There Will Be a One-State SolutionNovember/December 2019 33be moved around and dismembered,
because they were not a people deserv-
ing o demographic cohesion. Twenty
years later, the British Peel Commission
proposed a partition plan that would
have kept together the vast majority o
the Jews in Palestine but would have
split the Arab population into three
separate political entities: one Arab, one
Jewish, and one British. A decade after
that, in the wake o the Holocaust, a £
partition plan presented a similar vision,
with borders drawn to create a Jewish-
majority state and with the Palestinians
again divided into multiple entities.
In 1948, as British rule over Palestine
came to an end, Zionist militias began to
create a Jewish state on the ground by
force, relying on the £ partition plan to
legitimize their aims. In the war that
followed, the majority o the land’s
Palestinian inhabitants were forced out
or Áed ahead o Israeli incursions; they
were never allowed to return. Their land
was seized by the new state, their villages
were razed, and their urban homes were
given to Jewish newcomers. They
became refugees, their lives thrown into
limbo. Palestinians refer to this historical
moment as the nakba—the “catastrophe.”
The 19 years that followed might be
the only time in the past two millennia
that the land o Palestine was actually
divided. None o the great powers who
had ruled over the territory—the
Romans, the Byzantines, the Umayyads,
the Abbasids, the Fatimids, the crusad-
ers, the Ayyubids, the Mameluks, the
Ottomans, the British—had ever
divided Gaza from Jerusalem, Nablus
from Nazareth, or Jericho from Jaa.
Doing so never made sense, and it still
doesn’t. Indeed, when Israel took
control o the territories in 1967, itsuch disputes miss the point: any plan
that saw partition as a means to a just
solution was always doomed to fail.
The belie in the viability o a
two-state solution has depended on a
Áawed assumption that the conÁict was
rooted in the aftermath o the 1967 war.
Peace through partition would be
possible, advocates argued, i only the
two sides could break the violent cycle
o occupation and resistance that took
hold after the war. Yet the dilemmas
posed by partition long predate 1967
and stem from a fundamentally insolu-
ble problem. For the better part o a
century, Western powers—Ärst the
United Kingdom and then the United
States—have repeatedly tried to square
the same circle: accommodating the
Zionist demand for a Jewish-majority
state in a land populated overwhelm-
ingly by Palestinians. This illogical
pro ject was made possible by a willing-
ness to dismiss the humanity and rights
o the Palestinian population and by
sympathy for the idea o creating a
space for Jews somewhere outside
Europe—a sentiment that was some-
times rooted in an anti-Semitic wish to
reduce the number o Jews in the
Christian-dominated West.
In 1917, the British government
issued the Balfour Declaration, outlining
the goal o creating a “national home”
in Palestine for the Jewish people
without infringing on “the civil and
religious rights o the existing non-Jewish”
population. This formulation contained
a fundamental Áaw, one that would mar
all future partition plans, as well: it
conceived o the Jews as a people with
national rights but did not grant the
same status to the Palestinians. The
Palestinian population could therefore