One-state Solution - One-state Debate Since 1999

One-state Debate Since 1999

Since 1999 interest has been renewed in binationalism or a unitary democratic state. In that year the Palestinian activist Edward Said wrote:

"... after 50 years of Israeli history, classic Zionism has provided no solution to the Palestinian presence. I therefore see no other way than to begin now to speak about sharing the land that has thrust us together, sharing it in a truly democratic way with equal rights for all citizens."

In October 2003, New York University scholar Tony Judt broke ground in his article, "Israel: The Alternative" in the New York Review of Books, in which he argued that Israel is an "anachronism" in sustaining an ethnic identity for the state and that the two-state solution is fundamentally doomed and unworkable. The Judt article engendered considerable debate in the UK and the US, and The New York Review of Books received more than 1,000 letters per week about the essay. A month later, political scientist Virginia Tilley published "The One-State Solution" in the London Review of Books, arguing that West Bank settlements had made a two-state solution impossible and that the international community must accept a one-state solution as the de facto reality.

Leftist journalists from Israel, such as Haim Hanegbi and Daniel Gavron, have called for the public to face the facts (as they see them) and accept the binational solution. On the Palestinian side, similar voices have been raised. Israeli Prime Minister Olmert argued, in a 2007 interview with the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, that without a two-state agreement Israel would face "a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights" in which case "Israel finished".

Antony Lerman has written that a de facto single state already exists, detailing Israel's control over the West Bank and Gaza.

John Mearsheimer, co-director of the Programme on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, says the binational solution has become inevitable. He has further argued that by allowing Israel's settlements to prevent the formation of a Palestinian state, the United States has helped Israel commit "national suicide" since Palestinians will be the majority group in the binational state.

A poll conducted in 2010 by Israel Democracy Institute suggested that 15% of right-wing Jewish Israelis and 16% of left-wing Jewish Israelis support a binational state solution over a two states solution based '67 lines. However, according to the same poll, 66% of Jewish Israelis preferred the two-state solution.

In 2012, in an article in Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper, Ahmed Qurei called for Palestinians to reconsider a one-state instead of a two-state solution. He stated that the “one-state solution, despite the endless problems it embraces, is one of the solutions that we should be contemplating through an internal dialogue.” He blamed Israel for "burying" or "decapitating" the two-state solution though the building of settlements.