Seminal articles

The Palestinian National Charter of 1964 (see Articles 6, 7, and 15) aimed at a single state in all of historic Palestine but including only 'Palestinian' Jews, somehow defined. A Beirut lecture in 1970 by Yusef Sayigh in the name of the PLO expanded the definition of 'Palestinian' Jews to include all then living there 'who choose to live in peace and dignity with the Arabs'. This is the ODS position.

The MacDonald White Paper of 1939, superceding the Balfour Declaration and approved by the House of Commons by a vote of 268-179, proposed the one-democratic-state solution but became a dead letter when World War II broke out 4 months later. Likewise in early autumn, 1947, the lengthy report of the minority sub-committee of the UNSCOP (Special Committee on Palestine) rejected Zionism and Partition but was buried under UN GA (General Assembly) Resolution 181 of 29 November 1947. Last-ditch pro-ODS efforts of the U.S. State Department in March 1948 were scuttled by Zionist President Harry Truman.

ODS is not a 'binational' solution, but one based on individual human rights.

Both bi-national and ODS visions slumbered through the period of PLO's efforts to bring about a two state solution from the mid-1970s onwards. However, in the face of the obvious sell-out that was 'Oslo,' the mid-1990s saw a clear ODS revival.

Perhaps the first article in English re-stating and advocating ODS is Life with the Enemy, below, by Ghada Karmi, presented at Chatham House in 1997. Edward Said's The One-State Solution appeared in the New York Times in 1999.

Said's article and Tony Judt's Israel: The Alternative (2003) propound a vision a bit closer to binationalism than to ODS, but the argumentation and adherence to human rights are the same.