After Zionism - One State for Israel and Palestine
edited by Antony Loewenstein and Ahmed Moor contains an interesting and fascinating collection of essays by a very diverse range of contributors.There are 14 essays and the only one I have some arguments about is the last one, which to me seemed out of tune with the tenor of the other contributions.
The conclusions reached by many of the contributors are that in the end, both the Israelis and Palestinians will have to make enormous compromises, but that small area of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean will have to be shared on an equalised democratic basis with Israel basically being forced to share one of the Middle East's rarest commodities - life-giving and sustaining water.
Apartheid can only last for a limited period of time. Ultimately the pressure from the outside world, pathetic as it has been for over 60 years, is beginning to change as later generations of Jews and others outside the Middle East are beginning to see through the Israeli claim that they are the only democracy in the Middle East.
Israel has become more theocratic over the last 20 years and both this theocracy and that of the Hamas regime in Gaza will be forced out of their dogmatic controlling influences as the peoples of both sides of the apartheid barriers learn to understand how they will need to compromise to allow peace to settle on all their communities.
Ultimately, this book is an opening for more dialogue to take place throughout the governments and media of those countries with an abiding interest in maintaining the current status quo to the disadvantage of everybody everywhere. Threats to world peace, destabilising influences, nuclear threats because of Israel being the only nuclear power in the Middle East, and being maintained in that situation by the United States of America, who sing to Israel's song for reasons of imperial control of resources in all the surrounding countries, will have to come to an end.
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