Global History’s Lessons for Two-State Solutions: Implications for Israel/Palestine

Start with the history of partition’s gold standard for success: the no fault divorce. Here countries polarized by irreconcilable national, social, economic or sectarian divisions concluded a voluntary split was the better course than living contentiously together. Israel and Palestine never approached, much less crossed the no fault threshold and there is little prospect that they can.

The cases of Norway and Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and Malaysia and Singapore are instructive. In 1905, Norway thrust into union with Sweden following the Napoleonic era turned to the ballot to bolt from the Swedish federation.[i] In Stockholm, its Scandinavian partner acquiesced. No fault worked. The same was true for the Czechs and Slovaks, whose union, born out of the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, fractured as the Communist Block collapsed. Unable to bridge differences over the political centralization of the Czechoslovakian state, economic disparities and cultural distinctions led political leaders Václav Klaus and Vladimír Mečiar to agree to end the union.[ii] The result produced the 1993 “Velvet Divorce.”

Singapore’s breakup with Malaysia was bumpier, but no fault prevailed. Following independence from the United Kingdom, hoped-for economic synergies helped bring about the long-sought union with Malaya, Sabah and Sarawak in 1963.[iii] Optimism could not overcome latent cleavages, however. With the Malays unwilling to grant equal partnership, racial tensions exploded into ethnic riots. Two years into the union Malaysia’s parliament annulled the marriage and the parties went their separate ways.

Why did divorce succeed? In each instance domestic politics worked to generate more or less peaceful division. Further, the absence of irredentist claims durably locked in state splits. To be sure, in other efforts at divorce, the results were a mixed bag. In Canada facing Quebec separatism[iv], and in the United Kingdom, where the Scots sought the same[v], voting publics kept countries together. Spain did the same, in its case by suppressing Catalonian demands for an election.[vi] And in Russia’s case, the no fault divorces following the fall of the Soviet Union led to Russian revanchism marked notably by the invasions of Ukraine.

The divorce court idea between Israel and Palestine has come a cropper despite efforts to broker an amicable Israeli-Palestinian deal. The sad history speaks for itself. The failed Oslo accords signed in the 1993 White House ceremony by PLO leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin[vii] were intended to be the interim step to final no fault divorce.

Unresolved issues and domestic objections punctuated by a dozen Palestinian terrorist attacks on the streets of Israel and the Israeli terrorist assassination of Rabin[viii], and twenty-nine Palestinians in Hebron[ix] sank the agreement. Fifteen years later, failure arrived once more after the talks between Ehud Olmert and Mohammed Abbas stumbled. Israeli settlement building continued, and the Palestinian leader declared only returning to the “June 4, 1967 borders—without detracting a single inch, and without detracting a single stone from Jerusalem”[x]—would work.

Midwifery has provided a prominent model for birthing a two-state solution as well, albeit without results. Whether it was UN resolutions (notably the 1947 General Assembly Resolution 181 and later Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338); separate international efforts (the 1991 Madrid Conference and progeny); the 2002 Saudi Initiative and US efforts (the Clinton 2000 Camp David Arafat/Barak summit, George W. Bush’s Quartet Road Map in 2002-2003); the 2007 Annapolis Abbas-Olmert talks; the 2013-2014 Secretary of State John Kerry effort), to mention a few, disappointment followed all. The reasons include differences among principals as well as the international community’s inability to dictate, much less enforce their resolution.

Whatever the substantive details, the midwifery model’s failures are instructive: When it comes to midwifery, the power of enforcement matters a lot. Britain’s departure from its South Asia imperial holdings in 1947 is a case in point. The same year the United Nations first unsuccessfully attempted an Israel/Palestine partition buy-in several thousand miles to the east, Britain used its sovereign authority on the sub-continent to divide the real estate and create the Indian and Pakistani states.[xi] The August action sparked dramatic sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing as millions of fearful Muslims and Hindus sought safe haven in the new kindred nations. Despite the lingering dispute over Kashmir that spawned multiple wars over decades, partition held.

In sum, the successes notwithstanding positive results producing durable partitions through no fault divorces and political midwifing are rarities. More often violence determines outcomes when ethnically, religiously or politically divided populations are at loggerheads. Until the current Gaza war, Israel’s use of force to settle matters fell well below the military campaigns of others, for example Russia, Sri Lanka, Nigeria and the United States. Each unleashed crushing military campaigns to bring Chechen, Tamil, Biafran and Confederate rebels into the fold. The Gaza war has become the Jewish state’s test but fraught. Israel seeks no political integration.