> 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.
[...]
> 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.
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Why is renaming the Palestinian Authority the Palestinian "government",
calling the Palestinian territories a "state", and giving it modest taxing
and spending powers to collect garbage and dole out welfare - incompatible
with maintaining the current level of economic integration and continued
control by Israel of Palestinian trade, internal security, and foreign
policy?
This has long been the Israeli Labour party's conception of an "independent" Palestinian state. Sharon's casting off of the Likud in favour of a new "centrist" alignment with Peres and the right-wing Labourites suggests he is now free to pursue the idea, with the blessing of the Israeli business sector and US state department. The PA, of course, would have to sign a peace settlement to obtain formal Israeli and international recognition of Palestinian statehood, and, with it, access to foreign aid and investment.
I think this is the preferred Israeli solution because it would presuppose Hamas' acceptance of the arrangement. But even if there is no formal treaty, the Israelis can simply do what they did in Gaza - pull their forces out of the areas where there are no large concentrations of settlers, and let the Palestinians fend for themselves. They might even let the Palestinians declare statehood, for all that would mean. They could still regulate cross-border trade and the supply of cheap Palestinian labour coming into Israel, while maintaining political and cultural separation behind the wall dividing the two communities.
Economic integration does not, in other words, preclude separation - whether in the form of a nominally sovereign Palestinian state, or a de facto arrangement amounting to the same thing. In South Africa, the words used to describe this relationship were "apartheid" and "bantustan".
Wouldn't you agree?