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As the Israeli-Palestinian peace process continues to stalemate, voices calling for an inclusive single state in Israel/Palestine as an alternative to the two-state solution have grown louder. This article reviews the Palestinian debate around the one-state solution and analyzes the challenges its advocates face in generating political support, central among which is the difficulty of redefining the Palestinian cause in terms of a struggle for equal political rights within a single polity rather than in terms of a struggle for a separate state.
Since the collapse of the Oslo peace process in 2000 and the eruption that same year of the Al-Aqsa intifada, the prospects for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have grown increasingly bleak. The doubling of the Israeli settler population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem between 1993 and 2009 to over 494,000 settlers, the construction of a 709 km separation wall that cuts into Palestinian land in the West Bank and once completed would incorporate 11.5% of it into Israel, and the institutionalization of more than 99 Israeli checkpoints that cut Palestinian areas into over 12 disconnected geographic areas, have killed the prospects for any viable sovereign Palestinian state.1 This reality has been further aggravated by Israel's 2009 war on Gaza, the rift between Hamas and Fatah, and the failure of the international community to push the stalled Israeli-Palestinian negotiations towards fulfilling the 2003 "Road Map" to peace, which endorsed the idea of the Palestinian state as the only solution to the conflict.
In view of this impasse, a growing number of scholars and political activists have been calling for the alternative of a one-state solution in all of Palestine, inclusive of Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. Since 2009, a number of major conferences took place across the globe to discuss the prospects and viability of one-state solution.2 Numerous books and articles have been published over the past few years advocating this idea, as well as vehemently opposing it.3 The Palestinian civil society-led campaign calling for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, which began in 2005, is gaining ground among political activists for the Palestinian cause in Europe, South Africa, and North America. These activists argue that Israel has created an apartheid reality that can only be dismantled...