Lincoln, Myrdal, King and the One-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Opening Remarks—Martin Luther King Day Chapel Service
Daniel F. Sullivan—January 19, 2009
In his visit to campus last semester as part of our Contemporary Issues Forum, Saree Makdisi made a provocative argument regarding the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. “There is no longer a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” he said.
The violence will end, and a just peace will come, only when each side realizes that the other is there to stay. Many Palestinians have accepted this premise, and an increasing number are willing to give up on the idea of an independent Palestinian state and embrace instead the concept of a single democratic, secular and multicultural state, which they would share equally with Israeli Jews. . . . .
To resolve the conflict with the Palestinians, Israeli Jews will have to relinquish their exclusive privileges and acknowledge the right of return of Palestinians expelled from their homes. What they would get in return is the ability to live securely and to prosper with -- rather than continuing to battle against -- the Palestinians.
They may not have a choice. As Olmert himself warned recently, more Palestinians are shifting their struggle from one for an independent state to a South African-style struggle that demands equal rights for all citizens, irrespective of religion, in a single state. "That is, of course," he noted, "a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle -- and ultimately a much more powerful one."
Why, I asked myself while listening to Makdisi, is a one-state solution a much cleaner and more powerful struggle—perhaps inevitable? And then I began to think of Lincoln, Myrdal, and King and how, ultimately, an African-American could become president in America, and I began to see why Makdisi believes a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict inevitable.
Stay with me while I work this through. We begin with Lincoln, whose 272 words at Gettysburg, given in less than three minutes, literally “created” what we now call the “American Creed.” What Lincoln did at Gettysburg, as Garry Wills so stunningly shows, was
. . . . . cleanse the Constitution . . . . . . [by altering] the document from within, by appeal from its letter to the spirit . . .
You know by heart, I’m sure, Lincoln’s opening sentence:
Four score and seven years ago [the year of the Declaration of Independence, not the completion of the Constitution] our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation [the nation was founded in 1776, in Lincoln’s view; the state, and the Constitution that implemented it and determined how it would be governed, came later], conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
The spirit of the nation, its soul and central value system, implied Lincoln, is in the Declaration of Independence not the Constitution, an imperfect organizing document of the government that would henceforth manage the nation conceived in the Declaration. The words of the Constitution were the best that could be negotiated at the time. When the founders made provision for its amendment, Lincoln believed, they made it clear that they expected it would evolve with time, as indeed it has.
In Wills’ view:
. . . . [Lincoln] performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked. The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, [a] new Constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them. They walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America. Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.
An American creed was born. The core values of the Declaration were installed like a new piece of software into the minds and hearts of Americans, bypassing the Constitution entirely.
We know, of course, that Lincoln’s sleight-of-hand did not produce some kind of instantaneous racial justice in America, and in the middle of the Civil War our one-state solution was very much still in jeopardy.
Fast forward to 1944 when Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. Despite the fact that it was published during World War II, when the nation and world were focused on eliminating the Nazi threat, Myrdal’s work gradually came to frame and shape postwar scholarship on race in America. This monumental, comprehensive study of race relations lamented how little progress on race in American had been made since Lincoln’s address eighty years earlier and was unsparingly candid in its assessment of the vicious cycle of deprivation America’s whites imposed on its black citizens:
White prejudice and discrimination keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners and morals. This, in its turn, gives support to white prejudice. White prejudice and Negro standards thus mutually “cause” each other.
But Myrdal was ultimately an optimist about the future of race relations in America precisely because the so-called “American Creed” that Lincoln had smuggled into the American consciousness in his Gettysburg Address existed side-by-side with their racism in the value systems of individual Americans. The tensions this produced in individuals, the moral compromises individuals had to make every day, would inevitably lead, Myrdal believed, to a victory of the higher values over the lower. It cannot be possible, he argued, for Americans forever to believe simultaneously in “liberty, equality, justice, and fair treatment of all people” while oppressing fully 10% of Americans because of their race.
A problem, he recognized, was that one of the values included in the American Creed is “liberty.” Our belief in liberty partially takes racists off the hook. Liberty implies that Americans should be free to think and say what they wish, including having the freedom to be racist. Nonetheless, Myrdal believed that in the end, our commitments to the higher values of equality, justice and fair treatment of all people would win the battle of conflicting values.
Now we get to Martin Luther King, Jr., and then, in a moment, back to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The incredible power of King’s words and deeds we know from history. So that we don’t forget, we celebrate this day in his memory. But why were his words, while eschewing violent means to change, ultimately so powerful in moving us closer to the day when discrimination, racism, and other forms of racial injustice might finally leave us forever? King urged us over and over, in some of the most powerful and motivating language ever uttered in America, to live up to our ideals, to complete the American journey, to finally find a true one-state solution to American race conflict. And he moved us because, in the end, we had no other moral choice if we were to continue to be America.
Makdisi, I think, is making the same argument with regard to Israel. Israel does not as yet have a constitution but there are a series of “basic laws,” in addition to case law, that guide the nation. In the basic law entitled “Human Dignity and Liberty” (1992) it says:
The purpose of this Basic Law is to protect human dignity and liberty, in order to establish in a Basic Law the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
Like America, however, Israel also has a Declaration of Independence, created in 1948. It says things like:
THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open to the immigration of Jews from all countries of their dispersion; will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; will be based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew Prophets; will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex; will guarantee full freedom of conscience, worship, education and culture; will safeguard the sanctity and inviolability of the shrines and Holy Places of all religions; and will dedicate itself to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations. . . . . . .
In the midst of wanton aggression, we still call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to return to the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State, with full and equal citizenship and due representation in its bodies and institutions - provisional or permanent.
Here we see it declared that Israel is a Jewish state but one which also imagines full and equal citizenship by Arabs. Makdisi believes, I think, that Israel’s commitment to the liberal democratic values expressed in its Declaration of Independence and its Basic Laws, akin to the American Creed, will be more powerful ultimately than its current justifications for holding Palestinians in a second class status and that it will resolve the moral tension by giving preference to its liberal democratic values.
This one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is of course truly hard to imagine, but few imagined the transformation of South Africa the people of my generation witnessed, and I did not imagine that Barack Obama, or any African-American could ever become president of the United States until the votes were tallied and it became clear that Americans, in the privacy of the voting booth, put aside race and did the right thing for their country.
I am heartened by the cease fire in Gaza that was established over the weekend, but I have seen them before. If Makdisi is right, and a one-state solution is inevitable, it is unlikely to happen fast. On this day when we gather to remember Martin, let us leave together with hope reconfirmed that equality, justice and fair treatment for all are values powerful enough to overcome even in the Middle East. Thank you.
Saree Makdisi, “Forget the two-state solution,” Los Angeles Times, May 11, 2008.
Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 38.
Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1944).
