Greg Waldmann in Open Letters Monthly:
“Let me propose,” writes the Palestinian academic and activist Sari Nusseibeh in What is a Palestinian State Worth?, “that Israel officially annex the occupied territories, and that Palestinians in the enlarged Israel agree that the state remain Jewish in return for being granted all the civil, though not the political, rights of citizenship.” It will seem startling that such an idea could come from the pen of an organizer of the first intifada, a former prisoner of the Israeli military, and a one-time representative of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. But Nusseibeh isn’t exactly endorsing this, not as a permanent solution. It is a provocation, one he hopes is “so objectionable that it might well generate its own annulment, either by making all parties see the need to find a tenable alternative or, if indeed adopted, by serving as a natural step toward a single democratic state.” The two-state solution has become stale in the imagination, and it is time, he says, to “think outside the box,” to find another way forward. He wants Israelis and Palestinians to prepare to live together because he believes the dream of two peaceful states living side by side is probably dead. Few people have more authority to issue that judgment.
More here.
