The Reemergence of One-Statism

June 2007; and, last, the recent advocacy of a one-state solution by a coterie of non-Arab Western intellectuals, spearheaded by Tony Judt, a distinguished professor of modern European history at New York University, against the backdrop of the Second Intifada and, more pertinently, the Islamic world’s assault on the West, epitomized by 9/11 (and stretching, geographically, from the southern Philippines and southern Thailand through India, Afghanistan, and the Middle East to Madrid and London). I would like to focus for the moment on this third precipitant.

In 2003 Judt, who has never worked academically on the Middle East, published “Israel: The Alternative” in the New York Review of Books. This article can be seen at once as the harbinger and first blossom of this newborn one-statism among certain segments of the Western intelligentsia. For Palestinian one-staters, it was a public relations coup. It placed the one-state idea—or in Judt’s view, “ideal”—buried, in effect, since the late 1940s, squarely and noisily on the table of international agendas.

Judt’s arguments were fairly simple: the idea of Israel, as of ethnic nationalism in general, had (partly due to the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s) lost traction and was no longer adequate to underpin the continued existence of, and support for, a Jewish state. We are living “in an age” that rejects the idea of a state in which “one community—Jews—is set above others.” The Jewish state, he argued, had been established “too late,” “a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project” superimposed on “a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open