“The book’s shabby scholarship is a sad commentary on the state of our universities, and one wonders why Viking saw fit to publish it. Viking has an admirable history of printing some of the best authors of the English language. Pity they spoiled their own narrative with this one.”
The best thing about The Two-State Delusion is its title. Political elites worldwide have clung to the “two state solution” for decades, most recently in the fruitless diplomacy of Secretary of State Kerry in 2013 and 2014. But while Padraig O’Malley is right in saying more of the same will go nowhere, his analysis of the problem stands reality on its head.
O’Malley is a professor at the University of Massachusetts who “has spent his career helping to solve conflicts,” according to the back page blurb. He started with Ireland, moved on to South Africa, and has now landed in Israel. Hopefully, he’ll skip to another conflict quickly. In a world full of bad books about the Arab-Israeli conflict, this one stands out.
The book’s theme is that Palestinian and Jewish narratives are irreconcilable, which is true. The trouble is that O’Malley has his own narrative, which corresponds almost entirely to the Palestinian narrative, even those elements that are patently false. Take, for example, the Palestinian assertion that they have been “the indigenous population in Palestine without interruption for 1,500 years.” O’Malley first presents this as part of the Palestinian narrative, which is fair enough. But later it becomes (repeatedly) absorbed into his own account. Here is O’Malley in his own voice: “Neither the Zionist project nor the state that it created ever recognized the indigenous Palestinians as a distinct people for whom Palestine had been their homeland for 1,500 years.”
