From Ian:
What Palestinians Mean When They Talk about a "Two-State Solution"
Shift to UNHCR criteria would strip refugee status from millions of Palestinians
What Palestinians Mean When They Talk about a "Two-State Solution"
To American ears, the meaning of "two states" is straightforward. The struggle between Israel and the Palestinians, to them, is a struggle between two indigenous peoples fighting over the same space of land in which they share a history.
As Shlomo Avineri, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the Hebrew University, wrote in Ha'aretz, "According to the Palestinians' view, this is not a conflict between two national movements but a conflict between one national movement (the Palestinian) and a colonial and imperialistic entity (Israel). According to this view, Israel will end like all colonial phenomena - it will perish and disappear. Moreover, according to the Palestinian view, the Jews are not a nation but a religious community, and as such not entitled to national self-determination."
From my extensive experience speaking with Palestinians, I have come to learn that the Palestinian version of the two-state solution leaves no room for a Jewish state.
This year, I led an in-depth seminar in Israel trying to understand what Palestinian citizens of Israel want. To almost all Palestinian citizens of Israel I spoke with, a state of the Jewish people is illegitimate in their eyes; Zionism is a colonizing enterprise of Jews stealing Arab land. They view the Jewish historical claim to the land as fictional and Zionism as racism.
Their idea of a fair "two-state solution" is one completely Arab state in the West Bank and one democratic binational State of Israel that allows the right of return for descendants of Palestinian refugees.
They said they would not consider Israel a legitimate democracy until the Jewish star is removed from the flag, Hatikvah is no longer the national anthem, and the right of return for diaspora Jews to Israel is rescinded.
Shift to UNHCR criteria would strip refugee status from millions of Palestinians
At a cabinet meeting in January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to gradually take over the mandate of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).Is Jordan Palestine?
Netanyahu argued that the former, the UN agency charged with aiding refugees fleeing persecution and conflicts around the world, has legitimate criteria for granting refugee status, whereas the latter, the UN body tasked with supporting Palestinian refugees, does not.
He also contended that UNRWA “perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem.”
Netanyahu’s comments raised the question of how UNHCR and UNRWA differ in their definitions of a refugee, which they use to determine to whom they grant refugee status.
Eight months later, that question is even more resonant after US President Donald Trump’s administration announced that it is completely defunding UNRWA, with a reported goal of shutting it down altogether.
The UN flag at the Fawwar Palestinian refugee camp, southern West Bank, near Hebron, on September 2, 2018. (AFP PHOTO / HAZEM BADER)
Were responsibility for the designation transferred to the UNHCR, millions of Palestinians would lose their refugee status — which is a key factor in the longstanding demand by the Palestinian leadership for refugees to be granted a “right of return” to today’s Israel. How many exactly of the 5.4 million Palestinians registered by UNRWA as refugees would lose that designation under UNHCR? It’s complicated, as we will see.
But based on a comparison of UNRWA’s refugee figures and the assessments of James Lindsay, a former UNRWA legal adviser who has written extensively on the differences between UNHCR and UNRWA, almost all of Jordan’s 2.2 million UNRWA-designated refugees would likely lose their status under UNHCR criteria, as would most of Syria’s 560,000 and just under half of Lebanon’s 521,000. All 2.17 million UNRWA-designated refugees in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem would lose that status were those areas to become parts of a sovereign Palestinian state. This would leave a refugee total of a little over half a million.
For all of his talk about wanting to see a sovereign, independent Palestinian state on the West Bank, that is about the last thing Jordan’s King Abdullah II wants if he expects to keep his job. As my mother would say, he needs it “like a loch im kopf,” and that goes for the latest recycled idea being floated by the Trump administration.
First son-in-law Jared Kushner has been tasked with putting together the “deal of the century” to bring peace to the Israelis and Palestinians – even if neither side has shown any real interest. The Trump plan, according to those who’ve been briefed, notably Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, recycles a short-lived 1972 proposal for a confederation between Jordan and the West Bank. It envisioned no Palestinian state and no peace with Israel.
Israeli officials denied Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the one who sold the idea to his friend Jared. Netanyahu has long regretted his heavily conditioned 2009 endorsement of the two-state solution in favor of what he calls “state-minus,” a semi-autonomous state with Israeli security control – a proposal no Palestinian leader, present or future, is likely to accept.
Unlike its predecessors, the administration of US President Donald Trump has avoided endorsing the two-state solution, which is opposed by top Jewish Republican donors, Kushner and his team of Orthodox Jewish lawyers and the president’s evangelical Republican base.
Abdullah has personally urged Trump not to rush into reviving peace talks. He knows better than most that neither side is ready to get serious, maybe not even ready to begin talking about beginning. For now, Palestinians can’t make peace with each other, much less with Israel.
US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman privately told a group of American Jewish visitors that regional powers are no longer pushing for revival of peace negotiations. He added that the rollout of the Trump peace plan is “not imminent,” according to The Jerusalem Post.



























