Review: Sharing the Land of Canaan by Mazin Qumsiyeh
A Palestinian scientist makes the case for one democratic state built on human rights. The argument has aged better than its critics expected.
Mazin Qumsiyeh is not a typical author of books on Middle East politics. A geneticist and zoologist from Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, he taught at universities in the United States, including Duke and Yale, before returning home. There he taught at Bethlehem University and founded the Palestine Museum of Natural History. His scientific training shows in *Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle* (2004), a book that treats the conflict as a problem to be analysed from first principles.
The argument
Qumsiyeh's case rests on three claims:
- Rights come first. Any durable solution must be built on equal human and civil rights for everyone living in historic Palestine, including the right of refugees to return.
- Partition has failed. Settlement expansion and the fragmentation of the West Bank make a viable separate Palestinian state unrealistic.
- Coexistence has precedent. The land's history, the "land of Canaan" in his title, is one of many peoples sharing a place. Genetics and history both undermine claims of exclusive ownership.
From there he argues for a single democratic state, with protections for the cultural and religious identities of both Jews and Palestinians.
Strengths and weaknesses
The book's strength is its clarity. Qumsiyeh sets out the facts of dispossession, the legal framework of human rights and the practical obstacles to partition in accessible prose. He anticipates many objections to the one-state idea and answers them directly.
Its weakness, some reviewers noted, is that it pays less attention to politics than to principle. The book does not fully grapple with how Israeli Jews, most of whom support a Jewish-majority state, could be persuaded to accept a shared one. Nor does it say what institutions might make such a state stable.
Twenty years later
When the book appeared, advocates of one state were a small minority. The idea is now widely debated, and the diagnosis Qumsiyeh offered, that partition was being overtaken by facts on the ground, has become common. He went on to write about popular resistance and remains an active voice from Bethlehem.
Sharing the Land of Canaan is still a useful introduction to the rights-based case for a single state, written by someone who has spent his life in the place he describes.