When the Smoke Clears in Gaza

Yousef Munayyer
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/11/after-gaza-a-single-state.html?printable=true&currentPage=all#ixzz2ChxM6xyD

Sooner or later, hopefully sooner, the all-too-familiar scenes of violence in the Gaza Strip—the sight, on Sunday, of children’s bodies being pulled from a flattened house; the rocket launches—will temporarily stop. As after every round that preceded this, a ceasefire will eventually be reached. The question is what we will have learned.
Since the bombing began, both sides have asked how this ends. If the answer is something other than with a repetition in a few more years—a perpetual state of war—Israelis must wrestle with the question of their own identity. No, that question is not the clichéd one: Does Israel have a right to exist? Rather, the more imperative question is: Is the way in which Israel exists—as an occupier, a colonizer, and ultimately, as an apartheid state—right? Is there another solution, involving a single, democratic state?