Two Peoples or One Nation: The Case for Re-Imagining Israel-Palestine

Israel’s settlements in the West Bank have progressed to the point that most observers privately agree that a two-state solution is dead. Yet while Israel absorbs ever more land and resources, diplomats and regional experts continue to discuss the partition, as though it is still viable. The idea of a two-state solution appears everywhere in international diplomacy. Why is the concept of the two-state solution so entrenched?

According to Virginia Q. Tilley, the collective refusal to accept the obvious is best understood as a ’paradigm shift’ that has stalled. This is because the international community cannot reconceive the Palestine problem as ’one nation wrongfully divided by racial nationalism’ but instead view it as ’two peoples in one land’. To deconstruct the idea, Tilley invites readers to reconsider the very terms of ’peoples’, ’nations’, ’states’ and ’nation-states’, and challenges ideas about the history of the conflict and the racial logic that has for too long been accepted. Based on this new analysis, and by comparing the situation of South Africa, Jewish statehood is revealed to be conceptualized in ways that generate a regime consistent with the definition of apartheid in international law.

The book recommends a paradigm shift in international law and argues that peace is dependent on the embedded beliefs, values and ideas being revised by all parties. This means that the Palestine problem should be treated as a domestic conflict that requires conflict resolution to eliminate racial division within the society, rather than an international conflict that requires conflict resolution to end Israel’s occupation.

Virginia Q. Tilley is Frank L. Klingberg Professor of International Relations at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USA. She has over 30 years’ experience in studying the Palestine question, as well as comparative studies of ethnic conflict and the history of ideas and ideology in nation-building. She is the author The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock (2005) and Seeing Indians: A Study in Race, Nation and Power in El Salvador (2005). She edited Beyond Occupation: Apartheid, Colonialism and International law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (2012) and also co-authored with Richard Falk ＂Israel’s Practices regarding the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid＂ for the United Nations Economic and Social Council for Western Asia (ESCWA).