Book Review: The Two-State Delusion

The Two-State Delusion:Israel and Palestine – A Tale of Two Narrativesby Padraig O'MalleyViking, 2015Padraig O'Malley's current job description is longer than most people's resumes: he's the John Joseph Moakley Distinguished Professor of Peace and Reconciliation at the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. And in his career he's studied first-hand such internally-torn places as Iraq, South Africa, and of course Northern Ireland (O'Malley himself is from Dublin). In his latest book, The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine – a Tale of Two Narratives, he turns his attention to the world's most intractable conflict, which initially baffles him just as surely as it's baffled all other onlookers:

How could a people, I asked myself, themselves the victims of the most heinous human atrocity in recorded history, subject another people to life under occupation? How could two peoples living cheek to jowl not find a way to resolve their differences after close to fifty years of conflict?

O'Malley has studied the Israel-Palestine conflict through all its tortured history – much of this book is a recounting of that history, told in wonderful, extremely involving prose – and he's applied to it something of a pet theory of his: that protracted state conflicts begin to work on their participants in much the same way that protracted drug addiction works on individuals, only instead of chemicals, those participants become addicted to their grievances, their protests, and to the conflict itself. He looks at the Israeli fixation on the Holocaust and at the Palestinian fixation on the Nakba expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland during the 1948 war, and he writes that “if peace is actually the goal, neither the Palestinians' addiction to the comforts of humiliation and resentment nor the Israelis' addiction to the comforts of fear and security has worked very well.” He stresses: “Both have been counterproductive. Both always will be. Another fix is not the answer.” Rather, the answer springs from understanding the underlying needs:

Humiliation, as we have described, is a constant in their lives, and so, too, is the addiction it gives rise to. The Nakba, which is at the core of the humiliation, is also the core of the Palestinian identity. Letting go involves a loss. Letting go of collective memories of the Holocaust, the core part of Israel's identity, involves a loss. All losses are mourned. The genuine “dissolution” of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would also be fraught with difficulty. That's how it works with addictions. Compulsion to stay put smothers the desire to change. Overcoming an addiction also involves a loss.

“You cannot build where there are no foundations to begin with,” O'Malley writes when contemplating the likelihood of either side ever reaching a “final settlement agreement,” or FSA. And as his narrative progresses, his attitude toward such things as FSAs grows increasingly darker. He urges his readers to forget about such goals as FSAs; “First, both sides must address their respective habits/addictions, understand their nature, how they manifest themselves, and begin the arduous process of addressing them,” he writes. “Is there a point at which they will be willing to? For without willingness they're on a fool's errand.”Arrestingly, he ends up deciding there is no such willingness – that peace-seeking in this arena really is a fool's errand. If it's jarring for his readers, it was no less jarring for O'Malley's friends while the book was in composition, to hear him tell it:

But where, friends who read the manuscript of The Two-State Delusion asked, is my vision for the future? “You can't just end the book and leave the reader with no alternative to a two-state solution if you are so sure one is delusional. You have to give the reader hope that something is possible, that there exists some route to setting a new course.” But why should I be so presumptuous as to dare to provide a vision for people who refuse to provide one for themselves, not just in the here and now, bu in the future too? For people who have no faith in the possible? Who themselves believe the conflict will take generations to solve? Who are content to live their hatreds? Who are so resolutely opposed to the slightest gesture of accommodation? Who revel in their mutual pettiness? Why delude you into thinking that there is a magic bullet? Why trot out platitudes or list what both parties must do to reach a two-state FSA?

Coming from an expert on fractured states – and a professor of peace and reconciliation, no less – such despair is genuinely sobering, but the few people in the world who are still optimistic on the subject need not allow it to destroy their faith. Addicts can recover, after all, and fractured states can heal. Defeatism is no help in either process, but hope must never be classified as a delusion.