Eugene Rogan of Oxford, in the Financial Times, gets his head around the one-state solution. Wish they were talking about this in the American press.
Imagine that the settlers were to be allowed to remain as Israeli citizens in the state of Palestine after a peace deal, in exchange for an equal number of Palestinians in refugee camps being allowed to return to their native lands inside Israel. Palestinians exercising this right of return would be given Palestinian citizenship, and would live in Israel and respect Israeli law just as the settlers would have to respect Palestinian law. Like those Israelis who aspire to live in Judea and Samaria, there are thousands of Palestinian refugees who aspire to return to their ancestral homes. Rather than unbalancing Israel’s delicate demography, the returning Palestinians would give equilibrium to the Israeli presence in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Settlements can be the leading obstacle to peace. Or they can provide a solution to the refugee question, one of the most intractable problems of the Arab-Israeli conflict. At the very least, the prospect of a one-to-one Palestinian right of return for each Israeli settler remaining in the West Bank would put a real price on Israel’s continued settlement building.
