One State, Two States Quotes

“Although . . . polls have often concluded that most Palestinians, at least in the West Bank and Gaza, support a two-state settlement, they have also shown that there is almost complete unanimity among Palestinians in support of the “right of return,” the implementation of which would necessarily subvert any two-state settlement. And Palestinian Arabs are equally unanimous in denying the legitimacy of Zionism and Israel—which, again, would raise a vast question mark over the durability of any two-state arrangement.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“The idea of a “secular democratic Palestine” is as much a nonstarter today as it was three decades ago. It is a nonstarter primarily because the Palestinian Arabs, like the world’s other Muslim Arab communities, are deeply religious and have no respect for democratic values and no tradition of democratic governance.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“The mindset and basic values of Israeli Jewish society and Palestinian Muslim society are so different and mutually exclusive as to render a vision of binational statehood tenable only in the most disconnected and unrealistic of minds.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“The idea of sharing Palestine (as indeed, the sharing of any Muslim Arab land with non-Muslims and non-Arabs)—either through a division of the country into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab, or through a unitary binational entity, based on political parity between the two communities—is alien to the Muslim Arab mindset.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“From the eighth or ninth centuries, Muslim Arabs have been politically dominant in the Islamic world and have grown accustomed to that position; the notion of sharing power or being a minority in a non-Muslim Arab polity is alien to the Muslim Arab mentality.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“If a one-state solution is a nonstarter, what are the prospects for a two-state solution? Put simply, they appear very bleak. Bleak primarily because the Palestinian Arabs, in the deepest fibers of their being, oppose such an outcome, demanding, as they did since the dawn of their national movement, all of Palestine as their patrimony. And I would hazard that, in the highly unlikely event that Israel and the PNA were in the coming years to sign a two-state agreement, it would in short order unravel. It would be subverted and overthrown by those forces in the Palestinian camp—probably representing Palestinian Arab majority opinion and certainly representing the historic will of the Palestinian national movement—bent on having all of Palestine. To judge from its past behavior, the PNA would be unwilling and, probably, incapable of reining in the more militant, expansionist factions—Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and so on—who would represent themselves as carrying on the patriotic, religious duty of resisting the Zionist invader. No Palestinian leader can fight them without being dubbed a “traitor” and losing his public’s support.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“The division of historic Mandatory Palestine as proposed, of 79 percent for the Jews and 21 percent for the Palestinian Arabs, cannot fail to leave the Arabs, all Arabs, with a deep sense of injustice, affront, and humiliation and a legitimate perception that a state consisting of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (and perhaps large parts of East Jerusalem)—altogether some two thousand square miles—is simply not viable, politically and economically.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“Suicide bombings, introduced into the region by Hezbollah in the 1980s, were inaugurated by the Palestinian fundamentalists after the Goldstein massacre at the Tomb of the Patriarchs.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“The Second Intifada did nothing to push the Palestinians toward accepting a two-state solution. Indeed, because of Israel’s countermeasures, the Palestinian rebellion appeared to harden popular attitudes against Israel, which was certainly Hamas’s intention in the first place.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“The Hamas is deeply, essentially anti-Semitic.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“Though Hamas’s operations over the years have focused on Israel and the occupied territories, the movement’s ideology has potential universal reach or, as the covenant puts it, “its extent in place is anywhere that there are Muslims who embrace Islam as their way of life everywhere in the globe. This being so, it extends to the depth of the earth and reaches out to the heaven . . . the movement is a universal one”—so Americans and Europeans should not be overly surprised if, at some point, Hamas suicide bombers arrive on their doorstep.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“The Palestinian national movement started life with a vision and goal of a Palestinian Muslim Arab-majority state in all of Palestine—a one-state “solution”—and continues to espouse and aim to establish such a state down to the present day.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“Western liberals like or pretend to view Palestinian Arabs, indeed all Arabs, as Scandinavians, and refuse to recognize that peoples, for good historical, cultural, and social reasons, are different and behave differently in similar or identical sets of circumstances.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“In the late 1980s and the 1990s, it appeared as if the PLO, under Yasser Arafat, might be abandoning the one-state goal and adopting a two-state paradigm, envisaging a Palestinian Arab state arising, on 22 percent of historic Mandate Palestine, alongside Israel, and coexisting with it in peace. Such a vision, at least from the Israeli side, underlay the Oslo peace process. But already at the time the sincerity of Arafat’s newfound commitment to a two-state settlement was doubtful in view of some of his public pronouncements, his incitement to hatred and terrorism vis-à-vis Israel, and his serial nonimplementation of various provisions, especially those related to curbing terrorism, of the interim agreements he signed during the 1990s.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“The consistent refusal of the PNA-PLO leadership to accept Israel’s Jewishness points to a basic rejection of the two-state approach. Rather, it points to a desire to see the area of Israel eventually revert to an Arab majority presence and rule, whether through war and expulsion, through natural demographic increase among Israel’s Arab minority, through a mass refugee return, or a combination of the three.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“Hamas has the virtue of speaking clearly and consistently.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“If Arab expressions in the early years of the twentieth century of fear of eventual displacement and expulsion by the Zionists were largely propagandistic, today—in view of what has happened—they are very real. And if Jewish fears in the 1930s of Arab intentions to push them “into the sea”—to destroy the Zionist enterprise and perhaps slaughter the Yishuv—were, if heartfelt, unrealistic (as it turned out), today they are very real, as are Jewish fears of a nuclear Holocaust at Islamic hands. These fears and hatreds make a shared binational state, in which each community inevitably would seek to dominate the other, if only to prevent the other’s domination of itself, inconceivable.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“The suicide bombings, as every poll among Palestinians has shown, were, and remain, immensely popular.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“No Arab party during the 1930s and 1940s sought coexistence; all sought to crush the Yishuv and rule all of Palestine themselves, though a minority may occasionally have temporized or sought tactical, short-term accommodations.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“Israeli Jewish society is incapable, for moral and political reasons, of murdering millions or hundreds of thousands of Arabs. It is also inconceivable that Palestine’s Arab inhabitants would abandon the country of their own free will. But a campaign of expulsion, as required to rid the country of all or most of its Arab population, would doubtless take weeks if not months to implement and would be halted in its tracks by the international community and by much of Israel’s Jewish public.

Similarly, the achievement of a Jew-less Land of Israel through murder or expulsion or a combination of the two by the Arabs would in all likelihood be stymied by the international community, or at least the United States, which might well intervene militarily.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“Without doubt, the Israeli settlements in the West Bank have increased Palestinian militancy and motivation to fight Zionism and add a further layer of obstruction to any possibility of partitioning the land into two viable states—though the example and precedent of Israel’s uprooting of all its settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005 indicates that the majority of West Bank settlements, too, could be removed should the Israeli government and public come to believe that such a course would assure Israel peace and future prosperity. But given Palestinian behavior and discourse—and this must include the observation that the Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip did nothing to moderate Palestinian behavior and attitudes toward Israel; rather the opposite—there is little chance that Israelis will come to feel and believe this in the foreseeable future.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“A two-state settlement along the lines proposed by Barak and Clinton in 2000 is unlikely to come about or, if reached, to last long. It will not bring tranquility to the Middle East. And yet the two-state idea—the idea of a state for the Jews and a state for the Palestinian Arabs—remains the only sound moral and political basis for a solution offering a modicum of justice and, hence, a chance for peace, for both peoples.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“From inception, the Palestine Arab national movement, backed by the national movements and societies in the surrounding Arab countries, demanded that Palestine become an independent sovereign Arab state (except for the Syrian nationalists, who generally claimed and wanted Palestine as part of the future Syrian state) and rejected the notion of sharing the country with the Jews, either demographically, in a binational structure, or geographically, through partition.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“The Zionist movement, while ideologically regarding the country as the ancient patrimony of the Jewish people and as wholly, legitimately, belonging to the Jews, has over the decades politically shifted gears, bowing to political and demographic diktats and realities, moving from an initial demand for Jewish sovereignty over the whole Land of Israel to agreeing to establish a Jewish state in only part of a partitioned Palestine, with the Arabs enjoying sovereignty over the rest.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“On one level, the debate is simply about Israel—whether it should or should not exist. This is both a moral and a practical question. The first, moral part, can be subdivided: Should a Jewish state have been established in the first place? And, once coming into existence, should it—now sixty years old and with some 5.4 million Jewish inhabitants—be dissolved or disestablished, at whatever cost that will entail (first to Israel’s Jews and the Jewish people, and then to anyone else)?”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“British Mandate Palestine, between 1918 and 1948, was characterized by two separate societies that did not interact or live “together,” except in the sense of sharing the same air and complaining about the same, or different, British officials.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict

“The United States is completely powerless to effect a change in the rejectionist position of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian majority that supports them, and it is only marginally influential with regard to Israeli policies on the basic issues.”
― Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict