Hand What Over, Exactly?

Gershom Gorenberg at Foreign Policy appeals for an end to new settlement construction in the West Bank, and an eventual evacuation. He theorizes a tipping point for the West Bank, where longtime failure to swiftly deal with the settlers dooms any future attempt.

The settlers’ growing power makes it harder for any Israeli leader to act. The head of the Shin Bet security agency recently described “very high willingness” among settlers “to use violence—not just stones, but live weapons—in order to prevent or halt a diplomatic process.” He was articulating a country’s half-spoken fears: Withdrawal involves more than the social and financial costs of moving hundreds of thousands of people. It poses the danger of civil conflict, of battles pitting Jews against Jews.

I appreciate the irony of creating Palestine in order to save Israel, but Gorenberg's piece, to me, only reiterates the impossibility of a two-state solution. How much of the West Bank are Israelis to evacuate? Having -- presumably -- moved the radicals behind the wall, but still over the Green Line, and therefore having risked and overcome civil war, what are the odds of moving these same people again, this time into Israel proper?

More to the point, what exactly will Israel hand over, and to whom? If two states were mandated today, they would be Israel-behind-the-fence and a West Bank run by the PA. Gaza would be a "protectorate." Would this new Palestine have a port? Free air space? Access to water and to the ground beneath it? Without water and a port, it's a shit country.

Given that, wouldn't Palestinians do well to nix nationhood and instead to agitate for Israeli citizenship? You want to dissolve the checkpoints, the dual roadways, the fence, the settlers' compounds? Take Avigdor Lieberman up on his offer: loyalty oaths for all!

And I'm sure the hero of the Russian Street would oblige, so long as the Arab vote was, say 3/5 of the Jewish vote, and so long as Arab demands for work were confined to date-picking and goat-milking. This is the RSA. This is Muammar's One-and-a-Half-State Solution.

Still, agitating for Israeli citizenship sounds like a far better deal than trying to obtain a doomed-from-the-start nation-state. What Palestinians get at the end of any peace process is de facto rule by Israel, an economy totally dependent on foreign aid, and the final entrenchment of the corrupt political caste that got them there in the first place: in other words, the best case scenario is The Now, minus a few roadblocks and checkpoints.

And this is the parallax gap in Israel//Palestine: the only way for Palestinians to have a state is to give up on having a Palestinian state.