This is an interesting point of view that I haven't heard before. Please could you direct me to any reading material that has led you to think the Arab Palestinians wanted one state with Jewish people free to live there with the same legal status as Arabs?
It was my understanding that Arab Palestinians wished for their own state the way so many Arab regional identities got theirs at that time- with the breakup of the former Ottoman empire.
Palestinians wanted their own state, yes. The majority of the people living in Palestine were muslim Arabs. There were jewish and Christian minorities, under the British mandate as there had been for centuries under the Ottomans. Obviously there was division and resentment caused by the rapid influx of Zionist immigration with a specifically separatist agenda, and the perception that the British administrators favoured those Zionists and facilitated that agenda. But apart from that Palestine was just like most other countries and proto-countries - it had a majority religion/culture and minority ones.
I've never read or heard of any evidence that in the leadup to 1948 the Palestinian Arabs wanted the jewish and Christian minorities ejected from their country, or agitated for a political solution that would be purely Arab/muslim without any minorities, which is what you seem to be suggesting. No I don't have anything to prove they didn't, but I think you've got the burden of proof the wrong way round: in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, surely we should assume they were happy for the ethnic mix of Palestine to continue the way it had always been.
And what about you?
Do you think Israel should exist? Or would you favour a 1SS?
What should have happened in 1947 / 8, in your opinion?
Blimey. One thing I certainly don't think is that I'm in a position to have any say over it. The whole point is that the Palestinians have the right to assert their nationhood and the international community need to start respecting that right. That's obviously going to involve intensive negotiations with Israel, which are almost impossible to conceive of working as things are right now. I'm probably like a lot of people in that I would be happy with ANY solution that means both sides have a workable country and they can stop killing each other.
If I could rewrite history, I would write Zionism out of it and allow Palestine to have developed as its own, singular, multi-ethnic state like the other ex-Ottoman mandates. But that involves looking much further back than 1947/8, and isn't particularly relevant anyway since I can't, and neither can anyone else.
As for what happens now - Israel exists, and I can't see any way that it's going to voluntarily sign up to its own non-existence. So a one state solution seems absolutely impossible, doesn't it?
Practically speaking, the only solution that has any chance of actually happening is two states. And even that seems unlikely for the forseeable future.