[lbo-talk] Saree Makdisi in the New York Times: "If Not Two States, Then One"

[Joseph Catron]

>
> Once the fiction of a separate Palestinian state is revealed to have no
> more substance than the Wizard of Oz — which the E1 plan will all but
> guarantee — those Palestinians who have not already done so will commit
> themselves to the only viable alternative: a one-state solution, in which
> the idea of an exclusively Jewish state and an exclusively Palestinian one
> will yield to what was really all along the preferable alternative, a
> single democratic and secular state in all of historical Palestine that
> both peoples will have to share as equal citizens.
>
> A campaign for rights and equality in a single state is a project toward
> which the Palestinians will now be able to turn with the formidable
> international support they have already developed at both the diplomatic
> and the grassroots levels, including a global boycott and sanctions
> movement whose bite Israel has already felt.
>
> For Palestinians, in any case, one state is infinitely preferable to two,
> for the simple reason that no version of the two-state solution that has
> ever been proposed has meaningfully sought to address the rights of more
> than the minority of Palestinians who actually live in the territory on
> which that state is supposed to exist.
>
> The majority of Palestinians live either in the exile to which they were
> driven from their homes during the creation of Israel in 1948, or as
> second-class citizens of Israel, where they face formidable obstacles as
> non-Jews in a state that reserves a full spectrum of rights only for Jews.
>
> For Palestinians, the right to return home and the right to live in
> dignity and equality in their own land are not any less important than the
> right to live free of military occupation. A separate state addressed only
> the latter, but there can never be a just and lasting peace that does not
> address all those rights ...

http://nyti.ms/VDtm3C

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