Longtime readers will remember Mark LeVine from stories he wrote and stories written about him in OC Weekly, on topics ranging from spring breaking in Falluja and tracking underground rock music in the Middle East to surviving The O-Reilly Factor and being named one of the 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.
Now the UC Irvine history professor may have embarked on his most ambitious project yet: a solution to Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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OC Weekly's Mark LeVine archives
“Mark LeVine, professor of history at UC Irvine, has edited a book proposing an entirely new, out-of-the-box approach to resolving the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” reads a campus announcement pigeoned over to us. “One Land, Two States: Israel & Palestine as Parallel States (University of California Press) features almost a dozen leading scholars, policymakers and activists from Israel, Palestine, Europe and the U.S. exploring the idea of 'parallel,' or shared, sovereignty.”
In other words, instead of two separate states constantly fighting over borders and territory, the two states of Israelis and Palestinians would overlap or parallel one another, covering the entirety of the territory of Mandatory Palestine/Eretz Yisrael.
“As the carnage in Gaza continues, perhaps the biggest casualty–after all the needless deaths and destruction–has been clear and original thinking about new ways to solve this seemingly intractable conflict,” LeVine says in the UCI release. “Yet in the midst of interminable negotiations, violence and ongoing settlements over the last half-decade, a team of senior Israeli, Palestinian and international scholars has been working on an innovative approach to resolving the conflict.”
LeVine, a senior columnist at Al-Jazeera English, co-edited the book with retired Swedish Ambassador Mathias Mossberg, one of the founding figures of the Oslo peace process.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.