WHEN Anglo-Palestinian author and activist Ghada Karmi’s deeply compelling and highly informative new book — One State. The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel — was published in 2023, the events of October 7 and its genocidal aftermath had not yet happened.

Yet in the book, Karmi, herself a Palestinian exile who fled her country with her family in 1948, writes in a startlingly prescient way about the likely consequences should Palestinians further resist continued Israeli occupation and oppression.

Envisaging renewed popular uprisings more forceful than those of May 2021, rather than a specifically Hamas-driven act of violence, Karmi posits what Israel would do in response.

“On past performance, we can anticipate a knee-jerk response to defend zionism and safeguard the state with overwhelming force,” Karmi predicted in One State, reviewed on these pages in August 2023.

“Israel would intensify its anti-Palestinian repression, accelerate its colonisation programme, go on building the wall, and try to expel or starve out the Palestinians to thin their numbers. 

“At the same time, the worldwide army of Israel’s supporters would be mobilised to stifle the faintest anti-Israel criticism, and silence Palestinian voices everywhere it mattered. 

“Anti-semitism allegations would feature largely in this campaign, and attempts at influencing government legislation in Western states to outlaw criticism of Israel and zionism would be intensified.”

It turned out exactly so, and even worse.

Karmi’s argument for the one-state solution recognises the challenges of acceptance from both sides. As she concedes, not even a majority of Palestinians favour it — or at least see it as attainable. Yet Karmi writes in her book that such an outcome is “inevitable” if certainly not immediate.

Now, on top of the nearly 17 months of bombardments, starvation and other terrors meted out on Palestinians by Israeli forces, there is the added threat, put forward by US President Donald Trump, that he plans to “own” Gaza himself. 

The Palestinian people, he told Fox News, would be permanently removed from their rightful homeland with no right of return, thus fulfilling Israel’s genocidal agenda.

Over the bones of its native population the despotic Trump dreams of building luxury resorts in Gaza, turning a bloody and bulldozed crime scene into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Given this dire turn of events, I asked Karmi when we spoke last week whether a one-state solution was now permanently out of reach?

“I remain committed to the idea that it is the only ultimate trajectory for this terrible situation,” Karmi said. “But we’re talking about the long-term. Nobody’s talking about tomorrow.”

In the meantime, she says, “I cannot obviously ignore the tremendous changes on the ground.”

Israel’s genocide and Trump’s collusion with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s endgame to cleanse Gaza and the West Bank completely of Palestinians, would render the one state objective “not relevant,” agreed Karmi.

Obviously right now, “Palestinians and Israelis too, wouldn't be able to tolerate each other at all,” she said. “You would still want a state that was democratic and represented all its citizens and gave them equal citizenship and equal rights, but it’s not the same idea,” she said.

What shocks her the most perhaps, is “the idea that Palestinians — or the whole region of the Middle East — should actually be expected to tolerate a settler colony that is dedicated to its own success at their expense and which has proved itself to be dangerous, aggressive and expansionist.”

It’s one reason why she resolutely opposes the two-state solution perpetually put forward by Western powers. 

“The two-state solution means the persistence of the Israeli state in almost 80 per cent of the original Palestine while giving 22 percent to the Palestinians,” she said.

But even leaving aside those inequities “of dividing the land into one fifth to the Indigenous people and four fifths to the occupiers,” what is worse Karmi says is the willingness to “actually work to preserve a settler colony that has shown itself to be dangerous and actually evil. I use no other word. ‘Evil’ is the correct term for Israel.”

In turn, Israel serves as a handy colonial satellite. “The idea of Western imperialism is that the whole of the world’s resources belong to the West,” she said. “And so you have a local agent — Israel, the settler colony — that does what you want it to and represents your interests in a resource-rich region.”

But she has a second theory. When I mentioned how baffling I found it that Germany, of all places, would try to atone for its own genocide by supporting another, Karmi responded that to her, it was not baffling at all. It was instead, despite appearances, founded in perpetual anti-semitism.

“The real anti-semites are alive and well in the Western world,” says Karmi, who has herself been the target of false accusations of anti-semitism. 

She was expelled from the Labour Party for simply speaking out about her own experiences as a Palestinian at a constituency Labour Party meeting.

“I think the West genuinely hates Jews,” she told me. “They don’t want them here. There is no other way I can interpret this.”

She recalls the Evian conference of 1938 when “Western states met and talked about the Jewish refugees which were already forming because of Nazi Germany. They asked each state to put forward a quota to take in these Jewish refugees and the result was nobody would. What does that tell you?”

That was why “the effect of October 7 was to put them into a complete panic,” Karmi said of the Western world’s response.

“They cannot tolerate the idea that the Israeli state would fall apart and many Israeli Jews would come as refugees again to the West,” she said. “The whole thing is too frightful to contemplate.” 

Instead, “they put themselves out fantastically to make Israel succeed. That’s my interpretation of the extraordinary support given to this genocide.”

So is there no hope for a just solution, I asked?

“The point I want to stress is that you have to have an end point,” said Karmi, and she argues that has to be a single state. “There are all sorts of other problems as well, logistical problems, but the point I suppose I’ve made again and again, in the end there is no other way forward.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.