The Two State Solution is a fundamentally dishonest proposition. When Western colonial powers first conceived carving up the Middle East, starting with the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the 1919 League of Nations mandate system — and by way of dozens of partition schemes to take one people’s land and give it to another — the whole notion of partitioning Palestine became nothing less than an organized system of land theft persisting until the present day.
Naturally, Palestinians have reacted with understandable anger at the imposition of a Jewish state literally built on the rubble of their homes and communities — some 500 cities and towns — and the forced expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians accomplished through massacre and state terror. Today Israel continues to extend Jewish domination on the rubble of newly bulldozed and cratered Palestinian homes and cities. And state terror continues to be an important arrow in its quiver of control and repression techniques.
Operating out of desperation, with much of the Western world arrayed against them, Palestinians have at varying times acquiesced to partition schemes — just as one might have no choice but to allow an armed home invader to move into his house while he flees to the basement. These are essentially the terms that American “peace” brokers from various, mainly Democratic, administrations have dictated to the Palestinians. Americans who live in communities that long ago overran Native American lands — I’ll wager this is most of White America — somehow find this arrangement completely normal and reasonable.
So, while incapable of condemning the home invader, the fictive Two State Solution has become the default position of Centrist Democrats who promote this “solution” at every opportunity while offering neither description nor outline of how such an impossibility could ever be conjured into existence. Lately, these Two-Staters’ biggest problem is that One State is official Zionist policy and the entity our politicians are working in behalf of — Israel, not the US — won’t consider any sort of Palestinian state — even the “basement” option. And, of course, Palestinians are none too eager to accept a third-rate rump state on a fraction of their homeland while leaving the heavily-armed home invader still in charge.
As much as a Two State solution has become a deservedly lampooned article of faith among American Liberals and liberal Zionists, it is no longer even a remote possibility. 10% of Israel’s population — 15% of them Americans, many of them non-Jewish Russians — now occupy the West Bank. The scale of Israeli settlement is so vast, especially with Israeli laws that “legalize” ongoing pretextual land grabs and encourage Judaization of even Arab communities within Israel proper, that there is no longer enough contiguous land in the West Bank — forget about the isolated Gazan enclave — from which any sort of Palestinian state could ever be cobbled together. To speak of Two States, then, is to promote a damnable blatant lie.
A few years ago I read about an 11-foot python that swallowed a baby deer. It was a meal that cost both the deer and the python their lives. Israel has exactly the same problem as the snake — in a land where Zionism has long struggled to attain and maintain a Jewish majority, Palestinians have always been an indigestible mass that a Zionist ethno-state can never control, repress, or eliminate without massive assistance from the same colonial powers that created it. Zionism, which now openly expresses itself in the most vile, racist, separatist jingoism and violence, will never be able to contend with Palestinians in their midst or make peace with the Arab neighbors who sympathize with them. And it’s just a matter of time — repeated attempts to eat the deer will eventually kill the snake.
Historically, Zionism is an aberration and an anachronism, as historian Tony Judt and innumerable Jewish writers have observed in recent years. While earlier proto-Zionists like Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber and Judah Magnes may have envisioned a bi-national homeland, by the 1942 Biltmore Conference it was clear that Zionism now meant an exclusionary Jewish state. In 1945 the last European concentration camps were liberated but that did not alter the trajectory of Revisionist Zionism’s plan — initiated in the late Thirties — to completely rid Palestine of Arabs. As Israel’s New Historians have shown, the massacres, atrocities, and mass expulsions of Arabs of the Nakba had been long planned.
Ethnic cleansing was arguably built into Zionism by its best-known advocate, Theodor Herzl, who wrote in Der Judenstaat (the Jewish State) that the indigenous people would be “spirited across” the border. Though the Nakba had been planned for almost a decade, Plan Dalet was finally implemented on March 10th, 1948 — months before the fabled “massing Arab armies” supposedly instigated the 1948 war. Any discussion of the present conflict should begin not with October 7th but with March 10th, 1948, the day that the Nakba was launched from David Ben Gurion’s offices in Tel Aviv. It has been 76 years since then, and the snake is still trying to eat the deer.
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Today we live in a vastly different world than our mothers and grandfathers did in 1948. Colonialism has fallen into disrepute, South Africa’s Apartheid regime has collapsed. America’s foreign adventures in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, and Iraq have been recognized by a significant percentage of voters as bloody disasters that not only killed millions but tore our own country apart. Here in the US we are making uneven progress with our long-festering race problems, but a significant part of America remains committed to racial justice (even as a significant number is not). All this is to say that the climate for accepting a racist ethno-state like Israel’s has changed. What was normal at the end of Jim Crow America in 1948 is now seen as obviously racist. Yet, fighting to keep JIm Crow alive in Israel, Zionists are pulling out all the stops to demonize young protesters, pass laws that criminalize criticism of Israel, and assure that Israel-friendly candidates have a leg up in the Democratic primaries.
Peter Beinart, who one could consider a “recovering Zionist,” offers one of the best explanations of why young people today, including Jewish students, are turning their backs on Zionism. One of the reasons is “intersectionality.” This generation of students has been involved in racial justice and police accountability struggles following George Floyd’s murder, gun control, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ justice, and in climate and environmental justice campaigns. Some of these issues intersect with justice for Palestinians, but mainly their activism represents the fact that young people are simply paying more attention to the greater world we live in.
And this goes for Jews too. As the list of Israeli human rights abuses, crimes against humanity, and charges of genocide grows, many Jews have become soured on Zionism, particularly the Revisionist strain that became official policy after 1942. Following the 1967 war, especially, Zionism began hijacking Judaism and threatens to destroy the religion by compromising Judaism’s values as it insists that there is no difference between an ethno-nationalist movement and a religion. This, of course, is exactly what is happening to Christianity in the United States and Eastern Europe. And in fact many Zionists are politically in bed with the autocratic Far Right and Christian Nationalists. Consider Israel’s cozy relationships with Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Spain’s Vox party, and Christian Zionists like John Hagee, to cite just a few examples. Zionism is literally Christian Nationalism’s kissing cousin. Jews who fear our domestic turn to the right also fear Israel’s now shamelessly open expression of the same.
It’s fair to say that Europe-facing Israel would love to be part of an illiberal autocratic ethno-nationalist global Far Right, even as it courts the economically powerful neoliberal Western nations (US, Germany, France, Great Britain). While these nations admittedly have emerging autocratic, illiberal, and ethnocratic tendencies of their own, they also have significant numbers of people pushing back against these tendencies. This is what makes the unprecedented opposition to American and European policy on Gaza so remarkable — it is not antisemitsm, as the Zionists would have it, but a growing awareness of how our domestic turn to the right is connected with the illiberalism at Israel’s core.
Ultimately both MAGA revanchism and Israel’s attempts to preserve its antique ethno-nationalism are doomed to fail. In 2003 historian Tony Judt wrote in “Israel: the Alternative” that
“In a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry at will; where cultural and national impediments to communication have all but collapsed; where more and more of us have multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to answer to just one of them; in such a world Israel is truly an anachronism. And not just an anachronism but a dysfunctional one. In today’s”clash of cultures” between open, pluralist democracies and belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno-states, Israel actually risks falling into the wrong camp.”
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All this has led to the idea of a single, secular bi-national state for both Palestinians and those who made their homes out of Palestinian homes.
In 2010 Merav Michali asked Tony Judt what his idea of a bi-national state looked like:
“I don’t know. What I do know is that since I wrote that in 2003, everyone from Moshe Arens through Barak to Olmert has admitted that Israel is on the way to a single state with a potential Arab majority in Bantustans unless something happens fast. That’s all that I said in my essay.
But ok, since it looks as though Israel is determined to give itself this future, what will it look like? [It will look like] Hell. But what could it look like? Well, there could be a federal state of two autonomous communities – on the Swiss or Belgian model (don’t tell me the latter doesn’t work – it works very well but is opposed by Flemings led by people very much like [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and [Foreign Minister Avigdor] Lieberman). This could have crossover privileges and rights for both communities, but each would be autonomous. I think this would work better than a mixed single-state, and it would allow each community to set certain sorts of religious and other regulations according to its taste.”
Why “Hell?”
Because it would start from a very bad place. It would begin with Jews running the place in the name of a Jewish state, defined by Orthodox Rabbis and controlled by an army whose officer core is increasingly permeated by religious and settler communities. No Arab would feel remotely safe, much less equal or a citizen in such a “single state”. The Arabs’ lack of property, rights, status and prospects would either make them a sullen and potentially violent underclass or else the best of them would try to leave. This is no good basis for integration, though it is of course what some of Israel’s present leaders privately desire. And then there would be Gaza…
… Defense Minister Ehud Barak and former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert also recognize that Israel is on its way to a single state. […] In such a state, Jews would soon be a minority. Doesn’t that frighten you?
Not as much as it seems to frighten others. Why is it ok for a Jewish minority to dominate an Arab majority, its leaders to call for expulsions of majority members, etc., but not ok for a democracy to have a majority and minority both protected under law? At least Israel could then call itself a democracy with a clear conscience.
What you are really asking is whether I think the Palestinians would immediately set out to rape, pillage and murder the Jews? I don’t see why they would want to — there is no historical record suggesting that this is what Palestinians do for fun, whereas we have all too much evidence that Israelis persecute Palestinians for no good reason. If I were an Arab, I would be more afraid of living in a state with Jews just now.
Can you see or understand why Israelis are afraid?
Yes, but only in the sense that someone who has been brought up to fear and hate his neighbors will have good reason to be frightened at the thought of living in the same house with them. Israelis have created a generation of young Palestinians who hate them and will never forgive them and that does make a real problem for any future agreement, single- or two-state.
But Israel should be much, much more afraid of the Israel it’s creating for itself: a semi-democratic, demagogic, far-right warrior state dominated by racist Russians and crazed rabbis. In this perspective, an internationally policed and guaranteed federal state of Israel, with the same rights and resources for Jews and Arabs, looks a lot less frightening to me.
Can you see why American Jews are fearful as well of that?
No. This is the fear of the paranoid hysteric – like the man at the dinner table in the story I wrote in the New York Review who had never been to Israel but thought I should stop criticizing it because “We Jews might need it sometime.” American Jews — most of whom know nothing of Jewish history, Jewish languages or Jewish religion — feel “Jewish” by identifying unthinkingly with Auschwitz as the source of their special victim status and “Israel” as their insurance policy and macho other. I find this contemptible — they are quite happy to see Arabs killed in their name, so long as other Jews do it. That’s not fear, that is something between surrogate nationalism and moral indifference.
Judt was certainly not the first or last to speak of a one-state land-sharing solution, but he certainly roiled the waters when he suggested it. Zionists accused him of antisemitism and of denying the Jewish people both their “historic home” and “Jewish self-determination.” Aside from the fact that all the religious states we are familiar with are nightmares (Saudi Arabia comes to mind), Germany of early 1945 was the last European nation with laws privileging or demonizing specific ethnic groups. That Israel would essentially preserve Nuremberg-style laws in a Jewish state has always seemed aberrant. Especially to many Jews.
In the last two decades there have been dozens of proposals, all with slightly different wrinkles, offering plans to end the ongoing nightmare in Palestine. Contrary to the shrill voices of Zionists telling the rest of us what we mean when we say “from the river to the sea…” Palestine will be free someday. For everyone. There will be something closer to a democracy, and it will offer the world a hopeful example.
An overview of One State proposals — good and bad — will be the subject of my next essay.
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