Perry Anderson "The House of Zion" posted:

In this scenery, the demand for one state is now the best Palestinian option available. That it should be dismissed with such vehemence by Zionist and Scurrier spokesmen alike is evidence enough of that. It will remain an idea, rather than a programme, so long as it sidesteps the issues of reparation and return, which will not be resolved by fobbing off the fleeced with gestures of symbolic rather than material restitution, nor dumping refugees into the reservations of Oslo rather than allowing them to go where their families came from. [60] But above all, of course, what a one-state agenda requires is an organized movement giving shape to a reconstruction of the future as a struggle for democracy. By definition, it must encompass all three sections of the Palestinian population under Israeli control, currently cut off from each other—not to speak of the diaspora. No such thing is at present conceivable. But it makes sense to ask: what would it in principle involve? On the West Bank, Khalidi—echoed by others—has called for a self-dissolution of the Palestinian Authority, to which Israel has sub-contracted policing of parts of the West Bank. [61] For that to occur a third Intifada would be needed, a popular rising against the repressive Fatah regime, rallying its less infected cadres against it. In Gaza, probity and discipline are values critical for any movement of the oppressed; but has the fate of its parent organization in Egypt yet taught Hamas the costs of putting religion before democracy, not least for the faithful themselves? Last but not least, in Israel itself the Palestinian community gains nothing from impotent representation in the Knesset, whose ostracized Arab parties merely legitimize a system that ignores them. The most effective political boycott would start there, abandoning the Knesset for an Aventine assembly based on its own Arab elections, to bring home to the world—and to Israelis themselves—just how far from any democratic equality the Zionist construct has always been, and to offer a positive example of free debate and representation to the Occupied Territories. [62]

If a unitary Palestinian movement for democracy is a condition of a single state at any point in the future, the obstacles to one are plain, and at present insurmountable. They include not just the resistance of gendarmes and torturers in Ramallah, bigots in Gaza, placemen in Jerusalem and the hostility of the West and of Israel. For it is also as true today as in the past that without a revolutionary transformation of the surrounding Arab landscape, bringing an end to its suffocating universe of feudal autocracy and military tyranny, client regimes and rentier states, which religious wars now cross-cut but do not alter, the chances of emancipation in Palestine are small. There are two reasons for that. In the absence of any framing or corresponding move towards more democratic political structures in the leading Arab countries, Palestinian experience with them in isolation is bound to be weakened. When the Palestinian elections in 2006 were cashiered by the US, EU and Israel, there was no countervailing Arab support for the government they produced. An island of Palestinian democracy of any kind, preamble to a single state or otherwise, is unlikely in a sea of despotism. Nor will Israel ever yield its positions of strength until it is confronted with a real threat in the Middle East, which can only come when the region is no longer a zone on whose corruption and submission Washington can rely. Only then, faced with an Arab solidarity in control of its own natural resources and strategic emplacements, would the United States have reason to oblige its alter ego to come to terms.