Over at The Guardian - the newspaper which recently opined that Barack Obama was “compelled” to visit Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem - Saree Makdisi, a Professor of English Literature at the University of California, is waxing lyrical about the “one-state solution.”

There is nothing particularly original in Makdisi’s argument. Like other advocates of a single state between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan, he presents it as a quintessentially liberal solution. Only that pesky Jewish exclusivist, racist, apartheid state is in the way.

I’ve taken on the one-staters a few times now - here, here and here. Doubtless, I will be doing so again. What bears repeating is simply this: the Islamist and reactionary advocates of the “one-state” formula (Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian regime among others) at least have the courtesy to make clear that what is now Israel will largely be Judenrein in the event that they achieve their goal.

Not so Makdisi and those like him. In his world, Hamas, apparently, does not exist - or if it does, then its commitment to mass murder of Jews and an Islamist state does not confound the project of a “secular, democratic” state that guarantees everybody’s rights.

What we have here is a manifestly dishonest argument, amplified by the dressing up of preposterous claims as fact. For example:

- Makdisi says Israel is trying to create an “exclusivist” Jewish state. Quite what this means, he doesn’t say. Most anti-Zionists believe their assumptions are self-evident, you see. Does he mean that Jews have all the rights and non-Jews don’t have any? Is that a verifiable claim? Yes, says Makdisi - look at Israel’s flag. I am therefore going to conclude, by the same logic, that Norway, Switzerland and Malta are exclusivist Christian states. And that Saudi Arabia is an exclusivist Muslim state. Although I don’t have to look at the Saudi flag to know that.

- Makdisi says that those who want to commemorate Jewish suffering through history do so “rightly.” Which rather gives away that there are those advocates of the “one-state solution”, like the obscurantists I mentioned above, who think otherwise.

- Makdisi talks about “Israel’s methodical de-Arabisation of its Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) population in the 1950s and 1960s.” A blatant lie. They were “de-Arabised” in their hundreds of thousands by the states in which they lived, which stripped them of property, identity and what limited political rights they had. From time to time, it even got violent.

Still, Makdisi is on to something when he argues that “negation, denial and imprisonment have run their course.” The “one-state” formula negates the national rights of Israeli Jews, denies the complex realities of Jewish history and would turn Palestine into a prison for the tiny minority of Jews who remained there.