There’s a long interview with Sari Nusseibeh in Ha’aretz. He says he still supports the two-state solution, but time is running out:

“I still favor a two-state solution and will continue to do so, but to the extent that you discover it’s not practical anymore or that it’s not going to happen, you start to think about what the alternatives are. I think that the feeling is there are two courses taking place that are opposed to one another. On one hand, there is what people are saying and thinking, on both sides. There is the sense that we are running out of time, that if we want a two-state solution, we need to implement it quickly.

“But on the other hand, if we are looking at what is happening on the ground, in Israel and the occupied territories, you see things happening in the opposite direction, as if they are not connected to reality. Thought is running in one direction, reality in the other.”

And then:

“We have failed in the last 15 years to create the world we wanted to create. We were supposed to be very clever; we convinced ourselves that we were going to be very democratic and clean, a model for the rest of the Arab world. And Jerusalem was supposed to be our capital. That’s what we believed. But then it turned out that all of this was total rubbish. Jerusalem is out, all we have is Ramallah. And we lost Gaza. There is corruption and inefficiency. This is not what we vouched for when we sat back in the early 1980s and ideologized the two-state solution.

“It so happens that Fatah, in particular, the mainstream party and the only viable alternative to extremes on the left or on the right, now needs a strategy, an ideology. Because the ideology that Fatah has adopted over the last 15 years - a two-state solution - seems to be faltering, and with it, Fatah is faltering. So it is time maybe to rethink, to bring Fatah around to a new idea, the old-new idea, of one state. ”

“Fifty, 100, 200 years down the road there will be some kind of conclusion. Sometime in the future - however far away this future is - I believe we’ll be living at peace with one another, in some way or another. I am not sure how, whether in one state or two states, or in a confederation of states, but people finally will come to live at peace. In the meantime, we will simply cause pain to one another. It’s tragic. It is very tragic, because we know we can do it now. That today it is possible with some guts, leadership, vision, we can make it happen today, we can reach a peaceful solution today.”

On the PA, Nusseibeh is fiercely critical:

“The PA has no use. If we fail to reach a peace agreement by the end of this year, I believe it would be best to go back to the period when we were living happily under occupation. We had a small civil administration, they were paying back some $20 million a year to the Israeli treasury, so they were making money off us. Today, we are creating, year after year, bigger deficits. We are spending billions, we have 160,000 employees, half of them are security personnel, who give us no security whatsoever, we are spending masses of money on guns, which we only use against each other and which provide us no security. The whole thing is a mess.”

These are all salient points, though it’s disappointing that Nusseibeh doesn’t explicitly reference the disconnect between the liberal, confederal model he seems to be advocating and the shari’a-based, single state which Hamas is fighting for. Peace, understood as the absence of war, is not enough; states can only pool their sovereignty if they share common values and principles. It’s hard to envisage any willingess on the Israeli side to do that as long as the Palestinian side is dominated by Islamists.

Nusseibeh, who has courageously adopted unpopular positions on holy cows like the right of return (give it up) and boycotts of Israel (just wrong), now says he wants to “reengage” with the idea of “one state.” What he needs to remember is that, for Israelis, the very phrase evokes national suicide. As the EU shows, you can have open borders, a common foreign policy and transnational institutions without giving up statehood. If we are to really think creatively, we need to consider not just the applicability of the European model. We also need to find a language to express it that breaks, once and for all, with the maximalism that has brought fear to Israelis and failure to Palestinians.