"Past and Present Perfect of Israel’s One-State Solution" 

Caged in a minuscule china-store are a cat, a dog and an elephant. Their lives are fraught with tensions, hazards, and risks. As a consequence, the cat and the dog engage each other to debate the situation and devise paths to secure dignified life for all. Their exchanges are scrutinized also by observers who split every hair to four to weigh prospects for a functioning coexistence. Notwithstanding his dominance over the store, the elephant and his reasoning are rarely considered thoroughly. This, I submit, metaphorizes the post-1993 One-State/Two-States debate on Palestine/Israel. Whereas the neglected elephant in the china-store is Israel’s ruling Zionist Right – the cat and dog represent the non-Zionist One-State school and the left-Zionist Two-State school who ‘own’ the 1S2S debate. In what follows two complementary propositions are explained. The first is that there never really was a consequential pre-1948 Zionist constituency – nor a post-1948 Israeli-Jewish constituency – that supported a Two-State partition in the Lilliputian 26,320 km2 territory comprising Mandatory Palestine from the Jordan Valley to the Mediterranean Sea. Anti-partition was certainly the historical Palestinian stand as well. The second proposition is concurrent: the breathtaking One-State vision for this territory—in its dominant forms of a liberal or bi-national state—seems equally unlikely to materialize. Standard 1S2S solutions appear remote because the sole empirical/material process that does unfold in this territory since 1919 is what I term Israel's One-State Solution, i.e., ceaseless consolidation of Zionist-Israeli domination over the whole territory comprising mandatory Palestine.