The Reemergence of One-Statism

that a society would invest billions of dollars in roads and housing that it truly intended to give up,” he suggested.9 Hence, Israel’s advocacy of a two-state solution, as at Camp David in 2000, was never sincere; in reality the Israelis wanted, and want, all of Palestine for themselves.

So, only one idea remained: the one-state solution. More and more Israeli Jews, Palestinians, and Americans were recognizing this, argued Abunimah. Israel’s “insistence on maintaining its exclusivist Jewish character, in spite of the reality that PalestineIsrael is and has always been a multicultural, multireligious country, is a chauvinistic appeal to ethnic tribalism that stands no chance in a contest against democratic and universalist principles,” he concluded.10

Judt’s article had the virtue of igniting debate about the possible parameters for a solution of the Israel/Palestine problem. And as some of his critics pointed out, these parameters have been on (and off) the table for many decades—indeed, almost from the beginning of the conflict and certainly since 1917, when the British assented to the creation of a Jewish “National Home” in Palestine, in the Balfour Declaration.

On one level, the debate is simply about Israel—whether it should or should not exist. This is both a moral and a practical question. The first, moral part, can be subdivided: Should a Jewish state have been established in the first place? And, once coming into existence, should it—now sixty years old and with some