This weekend, Harvard Kennedy School is hosting a controversial “Student Conference” that has been organized to promote the so-called “one-state solution” as the best option to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to the conference program, the event will start out asserting that “’two-states for two peoples’” is no longer a viable option for Israel/Palestine,” and towards the end of the conference, participants will devote themselves to pondering how best to build a “global movement” to serve their agenda and how “academics and activists” could contribute to this endeavor.
Proponents of the “one-state solution” like to present their views in a language designed to create the impression that their primary concern lies with human and civil rights. However, it obviously takes willful blindness to overlook the fact that implementing an Israeli-Palestinian “one-state solution” would require the abolition of the world’s only Jewish state in order to subsume it in yet another Arab-Muslim majority state where Jews would have to live as a minority – and, based on the empirical record, it is only reasonable to expect that they would face the same precarious situation as minorities everywhere in the Arab and Muslim world.