Antony Loewenstein is being either disingenuous or -- more likely -- duplicitous in his essay “The Elusive Path to a One-State Solution.” Claiming (or even inferring) that a two-state solution is possible in present-day Palestine ignores the fact that the Israeli government has pursued a single-state (Jewish-only) policy of colonizing Palestine since the founder of present-day Israel -- Theodor Herzl -- published his founding document, THE JEWISH STATE, in 1896.

Simply because diplomats from the Jewish colonial state of Israel have “discussed” the possibility of negotiating a two-state solution with Palestinians does not mean this Jewish colonial state would ever surrender any part of the West Bank or Jerusalem to Palestinians (much less a legal entity defined as a Palestinian State). We must distinguish words from actions. The words of Israeli officials carry no weight whatsoever. Actions -- not words -- cut ice.

Zionist ideology, and the actions of the so-called Israeli state, have been suffused -- we must be willing to concede, however awkward and inconvenient this may be for Americans -- with a militant ethnic and religious nationalism, a craving to colonize all of Palestine (including the fertile Golan Heights), and an ethnocentric (or racist) mentality from its inception.

The colonization of Palestine has been only superficially disguised as Western “civilizing” venture from its founding document to the present. Like all Western colonial ventures of the 19th and 20th century, the Jewish colonial state of Israel has always regarded the colonized people of Palestine with utter contempt.

In his futuristic novel, THE OLD-NEW LAND (1902), Theodor Herzl transforms Palestine into a modern, social democratic state in which the indigenous peoples have equal rights with the Jewish immigrants. That is true. But that is a work of fiction. In his founding political pamphlet, THE JEWISH STATE (1896), by contrast, Herzl specifically characterized the Middle East and Asia of his day as a wellspring of “barbarism” (29) and suggested that the best form of governing the Jewish nation's Promised Land will be a combination of "democratic monarchism" and "aristocratic republicanism" in order to preserve "a true balance of power." "Nations are . . . not fit for unlimited democracy at present," he wrote, "and will become less and less fitted for it in the future" (70).

“Our people” (the Jews) who colonize Palestine, Herzl suggested, will "accept the new constitution it offers them. Should any opposition manifest itself," he contended, "the Society [of Jews]" will suppress it" (71).

Herzl made his strategy for the colonization of Palestine quite explicit in the concluding chapter of this political pamphlet where he suggests that the first colonists must be primarily from the Jewish underclass: "It is precisely the poorest whom we need at first" because "only the desperate make good conquerors" (79).

According to Herzl’s carefully-crafted political pamphlet: “Universal brotherhood is not even a beautiful dream” (79). In point of fact, he alleges, the Enlightenment concept of “universal brotherhood” -- as splendid as it may sound in theory -- has turned out to be wholly impractical (or utopian) in practice. The father of modern political Zionism derides the French philosophes’ concept of “universal brotherhood,” arguing that “antagonism [as opposed to cooperation or collaboration] is essential to man’s greatest efforts” (78).

I have not read Cherine Hussein's book. It is probably engaging and interesting. Not much has been published on the subject, and the fault lies with educated Palestinian who have no vision or interest besides sharing tables in cafés with lapsing Zionists.

First, this reviewer is too keen on advancing his own ideas and passing his own judgments on the author: she "rightly" says this and "rightly" says that. He presents no argument she might have presented in her book. In a typically Twitter/Facebook "activist" mindset, on the contrary, he faults her for not including popular opinions in a book that is clearly not designed as a survey. Such inclusion would have been fine in another publication, but we don't need another index of popular sentiment about a complex issue like what kind of state Palestinian (the original inhabitants), first of all, shall have.

He simply preaches. And he makes a point that I found particularly irritating: That there are "facts" on the ground and that, embracing the logic of every Zionist and every Zionist supporter, these facts are "irreversible."

Nothing is irreversible. The question is how these Jewish-only settlements will be "reversed," and it will not be on the Zionist movement's terms. This will never happen. Palestine will sooner become uninhabitable for everyone than any settler or Israel deciding on foreign settlements in the illegally Occupied Territories. Successive governments in Israel have guaranteed this on their own.

So much for the "Jewish" settlements, which are anything but Jewish in any pre-WWII sense, and are an abomination to humanity, which neverthless watches in silence. These settlements spell the terminal phase of Zionism, historically the ancestor of the Nazi race-worshipping movement that brought the world to the brink and cost 65 million lives. The Western collapsed twice in the 20th century: World Wars I and II. Zionism is the last nineteenth-century ideology on the way to extinction, the way of Communism, Nazis, Fascists and every monstrosity emenating from a constantly collapsing Western world.

As the "mother of all settlements," Apartheid, Jewish-only Israel shares the same fate as its hatchlings. It refuses to recognize international borders and therefore has lost its own borders. By trying to swallow all of Palestine it will have nothing.

To put it mildly, borderless Israel is destined for the junkyard of history, whether it executes its own dismantlement peacefully for the sake of world peace, or the world community will do it for Israel. or for that matter, whether there is a one-state or fifteen state solution. This is a failed race colony that simply has no future in the region, no matter which way intellectuals--Palestinians, lapsed Zionists or Israelis--paint their lovely future together. It has already caused the destruction of several countriesm, especiially Syria, which has been on its hit list for several decades.

The hard truth is that it is the one-state solution, too, is a non-starter as long as the Zionist boot is stamping out lives and a millennial culture to which Jews have no recorded historical connection as a state, as historians even inside Israel itself are starting to realize to their horror. There is not even a genetic connection.

Zionists can worship their "race" all they like. But their particular race myth is based on the lie concerning a Chosen People and about Palestine belonging to a mythical Jewish entity. This myth is the world's biggest hoax.

Ironically, this hoax was the invention of self-worshipping Western intellectuals, starting from the 18th century, who have been infaturated with the Old Testament and its fictional "Jews." A narrative that runs like something a child suffering from severe narcisim would come up with.

Let the Jews and non-Jews live normally without tribal gods dictating any promises, land leases or false claims on other people. That is all prehistory, and Zionist is no longer part of present history.