The Reemergence of One-Statism

appear to be an Israeli, Palestinian or international leader who can alter the trend... The bi-national state... will come about because separation is discredited and impossible.”

Shortly before the appearance of Sussman’s article, Omar Barghouti published a piece entitled “Relative Humanity: The Fundamental Obstacle to a One-State Solution in Historic Palestine.” Barghouti, an independent Palestinian analyst and doctoral student, asserted that “the two-state solution... is really dead. Good riddance!” and that “we are witnessing the rapid demise of Zionism, and nothing can be done to save it.” What remains is a one-state solution or, as he put it, “a secular democratic state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, anchored in equal humanity and, accordingly, equal rights.” But to this rosy outcome he quickly added a corollary: “the new Palestine” “first and foremost” must “facilitate the return of... all the Palestinian refugees.”5 Thus, at a stroke, he assured that the “binational” state he was proposing would instantly become a state with an overwhelming Arab majority.

Virginia Tilley, formerly of the Centre for Policy Studies in Johannesburg and currently a lecturer at Hobart and William Smith colleges, followed up the original Judt article with one of her own, “The One-State Solution,” published in the London Review of Books. It kicked off with a motto by Edward Said: “The notion of an Egyptian state for the Egyptians, [and] a Jewish state for the Jews, simply flies in the face of reality. What we require is a rethinking of the present in terms of coexistence and porous borders.” The rest of the article follows the selfsame logic. “The two-state solution... is an idea, and a possibility, whose time has passed.” This is so because Israel’s unrelenting settlement drive has made the unraveling of Palestine/Israel into two states impracticable—and “there can be no reversal of the settlement policy,” much as the expulsion of the country’s Arab population is unthinkable. So only a one-state solution, with Jews and Arabs coexisting, remains.

But Tilley admitted that for the Jews, “the obstacles” of converting their country into a binational entity were “clearly massive [and]... profound.” Moreover, many Palestinian Arabs might have a problem with a “democratic secular state”—after all, “many now favor” an “ethno-religious state based on notions of Arab and/or Muslim indigeneity of the kind taking hold in Gaza” (a polite way of describing a totalitarian fundamentalist Islamic Arab polity). Still, a one-state solution it must be because ofirreversible Jewish Israeli expansionist and racist actions. Israel’s complete and successful pullout from the Gaza Strip in summer 2005, despite stiff opposition from Israel’s settler movement— concretely and loudly demonstrating the settlement enterprise’s reversibility—must have come as a rude shock to Tilley.

Tilley expanded substantially on these brushstrokes in The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock, a 276-page tract calling for “real democracy, through a bridging of peoples and their histories. It has been done elsewhere against staggering odds [i.e., South Africa], and it can be