Over at the Palestine Chronicle, Kathleen Christison is trying to make the elimination of Israel sound reasonable.

In sum, she’s arguing that the “so-called” international consensus behind a two-state solution masks “an active effort to undermine any prospect of genuine Palestinian statehood.” This consensus is, in any case, “mythical”; yes, she concedes, public opinion polls in the US and Europe do support a two state solution, but such polls are, apparently, “essentially meaningless.” Why? Because few people understand “what’s happening on the ground in Palestine”. If they did, they would conclude that “genuine” - her word - statehood can only be achieved at Israel’s expense.

Christison’s article is the latest salvo in a mini-campaign by a group of activists and writers - Virginia Tilley, Ali Abunimah and Joel Kovel are all approvingly cited by her, and the Israeli anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappe also comes to mind - to revive the idea of a single state extending from the Mediterranean to the River Jordan as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A Palestinian state alongside Israel, these individuals insist, is neither just nor viable.

The one state formula is based upon a dubious narrative about Zionist original sin, together with the notion, more wishful than rigorous, that the struggle against apartheid in South Africa offers an irresistible model for this particular conflict in the Middle East. There are all sorts of problems here, not least the removal of Israeli national rights, the denial of the Jewish state and the definition of viability.

But none of that matters to Christison. Her point is that Palestinian rights are paramount and can only be achieved through a zero-sum game: you can have Israel or Palestine, but you manifestly can’t have both.

Now, if you are Hassan Nasrallah or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (read, and shiver, at his post “Message to the American People”), you can make such an argument in the most bloodthirsty terms without having to worry about your audience. Not so for Christison. Her appeal is to western liberals and so she has to, somewhere along the line, account for the fate of the Israelis.

It is precisely here that this particular version of the one-state formula acquires an absurdist character. Echoing the crop of one-state advocates mentioned above, Christison talks about “equal civil and political rights” for Israeli Jews in a single state framework. In other words, a throwaway line which bears no reality to the “on the ground” situation she asserts such an intimacy with.

Because, even if one were to momentarily forget the substantive moral and political objections to a single state, and simply focus on its implementation, there is no way to conclude that such an outcome could be brought about by negotiation. It is an outcome that could only be imposed upon the Jews of Israel, and only then by the deadliest violence.

That understanding, as well as the recognition of the inherent legitimacy of Israel as a state, is what underlies the very real international consensus for a two-state solution. The alternative is a single state of the sort envisaged by Hamas - under shari’a law, bearing not the faintest resemblance to democracy and with no qualms about the “civil and political rights” of Israeli Jews.

For that reason, the only resolution which corresponds to liberal imperatives is that resulting in two states. Indeed, it is not possible to claim the mantle of liberalism for anything else. However hard one might try to make eliminationist fantasies, whether nationalist or Islamist, sound acceptable, the devil - quite literally, in this case - is in the detail.