His book also documents the many difficulties that the Palestinians have faced in their struggle for liberation since the terrorizing theft of their land by Zionists in 1948, and the murderous invasion to occupy territories in 1967.

The other main obstacle is the United States. Abunimah points out that in the global “war on terror,” Israel is seen as a key ally of the United States, and the U.S. Congress consistently stands with Israel, missing no opportunity to endorse all Zionist positions placed before it.

He mentions Senator Barak Obama, the “first U.S. politician who inspired me to pull out my checkbook,” but soon exposed himself as “more hard-line than…the Bush administration. He opposed allowing Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem to vote in Palestinian Authority legislative elections, even after the Bush administration urged Israel to allow the election to proceed.”
In writing this book, Abunimah has challenged conventional wisdom regarding a solution to the occupation, both of the establishment as well as many supporters of the Palestinians.

When President Jimmy Carter appeared on CNN and spoke about his own book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, he mentioned his opposition to a one-state solution.

The Palestinians, if they were given a right to vote on an equal basis with all Israelis, would play a major role in making decisions about the whole country. And with the rapid population growth of the Palestinians…in the foreseeable future the Palestinians would actually have a majority in that nation.

Many on the Left also favor a two-state solution, not due to a fear that a single state would be overrun by Arabs, but because they think it is more “realistic.”

Abunimah argues that there is only one body with a monopoly on violence in Palestine, the Israeli state, and Palestinians live in varying degrees of disenfranchisement, inside and outside the borders of 1967. His point is that it isn’t “realistic” to believe that out of this situation, some sort of Palestinian state could be cobbled together.

He writes: “In such a hopeless situation, clinging to the prospect of peace through a two-state solution becomes a valuable placebo against the painful reality, even if no serious effort is made to implement it.”

If there is fault to be found in Abunimah’s argument, it would be an overly abstract view of how a single state would be achieved. As he reaches for an analogy to South Africa, his portrayal of apartheid’s final overseer, F. W. de Klerk, suggests that apartheid’s destruction began with an individual’s moral rebirth. It would be more accurate to state that white minority leaders had no other choice but to cave in, due to the incessant struggle for freedom by Black South Africans themselves.

Abunimah does, nevertheless, view resistance as critical, and draws connections to the international struggle to end apartheid in South Africa:

Palestinians and their allies need, morally and strategically, to turn to resistance that maximizes pressure on Israel without killing innocent civilians, capitalizes on global support, mobilizes the greatest number of people, and does not foreclose the possibility of future reconciliation.

The clearest lesson from South Africa’s example is that the Palestinian message and methods must make it clear that the target is not the Israeli people but an unjust system that denies one people their rights, identity, and dignity, and condemns the other to increasing isolation, fear and moral corruption.