The Reemergence of One-Statism

varieties, like to speak of Palestine’s “Muslims and Christians” when selling their case in the West—but this is a propagandistic device, wholly lacking in substance and sincerity (after all, the main reason Christian Arabs have been leaving the Holy Land has been fear of the Muslims and of future Muslim excesses, which is also the cause of the emigration of Iraq’s Christians). Many Christian Arabs from the 1920s through the 1940s would have been happy had British rule continued indefinitely, and some may have preferred Jewish to Muslim rule following the Mandate.

I will look at this more extensively later, but for now let me point out that the two simplest and most logical variants of a onestate solution are an Arab state without any troublesome Jews and a Jewish state without any troublesome Arabs. We are talking here about expulsion. The idea of an ethnically cleansed Palestine was raised consistently by the Palestinian Arab national movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, and there are good grounds to believe that that was the aim of the Arab onslaught on the Yishuv—the Jewish community in Palestine—in 1947 – 1948 (or, at least, that that would have been its outcome had the onslaught been successful). From the other side, the idea of a partial or full expulsion of Palestine’s Arabs by the Jews was discussed and supported by much of the Zionist leadership in the late 1930s and the 1940s, against the backdrop of the Arab Revolt of 1936 – 1939 and the Holocaust, and in some way this thinking contributed to the creation of the Arab refugee problem in 1948.