This paper interrogates two concepts rarely discussed conjointly: normalization and bi-nationalism. It suggests that the concept ‘normalization’ is helpful to make clearer sense of the history of Palestine/Israel from 1917 to date. It is firstly explained that between 1917 and 1967 Arab Nationalism generally, and the PLO specifically, attempted to materialize in the minuscule territory comprising mandatory Palestine a fairly ‘standard’ anti-colonial struggle vis-à-vis pre-1948 Euro-Zionism and post-1948 Israel, that is, de-colonization of the homeland along the lines of the Algerian/Vietnamese struggles whereby colonialists are meant to exit the colonized territory. The struggle’s frame of reference then was 1917: pre-1967 Palestinian Marxists, Nationalists and the PLO Charter entertained a sociopolitical reversal to a 1917 state of affairs. For a rainbow of reasons, in 1967 the frame of reference of the struggle changed from 1917 to 1948. The principal question has now become this: how to normalize in the colonized territory the existence of some 2.3 million Jewish Israelis and that is so without insisting on their exit (as ‘standard’ anti-colonial struggles otherwise command)? Marxist-Leninist PFLP was willing to grant Israel’s Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews individual rights as equal citizens of a secular-democratic Palestinian-Arab state, essentially conceptualizing them as members of a religious minority group. Post-1962 Marxist Matzpen understood this PFLP framing as ahistorical because it bypassed the possibility that a century of conflict has socially constructed into the Middle East a Hebrew-speaking collectivity that could no longer be conceptualized in individual-liberal terms alone -- let alone by Marxists familiar with the Marxist general-global discussion about ‘the National Question’. Matzpen posited that a unified Arab Middle East is unlikely to materialize without granting – and institutionalizing within it – collective national rights to non-Arab Kurds, South-Sudanese and Hebrew-speaking Israelis. This paper demonstrates how the ‘old’ intra-Marxist PFLP-Matzpen debate remains potently relevant to contemporary controversies over the (post-Oslo) idea of a single non-partitioned state in Israel/Palestine and its possible internal configurations in terms of restoring normalization of life for Palestinians and Israelis all, including individual AND/OR collective rights.