Two State Solution

I try to keep up with what’s going on geopolitically and with the international money system. Even local issues like the pothole at the corner or the price of carrots at the grocery store reflect global arrangements between sovereign nation-states.

The other night I was listening to a BBC radio broadcast when I heard something that I had never heard before and suddenly the current Mideast situation made more sense to me… maybe Ukraine, too. I don’t know. It was probably nothing.

It happened during a heated exchange between a supporter of the Israelites and a supporter of the Palestinians.

The Israelite said everything was the Palestinians’ fault because they have for decades rejected Israel’s "generous" offer of a “two-state solution.”

The Palestinian let out a huge sigh of frustration. Then he said something I’d never heard before. I mean, that I’d never heard before.

I’m sure what he said was no secret to anybody who’s followed the Israeli/Palestinian conflict over the years more closely than me -- scholars and diplomats who’ve waded into the fine print.

Not that I’ve been uninterested in that part of the world. I’ve read books about Ibn Saud and the creation of Saudi Arabia and about Mossadegh in Iran, Nasser and the Nonaligned Movement, Ataturk and Lawrence of Arabia. I’ve read the first-hand account of our Ambassador to Turkey (Henry Morgenthau, Sr. father of FDR’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr.) in the years leading up to WWI and why the Ottoman Empire allied itself to Germany. And I’ve read about the backroom Sykes-Picot deal creating the 20^th century’s Mideast out of lines scratched in shifting desert sand.

But I’ve never read a book specifically about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I’ve never gotten down into the weeds of the thing. I’ve mainly followed events there from the detached perspective of mainstream news. Every time there’s been a flare-up, everybody starts talking and pontificating about the need for a “two-state solution.” I just assumed the holdup was over defining borders.

But then I heard the Palestinian tell the Israelite (basically… I wasn’t taking notes): “All you ever talk about is a two-state solution. What you really mean is a self-governing entity within the Jewish state like the eastern provinces of Ukraine after the Maiden. But you never mention ‘sovereignty.’”

And that’s what caught my attention. I’m a big fan of sovereignty. The idea of sovereign nation-states was the cornerstone of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The idea of sovereignty is at the core of Leibnizian physics. He was an Irenaean, from the Greek word for Peace. He was born two years before the Peace and spent his life trying to heal people of their memories of what had happened before they become sovereign. Unlike Newton’s, his fundamental “particles” -- what Newton called "atoms" and Leibniz called "monads" -- were sovereign. Unlike billiard balls on the break, they choose to respond or to not respond to the inertial force of collisions. They're sovereign. Like Eve in the Garden, they're free to make up their own minds. They can go along with the lines of force, or wander off.

And sovereign nation-states have the authority to say what money is within their borders. And other sovereign nation-states have the right to not accept, let's say, a "Palestinian Peso" in exchange for, let's say, nuclear power. But in our rapidly changing world, some states might -- the BRICS nations, for instance.

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After hearing the BBC interview, for the next couple of days I paid close attention to the mainstream news. Except for a handful on the fringes, nobody seemed in favor of leveling Gaza like the Romans did to Carthage in 146 BC, widely considered the world’s first genocide.

I did hear the sentence fragment “two-state solution” a couple dozen times.

But I never heard anybody use the word “sovereignty" and try to explain what it means.