Any serious political thinking about Israel and Palestine must be based on the premise that military force is a deterrent only and an increasingly questionable one at that and that it is not arms but humans who conclude peace. Peace is a collective good. Israel is caught in a defunct Westphalian model of sovereignty which assumes that the state is in control of all that is alive and dead within and at the margins of its boundaries. Most advanced democracies know that neither normatively nor empirically is this the case anymore. Sovereignty is a bundle of state privileges and prerogatives which can be shared, delegated and co-exercised with other groups and powers. Many in the Israeli leadership know that they will never permit full and Palestinian sovereignty over air space, be it in Gaza or the West Bank; over the free passage of goods in and out of ports in Gaza which would be the only form of access to the sea for a future Palestinian state; nor will Israel give up control of the underground water reserves extending on both sides of the 1967 territories. So why does one pretend that a sovereign Palestinian state will be sovereign in the sense in which Israel would like to consider itself sovereign? The sad and simple truth is that such a Palestinian state will be perpetually bullied, controlled, monitored, and occasionally smashed by Israel. Precisely because many who advocate a two-state solution also know that their future relations with the Palestinian state will be less like those between Italy and Austria and much more like those between Tibet and China and India and Kashmir that many Israeli politicians pay lip service to this ideal while making sure on the ground that it becomes less and less likely.
Quando ti ripetono a pappagallo il mantra del "una terra, due stati". Da
leggere. Via
3QD.
