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The Twilight of the Two-State Solution in Israel-Palestine: Shared Sovereignty and Nonterritorial Autonomy as the New Dawn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 November 2019

Ephraim Nimni
Ephraim Nimni*
Affiliation:
Queen’s University, Belfast, United Kingdom of Great Britain
*
*Corresponding author. Email: e.nimni@qub.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article analyzes the international consensus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that there should be a two state solution and finds it unworkable on several counts. The conflict has no territorial solution: high population density makes partition impossible without leaving unwanted pockets of one people in the territory of the other; it is not possible for any Israeli government to dismantle settlements in the West Bank without causing a civil war; and in such a small and overcrowded territory, it is not feasible to have monocultural nation-states when the population is now evenly divided between the two conflicting national communities that reside in overlapping areas. Demographic forecasts show in the short term, a decrease in the proportion of Israeli Jews and an increase in the proportion of Palestinians. In the face of this stalemate, the article recalls the 90-year-old proposal by enlightened Jewish personalities to create a binational state under the modality of national-cultural autonomy. Furthermore, and paradoxically, in a reversal of the situation 90 years ago, Palestinian Israeli citizens are slowly creating a bottom-up series of autonomous communal organizations that provide self-government without territorial control, a model for nonterritorial autonomy in a manner that reminds of the earlier proposals of the Jewish personalities. The article concludes that this could potentially be a way out of this stalled and protracted conflict. A plurinational state in Israel-Palestine based on the model of National Cultural Autonomy with shared sovereignty and collective rights for all communities.

Keywords

Israel Palestinenational cultural autonomyone-state solutionBrit ShalomHans Kohn
Type
Special Issue Article
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 48 , Special Issue 2: Special Issue on National Cultural Autonomy in Diverse Political Communities: Practices, Challenges, and Perspectives , March 2020 , pp. 339 - 356
Copyright
© Association for the Study of Nationalities 2019

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