One of the more prominent spokesmen for this approach is Tony Judt, who has evolved into a target of the Israel lobby. Judt, like many other American Jewish intellectuals, has understandably become appalled by the realities of Israeli occupation in the West Bank and the punishment of Gaza. He expressed his hopes for an end to this nightmare for the Palestinian people in a 2003 New York Review article titled Israel: the Alternative.

The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European "enclave" in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a "Jewish state"—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.

Perhaps I haven’t been paying attention carefully, but the world has not moved on when it comes to individual rights and open frontiers, especially during a period of declining economic indicators. Judt seems to have pinned his hopes on an outcome that is virtually excluded in an epoch that is generating the same kind of xenophobia that victimized the Jews in the 1930s.

The London Review of Books, a journal inspired by the New York Review but with politics more closely aligned with the left, hosted a like-minded article by Virginia Tilley that appeared in late 2003 as well. Tilley is an American professor who has contributed to the New Left Review and is now working for a progressive think tank based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Titled One State Solution, Tilley reprises Judt’s argument and provides some policy recommendations that would make the new state more equitable:

The long-established role of the Jewish Agency, which administers Jewish national resources and privileges in Israel, would have to be re-examined. Electoral politics and Knesset representation would also be transformed, to permit legislative debate on the basis of equal ethnic standing. Alterations to the Basic Laws, or the creation of a secular constitution, could ensure that Israel continues to safeguard Jewish lives and rights, providing the sanctuary which many Jews in Israel and abroad remain anxious to preserve. But the same basic law would have to ensure Muslim, Christian and, indeed, agnostic/ atheist rights, and eliminate – at least juridically – any institutionalised hierarchy on ethnic or religious lines. Such a transition would require years of debate and struggle – and a political will now glaringly absent. Truth commissions and/or a general amnesty might eventually surmount the legacy of violence and hatred, but as in all such aftermaths, the process will take generations.

While these changes in and of themselves are not objectionable, they do not address the fundamental cause of inequality in the region, namely the ethnic cleansing that robbed Palestinians of their land and houses, in some cases owned by families for hundreds of years. It would be analogous to a post-Civil War Reconstruction in the USA that failed to grant land to the former slaves.

Perhaps the highest profile on the left for the single state solution is Ali Abunimah who wrote One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse in 2007, a book that can be read on Google Books, with the customary omissions, including all of chapter four "Learning from South Africa".

Fortunately, we can look elsewhere to understand the basis for his comparison. In 2006, Abunimah wrote an op-ed piece for the Chicago Tribune titled South Africa as a model for one state in Palestine that argued:

Allister Sparks, the legendary editor of the anti-apartheid Rand Daily Mail newspaper, observed that the conflict in South Africa most resembled those in Northern Ireland and Palestine-Israel, because each involved "two ethno-nationalisms" in a seemingly irreconcilable rivalry for the "same piece of territory." If the prospect of "one secular country shared by all" seems "unthinkable" in Palestine-Israel today, then it is possible to appreciate how unlikely such a solution once seemed in South Africa. But "that is what we did," Sparks says, "without any foreign negotiator [and] no handshakes on the White House lawn."

Now, four years later, Abunimah finds events moving slowly but perhaps inexorably in the direction of a post-apartheid Israel:

By the mid-1980s, whites overwhelmingly understood that the apartheid status quo was untenable and they began to consider "reform" proposals that fell very far short of the African National Congress’ demands for a universal franchise — one-person, one-vote in a nonracial South Africa. The reforms began with the 1984 introduction of a tricameral parliament with separate chambers for whites, coloreds and Indians (none for blacks), with whites retaining overall control.

The fact that it is elements of the Israeli hard right like Moshe Arens who are raising the possibility of a one-state solution rather than the Labor Zionists convinces Abunimah that Israel might be on the same track:

That proposals for a single state are coming from the Israeli right should not be so surprising in light of experiences in comparable situations. In South Africa, it was not the traditional white liberal critics of apartheid who oversaw the system’s dismantling, but the National Party which had built apartheid in the first place. In Northern Ireland, it was not "moderate" unionists and nationalists like David Trimble and John Hume who finally made power-sharing under the 1998 Belfast Agreement function, but the long-time rejectionists of Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, and the nationalist Sinn Fein, whose leaders had close ties the IRA.

Am I the only person troubled by such analogies? If there is anything that can be learned from the South African and Northern Ireland experience, it is that the oppressed nationality gained very little except for formal democratic rights. If South African blacks, except for a privileged and decadent minority, still lack property, what good is the right to vote? Furthermore, being part of the "peace process" in Northern Ireland is not very reassuring when it comes to the role of one David Trimble, named to the committee established by Israel to whitewash the murder of 9 peace activists on the Mavi Marmara.

Trimble was a leader of the Unionist Party in Northern Ireland who amounted to the Irish De Klerk. Since being named to the panel, Trimble got involved with another project:

Initiated and led by Spain’s former prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, a group of international leaders is to meet in Paris on Monday night to launch the "Friends of Israel Initiative," a new project in defense of Israel’s right to exist.

The leaders – who include the Nobel Peace Prize laureate David Trimble, Peru’s former president Alejandro Toledo, Italian philosopher Marcelo Pear, former United States Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton and British historian Andrew Roberts – say they seek to counter the attempts to delegitimize the State of Israel and its right to live in peace within safe and defensible borders.

Their launch meeting Monday will be addressed by the former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Dore Gold. On Tuesday, they will release a formal manifesto at a press conference in the French capital.

The initiative is being launched now, its sponsors said in a statement, because of their outrage and concern about the "unprecedented delegitimation campaign against Israel, driven by the enemies of the Jewish state and perversely assumed by numerous international authorities."

Just the right man to sit in judgment on whether or not Israel was guilty of war crimes or not.

Unfortunately, what is missing entirely from the calculations of Tony Judt, Virginia Tilley and Ali Abunimah is the question of class. Analogies with South Africa and Northern Ireland are most unfortunate since they elide the basic question of who rules. As long as a society exists on the basis of social and economic inequality, there can be no true democracy. Institutional racism in South Africa, Northern Ireland and Israel effectively precludes the possibility of true equality.