Every now and again you'll come across an opinion piece arguing that the two-state solution for Israel-Palestine - which the writer once favoured - is no longer a practical proposition. This state of affairs may be noted by him or her with some regret but nonetheless we must, we are told, buckle down to realities on the ground as they are now said to be, and accept a single democratic, secular state; it is the only realistic game in town. Such a piece is this one at Comment is Free.
Argument for the inevitable one-state fate of Israel-Palestine has a peculiar logical structure, however, which I shall attempt to bring out in what follows. If there is to be a single democratic and secular state, this must be either (C) with the consent of both populations, Israeli and Palestinian, or (N) without it - which means without the consent of at least one of the two.
(C) If it is with the verified consent of a majority of Israelis and a majority of Palestinians, then there can be no fundamental objection to it, since the one-state solution would then go ahead on the basis that the rights to national self-determination of both peoples had been respected. But if this is the thinking behind the one-state 'realism' of its proponents, one should register what an improbable combination it assumes. For it assumes a majority Israeli opinion unwilling to reverse the inroads made on Palestinian land through Jewish settlement activity since 1967, intransigent therefore in attitudes of territorial dispossession, and yet simultaneously willing to agree to a bi-national state, to living side by side with the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank in the same democratic polity as co-equal partners. Why would an Israeli electorate sensitive enough to Palestinian interests to be open to the latter possibility be closed to the former? This is not a persuasive reading of comparative political prospects.
(N) One is bound to wonder, consequently, whether the regretful converts to the one- from the two-state solution are in fact committed to its being based on the consent of both populations, Israeli and Palestinian. If they are not, if more particularly they envisage this solution being imposed upon the Jews of Israel, different questions arise. First, how could it be imposed if a reversal of the policy of the settlements could not be? Second, are the Jews to be denied their right of national self-determination while the Palestinians (assuming them to fall in with the proposed one-state solution) are granted theirs? Third, are the democratic one-state solution converts merely sponsoring in a more hand-wringing way what others put less tactfully in their rhetoric - namely, the forcible destruction of Israel?