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Showing posts with the label Yasser Arafat Tony Hall One state solution Palestine

One-state solution

I believe Yasser Arafat would have approved a one-state solution. I wrote this at the time of Arafat's death. I republished it as Hamas was given a voters' mandate to carry the torch of Palestine into the next stage, in conditions of extreme difficulty...and now again, as Israel has gone from bad to mad. In mourning the death of Yasser Arafat, let me quote extracts from an article by Jonathan Steele in the Guardian Weekly in which he gets the historical context exactly right, in explaining Arafat's greatness:"In the days when Britain was being forced to give up one colony after another, the phrase 'father of the nation' was much in vogue. Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Archbishop Makarios in Cyprus, and Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia were among the many who won this informal title, not just from journalists in search of a label but, more importantly, from their own people. As teachers, clerics or trade unionists who became political leaders, they were seen as the chief