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One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict by Benny Morris

Article in Contemporary Sociology A Journal of Reviews · January 2010

DOI: 10.2307/20695266

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68 Reviews
One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/
Palestine Conflict, by Benny Morris. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
240pp. $26.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780300122817.
DANIEL BRESLAU
Virginia Tech
dbreslau@vt.edu
When it is difficult for a party to a conflict to
acknowledge its own role in the conflict’s
origin and perpetuation, it will portray the
other side as impervious to good will. The
other side’s hostility is elemental, fixed,
and unprovoked. One would expect an his-
torian of the Israel-Palestine conflict to
understand this style of thought as an histor-
ical product, emanating from the conflict
itself. But in One State, Two States, Benny
Morris thoroughly inhabits this perspective;
it informs his interpretation of the conflict
from its beginnings to its present discourag-
ing state.
Morris begins by warning readers of
a resurgence of ‘‘one-state’’ solutions to the
conflict. In his view, one-state proposals are
cover for the hidden agenda of replacing Isra-
el with a Muslim-Arab state in which Jews
are at best a second-class minority. He con-
tends that the resurgence of one-state pro-
posals has been precipitated by Palestinian
actions—Arafat’s rejection of the Clinton/
Barak proposals in late 2000, and the rise
of the Islamist Hamas movement—and its
advocacy by ‘‘a coterie of non-Arab Western
intellectuals’’ (p. 6).
The bulk of the book consists of a long
chapter on ‘‘The History of One-State and
Two-State Solutions.’’ Beginning with the
Zionist movement, Morris chronicles the
ideological and political disputes among its
factions, concerning the desired political
relationship to the Palestinians and its terri-
torial configuration. He shows how a range
of one-state alternatives were weeded out.
On the right, the revisionist Zionists, fol-
lowers of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who militated
for a maximalist Jewish state were ultimately
frustrated by geopolitical realities. The
opposite wing of Zionism, composed of
a diverse set of intellectuals and leftist
organizations advocating coexistence in
a binational state, failed to find significant
partners on the Palestinian side who would
Contemporary Sociology 39, 1
tolerate even shared sovereignty. Morris
sees the failure of the binational project as
caused by, and evidence for, Palestinian
intransigence. He minimizes what Jabotin-
sky was acutely aware of: that the Palesti-
nian reaction was driven by anxiety over
the prospect of their own displacement—
physical, cultural, and political—an anxiety
that would prove to be justified. The Zionist
center, embodied by the Labor Party-led
Alignment that ruled Israel for nearly 30
years, was more pragmatic than either of
the one-state factions, and accepted the
1947 UN partition plan. But it is not quite
right to credit this group with early accep-
tance of a two-state solution, as Morris
does, since most of Israel’s leadership
rejected Palestinian statehood at least until
the 1990s.
While Morris is attentive to the diversity
of perspectives within the Zionist movement
and Israel, there is no parallel treatment of
the Palestinian national movement. His
polemic tolerates no substantive distinctions
between Palestinian factions. For Morris, the
Palestinian National Movement, as a whole,
has rejected Israel’s existence, rejected
even the presence in Palestine of the Jews
(and their descendents) who had immigrat-
ed under Zionist auspices, and has had
no other goal than Palestinian-Arab-Muslim
sovereignty over the entire homeland.
Any utterance or strategic position consistent
with these objectives Morris labels as a genu-
ine statement of Palestinian intentions. Any
deviations he treats as ‘‘tactical’’ or ‘‘superfi-
cial’’ dissimulation, ‘‘a spin invented for gull-
ible Westerners’’ (p. 168).
The period beginning in the 1970s, when
the strategic position of the Palestinian polit-
ical center showed signs of moderation, leads
Morris into some surprising contortions. For
instance, he brings up the case of Palestinian
moderates who were assassinated in the late
1970s. He describes those assassinated as
‘‘dissidents’’ who ‘‘struck out on their
own,’’ seeking an opening for discussing
coexistence with Israel, only to be fatally dis-
ciplined by their ‘‘colleagues’’ (p. 123). In fact,
all the figures mentioned by Morris were at
the center of Palestinian national politics.
They did not strike out on their own, but
were undertaking diplomatic efforts fully
authorized by the PLO. Their assassins

were members of the Abu Nidal organiza-
tion, a rejectionist fringe. Morris has the story
backward: it was the representatives of the
political majority who sought conciliation,
while dissidents killed in the name of rejec-
tionism. The entire strategic shift toward
coexistence with Israel, beginning in the
1970s and becoming PLO policy in the late
1980s, he regards as a carefully constructed
sham. When dealing with more recent hist-
ory, Morris indulges in a pastime pioneered
by ‘‘pro-Israel’’ Web sites that mine the media
for quotes that seem to contradict Palestinian
public support for a two-state solution.
Morris’s insistence on forcing Palestinian
history into this framework of intransigence
and duplicity is surprising, since he knows
very well that the Zionist movement can
be, and often is, given the same treatment.
The argument that the Zionists always had
their eye on the whole of Palestine, and
any deviation was a ruse in order to enlist
international support is equal to Morris’s
account in plausibility and inadequacy.
Near the end of the book, Morris’s outlook
is taken to its logical conclusion. Citing
incompatible values, he dismisses the possi-
bility of Jewish and Arab coexistence in
a binational state. ‘‘The value placed on
human life and the rule of (secular) law is
completely different—as exhibited, in Israel
itself, in the vast hiatus between Jewish and
Arab perpetration of crimes and lethal road
traffic violations’’ (p. 187). So determined is
Morris to avoid consciousness of Israel’s
role in the economic, social, and political mar-
ginalization of its Palestinian Arab minority,
that he converts the symptoms of marginali-
zation into essential cultural deficiencies.
The Making of Pro-life Activists: How Social
Movement Mobilization Works, by Ziad W.
Munson. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 2008. 233pp. $22.50 paper.
ISBN: 9780226551203.
BENITA ROTH
Binghamton University
broth@binghamton.edu
The Making of Pro-life Activists: How Social
Movement Mobilization Works, by Ziad W.
Munson, is an important book that should
View publication stats
Reviews 69
change the way we think about the pro-life
movement and about mobilization in move-
ments. Munson explores how pro-life acti-
vists became activists in four metropolitan
areas: Oklahoma City, Minneapolis/St.
Paul, Charleston, and Boston. He conducted
150 interviews with pro-life leaders, acti-
vists, and pro-life ‘‘non-activists,’’ leading
to his counterintuitive finding that pre-exist-
ing anti-abortion beliefs were not the spur to
individuals’ activism, but developed
through activism itself. What made pro-life
sympathizers into activists was their contact
with the movement at a significant turning
point in their lives, when changes in living
circumstances made them cognitively avail-
able to new ideas. A significant portion of
the pro-life activists Munson interviewed
initially held nominally pro-choice beliefs.
Munson argues that a new model of social
movement mobilization is needed that drops
assumptions about preexisting grievances
(then coupled to resources, opportunities,
and the like) driving individuals into move-
ment activism.
Munson argues that the pro-life move-
ment itself is composed of ‘‘streams,’’ which
he defines as ‘‘collections of organizations
and activists that share an understanding
of the best means to achieve the goal of end-
ing abortion’’ (pp. 98–99). Members of the
different pro-life streams of politics, direct
action, individual outreach (crisis pregnancy
counseling), and public outreach are actively
critical of the strategies and tactics of those in
other streams, and do not cross over. Mun-
son found that pro-life activists in different
streams shared little ideologically besides
a belief in fetal personhood. Some saw abor-
tion as a social ill in itself while others saw it
as an effect of wider social decadence. Still
others regarded abortion as a conspiracy
that exploited women by letting men off
the hook for familial responsibilities. The
variety of kinds of moral reasoning by pro-
life activists leads Munson to conclude that
although evangelical Protestant and Catho-
lic religious beliefs played a role in cement-
ing activists’ views, the pro-life movement
should not be seen as an arm of the religious
right. Munson further argues that the move-
ment affected religious practice in religious
institutions as much as religious institutions
affected it.
Contemporary Sociology 39, 1