Reprinted from Gush Shalom
No more gas. No more pollution. No more astronomical prices. Just fill it up with water, and it will fly to the end of the world.
"Wonderful!" people cried out. "Show us the plans!"
"Plans?" the man said. "I have had the great idea. I leave it to the engineers to work out the technical details."
The inventors of the "One-State Solution" remind me of this genius. They have a wonderful idea. But there are a few questions left open.
FIRST QUESTION: how can it be achieved?
The obvious answer is: by war.
The Arab world will mobilize its armies. Israel will be conquered. The victors will impose their will.
This may be possible within a few generations. I rather doubt it. In a world of nuclear arms, wars may end with mutual annihilation.
Well, if not war, then "outside pressure."
I doubt this, too. The international boycott movement is quite effective, in its way. But it is far, far from being able to compel Israelis to do something that is opposed by every fiber of their being: to give up their sovereignty. The same goes for political pressure. It may hurt Israel, it may isolate it -- though I don't believe this is possible in this or the next generation -- but this, too, won't be enough to bring Israel to its knees.
Convince the majority in Israel? One has to be very remote from Israeli reality to believe that this can happen in the foreseeable future. For more than 130 years, now, the core of the Zionist and Israeli raison d'etre has been Israeli (or "Jewish") statehood. Many people have died for it. Every child in Israel is indoctrinated from kindergarten on, through school and the army, to see the state as the highest of all ideals. Give it up voluntarily? Not likely.
But for argument's sake, let's assume that one way or another, the One-State Solution becomes possible. Perhaps by divine intervention.
How would it function?
In all my dozens of debates with One-Staters of all kinds, I have never, not even once, received an answer to this simple question. Not once. Like the inventor of the water-fueled plane, they leave that to the engineers.
Let's try.
