All successful liberation movements in history had a clear vision of what constituted liberation. The Vietnamese National Liberation Front set the objective of driving the US army out of their land and establishing one socialist state. The French resistance was not content with driving the German army out but aimed to dismantle the Nazi state. The African National Congress centered its efforts on dismantling apartheid while allowing white South Africans to remain. The Algerian National Liberation Front set out conditions under which French settlers would be allowed to remain after liberation. One thing they all had in common: A single state over all of the land, through which society itself—not foreign forces—could determine its future.

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) also set out such a vision in 1964 and 1968, emphasizing the unity of Palestinian land and setting out the conditions under which Jews could remain. Unfortunately, it dropped that vision when it bowed to the colony and the US at Oslo. In this context, the recent articles on the “one democratic state” solution are an excellent development in terms of discussing the original Palestinian vision for liberation. This article aims to take this discussion some steps further.

Diagnosing the problem to discern the solution

The questions recently raised by Lara Kilani in her article are critical. There is, of course, room for debate on each of them. This said, diagnosing the problem helps up discern the solution. If we understand occupation as the imposition of foreign hegemony, and the difference between immigration and settler colonization to be that settlers seek, not to integrate an indigenous society, but to impose a polity of their own atop of it, then the problem because clear: The existence of a settler state that (happens to) defines itself as Jewish. This means that the problem is not the presence of non-Palestinians but that of a non-Palestinian state; that the problem with the two-state model is not the number “two” but the fact that one of them is a non-Palestinian state; and that the root problem is not the violence itself but the fact violence is inherent to the existence of a non-Palestinian state. Once the diagnosis is clear, the solution is equally clear: Not just “one state”—the colony is also “one state”—but one Palestinian state, on all of Palestinian land.

This is the foundation for........

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