On our recent webinar celebrating the launch of Beyond the Two-State Solution, we were pleased to hear from Robert Herbst. He has just published a piece about Jonathan Kuttab's new book on Mondoweiss. Please read an excerpt here and read the powerful full article at the link below.
If the Two State solution is dead – no longer viable – is there, or could there be, sufficient Palestinian support for a One State solution that guarantees equal rights, dignity, and resources to both peoples? How would we mobilize public opinion around it, there, here, and around the world? What would the end game be? What might it look like? How do we get there?
Jonathan Kuttab is a Palestinian-American human rights lawyer in Palestine, Israel, and the United States. He has now delivered a book devoted to those questions and how we might start to answer them. Born in West Jerusalem to a family who moved to the United States after the Six Day War, he is the co-founder of Al-Haq, the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence. In “Beyond the Two State Solution”, published by Nonviolence International, he offers a vision of a single state that might respect the national aspirations of both peoples.
The book – a booklet really, numbering 100 pages in large-font – is a quick and easy read. Without implying any moral symmetry between the claims of the Zionist and Palestinian national movements, Kuttab quickly describes how those movements developed and how their respective narratives generally accorded no place for the other and take us through the expulsion of most Palestinians from their homeland, the 1967 War and occupation. He characterizes the Two State Solution as a compromise between the two national movements, which soon became “the only game in town” — only to die at the hands of Israel, whose officials and settlers changed the facts on the ground, choosing dominion over all the land between the River and the Sea rather than creating conditions for a viable Palestinian state.
If you would like a copy of the booklet, click the links below!
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Robert Herbst is a human rights lawyer in New York City and a member of the Westchester, New York chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. He has been speaking and writing on Israel-Palestine since Operation Protective Edge in Gaza in 2014. Before moving to Westchester, Bob served on the Board and Executive Committee of Congregation Bnai Jeshurun on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and as Chair of its Social Action Committee.
Read the full article on the Mondoweiss.