Analysis
The JC: What a one-state solution really means, by Alan Johnson
Category:
Some ideas, wrote George Orwell, are so absurd that you can only get the intellectuals to believe in them.
Today, the idea of the one-state solution – the creation of a single state in which Israelis and Palestinians, Christians, Muslims and Jews would live in peace as equal citizens between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea – is on the march.
Colonel Gaddafi called for one state of “Isratine” in 2003. In 2004, imprisoned Fatah politician Marwan Barghouti argued for Palestinians to quit the peace process and fight for equal rights instead – the “citizenship idea” as the UK academic one-stater Ghada Karmi puts it. In 2005, another western academic, Virginia Tilley, wrote The One State Solution, the first serious scholarly look at the idea (it was subject to a devastating critique by John Strawson in the online journal Democratiya). Ali Abunimah, the creator of the website Electronic Intifada, followed up a year later with One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israel-Palestine Impasse.