John V. Whitbeck, Special to Arab News

JEDDAH, 12 January 2004 — With Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon threatening to impose unilaterally the permanent status solution of his choice if the Palestinians do not bow to his wishes within the next few months, Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei has now responded with a quiet threat of his own which is far more likely than either continued violence or continued immobility to produce the sensible two-state solution which clear majorities of both Israelis and Palestinians wish to achieve.

In an interview on Jan. 8, Qorei noted that the wall being built through the West Bank, which Sharon has pledged to complete notwithstanding overwhelming international opposition, represents an “apartheid solution” which would “put Palestinians like chickens in cages” and “kill the two-state vision”. His conclusion? “We will go for a one-state solution. There is no other solution.”

The timing could not be better. The non-governmental Geneva Accord signed on Dec. 1 has revealed, in meticulous detail, what any negotiated two-state solution would have to look like.

No negotiated agreement which could conceivably be acceptable both to most Israelis and to most Palestinians could be more than very marginally different from the Geneva Accord, which contains all the fundamental substantive compromises long recognized to be necessary in any negotiated two-state solution. If this is simply not good enough for either people, then only two alternative solutions remain — a one-state solution and a military solution.

In a one-state solution, the entire territory of the former Palestine Mandate would form a single democratic state, free of any form of discrimination based on race, religion or national origin and with equal rights for all who live there, as in any true democracy.

In a military solution, the most likely sequence of events, over a period of time which might last decades or be relatively brief, would be a completion of the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population of historic Palestine (an option which is widely supported in Israeli public opinion polls), followed by an attack on Israel by one or more Muslim states and an immediate, massive Israeli nuclear response against the Muslim world. This nightmare scenario is not alarmist. It is realistic in the absence of peace.

All indications are that, in the absence of another major expulsion of Palestinians, Israeli public opinion would reject with horror the prospect of a single democratic state “from the sea to the river” which would be free of any form of discrimination and with equal rights for all who live there, considering such a state, rightly, as a complete negation of Zionism and of Israel’s reason to exist. The whole world must reject with horror the military solution and, with this in mind, help Israelis and Palestinians to make a better choice.

In these circumstances, the Palestinian leadership should follow up on Qorei’s broad hint with a clear ultimatum that, if the Israeli government has not commenced government-to-government negotiations toward a two-state solution on the basis of the Geneva Accord by a fixed, near-term date, the Palestinian Authority will dissolve itself, returning to Israel full responsibility for administering all aspects of life in the occupied territories, and the Palestinian leadership and people will thereafter seek, peacefully, “one man, one vote in a unitary state”, to adopt the old slogan of the South African anti-apartheid movement.

Even the United States would have difficulty opposing a peaceful demand for “one man, one vote”. The long-running game of stringing out forever a perpetual “peace process” while further entrenching the occupation with new “facts on the ground” would finally be over. Faced with such a challenge, the current Israeli government, already wobbly, would almost certainly collapse. A decent peace for both Israelis and Palestinians would suddenly be possible, even close. The road to peace based on a two-state solution is not a straight one. As the Palestinian leadership appears now to realize, the expressway to this destination is, in fact, a bypass road permitting Israelis to focus clearly on the one-state alternative and, now that the precise terms of any two-state solution have been revealed, to embrace them as, at least, the lesser evil and make the changes in their own leadership which would bring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to an end.

— John V. Whitbeck is an international lawyer who writes frequently on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.