With the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in its 60th year, a peaceful solution seems as evasive as ever. Neither side is willing to compromise when it comes to such sensitive topics as the future status of Jerusalem and the right of Palestinian exiles to return to their homeland. The prevailing wisdom within the international community predicts an eventual Palestinian state existing side by side with Israel, but in recent years there are increasing voices rejecting two states in favour of one bi-national entity. Who are these dissenters from the mainstream and, they might have a point, states Linda S. Heard

Advocates of a one-state solution envision a new country that will merge Israel, the West Bank and Gaza where Arabs and Jews will enjoy equal rights and equal opportunities as co-citizens while maintaining their separate traditions, culture and religious beliefs. When this one country, based on one-man one-vote idea, was first mooted it was considered to be outrageous but today almost a quarter of the Palestinian electorate support it according to polls undertaken by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre.

Last year, a leaked confidential report exposed the thoughts of Alvaro de Soto, a former UN diplomat, who wrote that the one-state solution is “gaining ground” due to the institutional decline of the Palestinian Authority and “a growing conviction among Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, as well as some Jews on the far left in Israel that the two-state solution’s best days are behind it”.

One of the most outspoken proponents of one state is the Palestinian-American political commentator Ali Abu Nimah, who authored One Country: a bold proposal to end the Israeli-Palestinian impasse and who also co-founded the Electronic Intifada website. Abu Nimah told Al Jazeera that while he believed in a two-state solution for many years he was eventually driven to make an uncomfortable ideological shift during the ‘Second Intifada’. His explanation:

“I recognised that the talk of a two-state solution, all of the diplomatic initiatives, were so divorced from the reality of what Israel was doing on the ground that it became clear to me that it was not possible. I learnt more, I read more about South Africa, about Ireland, about Palestine, and this is where I ended up,”

He particularly holds to the South African model stressing that: “whites were not more ready to live with blacks than Israeli Jews are to live with Palestinians. The fact that they were willing to do so was the outcome of the struggle.”

Virginia Tilley, author of; The One-state solution: a breakthrough for peace in the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock says: “the conditions for an independent Palestinian state have been killed off by the inexorable and irreversible advance of the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.”

“…The two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an idea, and a possibility, whose time has passed, its death obscured (as was perhaps intended) by daily spectacle: the hoopla of a useless ‘roadmap’, the cycles of Israeli gunship assassinations and Palestinian suicide bombings, the dismal internal Palestinian power struggles, the house demolitions and death counts – all the visible expressions of a conflict which has always been over control of land”, she writes.

Palestinian writer and former negotiator Ahmad Samih Khalidi wrote as long ago as 2003 that: “Sharon and his predecessors have all but destroyed the possibility of a viable and sustainable territorial settlement along national lines.”

Khalidi states: “a one-state solution not only does away with the conflict over history and mutual legitimization, but has practical political implications as well. Both sides can maintain their ‘right of return’ without this being at the expense of the other and Israeli setters would not need to be removed from where they are today. Jerusalem could truly become the shared capital of a unitary Arab-Jewish state.”

Essayist and author Tariq Ali agrees that the Israelis have made any other alternative impossible. He declares the Palestinians should fight for a single state and transform the PLO and Hamas into a giant civil rights and liberation movement that rejects violence.

“Anything else will fail,” he says. “I think we will have to take the initiative and say ‘End all this farce of negotiations and this farce of Mahmoud Abbas going to the Israelis to talk like a servant, trying to force Hamas to do the same. It doesn’t serve anybody’s interest. It completely debases the Palestinian cause.”

Palestine’s foremost intellectual, the late Edward Said, once wrote that he saw 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 each citizen.”

The Israeli writer, historian and political science lecturer Ilan Pappe is also a fan of one state. “We need to wake up,” he urges. “The day Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush declared their loyal support for the two-state solution, this formula became a cynical means by which Israel can maintain its discriminatory regime inside the 1967 borders, its occupation of the West Bank and the ghettoization of the Gaza Strip.”

However, another guru of the Israeli left Uri Avnery disagrees entirely. He says he opposes a one-state solution because it will not work. In his article “The One-state solution – a vision of despair” he has this to say:

“If someone despairs of swimming the English Channel and decides, therefore, to swim across the Atlantic Ocean, it might be considered slightly odd. When my Palestinian friend Michael Tarazy despairs of a two-state solution and now advocates one state it does not look to me much more realistic. Many beautiful Utopian ideas have come to nothing, and some, like Communism, have caused great tragedies, because they run contrary to human nature.”

Other Israelis view the one-state option as a threat that can never be contemplated or even a taboo that should never even be discussed. For them it represents a demographic nightmare that would spell virtually the end of the Jewish state. An article on the so-called Honest Reporting website terms the one-state option as a: “thinly veiled strategy for destroying the Jewish state.”

The pro-Israel, right-wing lawyer, professor and commentator Alan Dershowitz pronounces the one-state solution is a ploy, “designed to destroy the Jewish state of Israel and to substitute another Islamic Arab state. Those who advocate the single state solution would never do so with regard to India, the former Yugoslavia, or other previously united states which have now been divided on ethnic or religious grounds.”

My own feeling is there will never be a state where Jews and Palestinian Arabs cohabit as equals. It is a nice idea but it just is not going to happen primarily because committed Zionists would fight it tooth and nail. If the one state solution has any value, it lies in the traction it might eventually gain and the pressure such an option would place on the Israeli leadership to choose the lesser of two evils – a Palestinian state.

In the end, neither solution is an all encompassing panacea. ‘One-state’ is pie in the sky and the type of two-state solution envisioned by the ‘Roadmap’ will leave the new Palestine diminished, fractured and vulnerable to re-invasion. In my view, only the all-encompassing peace proffered by the Arab League during the 2002 Beirut summit whereby Israel would return to its pre-1967 borders in return for normalization of relations with the entire Arab world, has any chance of lasting success.