ICAHD, the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions has taken the significant step of positively endorsing a one-state solution.

A paper by Jeff Halper and Itay Epshtain titled “In the Name of Justice: Key issues around a single state,” lays out ICAHD’s new position:

with the two-state solution gone, apartheid unacceptable and a Middle Eastern economic confederation a distant vision, it seems time to seriously consider the only alternative available to us at this time: the creation of a single state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. To be sure, the idea has been raised before, but it remains ambiguous. There are fundamental variations and disagreements even among one-state proponents themselves. Political clarity is vital, especially if such a solution is - or is not - inclusive of Israelis. Indeed, does post-apartheid South Africa inspire our joint aspirations or is Algeria the model, whereby the Israeli “colonists” (if they are that) leave or are driven out when Palestine is liberated? If the state is to be inclusive, should it be a unitary democratic state, a bi-national one or a combination? Will the solution be one defined purely by politics, or will the rights and obligations of all parties be guided indeed by international law and human rights treaties?

“Warehousing” in its “final stages”

ICAHD concludes that with no prospect of a “two-state solution,” the only options are apartheid, “warehousing” or a single state.

Warehousing is entrenching of the status quo without declaring a political solution. As the paper explains:

Since apartheid, even dressed in the clothes of a “two-state solution,” is obviously unacceptable to the Palestinian people (and hopefully to people everywhere), the second, more likely option, is to merely normalize the status quo, which is the current process of “warehousing.” Indeed, with the Palestinians pacified, their leadership coopted and no political process in the offing, and with a successful Israeli campaign of deflecting international attention to Iran, the danger is that the Palestinians of the Occupied Territory will be warehoused. They will be permanently locked into Areas A, B, Gaza and the ghettos of “East” Jerusalem, the key thrown away, the inmates being fed by the international community, as they are today. Signs are that this strategy is in its final stages of implementation.

Right of return

Warning of the need for urgent action as Israel implements its preferred and dismal vision, the ICAHD paper lays out several principles for the group’s conception of one state, including affirming the rights of Palestinian refugees:

two conditions are critical if the refugee issue is to be resolved: the refugees’ unconditional right to return, as it is advocated by UN General Assembly resolution 194 related to the Right of Return of Palestinians, must be accepted, so that “goodwill” or “humanitarian” gestures do not replace the refugees’ alienable rights to repatriate, return to their homes and live at peace; and Israel must acknowledge its responsibility for driving out half the Palestinian people in 1947/48, as well as for the expulsions of 1967 and displacement ongoing since - a symbolic admission of responsibility crucial to reconciliation between the people and to eventual historical “closure.”

“Self-determination”

However, there are other areas – particularly the paper’s conception of the conflict as one between two “peoples” who “aspire to national self-determination, a right firmly embodied in international law” – that are problematic.

I have argued in a brief for Al-Shabaka why self-determination, as understood historically and in international law, cannot apply to Israelis as a separate group, due to the settler-colonial nature of Zionism.

In my Al-Shabaka brief, I cite Omar Barghouti’s response on this issue:

There can, Barghouti argues, be no “inherent or acquired Jewish right to self determination in Palestine that is equivalent, even morally symmetric, to the Palestinian right to self determination” as this would blur “the essential differences between the inalienable rights of the indigenous population and the acquired rights of the colonial-settler population.”

Settler-colonial groups do not acquire a separate “right” of self-determination, but can only exercise self-determination as part of the whole in the context of full decolonization and unmitigated equality – that’s the case I make in the rest of the brief (Also see The One State Declaration).

The source of the difference is that the ICAHD paper does not conceptualize the Zionist project, as a whole, as a settler-colonial invasion of Palestine.

These are significant distinctions with consequences for how we conceptualize the way forward, however they should not stand in the way of recognizing the leap ICAHD has taken and carefully considering the positions the paper advances.

As ICAHD appropriately puts it, “The work has just begun.”