Not having a subscription to The Atlantic, I can only read the beginning of Benjamin Schwarz’s piece, which includes this:
The Palestinian-Zionist contest is rooted in and remains vexed by land and demographics. The founders of Zionism may have enunciated the strikingly obtuse slogan “A land without people for a people without land,” but in fact they fully grasped that making an Arab land into a Jewish state required upending demographic reality by implanting a huge foreign population and, in the parlance of the time, “transferring”—voluntarily if possible, forcibly if necessary—large numbers of Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants from those areas intended for Jewish statehood. For their part, the Palestinians rejected proposals in 1937 (the Peel Commission report) and 1947 (UN Resolution 181—which, Palestinians protested, designated as Jewish a state that contained 500,000 Jews but fully 400,000 Arabs) to divide the land between Arab and Jew. The rejection of any Jewish state in Palestine defined the Palestinians’ national movement from its inception, in the 1920s, until at least the early 1990s (many Israelis believe, with some justification, that the same rejectionism fuels that movement to this day). And the “basic tenet of Palestinism,” say Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal in their definitive and sympathetic history of the Palestinians, continues to be the “right of return” for those 700,000 Palestinians displaced from Israeli territory in 1948 and their descendants (a population that may now number as many as five million)—which if exercised would mean the end of a Jewish majority in Israel.
Fortunately, Mark Follman paraphrases and quotes from the rest of Schwarz’s article in Salon,:
“Assuming that a comprehensive settlement could be reached, Israel’s long-term prospects are bleak,” he writes. “A future Palestinian state hemmed in between the Green Line and the Jordan and in the Gaza Strip will face astronomical population growth (the population in Gaza now doubles every generation, and an enormous influx of former refugees now living throughout the Arab world — mostly in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon — is almost certain), scarce water, and dire economic conditions. (The obvious outlet for Palestinian labor — Israel — will perforce be tightly closed; otherwise the sort of creeping immigration the United States has experienced from Mexico would swamp Israel, thereby subverting efforts to maintain a Jewish state.) A host of realistic Israeli observers, including Israel’s national security adviser, General Giora Eiland, doubt that the area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan contains enough land and resources to sustain two viable sovereign states. In few places in the world do conditions more demand that two peoples develop a symbiotic relationship; in no other place are the chances of building such a relationship more remote.”
Schwarz argues that faced with economic disaster and severe overcrowding, the future Palestinian state will end up trying to reclaim Israeli land. “…Palestinian leaders seeking further territorial revision will no doubt argue, correctly, that the Green Line was a cease-fire line, not an international boundary; that that line itself awards Israel territory won in war; and that it in no way resembles the boundaries of the UN partition resolution upon which the Jewish state was founded. David Ben-Gurion always urged his people to accept even the smallest Jewish state, arguing that it would serve as a springboard for future expansion. Palestine, he saw, would be taken over in stages. Today Israelis understandably fear that either by design or merely in response to exigencies it may be taken back in the same piecemeal fashion.”
Schwarz concludes that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may simply be insoluble. “At some level most perceptive Israelis seem to grasp these future existential dangers. In fact, in conversations with Israelis on the left and the (moderate) right in academe, the military, the government, and the security services, I’ve been struck by their grim declarations that they as a people aren’t going anywhere, but also by their foreboding about the country their children will live in. Most of all, though, I’ve been struck by the frequency with which these men and women — patriots all — have wistfully said, ‘We should have taken Uganda’ (which Britain offered to the Zionist leadership in 1903). History shows that many problems have no solution — a fact all but unfathomable to Americans. Nevertheless, the century-long Palestinian-Zionist conflict is a story of two peoples, each with reasonable claims to the same piece of earth; and nearly every aspect of that story suggests that in the end — and to the detriment of those peoples, their region, and perhaps the entire world — their aspirations are not amenable to compromise.”
I share Schwarz’s pessimism about the prospects of a successful Palestinian state alongside Israel, for many of the reasons he provides, but that doesn’t mean the problem is, as he says, “insoluble.” I don’t know if his complete article considers the possibility of a single state. That solution would mean the end of a Jewish-majority state, so I don’t envision Jewish Israelis opting for it voluntarily, but it increasingly seems to me that one state is the only possible result of three decades of Israeli expansion into the West Bank. Ariel Sharon and his peers sought to create “facts on the ground.” They have, and those facts point to one state, not two.
So the conflict is, it seems to me, “soluble,” so long as retaining a Jewish state is not taken as a given.