From the river to the sea, how many nations will there be?
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” This slogan goes back to the 1960s and has meant a variety of political objectives ever since, with many Palestinian militants looking forward to the end of the Jewish State of Israel, peace activists imagining a united democracy in which Palestinians and Israelis can live as equals, and the Likud Party altering the wording to a new phrasing in their 1977 platform that called for exclusively Jewish sovereignty over the territory. And in that time, the surrounding Arab nations have lost the occasional war with Israel, terrorist groups have killed numerous non-combatants, the Israelis have taken, settled, pulled back from, bombed, abandoned, and otherwise treated patches of land as theirs to employ as they wish, regardless of who is living therein. And the Palestinians are still not free.
The reasons for this are long and complex, and the claims to the land go back centuries or millennia, depending on how we read the mythologies. I anticipate the ire of both sides when I say that they both have some claim to the land and plenty of the blame for the inability to come to a permanent agreement. It is not my task to settle that here, however much as an outsider, “just do it” looks to me like the answer. The question that I do intend to consider is whether or not two groups of people such as we see in this region can ever live together democratically in mutual peace and legal respect.
The evidence of history is not favorable to that notion. There have been many empires and other political structures since humanity developed civilization that have welded various tribes into some kind of unity, at least for a little while and for the benefit of the ruling class from Sargon of Akkad to Marshal Tito and Mikhail Gorbachev, and while the Romans and the Soviets, for example, attempted some kind of ideological gluing, for the most part, disparate groups were only held under one banner by varying measures of force. When Tito died, Yugoslavia unwound and eventually blew apart in ethnic conflict that dragged up memories of strife from hundreds of years prior to the Austro-Hungarians and the communists. The rise of the modern nation as witnessed in much of Europe since the time of the Middle Ages was a similar process, at times violent and at other times less so, and the struggles to realize the current dream of the European Union demonstrate that the era of not liking one’s different neighbors is not over. The same can be said of Cyprus and Ireland, of many nations in Africa formed out of the European love of drawing straight lines across maps—essentially of any region in which two or more distinct groups share the space.
As a long-time fan of Star Trek, I have to wonder with Rodney King why we all cannot simply get along. But we do not live in that fantastic galaxy. Not yet. For the moment, we live on one subdivided planet. We already know what the Israelis would do if they were to hold the majority of political power over a unified state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. We know what various Palestinian organizations have declared their intentions to be. A one-state solution under these conditions is nothing but lunacy. Just as Israel was created to be a guarantor of Jewish identity and liberty, so must a Palestinian state come into being alongside the Jewish state for, mutatis mutandis, the same purpose.
But why? The United States has—albeit imperfectly—tried to be a multi-ethnic and multi-racial nation whose legal system is supposed to treat each person equally. Can something like that not exist elsewhere?
As I hinted at, we are not an unequivocal example of success, having slavery, Jim Crow, the genocide of indigenous populations, and a civil war in our record. Today, we are divided by visions of political destiny, whether we will deepen our commitment to human rights, to the kind of one-out-of-many diversity found in our motto, and to progress both in the arts and sciences and in individual development and personal fulfillment on the one hand and a Christofascist dictatorship with no moral high ground from which to pontificate on the other.
But we do have a core to draw on that does offer all of humanity a template for solutions: a secular constitution, for as long as we can keep it. Said document limits what extremists in any political party can do and enshrines basic rights for each person. Under such a legal system, when it works, someone can be Jewish, Muslim, or any other religion or no religion at all, can be the child of any racial or ethnic group, can practice this or that or some other culture and be a protected and—as things ought to be—valued member of society.
It seems to be the case that groups with a long history of animosity need a period of separation, but the essential fact is that we are all living between the waters—rivers, seas, and glacial ages. If there is anything to be learned from the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, it is that such squabbles are a luxury, one that our species cannot continue to indulge in. Freedom on the little bit of land we cling to can only come if we agree that I will be myself, you will be yourself, we will cooperate on projects necessary and interesting, and each one of us gets a fair share of the planet’s blessings.
The question, then, is how long we will keep saying, “next year in paradise,” and instead get busy building that world.