Sunday, June 18, 2006
Virginia Tilley on "The One-State Solution"
I read Virginia Tilley's The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock (Univ. of Michigan Pr., 2005) before I started this blog and didn't take notes. So, rather than try to write a review from my faulty memory I provide interested readers with an excerpt below from a review by Professor Mahmoud N. Musa on the Association for One Democratic State in Palestine/Israel web site.
Few people are as qualified to write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the author of this book. She is a professor of political science with a PhD from the university of Wisconsin with special emphasis on ethnic conflict. Further, Dr. Tilley has had twenty years direct experience with this conflict, including living there for two years. The book, is scholarly, well-documented, and illustrated with maps. It can serve as an excellent background for this conflict, and includes a discussion of the important international actors: the Zionist movement, the Arab States, the United States of America, Europe, and the United Nations.Tilley wrote an essay entitled "The One-State Solution" for the London Review of Books in 2003. Here's an excerpt:
... the conditions for an independent Palestinian state have been killed off by the inexorable and irreversible advance of the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. The two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an idea, and a possibility, whose time has passed, its death obscured (as was perhaps intended) by daily spectacle: the hoopla of a useless 'road map', the cycles of Israeli gunship assassinations and Palestinian suicide bombings, the dismal internal Palestinian power struggles, the house demolitions and death counts - all the visible expressions of a conflict which has always been over control of land.
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