Mike Huckabee, the Settlements, and the One-State Crowd

Just call him Huckabee the Macabee. That's the nickname former (future?) Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee earned himself this week, after he essentially nixed the widely accepted goal of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine dispute. While on a three-day tour of Israel, hosted by a group of far-right settlers group who took him to some of the most contentious spots in the land, Huckabee dismissed the notion that there could be a Palestinian state "in the middle of the Jewish homeland" as "virtually unrealistic," according to AP reports.

It's a sharp disagreement with, well, pretty much everyone. For two decades, politicos earned their moderate stripes by shouting their commitment to partitions and 1967 borders. That even includes hyperconservative Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahau, who, despite talking the hardline talk all year, was shown yesterday to have been quietly rejecting applications for new settlement projects in the West Bank (although so-called natural growth of existing settlements is still kosher).

But there are those who think the region would be better off with only one state, and they're getting second looks as the momentum behind two-state negotiations has fizzled. Most—OK, all—are on the fringes of both left and right, and some are wackier than others. But it's getting harder to know what a fringe really is when proclaiming the moderate mantra has become, as FP's Stephen Walt put it, a fig leaf for inaction. Do you know who's on board? Here's a rundown of the politicos who have hinted that they think two-state plans are passé:

Dick Armey: The former House majority leader told Chris Matthews in 2002 that he thought Israeli leaders should kick Palestinians out of the occupied territories, which could then become permanent parts of the state of Israel. "I'm content to have Israel grab the entire West Bank. I'm also content to have the Palestinians have a homeland, and even for that to be somewhere near Israel," he said. To which Matthews replied: "Well, where do you put the Palestinian state, in Norway?"

Gary Bauer: An adviser in the Reagan White House, Bauer inserted himself into the intifada in 2002, after Israeli officials had sent military forces into the West Bank to target Palestinian suicide-bombing networks. To the dismay of the White House, he critiqued Bush for pressuring Israel to withdraw once their operation finished up. Instead, he suggested, Israel should "do everything it can to drain the swamp that is producing these murders."

Muammar Kaddafi: On the other side of the fence, the Libyan president editorialized in The New York Times this January about the failure of two-state efforts and the promise of a single secular democratic state named Isratine. Yes, that's right. Isratine.

Ahmad Samih Khalidi: A Palestinian adviser to the negotiating teams back in the '90s, Khalidi wrote a column for The Guardian in 2003 proposing a single "one-man, one-vote"-based state west of the Jordan River. "Both sides can maintain their 'right of return' without this being at the expense of the other, and Israeli settlers would not need to be removed from where they are today," he wrote. "Jerusalem could truly become the shared capital of a unitary Arab-Jewish state."

Alon Pinkas: A former consul general of Israel in New York, Pinkas has suggested that the two-state solution is "very near death." He's dead set against the alternative, a binational one-state solution, but warns that it may become the inevitable political reality. "While the two-state solution is a wonderful idea, it is losing its appeal and becoming less and less viable as Israelis and Palestinians drift apart."