The Reemergence of One-Statism

done here.” A one-state solution is possible and necessary. Again, it is the Israeli settlement grid, and the ideology and political forces behind it, that are the impediment to a peace based on a two-state solution. “No power,” she wrote, “has the political capacity to effect any meaningful withdrawal” of the urban cores of the settlement enterprise. On its back cover, Judt defined Tilley’s book as “of enormous importance,” just as Tilley, inside her book, praised Judt for “breaking public U.S. political ground.”6

Tilley’s self-styled “breakthrough” one-state proposal was shortly to be followed by Ali Abunimah’s self-styled “bold” one. The Palestinian American cocreator of the Electronic Intifada web site and, more recently, the Electronic Iraq and Electronic Lebanon web sites, Abunimah in 2006 published One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. He, too, proposed a one-state settlement.

Giving history a series of mighty, distorting twists, Abunimah implied, ostensibly on the basis of his refugee grandparents’ and parents’ recollections, that there had been “peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs in Palestine before the creation of Israel”—and, if men and women of goodwill got together, this peaceful coexistence could be re-created.7

This recollected idyll is a whopper of truly gargantuan dimensions. Of course, on the individual plane, there were, here and there—in Jerusalem, in Haifa, perhaps in Jaffa—Arabs and Jews who interacted commercially and, in small numbers and on some level, even socially. But in general, British Mandate Palestine,