The One-State Solution Deception

Some anti-Israel activists, like Ali Abunimah, who runs the internet site Electronic Intifadah, masquerade as moderates promoting a benign-sounding “one-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But their call for a single binational state encompassing Israel, the West Bank and Gaza is not a new or moderate idea at all.

The “one-state solution” has long been recognized to be a euphemism for the destruction of Israel. Advocates of the one state solution include Yasser Arafat, Hamas and anti-Israel Jewish extremists like Jeff Halper and Tony Judt.

The process of eliminating Israel that the one-state solution portends is easily understood.

1. Declare a one-state solution that eliminates the law of return, which allows Jews to easily become citizens of Israel, while allowing Palestinians from all over the world to converge on Israel.

2. In combination with the growing Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza, the Arab population would become the majority.

3. The Arab majority could then vote in an Arab Islamist government — like Hamas — which would establish Arab and Islamic supremacy in the state. If the situation for Jews in this new Arab state would resemble what the Jewish minority had faced in every other Arab state, the Jews would then be subject to persecution, driven out and killed.

Islamists throughout the world have been quite open about their goals with respect to establishing Islamic states in their lands of domicile once they have the population advantage. Advocates of the one-state solution are uniformly bitter opponents of Zionism. Read the Hamas charter to get an idea of what policies could be implemented as soon as an Islamist group acquired power in a one-state scenario.

While the one-staters deny the right of Jews to a homeland, they do not criticize the 22 Arab-Muslim homelands, most of which deny Jews equal rights or even the right to citizenship and treat their Christian minorities deplorably.

The one-state solution is a deceptive means to accomplish the destruction of Israel and subsequent subjugation or elimination of the Jewish population. Othman Abu Gharbiya, a senior official in the Palestinian Administration, stated in November 1999:

Every Palestinian must clearly understand that the independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital, is not the end of the process but rather a stage on the road to a democratic state in the whole of Palestine… This will be followed by a third phase, namely Palestine’s complete amalgamation in the Arab and Islamic cultural, national, historic, and geographic environment. This is the permanent-status solution.