The Re-Emergence of the Single State Solution in Palestine/Israel by Cherine Hussein (Routledge, 2015)

The death of the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine has been a long time coming.

Israeli journalist Avi Issacharoff recently wrote in The Times of Israel that the settler movement had “won.”

“No Palestinian state will exist here beside the State of Israel,” he said. He argued that Israel was beginning “its inexorable slide toward eventually becoming a Muslim state.” Issacharoff feared this outcome because he believed “separation” was the only way for Israel to survive as a Jewish-majority entity.

The unspoken reality, however, has always been that a two-state arrangement, if it ever came to fruition, would disproportionately discriminate against Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel. Moreover, a true democracy doesn’t divide itself along ethnic or religious lines unless it wants to resemble apartheid South Africa or the Jim Crow south in the United States.

In today’s Jewish state and even more so in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israeli violence against Palestinians isn’t an aberration but a deliberate policy of control.

And nobody truly believes that hundreds of thousands of Israeli colonists will be moved from their places of residence without causing a Jewish civil war in Israel.

Imagination needed

These realities require more imaginative thinking towards a viable outcome for an oppressed Palestinian population.

This book by Cherine Hussein, deputy director and research fellow at the Council for British Research in the Levant’s Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem, aims to correct the myriad of misconceptions about the one-state solution. She frames her argument around the celebratory mood after the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993 and posits a more realistic alternative.

“Since then, the two-state solution has continued to both dominate, and frustrate, the official search for peace,” she explains. “In parallel to this however, a more obscured struggle of resistance — centered upon the single state idea as a more liberating pathway towards justice — has re-emerged against the hegemony of Zionism and separation, and the shrinking territorial space for a viable two-state solution in the contested land.”

For Hussein, this struggle is personal. She writes that being an Egyptian “played a big role in establishing an easy rapport based upon a natural solidarity with the Palestinian people.”

She wants to know “whether or not the single state solution simply represented the resurfacing of an idea within the corridors of academia; to illuminate the kind of phenomenon the single state idea could be in the process of becoming; and to inform the understandings of political and social transformation deployed within it.”

Hussein aims to illuminate questions relevant to the scholarly field of International Relations, but her project also aims to be forward-looking, and to “explore the possibility of a single-state movement seriously.”

Dense

Over the course of the book, it becomes clear that Hussein had only limited access to Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories. It’s an unfortunate gap, despite the author blaming “geographical accessibility and limited sources of information.”

Modern communication technology surely renders these excuses redundant. After all, decades of futile negotiations between a complicit Palestinian Authority and Israel has led to growing support within Palestine for a single state. We need to hear these voices.

Hussein offers a pithy history of how the one-state option entered the public consciousness, highlighting a number of articles in American literary publications and surely more importantly “the extent to which ‘the facts on the ground’ created by Israel were irreversible, and how profoundly this reality had transformed the search for workable solutions and viable futures.”

Importantly, she stresses that “the broad ideological orientations of single-state intellectuals are located within the realm of the secular” despite the majority of Palestinians being either proud Christians or Muslims. The challenge of including, say, Hamas in a one-state imagination, a group wanting an Islamic entity, is acknowledged.

How to mainstream the one-state solution, to generate widespread support among Palestinians in the diaspora and in Palestine itself is a key question without any set answers. Hussein writes that ”while it is Palestinian-Israelis [Palestinian citizens of Israel] who are acknowledged to be the central energy behind the re-emergence of the single-state idea, Diaspora Palestinians are its fastest growing force.”

Deepening Israeli racism, occupation and intransigence are arguably the best weapons one-state advocates have and there’s every indication Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government will continue delivering on that front.

Urgency

The surging boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign is intricately linked to this shift in political alignment. Hussein correctly concludes that ”while the BDS movement may not take an open stand on political solutions … its practices of resistance remain interlinked with the tactics of the single-state conception of the world.”

However, the short-term impediments to the one-state movement and Palestinian political elites joining forces are clear: “no official Palestinian body or faction has openly supported the single-state solution as the desired Palestinian solution as of this writing. As such, single-state intellectuals are obstructed by this obstacle in openly calling for a single-state solution within diverse theaters of international civil society.”

Hussein is presumably referring to the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, two leading political bodies with a desultory record of adherence to human rights.

This book would have been greatly enhanced by Hussein spending far more time on the ground in Palestine rather than overly relying on (often) years-old sources and writings. This is an academic text and sometimes feels burdened with impenetrable language. The aim is clearly a scholarly readership.

The urgency in Palestine for solutions has never been clearer. The author has written a summary of the key events in modern Palestine and why the one-state solution is a just outcome to the conflict.

Insightful analysis is vital in an age of cheap and predictable opinions, and Hussein reviews the record comprehensively. It would have been helpful for the author to provide more concrete thoughts on how more Palestinians (and Israelis, for that matter) would embrace a truly democratic, one-state solution, but perhaps that’s a task for another book.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and Guardian columnist. He is author of, most recently, Disaster Capitalism.