Iappreciate Yoav Peled’s undertaking this review of my book, The One-State Solution.footnote¹ Some of his criticisms help to move the debate on the Israeli–Palestinian question forward, and since this was a central goal of the book, those moments are very welcome. Still, his approach reflects a common weakness of the one state/two state debate, in evading the real implications of the evidence I cite. He takes some early summary statements regarding a one-state solution to charge that my argument is over-simplified: ‘real political life is a little more complicated than that’, he concludes. He also dismisses my extended discussion of Zionist doctrine as ‘ethereal’, over-absorbed with ‘texts’, and divorced from useful reality. He agrees that the two-state solution is ‘dead’ yet interprets this simply as Palestinian ‘defeat’—failing to recognize its implications for Zionism. His response seems to suggest that all views are set in stone and, effectively, that no solution is imaginable. Need we be so fatalistic? Can we afford to be? The search for an equitable solution is as urgent and legitimate as ever.

Two central aspects of the book’s agenda, as well as its theoretical framework, seem to have eluded Peled. Its first goal, as he acknowledges, is to lay out the empirical evidence that a viable two-state solution is now dead. Hence the opening chapters offer a dense overview of relevant ‘facts on the ground’: the geographic realities of the settlement grid—that huge and deliberately sprawling network of stone and concrete cities, suburbs, industrial zones and highways that has already dissected the West Bank into cantons—as well as the social, political and economic grids that underpin them. A further chapter explores at length the backing, tacit and otherwise, which Israel’s annexation strategies have received from the United States, and how that backing is secured politically by a matrix of high-profile pro-Israeli ‘research’ and lobbying organizations, coordinated with a nationwide array of small but active grassroots constituencies which are regularly mobilized to pressure Congress and the media. Peled ignores this material entirely.

The goal of stimulating debate also informed a second aspect of the book’s agenda: to free up discussion of a one-state solution for Israel/Palestine by addressing head-on what is, in my experience, its principal political obstacle—the canon of intimidating and confounding claims deployed by mainstream Zionist propaganda tanks (such as local Zionist federations or ‘Israel Media Teams’). As many of us know to our great frustration, that canon now cripples pragmatic rethinking and frank discussion about the fiction—or lie, or swindle—represented by the ‘road map’. Above all, it is almost impossible to discuss a one-state solution without incurring orchestrated Zionist accusations of anti-Semitism.footnote² The second half of my book takes on this Zionist edifice in its substantive as well as divisive dimensions, in the hope that exposing ambiguities will help to liberate the social and political analysis which, as Peled correctly asserts, is essential to a one-state solution.

Some solid political science theory also underlay this approach, which seems to have run foul of Peled’s own preferred theoretical framework. The ineffable realm of values and emotion, wrapped up in ethnic identities and nationalist myths, is crucial to ethnic-conflict resolution. That realm may strike some as ‘ethereal’—particularly those who consider class struggle to be the only ‘real’ conflict in society—but it packs a strong political punch, nonetheless. Discourse analysis should be understood to complement rather than compete with socio-economic approaches; to pursue one is hardly to dismiss the importance of the other. Since Zionism and the two-state solution both exist as discourses, their analysis seemed to take priority as an opening step. If he did not grasp these agendas and the theory driving them, it is less surprising that Peled challenges me for what I did not attempt to do.

One of the most puzzling of Peled’s criticisms is his assertion that I write particularly for an American readership.footnote³ This is mistaken. As noted above, he overlooks entirely my lengthy discussion of the reasons why us policy in the Middle East is deadlocked; nor does he address my argument that neither Europe nor the Arab states have sufficient will or leverage to alter us policy. Facing these political realities reveals that the driving force for change must be sought elsewhere. The transnational human-rights community may now comprise the only agent capable of creating the political space in which the diplomatic community might be brought to consider a one-state solution—for example, through the international boycott and disinvestment campaign now springing up within European, us and South–South human-rights networks.

This international orientation also reflects the expanding global character of the debate. The academic world may be aggravating the common misapprehension, shared by Peled, that arguments for a one-state solution are largely confined to ‘Palestinian intellectuals’ (or to academics generally). My own recent experience in Washington, London, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Budapest, Berlin and Pretoria, not to mention extensive internet activism, has confirmed that the death of the two-state solution has become the elephant in the room for diplomats, human-rights activists and the ‘Arab street’ alike. Judging by confidential reports, belief that a one-state solution has become inevitable is circulating within the Palestinian Authority itself. (In December 2005, Saeb Erekat told me that he is the primary voice in the pa still arguing against a one-state solution, indirectly confirming this internal turmoil.)

Nor is this analysis confined to Palestinians: broad layers of diplomats and other staff from European states and the United Nations are privately discussing the one-state solution. Moreover, some of the most eloquent endorsements for such a solution are from prominent Jewish professionals in Israel and abroad: Tony Judt, Rabbi David Goldberg, Haim Hanegbi and Tony Lehman come immediately to mind. The scope of this widening concern can be measured also by the angry denunciations of one-state ideas now regularly emanating from official Israeli bodies and local Zionist organizations, which would not be moved by the writings of a few ‘Palestinian intellectuals’.