jonathan kuttab, who is a leading human rights attorney and peace activist in israel/palestine and the co-founder of the palestinian center for the study of non-violence and the mandela institute for political prisoners, was here in rochester on sept 9-10 as a panelist for the witness palestine film series. in this picture, he is the man on my right. he talked about “thinking outside the box” and focusing on palestinian human rights issues rather than being embroiled in the useless and palsied rhetoric of “two state vs one state.” it’s interesting that ever since we had this conversation, the same idea has been echoed in both alternative and mainstream media. noam sheizaf wrote about it in +972 (“two state vs one state debate is a waste of time, political energy”) and yousef munayyer just published “thinking outside the two-state box” in the new yorker. he writes:
While the two-state solution might provide an answer to Israel’s identity crisis, it does little in terms of solving both the humanitarian and human-rights crisis facing Palestinians. In the best-case scenario, a Palestinian state would be demilitarized and have not a semblance of the sovereignty afforded to every other state in the international system. It would, more or less, be under glorified occupation. Palestinian refugees would not be permitted to return to their homes. The status of Jerusalem, having become so marred by Israeli settlement-building, would likely be indivisible and largely off limits to the Palestinian statelet.
Endlessly pursuing a two-state solution that is condemned to failure, simply out of a reluctance to challenge the core problem Zionism has created, leaves Palestinians subjugated and waiting. They have already been waiting for far too long, and we owe them more than just robotically returning to the two-state framework every time it fails.
[…] Recognizing that we have a “one-state problem” is the key to peace. The first step is ending discrimination in the law based on ethnicity or religion throughout the entirety of the territory. Palestinians must be part of shaping any future state they will live in, and they can do so only on equal footing with their Jewish counterparts before the law, not under military occupation. For the next steps, numerous historic examples of multi-ethnic democracies exist, including those that made transitions from parallel situations. South Africa is one. It is important to note that while each case is different, and no analogy is perfect, lessons learned from those experiences and examples can inform the path forward for Israelis and Palestinians, even as they simultaneously take into consideration the uniqueness of this case.
