Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Western powers, and in some cases, private organizations with the backing and support of Western powers, embarked on the colonialization and imperial rule of much of the world. In some cases, as in India and South Africa, the motive was profit. In others, as with the Puritans and the Zionists, the goal was to found a new society, safe from persecution, on one's own terms. Sometimes the goal was simply the traditional one of extending the power and glory of the regime.
In all cases, this resulted in conflict, because there is nowhere on earth where people want to live where there are not people living already. The story of Zionism, which is, like any other historical phenomenon, unique, is no exception to this iron rule. Native Jews (who were anti-Zionist) formed 3% of Palestine's population in 1800. The effort to transform this tiny minority (only 7,000 people), smaller than the Muslim majority and the Christain minority both, lead directly to the conflict that continues to rage today.
So what is the solution to the conflict between the Jewish settlers and their children and grandchildren, and the native Palestinians?
We cannot turn the clock back. Presently we have two five-million strong, pissed off communities, plus millions more, equally if not more passionate, in the Diasporas of both sides. So what is the solution?
In almost every case, whether it meant the loss of the colonial movement's monopoly on power, as in South Africa, or simply an admission of the natives as equal partners in the state that took their homeland, as in the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, colonial states around the world have had to enfranchise the natives. While it sounds simple, in many cases it was the cumulation of literally centuries of struggle, both violent and civil. Discrimination, in many cases, has continued. Nevertheless, where it has happened, as in South Africa, there are not very many people who argue for its reversal. It is generally accepted as both fair and practical, as long as the colonizers and their descendants are equal partners in the new constitutional framework, and not the targets of harassment, as has been the case, for example, in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. Which leads us logically to:
One democratic state shared by all faiths and ethnicities: the perfect solution.
The idea here is to stop trying to partition Palestine, which has, frankly, not worked out so well so far, and take the single state which has governed the Mandate since 1967 and modify its laws so that all the Palestinians are citizens and Palestinian refugees have the right to return to their homeland.
In theory, this is the ideal solution. Israel is the regional specialist at absorbing and retraining immigrants: they've absorbed millions of Jewish immigrants. They also have the only economy in the region that could begin to be dynamic enough to absorb the Palestinian refugees who have been without employment or rights of ownership for decades.
We bypass the problem of the PA's corruption and Hamas' anti-Semitism, and we use the only functional legal and administrative authority around; Israel's. Fatah and Hamas can run for office and sit in the Knessnet, where they can sit next to the corrupt Shas or the racist Yisrael Beiteinu. With any luck, they'll cancel each other out and the moderates on both sides will gain.
As we have seen in South Africa, giving the natives a strong stake in the united state makes a lot of the problems of reconciliation easier. Sorting out property claims and paying compensation, deciding what to do about terrorists and war criminals on both sides -- these things are progressing nicely in South Africa, for a simple reason, which is -- not to be cynical -- that white South Africans, under the negotiated settlement, continue to control most of the wealth and most of the key positions in the economy. Push them hard, and they will simply leave, and the economy will collapse. Since it's their economy now, the black majority has think long and hard before embarking on redistributive justice (which is one of the great fears of Jewish Israelis).
Yes, the one-state model is perfect. No one is displaced or expelled. You don't have two armed and mistrustful states, each harboring many nationalists and religious fundamentalists with a strong belief that the other is squatting on land that belongs to them. It's simple -- you could bring it about by changing two laws, on citizenship and the Law of Return -- and it solves all the outstanding issues in a just and reasonable way.
But the perfect, in this case, may be the enemy of the good. The single-state solution may turn out to be the Betamax of political settlements, it's superiority in principle made irrelevant by the adoption of another standard. Because that's the problem with the single state solution -- not enough adopters. Most Jewish Israelis regard the idea as suicide (but some 20% do not, which is somewhat surprising, given the conventional wisdom is that "99.99%" oppose it. That contention, and an excellent discussion of one state vs. two, can be found in a debate between Ilan Pappe and Uri Avnery, here.) Never being a minority subject to the rule of a majority is what Zionism is all about. They also have a health dose of the colonial attitude that the natives are inherently bloodthirsty and violent (and as is always the case, they can point to examples, examples which ignore the causal event of seizing someone else's land. I've often maintained that if America were settling the frontier today, we would describe it as a reaction to the deadly scalping threat.)
The world's major powers, each for their own reasons, tend to support Israel's meme that the Jewish population must always rule over the lands captured in 1948. This position has been misrepresented as a "right" -- "Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state." But misconstrued or not, most of the Western world supports them in this. Russia and China probably could care less, one way or the other, but Israel has astutely cultivated both parties with economic and technological alliances. To make a long story short, one state is a non-starter with most of the heavies.
The Palestinians, who have often been libeled as fanatics, and unfairly castigated for missing opportunities for peace (opportunities which, if one closely investigates, were not very real to begin with. But that's an argument for another time.) have responded to Israel's military, economic, and diplomatic supremacy by moving away from the single democratic state solution, which they advocated from the 1920s to the 1980s, with the exception of a brief period in the 1950s and early 1960s in which the newly formed Fatah advocated expelling the Jewish population (this was at a point when Fatah was basically three guys in a basement with a newsletter, so while it's never OK to advocate or propose ethnic cleansing, I suggest keeping it in its proper historical context). Both of the large Palestinian resistance movements, Hamas and Fatah, support a two-state solution. (I'll get to the confusion around Hamas' position in part two). The Israeli left, what remains of it, also supports partition.
So if you are holding a one-stater convention, don't order too many platters of hors d'oevres, if you get my meaning. Other than the Third World, which contains a lot of people with a history of being colonized, the one-state solution is mostly the provenance of hard-core leftists, some intellectuals, and a significant minority of the Palestinians. (But before Zionists puff up their chests too much, it is worth recalling that a lot of successful social and political change started out with a coalition of victims of the status quo, intellectuals, and hard-core leftists.)
All of which brings us logically to:
Part Two (no pun intended): Two states partitioned along the lines of June 4th, 1967, with the Right of Return honored: the good solution.