Settlements and the One-State Solution
I’m already pretty firmly on the record that the continued expansion of the settlements poses a massive threat to the viability of the two-state solution of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The longer the settlements stay up, many argue, the more entrenched they will become — eventually, they will be so dug in that evacuating them will become impossible, and suddenly there is no two-state solution. At that point, the only alternatives will be ethnic cleansing, outright apartheid, or a binational, one-state solution.
This is bad enough for me, because the former two options are morally intolerable and the last I consider to be pretty awful as well. But I was doing some thinking, and it occurred to me that the settlements are near-equally threatening to a one-state solution as they are to a two. There are a few Palestinian advocates who are publicly nonchalant about the settlements precisely because they signify that “the egg is already scrambled” — that is, Israel is inexorably on the path to one-state. But the reasons that the settlements would need to be evacuated won’t go away in a one-state climate. It’s not as if it will suddenly be okay for Jews to be living in Ariel or Hebron just because the territories have unified.
