Binational solution

Binational solution is a term most often used in reference to a proposed resolution of the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is also known as the One-State Solution, as opposed to the Two-State Solution.

The Friedlander-Goldscheider study

That assumption was, however, based on the Arab population remaining a minority in the combined territories of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. In 1980, Hebrew University professors Dov Friedlander and Calvin Goldscheider published a highly influential study entitled "The Population of Israel," which concluded that - even allowing for a big increase in Jewish immigration - the high birth rate among Arabs would erode the Jewish majority within a few decades. The two demographers predicted that the total population of Israel-Palestine would be 6.7 million by 1990, and some 10 million by the year 2010. By that time, the Jewish population could be only 45% of the total. Friedlander and Goldscheider warned that maintaining Israeli rule in the territories would ultimately endanger the Jewish majority in Israel-Palestine. Ariel Sharon, then Agriculture Minister in Begin's government, rejected this conclusion; he claimed that Jews would make up 64% of the population in Israel-Palestine by the year 2000 if Jewish immigration remained at the rate of about 30,000 a year, although he did not cite any sources for this estimate.

Related Topics:
1980 - Hebrew University - Demographers - 1990 - Ariel Sharon

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The conclusions of the Friedlander-Goldscheider study soon became a hot political issue between Israel's two main parties, Likud and Labour, in the June 1981 parliamentary elections. Both parties opposed withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders or setting up a Palestinian state, and both supported building more Jewish settlements in the territories and maintaining exclusive Israeli control over Jerusalem. However, Labour argued for building settlements only in areas Israel intended to keep, while handing the rest back to Jordan. Likud argued for keeping the whole area, building settlements everywhere and giving the Arabs limited self-government. Labour was strongly critical of this proposal, claiming that the result would be a binational state spelling "the end of the Zionist endeavour." Many on the left of Israeli politics were already warning that without a clean separation from the Palestinians, the outcome would be either a binational state by default (thus ending Israel's Jewish character) or a South African-style "Bantustan" with a Jewish minority forcibly ruling a disenfranchised Arab majority (thus ending Israel's claims to be a democracy).

Related Topics:
1981 - Bantustan

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In the event, Begin won the election and announced (in May 1982) a formal policy of "extending state sovereignty ... over Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip" accompanied by a major expansion of Jewish settlement and the granting of "full autonomy" to the Palestinians. Formal annexation was not envisaged on the grounds that the territories already belonged to Israel by moral right. Labour strongly opposed Begin's policy, on grounds that were perhaps most succinctly stated by Shlomo Avineri, a Hebrew University professor and former Foreign Ministry director general under Labour:

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:"You can have a state that may be Eretz Israel geographically, but sociologically, and intellectually, and emotionally and morally will be a binational state. It is out of this agony over the preservation of the Zionist and Jewish nature of Israel that we must make compromises territorially, because the soul of the Jewish people and the reality of Israel as a Jewish state is as much a Zionist goal as possession of real estate."

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On the Palestinian side, the Israeli opposition to a binational state led to another change of position which evolved gradually from the late 1970s onwards. The PLO retained its original option of a single secular binational state west of Jordan, but began to take the position that it was prepared to accept a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza in land from which Israel had withdrawn under Security Council Resolution 242. Settlements would need to be dismantled and Palestinian refugees allowed to return (to Israel as well as the new Palestine). This new position, formally adopted in December 1988, was overwhelmingly rejected by Israeli public opinion and the main political parties but was subsequently used as the basis of peace discussions in the 1990s.

Related Topics:
1970s - 1988 - 1990s

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