Following my article in yesterday’s Crikey that discussed the Australian Greens and the one-state solution, the following letter is published today:
Michael Reich writes: Time may be rapidly changing in the Middle East but the one state solution is a throwback to the early part of the last century.
One state solutions were all the rage after World War 1 when the colonial powers were re-drawing the boundaries of many countries in the Middle East and elsewhere. The prevailing philosophy of the time of creating a one state solution that fits all, by simply drawing a boundary that disregards the ethnic make-up of the populations (let the Sunni, Shiites and Kurds etc. sought themselves out) has in retrospect not proved to be a great success.
Similarly the one state solution to the Balkans problem has also been problematic. Bosnia and Kosovo now have majority Muslim populations and, if Loewenstein regards consistency as virtue, he should be agitating for a reunion of these states with Serbia so that the Muslims could then return to their cherished minority status.
The reconstitution of Yugoslavia from its now diverse constituent parts would be an ideal practice run for those whose delusions extend as far as support for a single state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict .
The Reich letter is a mess. The arrogant strand is unwarranted, given both the extreme complexity of the issue, the diversity of historical cases, and Reich’s limited historical understanding.
Israel itself is a product of the colonial powers re-drawing the boundaries with their post WWI booty to suit their own interests.
A Zionist presence was to be the satrap by which Britain (and France) controlled the Middle East. Little did the Brits know!
Israel should never have been created in the first place.
In any case, the label ‘one state’ for the arbitrary arrangements established by the powers is inappropriate.
Two states that did emanate from the dead Austro-Hungarian empire, Yugoslavia and Czechoslavakia, were atypically complex, and contemporary astute observers claimed that they were unlikely to survive long. That they both survived as long as they did is tribute to counter, centralising forces. True that Serbia under Milosevic proved oppressive, but a federalist post-Tito Yugoslavia remained conceivable, were it not for the Western powers brilliantly successful ambition to dismember it – fostering of the early secession of Slovenia and Croatia, support of KLA terrorism, etc.
Many nation states, all pragmatically delineated, remain host to ‘minorities’ – to varying degrees of tolerance, acquiescence, dissatisfaction, rebellion – France, Canada, Spain, Turkey, Iran, Iraq (thanks to the Brits in the first place, and now American destruction of a secular state subsequently), etc.
But Israel is the only state that has instituted a permanent occupation of the territory of another population with minimum to no civil rights, while maintaining internally (albeit not itself unique) an apartheid structure to permanently subjugate an ethnic minority.
Israel is a special case, and the cessation of the ongoing barbarism that the Western powers and now Israel have created will not depend upon irrelevant lessons from dismembered Yugoslavia but the peculiar conditions pertinent to itself.
Did Reich just implicitly make an argument for an ethnically pure Australia … after all, according to him, multicultural societies are utter disasters.