Monday, August 01, 2011

How do Palestinian intellectuals feel about the two-state solution?

When discussing Palestinian support or non-support for the two-state solution, the discussion tends to focus on people responding to opinion polls and the pronouncements of officials. A current EOZ post presents an attack (from a Electronic Intifada piece called "The sham solidarity of Israel’s Zionist left") on, among other things, the two-state solution, an attack which includes the following sentence:
The whole idea of two states for two peoples as the only solution to the Palestinian-Israeli impasse — extremely popular among liberal Zionists — is predicated upon isolationism, exceptionalism and Zionists’ sense of moral righteousness and superiority to Palestinians which grants them the legitimacy to determine the problem, the solution and the means by which this solution shall be achieved.
Besides the fact that the quote makes you wonder what the author thinks "isolationism" and other words mean, the sentence suggests that there is no advocate of the two-state solution that the author would ever care to try to convince of anything. How typical is this fellow of the Palestinian intellectual where the two-state solution is concerned? Is it possible to generalize about such things? It would be an interesting avenue of investigation. I don't know exactly where it would lead, but it might make an interesting series of posts.

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