Summary
In the Introduction to Rethinking Statehood in Palestine, one of the two forms of the One-state solution: a single civic state in which Palestinians and Israelis hold both individual and collective rights, created through a democratic, inclusive process of constitutional self-creation rather than partition (Rethinking Statehood in Palestine, PDF p.33).
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Binationalists reject the ethno-exclusionary character of Zionism and the impossibility of Partition given settlements and multilayered, unequal interdependence, but accept the enduring nature of Palestinian and Israeli national identities and the political potency of national markers such as language, religion and traditions (PDF p.33).
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Their central argument: the right to self-determination does not need to be territorially conscripted and cannot be fulfilled through partition or in a nation-state; it can be protected only in a civic state that is not ethnically based, where the state is a juridical order accountable to its citizens — echoing Hannah Arendt on producing equality through organisation (PDF p.33).
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Against binationalism, Ali Abunimah and others reject it as an endorsement, however oblique, of Zionism and thus of colonialism; liberal democratic one-state advocates hold that Israeli Jews have individual but not collective national rights (PDF p.32-33).
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Bashir and Busbridge, as presented: decolonization requires placing Arab-Jewish relations at its center, allowing “for the narration of Palestinian and Jewish experience in the Middle East alongside each other” (PDF p.34).
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Chapter 7 gives the concept its documentary history: Ihud’s 1946 Palestine: A Bi-National State envisaged a federated or confederated state protecting each national group’s cultural and political institutions and local autonomy (elected local government, local taxes, domestic police, language) under a federal government controlling common foreign and defense policy (PDF p.193); the PLO’s 1970 pamphlet explicitly rejected binationalism — “religious and ethnic lines clearly cross in Palestine so as to make the term bi-national and the Arab-Jewish dichotomy meaningless or at best quite dubious” (PDF p.197) — and the recent parallel-states proposal is treated as a reformulation of the binational ideal (PDF p.202-203).
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Chapter 9 assesses binationalism in four levels — declarative recognition, cultural autonomy and joint symbols, immigration on a Law of Return logic with parity, and governance as Consociationalism — and finds its pitfalls in legally defining the two nations and their members, compelled association and the exclusion of those in neither group (Bosnia’s Sejdić and Finci case), and the risk that a parity legislature violates equal citizenship if population parity does not hold; some consociational ideas could be used without the ethnic dimension (Rethinking Statehood in Palestine, PDF p.253-258).
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Chapter 10 of Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: the Vision Documents stressed that “Israel should be a democratic binational state that guarantees full equality between Arabs and Jews within the Green Line” (PDF p.285); Bishara’s 1997 sketch proposed a Jewish-Arab polity with two legislative chambers and a common parliament, federal or confederal (PDF p.282).
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A December 1987 poll found 33 percent of ‘48 Palestinians opting for a binational state, against 28 percent for a state alongside Israel (PDF p.279).
Related pages
Rethinking Statehood in Palestine, One-state solution, Partition, Self-determination, Secular Democratic State