Surmising that: ‘Once we grant that Palestinians and Israelis are there to stay, then the decent conclusion has to be the need for peaceful coexistence and genuine reconciliation’, Said’s seminal essay on the subject of a one-state solution assesses the reality of just and sustained peace as an outcome of the two state solution and the alternative proposed by the author himself. One state that delivers the ideal of the “idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community, as the main vehicle for coexistence.”

Using the example of institutionalised racism in South Africa, the authors place the idea of a one-state solution within the context of the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions. A two-state solution, with its concretisation of racist and colonial injustices, cannot allow for the development of Palestinian self-determination.

Since the now iconic handshake between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn in 1993 the two-state solution has gained currency as the best possible chance of peace in the Middle East. The awkward shake was the culmination of the Oslo Accords,