One State Solution For Palestine?

| Monday October 4, 2010 00:00

It was clear from the very beginning - shall we call it the Zionist movement and the events leading up to the establishment, by a resolution of the United Nations, of a state of Israel.

Much of the argument for this state was made on the basis of the Biblical scripture, itself a creation of mainly Jewish thinkers and the Torah.

On the ground, it was clear that the Palestinians and the Jews lived together for centuries, sharing separate philosophies about how the world came about and their place in it.

They lived together though. The peoples of Arabic extraction, before the Jews, occupied the land that is now being contested.

The Jews, believing that they have suffered a greater travesty of justice than black folk in all of Africa, the Latin Americans and the Asiatic, hang on tenaciously to the notion that it is they who deserve citizenship of a land once occupied by themselves and the Palestinians.

The Americans, even under the presidency of the messianic Barrack Obama, continue to play the peace-making game that outlived the Jimmy Carter, George Bush, Bill Clinton and Bush Jr administrations at the American White House.

Quiet clearly, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) has, like its great deceased champion, Yasser Arafat, gained favour with the Americans and the Jews at the expense of the PLFP of George Habash and Hamas.

The PLO laid down arms for peace and lost the fighting initiative against the state of Israel. Hamas held up the arms and lost favour with the Americans.

In all this, it is the huge masses of the indigenous Palestinians who suffer day in and day out suffering for the absence of water, electricity, land and freedom of association, movement and political franchise. It is not clear what the 'two state' solution proposed by all US presidents who negotiated peace in the Middle East has to offer.It might be a worthwhile enterprise to further investigate the 'one state' solution.