Tilley’s Case for One-State

Virginia Tilley is author of One State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock (2005). I’ve not read it. I did, however, read an article she wrote (in 2003) -The One-State Solution as well as those by Ahmad Samih Khalidi & Daniel Lazare in the same year, with the same title. Michael Neumann also wrote one that year: One State or Two? A False Dilema. This was the most persuasive of those I’ve read. In addition, I’ve read Uri Avnery’s The One State Solution - A Vision of Despair and yet to read One-state Solution a Pipedream by Ray Hanania.

(For many others on this topic pro or con).

Virginia Tilley is making the case for the One-State Solution. Was the case made? When one looks at what is apparently required to make either a one-State or two-State solution viable it appears that neither are viable. Both are long shots.

Tilley argues that an independent Palestinian state was “killed off by the inexorable and irreversible advance of the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.” She provides gritty details about what “settlement” has entailed. Paragraph three:

All the while and day by day, Israeli construction crews have been crunching and grinding through the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, laying roads and erecting thousands of new housing units in well-planned communities. ‘Settlement’ suggests a few hilltop caravans defended by zealots, but what we have is a massive grid of towns penetrating deep into the West Bank and Gaza and now housing some 200,000 people (in addition to the 180,000 in the East Jerusalem city settlements, which no one believes will be abandoned). Tens of thousands of homes and apartments are served by schools, shopping malls, theatres and arts centres, connected by major highways, elaborate water and electricity supplies, dykes, walls, perimeter fences and surveillance systems. The grid is immovable both because of its massive infrastructure and because of the psychological investment of its residents. A decade ago, a concerted international effort might have arrested its growth. But it has now gone too far, and nothing stands in the way of its expansion.

Her aim is to show the many factors that support settlement practices and to argue that this process cannot be reversed.

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