A combined one-state solution is the best way forward for Israel and the Palestinians to finally put an end to "perpetual war," Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi wrote in The New York Times Thursday. "The history of Israel/Palestine is not remarkable by regional standards -- a country inhabited by different peoples, with rule passing among many tribes, nations and ethnic groups; a country that has withstood many wars and waves of peoples from all directions. This is why it gets so complicated when members of either party claims the right to assert that it is their land," Kadhafi wrote.
"A just and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians is possible, but it lies in the history of the people of this conflicted land, and not in the tired rhetoric of partition and two-state solutions," Kadhafi said.
The Libyan leader argued that a two-state solution inevitably would create an unworkable security threat to Israel, while partitioning the West Bank into Jewish and Arab areas, with buffer zones between them, also would not work.
"Buffer zones symbolize exclusion and breed tension. Israelis and Palestinians have also become increasingly intertwined, economically and politically," Kadhafi wrote, so "the compromise is one state for all, an 'Isratine' that would allow the people in each party to feel that they live in all of the disputed land and they are not deprived of any one part of it."
"Assimilation is already a fact of life in Israel," Kadhafi added, noting that "there are more than one million Muslim Arabs in Israel."
