The Reemergence of One-Statism

ous PLO conception of a secular, democratic state in all of Palestine with equal rights for all... [or] in terms of an Islamic state in which non-Muslims would be tolerated minorities.”

A last group of one-staters, according to Khalidi’s definitions, are those who advocate “a binational approach... [that] would take into account... [the] two national realities within the framework of one state.” Khalidi acknowledges that all the onestate approaches have not taken real account of the “stone wall” of Israeli and American rejection of the dismantling of the Jewish state and run counter to the international warrant of legitimacy for Jewish statehood (and Palestinian Arab statehood) issued by the UN General Assembly partition resolution (number 181) of November 1947. 2

The precipitants to this newfound candor about the desirability, or at least the inevitability, of a single state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River (and often the assertion of “inevitability” is mere camouflage for the propagation of its “desirability”) are three: PLO chairman Yasser Arafat’s rejection of the two-state solution proposed in July and again in December 2000 by Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and US president Bill Clinton, his rejection providing political impetus and cover for the in-principle subversion of two-statism; the rise of the openly rejectionist, one-statist Hamas to primacy in Palestinian Arab politics, as epitomized in the movement’s general election victory of January 2006 and its violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in