Harvard University is going to be hosting a conference entitled “One State Conference: Israel/Palestine and the One State Solution,” scheduled to take place March 3-4.
According to the “Vision and Goals” of the conference, as outlined by its website:
“To date, the only Israel/Palestine solution that has received a fair rehearsal in mainstream forums has been the two-state solution. Our conference will help to expand the range of academic debate on this issue. Thus, our main goal is to educate ourselves and others about the possible contours of a one-state solution and the challenges that stand in the way of its realization.”
The conference was organized by a number of student groups including, Students for Justice in Palestine, the Palestine Caucus, the Arab Caucus, the Progressive Caucus, and the Association for Justice in the Middle East, all of which perpetrate an ideology based on the belief that Israel is an “apartheid state,” responsible for the “ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population.”
Speakers include, Ali Abunimah, the Executive Director of the Electronic Intifada; Dalit Baum, of the BDS organization Coalition of Women for Peace; Ilan Pappe, radical left Israeli academic and fervent supporter of the BDS movement; Marc Ellis, Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Baylor University, who compares Zionism to colonialism and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to the Nazi treatment of Jews; as well as a number of other academics and scholars who advocate similar beliefs.
“Most of the speakers are heavily involved in anti-Israel advocacy. The conference program features an activist workshop, in contrast to an academic or research framework in which different perspectives are presented… Such events represent the antithesis of constructive academic dialogue and peaceful coexistence,” the NGO Monitor claimed.
“Those who promote a one-state ‘solution’ advocate creating an entity which would, through its merger with the Palestinian Arab population of the West Bank and Gaza and an influx of Palestinians from neighboring states, lose its Jewish majority and its Jewish character. In effect, Jewish self-determination would be nullified,” the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) reported. The forum is clearly focused, therefore, on “dismantling the Jewish State of Israel.”
“According to the working definition of anti-Semitism developed by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), and recognized by the United States Department of State, the One State Conference, in implicitly ‘denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination,’ is an exercise in anti-Semitism,” CAMERA explained.
In a conversation recorded on February 9, 2012 at Imperial College in London, Norman Finkelstein, who describes himself as having devoted his life to the “Palestinian cause” told his interviewer, “You know and I know exactly what we’re talking about because if we end the occupation, and we bring back 6 million Palestinians, and we have equal rights for Arabs and Jews, there’s no Israel. That’s what it’s really about.”
Israel was declared a state on May 14, 1948. Israel is a full fledged member of the United Nations. Its Declaration of Independence clearly states: “On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable. This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.”
