The New York Times · 10 January 1999

CP-1999-022

The One-State Solution

Why the only answer to Middle East peace is Palestinians and Israelis living as equal citizens under one flag.

By Edward Said

Shown from the top. The whole column — 4.4 times taller than it is wide — is in the enlargement.

Scan 463 × 2048 pixels

Transcribed from the clipping

“There is no example in history,” Said quotes David Ben-Gurion as saying in 1944, “of a people saying we agree to renounce our country, let another people come and settle here and outnumber us.” […] Thus we are the victims of the victims, the refugees of the refugees. […] There can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two communities of suffering, resolve that their existence is a secular fact, and that it has to be dealt with as such.

How this transcription was made

The image is a composite of four consecutive pages, 36 to 39, scaled to a common text measure and stacked in printed order. It is not a reconstruction of a single page: the four scans were made at three to eight percent different scales and each page keeps its own layout, so the folios and the photographer’s credits stay visible inside the composite. The order is fixed by the pages themselves — page 37 ends “the conflict between us was exacerbated. Years” and page 38 opens flush left “of military occupation have created…”, and page 38 ends “ethnic and religious” where page 39 opens “criteria that now make Israel…”. The join from 36 to 37 falls on a paragraph break, so it rests on consecutive folios and identical typography rather than on a severed sentence. The body is not fully transcribed: the passages above are the ones read back against the scan at magnification, and […] marks text between them that has not been read. The third column of page 39 is sliced at the right edge of its scan, losing the last one or two characters from most of its lines, and is excluded from the transcription rather than guessed at. The running foot on pages 37 and 39 reads “THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE / JANUARY 10, 1999”. The Magazine is filed under its parent paper, as the archive files all of its supplement pages.

Context added by this archive

Edward Said, professor of literature at Columbia University, is the author most recently of “Peace and Its Discontents.” A former member of the Palestine National Council, he broke publicly with Yasir Arafat in 1993 over the Oslo peace accords. — the author note printed at the foot of page 38.

Cite this clipping

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