The Israel-Palestine conflict sits at the heart of many current global tensions. As Noam Chomsky (2011) has recently pointed out, one of the most obvious questions is why this has not been resolved. For some of the world's problems, it is hard to see a reasonable solution, yet many find hope for an end to this conflict, which continues to fuel immense resentment across the region, through the recognition of a two-state-solution and the creation of a viable and autonomous Palestinian state, as supported by the Arab League, most of Europe, the United Nations and international law. Every so often, that tantalising alternative of the one-state solution is discussed, a state in which Palestinians and Israelis (and others), Jews and Muslims (and others), Hebrew speakers and Arab speakers (and others) live and work together in a new version of the promised land, but this, we know, is probably the least likely of options. It has the support of many Israeli Arabs, who fear that the two-state option would further disenfranchise them (a one-state option renders them part of a potential Arab majority, a two-state option renders them a minority in a state which would likely acknowledge their rights even less than it does now), and very little support among Jewish Israelis, who quite rightly see such a proposal as potentially threatening the Israeli state as Jewish. Meanwhile, for many Palestinians, life is led under conditions of occupation: walls, checkpoints, harassment and humiliation are daily realities; it can take hours to get through the checkpoints between Ramallah and Bethlehem, or the old city of Jerusalem and Al-Quds University. Why has the two-state option not been finally realized?

To unravel that question is much harder. While the continued lack of resolution to this conflict, the occupation of Palestinian territory, the unrelenting construction of settlements, the lack of rights for Palestinians, represents a continuing injustice not just for Palestinians, but for Arabs and Muslims more generally, other Arab states have all too often overlooked the Palestinian struggle.