The Reemergence of One-Statism

international administration to soldier on. Temporary international governance—conceivable though highly unlikely—would leave us where we were before, seeking a solution in the medium and long term to the Zionist-Arab conundrum. External, foreign rule over one political entity offers, it would seem, no solution.

More saliently, there are three realistic basic formulas for a one-state solution: a state with joint Arab-Jewish sovereignty, based on some form of power-sharing by the two ethnic collectives ( à la Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland) or on individual rights without any collective ethnic entities and entitlements (à la postapartheid South Africa), both of which can be defined as forms of binationalism; a state ruled by Jews, with or without a large or small Arab minority; and a state ruled by Muslim Arabs, with or without a large or small Jewish minority. I write Muslim Arabs because the proportion of Christians among Palestine’s Arabs has been declining steadily since 1947, when they were close to 10 percent of the population. Today less than 5 percent of Palestinian Arabs are Christians, and their numbers continue to diminish through emigration to the West (mainly from the West Bank—Bethlehem is now a Muslim-majority town). The proportion of Christians among Israel’s Arab citizens is higher, but given far higher Muslim birthrates and a measure of Christian emigration, the proportion of Christians in Israel’s Arab minority is also declining. So the Christian element in Israel/Palestine is negligible and politically irrelevant.

Palestinian Arab nationalists, of both the Fatah and Hamas