This has been promoted by Colonel Qaddafi again in New York yesterday.
Other people simply call it the one state solution.
One state, yes. I don’t care what they call it. It’s beyond me why we accept the idea of a racial priority system in the first place.
This may be somewhat naive given the current state of American politics, but how do you govern a country when a large section of one part refuses to recognize/wants to kill all or a large section of the other part and vice versa?
This would solve the problem of whose capital Jerusalem really is, but it seems like it would just change the name of many of the current problems. In order to balance both sides, you would have to arrange a power-sharing scheme even more complicated than that of Lebanon and the threat of civil war would always be hovering over your shoulder.
The article I saw said “But even in that, Colonel Qaddafi sounded more like a guest lecturer than a fiery ideologue. His theory hinged on demographics, he said: there were too many Palestinians living in Israel and too many Jewish settlers in the West Bank to divide the two into separate, homogeneous states. “I make an analysis of the reality on the ground,” he said, adding that Jews and Palestinians were cousins anyway, the grandchildren of Abraham.”
I don’t know if there are Israelis in the Palestinian areas, but I know the Christians and others are being discriminated against by both groups. As an atheist, I think all religious squabbles ought to take a back seat to civic planning, obtaining water in the desert, setting up a fair tax structure…
I am no supporter of ethnic nationalism including Zionism but I don’t think a one-state solution is feasible or would work if implemented. The single state would become like an even more unstable and violent version of Lebanon.
Having said that I wouldn’t be surprised if in the very long run that’s what Israel ends up as. I think there is maybe a ten-year window to implement a two-state solution or at least make strong progress in that direction. Practically speaking that means the Obama presidency if it lasts two terms. If Obama loses 2012 I doubt that any Republican successor would be any more successful at making progress in the Middle East than Bush.
If serious progress isn't made over that period, I think Israel will enter a long downward spiral and eventually sometime in the second half of the century, international isolation, demographic changes and violent agitation will force some kind of one-state solution.Two words come to mind: Fucking Insane.
Two groups of people that hate each other, and have for damn near forever, merged into a single country? May as well erect a giant steel cage around the region and let WWE market it as the new Armageddon PPV.
They already are a single country, just not an egalitarian one. I don’t see how tearing down barbed wire fences and giving everybody equal rights is gong to increase tension. Both sides just need to let go of the backwards and barbarous notion of religious/ethnic entitlement to land and resources.
Why should there be a two-state solution to the conflict between Pakistan and India? Wouldn’t a one-state solution solve the problems? Why do we have a n-state solution in Central America? Why do we have a two state solution between Canada and the United States? Why do we accept a racist division of North America into Mexico and the United States?
If the problem is that the West Bank is too small and disjointed to form a proper state, well, who says it has to remain an independent state? But why must it form a federation with Israel? Why not a federation with some other Arab state–like Jordan, or Lebanon, or Syria, or Egypt? What’s that? Egypt and Jordan don’t want to merge with Palestine, and have in fact refused to take back the territories they annexed in 1948?
If Egypt and Jordan don’t want to deal with the headaches of a one-state solution with the Palestinians, why do you think the Israelis are obligated to do so?
Just like in Yugoslavia, eh?
That should be pretty easy to get done. 
More like South Africa.
No, they didn’t start hating each other until the early 20th Century. Before then, Jews and Muslims got along just fine, in any country where the Muslims were running things.
As for a name for the single state, the most neutral choice would be the most ancient name for the land: Canaan.
One state is fine, but make it bigger, to make all of the middle east one big country and then all wars would be civil wars we could sit out in good conscience.
That’s what should happen, but we’ve all been trained to accept that Israel should be and always remain a “Jewish State” no matter what. Besides, Israeli’s would be scared to death of being swallowed up by the Arabs…they might as well high-tail it back to Europe, they fit in better over there anyway.
Can we please aim to see one, just one of these debates go by without someone preferring to invent fiction rather than deal with actual facts? Just one?
While your fiction sounds awful nice, claiming that Dhimmi status is “getting along just fine” evinces Orwellian levels of deception. One wonders how awesome you think Jim Crow was, too. If your argument will not stand on the facts, please do not try to substitute fiction.
Indeed…the Jews were second-class citizens in the Arab world. There were all kinds of restrictions prohibiting what they could wear, where they could live, how they could build their synagogues, etc. They weren’t allowed to ride horses or carry swords (that may sound trivial, but in a culture centered around horsemanship as a manly virtue and symbol of social standing, it was a completely degrading restriction.) If these restrictions were imposed on anybody in any country today, people would rightly call it horrific discrimination - but I guess for some people it’s “getting along just fine.”
It worked well in Lebanon. 
Yeah, but if you asked them whether they’d rather live amongst the Arabs or the Europeans, I’m pretty sure they’d choose the Arabs.
People trying to kill you tends to do that.
Sure, apart from little hiccups like the Holocaust, they got along fine.
No no no, Israel and Palestine are fungible with South Africa. Hamas et al will not embark upon violence, either, because they are fungible with the moderate factions of the ANC. We must not mention the Congo. Or Zimbabwe. Or Yugoslavia. Or Lebanon. Or Iraq. Or India-Pakistan. Or…
This is sound logic, everything will work out exactly as it did in South Africa, and we don’t even need to look at the actual situation here, because we have a totally different test case that will allow us to ignore that actual situation involved.
Obviously, this is intellectually honest logic, too.
We know, for example, that any French colonial Caribbean territory will develop Voodoo as its national religion. We know that any former French Asian territory will flirt with Communism before embracing it due to a lack of American support, then go on to defeat the US in a massive, protracted, unfocused and unpopular war and they will later welcome Bill Clinton with open arms. We know that any former colonial property of the UK will become the world’s sole superpower. We know that any revolution away from autocratic rule will involve Robespierre. We know that any large land mass administered by the UK will, upon gaining independence, fragment into religiously based halves and gain nuclear weapons and remain in a state of perpetual hostilities after massive population transfers which will be accepted by the world as necessary and just. We know that after any major war in which the aggressor is defeated, the entire world will support dismantling that state and awarding some of its territory to other nations in order to avoid future wars due to another round of the need for lebensraum. We know that any community, like a kibbutz, that embraces communism will be very successful and quite possibly a tourist destination.
And we know for sure that any time there are two groups of people are on a plot of land, and have a conflict based along broad ethnic lines, for any reason at all, with any history at all, with any grievances at all, with any current political agendas at all, that it will result in Truth and Reconciliation.
It’s so obvious I’m surprised anybody even needs to point it out.