The idea of "one joint state" was old when I was a boy. It
flourished in the 30s of the last century. But it went bankrupt. The idea of the two-state solution grew in the soil of the new reality.
If I may be permitted to make a personal remark: I am not a historian. I was alive when it happened. I am an eyewitness, an earwitness, a feeling witness. As a soldier in the 1948 war, as the editor of a news magazine for 40 years, as a Knesset member for ten years, as an activist of Gush Shalom, I have seen the events from different angles. My hand is on the public pulse.
There are three questions concerning the one-state idea:
1. Is it at all possible?
2. If it is possible-is it good?
3. Will it bring a just peace?
As to the first question, my absolutely unequivocal answer is: "No, it is not possible."
Anyone connected with the Israeli-Jewish public knows that its innermost desire is the existence of a state with a Jewish majority, a state where the Jews are masters of their fate. That desire trumps all other aims, even the desire for a state in all of Eretz Israel.
One can talk about one state from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, a bi-national or non-national state-in practice what it means is the dismantling of the State of Israel, the negation of all the nation building that has been carried out by five generations. That must be said clearly, without mumbling and equivocation, and that's what the public-the Jewish, and certainly the Palestinian public-quite rightly thinks it is. What we are talking about is the dismantling of the State of Israel.
We want to change many things in this state, its historical narrative, its accepted definition as a "Jewish and democratic" state. We want to put an end to the occupation outside and the discrimination inside. We want to create a new basis for the relationship between the state and its Arab-Palestinian citizens. But it is impossible to ignore the basic ethos of the huge majority of the state's citizens.
99.99 percent of the Jewish public do not want to dismantle the state. And that's quite natural.
There is an illusion that this can be changed through pressure from outside. Will outside pressure compel this people to give up the state?
I propose to you a simple test: think for a moment about your neighbors at home, at work, or at the university. Would any one of them give up the state because somebody abroad wants them to?