The Reemergence of One-Statism

of an Arab-dominated polity encompassing the territory of Israel and the (at present) semioccupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

For many of these “Western” Palestinians, this represents nothing more than an emergence from the closet. In fact, these current one-staters never really identified with the Fatah’s professed advocacy in the 1990s of a two-state solution, with a partitioned Palestine divided into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab, living side by side in peaceful coexistence. Like their cousins in Palestine, both inside Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and in the main concentrations of the Palestinian diaspora—Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria—they had always believed, and continue to believe, that all of Palestine belongs to them, the Palestinian Arabs; that a Jewish state in any part of Palestine is illegitimate and immoral; and that, in the fullness of time, the whole country will eventually revert to Arab sovereignty. But the Western—American and European—governmental twostate mantra and the PLO’s apparent adoption of two-statism in the late 1980s and early 1990s forced them underground or into a duplicitous advocacy of, or reluctant acquiescence in, the twostate formula.

Now these Arab one-staters—the “all of Palestine is ours” advocates—are surfacing once again, loudly proclaiming the truth and justice of their cause. Ghada Karmi, a British Palestinian activist, perhaps heralded the trend with her article (albeit published in Arabic, in 2002) “A Secular Democratic State in Historic Palestine: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?” The ques-