In 2012 I co-edited a collection with Ahmed Moor called After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine. The issues within it have continued to become more relevant as… the two-state “solution” is increasingly viewed as unworkable and unethical.
A long essay in the New Left Review by Perry Anderson discusses the necessity of one-state for… long-term peace:
From the beginning, no-one saw more clearly the nature of the Oslo Accords than Edward Said. Before his death he started to speak of a bi-national state, not as a programme but as a regulative idea—the only long-term prospect for peace in Palestine, however utopian it might seem in the short-run. In the decade and a half since, the number of voices making the same proposal, at greater length and with much greater specification, has multiplied. What in the inter-war period was a minority line of thinking in the Yishuv, extinguished in 1948, has become a significant strand in Palestinian opinion, with some echoes in Israel. The expansion of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the construction of the Separation Wall, the insulation of Gaza, the scission between Fatah and Hamas, the futility of Arab representation within Israel, have leached credibility, however weak, from the Road Map. Some months into the Second Intifada, the first incisive argument by a Palestinian for a one-state solution appeared in early December 2001, in an article by Lama Abu-Odeh in the… Boston Review—to this day, one of the most lucid and eloquent statements of the case. In the summer of 2002 it was succeeded by a powerful and more pointedly political piece from Ghada Karmi in the Lebanese journal… Al-Adab. Three years later, the first book-length advocacy came with… The One-State Solution… from the American scholar Virginia Tilley, further developed in an effective rejoinder to a left-wing critic from Israel.
Thereafter the dikes opened. In 2006 appeared the Palestinian-American Ali Abunimah’s… One Country, in grace of style and inspiration of outlook the single book closest to Said’s own work. In 2007 Joel Kovel published a blistering attack on the conventions of Jewish nationalism in… Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine. In 2008 Said’s nephew Saree Makdisi produced what remains the best documented, most moving of all reports on the condition of the Occupied Territories,… Palestine Inside Out, which ends with its own case for a single state. In 2012 two works by Israelis and a third with Israeli and Palestinian contributors appeared within a few months of each other:… The One-State Condition… by Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir,… Beyond the Two-State Solution… by Yehouda Shenhav and… After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine, edited by Anthony Loewenstein and Ahmed Moor. In 2013, Rashid Khalidi’s… Brokers of Deceit… called for the self-dissolution of the Palestinian Authority and shift to a struggle for full democratic rights in a single state, while the volume edited by Hani Faris,… The Failure of the Two-State Solution, brought together the most comprehensive set of reflections and proposals on a one-state agenda to date, from some twenty contributors. Ripostes to this literature have not been slow in coming, from both Israeli and Palestinian sides. In 2009, Benny Morris produced… One State, Two States,… Hussein Ibish… What’s Wrong with the One-State Agenda?; in 2012, Asher Susser… Israel, Jordan and Palestine: The Two-State Imperative;… in 2014, a group of Israeli and Palestinian insiders collaborated on… One Land, Two States, under Swedish guidance. A new intellectual landscape has begun to emerge, one in which Olmert himself could warn of the dangers to Israel of increased discussion of a single state in the Promised Land.
The forms envisaged for such a state vary across the literature proposing it, from a unitary democracy with equal civil and political rights for all, to a bi-national federation along Belgian lines, to a confederation of ethnic cantons. But the general case they make rests on a set of common observations and arguments. Across the West Bank, not to speak of East Jerusalem, the grid of Jewish logistics and pattern of Jewish settlements have sunk too deep to be reversible: Israeli expansion has effectively destroyed the possibility of a second state nested within Zion. If it were ever to take shape, the second state offered Palestinians since Oslo could only be a dependency of the first, lacking geographical contiguity, economic viability or the rudiments of genuine political sovereignty: not an independent structure, but an outhouse of Israel. But since even the delivery of that is perpetually postponed, it would be better to turn the tables on the oppressor, and demand a single state in which at least there would be demographic parity between the two. As a political banner under which to fight, civil rights—so the argument goes—have a more powerful international appeal than national liberation. If Israel is impregnable to ethnic attack, it is vulnerable to democratic pressure.