EI contributor and producer of the weekly podcast Crossing the Line Christopher Brown interviews EI co-founder Ali Abunimah on his new book One Country and the problem of partition as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Abunimah explains, “This goes back to the very origins of the idea of partition when you had a growing Zionist movement brining Jews from Europe into an overwhelmingly Arab country and the British who were in charge in the 1930s appointed a royal commission which looked into this seemingly irreconcilable, growing problem and said the only solution is partition. The only problem with that solution is that you cannot partition the country between Arabs and Jews because you just can’t draw a line between them. So the solution that the British Royal Commission recommended was partition but there would have to be the transfer — voluntary or otherwise, as they put it — of hundreds of thousands of Arabs to make room for a Jewish state. So from the very beginning partition was inextricably linked with what we would today call ethnic cleansing, and of course that’s what happened in 1948 in order for the State of Israel to be born.”

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