Home OP-ED Is Israel Growing Closer to a One-State Solution?

Is Israel Growing Closer to a One-State Solution?

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Sixty-nine percent of Israelis are against granting the 2.5 million Arab residents of an annexed Judea and Samaria the right to vote in Knesset elections.

Even Israeli Arabs’ right to vote should be taken away, according to 33 percent of Israelis. This was the result of a poll undertaken by Dialog in October.

Its findings may be a slight improvement over a Dahaf poll taken two years ago, in 2010, where 36 percent of Israelis did not support the right of non-Jewish citizens to vote in Knesset elections.

The recent Dialog survey found that only 38 percent of Israelis are for annexation of territories where there are Jewish settlements, while a small majority, 48 percent, were against. The rest, 14 percent, didn’t know.

Israel may be getting closer to a one-state solution. A few days ago Israel declared that it will construct an additional 3,000 housing units in Jerusalem and the West Bank. As Tuesday’s LA Times editorial warned:

As U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, it would deal “an almost fatal blow” to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because it would make it extremely difficult to configure a reasonably contiguous Palestinian state. (The Obama administration described the Israeli announcement as “counterproductive,” and a State Department spokesman said that construction in E-1 “would be damaging to efforts to achieve a two-state solution.”)

Dr. Herman, Ph.D., a demographer, has served as Assistant Research Professor at the USC Dept. of Geography, adjunct lecturer at the USC School of Social Work, Research Director at the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles following Bruce Phillips, Ph.D., in that position (and author of the “most recent” 15 year old study of the LA Jewish population which was the third most downloaded study from Berman Jewish Policy Archive in 2011) and is a past President of the Movable Minyan a lay-led independent congregation in the 3rd Street area. Currently he is a principal of Phillips and Herman Demographic Research. Dr. Herman may be contacted at pini00003@gmail.com