ONE STATE SOLUTION

In Israel, Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Knesset, recently warned that if Israel wishes to preserve what little democracy it still has, it must either

• withdraw to its pre-1967 boundaries or

• grant full citizenship to the approximately 3.5 million Palestinians in the occupied territories,

a step that would spell the virtual end of the Jewish state.


Meron Benvenisti, the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, has pronounced the

• two-state approach "inapplicable" to the problem of Israel and Palestine and is

• calling for a single binational state based on Arab-Jewish equality.

In the United States the historian Tony Judt, declaring the Middle East peace process a dead letter in The New York Review of Books, says that the very idea of

• a Jewish state has become an "anachronism" in a multicultural world in which citizenship is increasingly separated from race, religion and ethnicity.

• "In today's 'clash of cultures' between open, pluralist democracies and belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno-states," he adds,
  
  
• '"Israel actually risks falling into the wrong camp."