One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse By Ali Abunimah Metropolitan Books, 220 pp. $23.00

Violence is intensifying in Palestine. A 2006 cease fire collapsed in May under a barrage of rocket fire and the re-entry of Israeli troops into Gaza. The death toll mounts. For Palestinians, the stress of living under Israeli occupation grows more desperate. The costs, for Israelis too, are multiplying. The “peace process,” championed by successive US administrations is stymied. The Israeli government, wracked by corruption and scandal and its inability to live in peace with its neighbors, cannot provide real security for its people. The Palestinian Coalition Authority, made up of competing Fatah and Hamas factions is also unable to unite behind a coherent vision for the future, and is in danger of collapse. Yet, in spite of what appear to be intractable difficulties, there are still those who believe that real alternatives exist. Prominent among them is Ali Abunimah, a young Palestinian American who has written a book that offers a compelling vision for peace. In it, he rejects outright the “two state solution” embodied in UN resolutions and the 1993 Oslo Accords that call on Palestinians and Israelis to recognize each other’s pre-1967 borders in exchange for peace. Instead of “two-states,” Abunimah calls on Palestinians and Jews to come together to create a single, unified, multi-ethnic democratic state, with a constitution and a bill of rights that would guarantee full citizenship and equality of opportunity to all its citizens, Arab, Jewish, Muslim and Christian.

The idea is not new. Abunimah reminds us that years ago, leading Jewish intellectuals, including Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Buber, warned against the partition of Palestine into two separate states. In 1947, Buber wrote, “Jews and Arabs need to develop the land together without one imposing his will on the other…We need to aim at a social structure based on the reality of two people living together.” Buber and Arendt also worried about Zionists basing their claims for statehood on Biblical scripture. Buber wrote, “If every people in the world based their claim to land on where they had lived 2,000 years ago, the world would be a madhouse.”

The vision of a bi-national, one state Palestine soon evaporated however, as Zionists, with their goal of a greater Jewish state, maintained that Israel’s national security, threatened by its Arab neighbors, would depend on building a formidable military presence in the region. Palestinian nationalists responded with desperate appeals to their Arab neighbors in an ultimately futile effort to regain their lost homeland. Decades of war ensued, all ending in Israeli victories and Palestinian losses.

Abunimah argues that the international communities’ “two state solution” to the conflict has proven utterly unworkable. Israel has never committed to withdrawing from territories occupied since 1967. Instead, in violation of UN resolutions and subsequent rulings by the International Court of Justice, it has expanded Jewish settlements in those territories, and built protective walls and fences that slice across the Palestinian countryside, dividing Palestinian families and communities. Despite numerous international resolutions condemning these actions, Palestinians continue to suffer the loss of their homes and farms. Their communities are desperately poor, jobs are scarce, and movement is restricted. Farmers are cut off from their markets and children from their schools. Over four million Palestinians live in exile. Others resort to desperate, often self-destructive acts of violence.

So on what does Abunimah base his optimism? How can a legacy of mistrust, fear, hatred and war, be transformed by hope, mutual respect and peace? To these questions Abunimah offers lessons from South Africa’s and Northern Ireland’s recent history. Both countries, despite years of bloodshed, religious and ethnic violence, finally emerged from those horrors and created unified, tolerant, multicultural, democracies. Twenty years ago, few of us would have had much faith in such outcomes. But the lessons from South Africa and Northern Ireland are inspiring, and Abunimah uses them effectively. His use of South Africa’s example is especially compelling.

For decades, South Africa’s apartheid government manipulated the fears of its white minority population, maintaining that only by enforcing strict racial segregation and depriving Black South Africans of their civil rights, economic opportunities and political representation could white South Africans survive. The parallels with conditions in Israeli-occupied Palestine are striking. With many of their leaders imprisoned or in exile, ANC activists often resorted to violence against strategic targets. In response, the apartheid government increased its repression, and insisted that it would never negotiate with “terrorists.” While the ANC never gave up its right to an armed struggle, its leaders broadened their tactics, mobilizing a non-violent campaign to build global support for economic sanctions, an arms embargo and a cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa. With international pressure mounting, and the ever present threat of renewed violence in the absence of good-faith negotiations, the South African government dropped the excuse not to talk. And talk they did! Abunimah argues that Palestinians and Israelis can learn much from South Africa’s example. Palestinians need to adopt a message and methods that make it clear that their target is not the Israeli people but rather an “unjust system that denies one people their rights, identity and dignity, and condemns the other to increasing isolation, fear and moral corruption.”

Abunimah appreciates the difficulties Palestinians and Israelis who hope to follow South Africa’s example now face. Palestinians will need to articulate a vision in which Israelis can see themselves in “a future of reconciliation rather than revenge.” Israelis will need to “listen to their enemies rather than demonize them, which may lead to a secure future free of the burden of ruling others by force.” He notes that among Palestinians, even among Hamas supporters, there is overwhelming support for a negotiated settlement. A poll taken after the 2006 election found 84% of Palestinians in the occupied territories wanted a negotiated peace. And within Hamas, an avowedly Islamist movement, key members have signaled their openness. As one of them wrote in a recent Washington Post article, “Our society has always celebrated pluralism in keeping with the unique history of the Holy Land. In recognizing Judeo-Christian traditions, Muslims nobly vie for and have the greatest incentive of all three Abrahamic faiths.”

These are the voices that the international community must hear. The campaign for Palestinians rights is growing, but it still is far from reaching the strength that the anti-apartheid movement once had. The U.S. government’s stubborn commitment to a two-state solution and its tolerance for Israel’s occupation policies dangerously undermine prospects for peace. Edward Said understood this, and Ali Abunimah reminds us of what that pioneering thinker wrote in 1993. “It has been the failing of Oslo to plan in terms of separations, a clinical partition of peoples into individual, but unequal entities rather than to grasp that the only way of rising beyond the endless back-and-forth violence and dehumanization is to admit the universality and integrity of the other’s experience, and to begin to plan a common life together.”

“One Country” offers this compelling solution again. It deserves our attention and careful consideration.

Wendy Hazard teaches history at the University of Maine in Augusta