Here’s what I don’t understand about a proposed “two-state” solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All variants of a “two-state” solution (that I’ve seen) end up creating a Palestinian state out of discontiguous territories. And I’m not just talking about Gaza and portions of the West Bank. Within the West Bank itself, the territories proposed for “sovereign control” by a Palestinian state are discontiguous, unless Israeli settlements are removed from the West Bank much more fully than is currently proposed.
So here’s what I don’t get: why does virtually none of the discussion surrounding a “two-state” plan address the insanely difficult infrastructural problems this will create? I’m no expert, either on the Middle East or on urban planning and engineering, but even I can figure out how difficult it’ll be. How do the Palestinians create water and sewer systems, electricity, phone systems, and other needed infrastructure, if every system has to cross the territory of another country to link up the discontiguous areas?
Surely, you’d say, the Israelis would cooperate in allowing the Palestinians to run pipelines, electrical transmission lines, fiber-optic cable, and so on, between their territorial chunks. But why would they? Once the Palestinian state is independent from Israel, it’s not like the Israelis are going to spend tax dollars to help maintain such an infrastructure, and it’s not like the animosity is going to go away just because they manage to somehow partition into two states. Especially if one of the two states isn’t able to function, provide services to its citizens, or effectively defend its territorial “chunklets.”
So I don’t get it, unless the answer is that the “two-state” solution isn’t meant to work in the first place, or unless the Palestinian Authority has just decided that a crippled, unworkable country is better than none at all. After reading Edward Said’s interviews with David Barsamian in Culture and Resistance, I just keep looking at the maps and wondering how anyone thinks this is a real solution.
