Actually, on Saturday, during the Alternative Information Center (AIC)seminar in Bethlehem this last weekend, Shir Hever, our resident (and in my opinion brilliant) economist made what I thought was an excellent lecture that dealt with the issue which Yoshie brings up here.
Shir lays out the level of actual economic integration between the Palestinian and Israeli economies. His aim was to try to empirically determine (as far as possibile), whether Meron Benvenisti's statements in the past couple of years, that ‘bi-nationalism' is not a plan for the future or a proposed solution, but a currently existing condition and that it is a description of the current conflict not a prescription. The idea that ‘separation' is achievable, Benvenisti states, is illusory. The two communities are too intertwined for any kind of division to be possible.
I don't want to oversimplify Shir's argument, he didn't speak solely on this point, but also went into detail on the whole economy of occupation, but in general he holds that while the Palestinian and Israeli economies are not fully integrated (the Palestinian economy is much more dependent on the Israeli than the converse), they are so intermeshed (and with the geographic, settlement, population,resource overlap), that it would be significantly easier to integrate them fully into one economy then it would be to separate the economies in a two state solution (again, this is a highly summarized reading of his nuanced arguement).
We filmed the entire seminar and are in the midst of uploading some of the lectures onto the website.
Hopefully it will be up in the next week or so, and I will inform you all.
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> Obviously, the most realistic in the near future is a one-state
> solution -- i.e., the one state being Israel, leaving Palestinians in
> the West Bank and Gaza, as well as refugee camps abroad, with no state.