

Every one-stater to whom I have ever addressed the equivalent question has answered no. Oh, and a further question: If I actually advocated returning enough former residents of Lebanon to the country to restore its former Christian majority, but I didn't state this explicitly, and I characterized my position as merely "the uncontroversial view that all people are created equal," wouldn't you think I was being dishonest?

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