A Final Status of Isreal
This post is not a moral endorsement. It merely aims at description!!
Advocates of a two state solution will often argue that Israel will be permanently insecure without coming to terms with their neighbors. If continued settlement aborts a nascent Palestinian state, Tel Aviv (or should I say Jerusalem) will face an insoluble security risk from the impoverished and dispossessed Palestinians and loose any claim to democratic legitimacy in their diplomatic relations.
I think this conclusion is wrong. Three trends are combining to make a one state solution viable for Israel over the next century. Within my life time, Israel might be positioned to extend formal political equality to all Palestinians, while maintaining a Jewish majority and zionist national identity.
First demography: All Arab countries are seeing dramatic collapses in their birth rates, and the Palestinians are no exception. For the first time in 2022, the number of Israel Jews is though to finally catch the total Palestinian population (including both territories and the diaspora). From the Jerusalem Post, “the total fertility rate among Palestinians between 2017 and 2019 has declined to 3.8 births, compared to 4.6 births in 1999; 3.8 in the West Bank and 3.9 in the Gaza Strip.” This trend shows no signs of abating. Meanwhile, Israel has become the only place in the developed world were birth rates are stable and above the replacement level. Time is on their side,
Second diplomacy: There have always been more Jews than Palestinians within the borders of the territories and Israel proper combined. However, millions of Palestinians are living in neighboring countries, sometimes still in squalid refugee camps. The Palestinians demand that their displaced national have a “right to return.” Meanwhile, the neighboring Arab countries were eager to send them back once the conflict was resolved and have often erected barriers to their integration into new countries, set on their return. However, the diplomatic openings to Israel could change the dynamic here. In return for money, technology transfers, or intelligence, could Israel convince Arab countries to permanently accept parts of the Palestinian diaspora? Doesn’t seem ridiculous. Could Israel endow work programs in neighboring to encourage some Palestinians out-migration from the territories. (Again, this is not endorsement!) You don’t need to imagine anything drastic here, just moves on the margin to relocate Palestinians permanently outside the unified country’s new borders. All these moves could help reassure the Jewish majority that their status would be secure under a system of one person one vote.
Finally domestic politics: For the first time in Israel history, an Arab party has joined the government. For along time, such a coalition was thought to be unthinkable. However, if the politics of Palestinian Israelis is no longer monolithically opposed to the government that makes the idea of adding more Palestinian to the electorate more viable. One of the greatest assets a nascent democracy can have is an effective Conservative party. Daniel Ziblatt argues that the ability of the English Conservatives to win working class votes made elites comfortable enough to expand the suffrage. You could imagine something similar here. An ecosystem of parties that can deliver a chunk of the Palestinian vote in favor of a Jewish-led government would dramatically lower the threat Israelis would see from granting universal suffrage.
Longterm predications are always dangerous. However, predications about demography are often the most stable projections we can make. Forecasts of who will be middle aged forty years out are just merely counts of children that have already been born today. Predictions about the future are hard, but demography is in some sense prediction about the present, which tends to be easier.
Likewise, I think the newfound pragmatism of Arab states and Arab Israeli parties towards Israels existence will prove stable. It was kind of plausible a couple generations ago for people to analogize Israel to European colonies and to think that just as those colonies proved fragile to comparatively non-violent pressure perhaps Israel would also fold. That was obviously a mistake. As generational memory of decolonization recedes, more and more Arab leaders will recognize Israel’s permanence and seek to work with her.
Up to now, I have just tried to play political scientist and describe a path that leaders could chose to pursue. For this last paragraph, I’ll be a little less cowardly and elliptically hint at to what I think of all this. One of level, what I am describing is the crushing of a legitimate national aspiration. Worse, my euphemism about economic programs to encourage out-migration might constitute ethnic cleansing depending on how they are done. This is brutal stuff. However, it is important to keep in mind how brutal the status quo is too. Generations of Palestinians born in refugee camps in other countries, millions of Palestinians in territories live without mechanisms of justice or accountability for the government that rules them, and decades of violence afflicting everyone. Right now, there is no plausible plan to address any of those issues. It is possible to imagine an imperfectly just victory by one side being better for everyone than prolonged, or indefinite, conflict. I regret that this may be one of those situations.