According to defenders of Israel’s Apartheid state — which today maintains a brutal supremacist regime across all of Palestine — the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” supposedly implies the genocide of the Jewish people. The ADL, which cites the Hamas and PFLP charters, calls it an “antisemitic slogan” that “means the dismantling of the Jewish state. It is an antisemitic charge denying the Jewish right to self-determination, including through the removal of Jews from their ancestral homeland.” — Or so they say.
Hamas, of course, is not the only group to have used this phrase. Israel’s Likud party used a similar phrase (“between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”) in its platform. Perhaps it’s just simple projection, but Zionism has actually denied the Palestinian right to self-determination, especially through the removal of Palestinians from their ancestral homeland. The perpetuation of a system of Jewish supremacy maintained by a genocidal occupation is both unsustainable and unimaginable.
The purpose of this and two essays to follow is to review three books that propose — instead of a Zionist supremacist state– a shared democratic, secular state in Palestine.
It is fair to say that the so-called Two State Solution (TSS) may have once had its day, but that day is long gone following massive settlement by now more than 700,000 illegal settlers in the West Bank. Until or unless they are withdrawn there will never be any land for a contiguous Palestinian state. In terms of a Palestinian “rump” state, the conditions imposed on Palestinians in each of the American “peace” negotiations would have been unacceptable to Israel if imposed on Jews; thus each foundered because Palestinians too would reasonably not accept colonialism, even a “Lite” version that denied them a genuine state with full self-determination.
This leaves a One State Solution, or some variant, as the most reasonable solution — a single land for two peoples. Each of the solutions in these three books have a slightly different wrinkle, as we will see.
Today’s review is Ian S. Lustick’s Paradigm Lost: from Two-State Solution to One-State Reality. In following posts I will review Omri Boehm’s Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel; and Jonathan Kuttab’s Beyond the Two-State Solution. Each of the authors has proposed a solution “from the river to the sea” that is more than a maligned slogan — a solution in which everyone in Palestine is free.
But before we get into the books, the Hamas Charter frequently cited by Israel-defenders actually reads like a mirror of Zionist policies. You could almost do a global search and replace of “Judaism” with “Islam” or “Jewish” with “Palestinian.” Or replace “the Jewish people” with the “Ummah” — and you get the idea. Palestine is still contested land and its original inhabitants have rightly never given up their claim.
Here is the context in the Hamas charter in which the contentious phrase is used:
“20. Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.”
This doesn’t sound like genocide to me. Elsewhere the charter makes it even clearer:
“16. Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.”
While it is presumptuous of the ADL and other Zionist attack organizations to tell us what our own words mean, their interpretations are quite a stretch. The authors of each of the three books I review could well be smeared as “antisemites” by Zionists for their proposals of secular democracies that do away with Jewish supremacy, but each of these proposals must be read to see how Jewish — and Palestinian — life and culture can not only survive but flourish in a shared state. This is anything but antisemitic.
And what of a Zionist state? Is dismantling a racist, Apartheid regime such a tragedy? The question answers itself.
To me the premise that any particular religion has a “right” to its own nation seems strange. Where then is the Mormon nation? The Scientologist nation? The state for practitioners of Santeria? Writing as a secular American, the whole notion of Christian Nationalism offends me, and the reality of today’s Christian nationalists (and their kissing cousins, the Zionists and Saudi Wahabbists) ought to be a cautionary tale about the dangers and excesses of theocratic states. So, yes, for Zionists to claim that Israel is the home of all the world’s Jews, including me, is both offensive and insane.
Furthermore, a repressive state does not have a right to claim special privileges for itself, or whine that criticisms of it constitutes hate-speech or antisemitism. If people call for dismantling Israel’s repressive state — as it is — this does not mean the extermination of its citizens; it simply means that the state itself cannot conduct business as usual under its toxic ideology. Portugual, Greece, Germany, South Africa — to list only a few examples of former dictatorships and repressive regimes — were all reconstituted as democracies without purges or extermination. And this is my hope for Palestine. This is what I mean when I say:
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Paradigm Lost
Ian Lustick is a former intelligence analyst with the State Department, and currently a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a founder and past president of the Association for Israel Studies, a member of the American Political Science Association, the Middle East Studies Association, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Lustick grew up Jewish in upstate New York. His dissertation was on Arabs in the Jewish state, and he has written extensively about the Israeli settler movement. He has clearly thought deeply about how two peoples might live in this one land.
Lustick’s One State Solution is essentially the democratization and transformation of Israel into a nation for all of its people from the river to the sea. He builds his case, beginning with an uncomfortable truth: “A Palestinian state could have been established and could have coexisted peacefully alongside Israel, but the opportunity to establish it was historically perishable and is no longer available.” The question then becomes: what kind of Single State does Lustick envision?
Lustick recounts the history of Zionism, from the Yeshuv to early Israel, through 1948, 1967, Oslo, the PLO, and Arab League peace initiatives. A Palestinian state was no longer an option by the 1980’s because it was official policy of almost every government that a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River could never exist. Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s famous “Iron Wall” was the operational philosophy that decreed that Palestinians must experience unrelenting, uncompromising force until their nationalist aspirations have been extinguished. While it guided successive Israeli governments and parties like the Likud, it has never succeeded. A variety of Palestinian liberation movements have fought Israel tooth and nail since its founding. The unintended consequences of the “Iron Wall” were, according to Lustick, that “Zionism’s strategic logic unintentionally institutionalized a political incapacity to discern or exploit Arab willingness to compromise.” Zionist state builders like David Ben-Gurion convinced themselves that the Arabs would eventually give up. But they never did.
Another self-inflicted Israeli delusion is what Lustick calls “Holocaustia.” This is the abuse of the Holocaust by turning it into a justification for the demonization and nazification of Palestinians and the Arab world. In 2006 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed American Zionists in Los Angeles, telling them “it’s 1938 and Iran is Germany.” In 2016 Israeli president Reuven Rivlin told a group of soldiers, “Today, seventy years after the liberation of the death camps, we stand before you and we swear an oath, and promise: All of us, each and every one of us, has a number tattooed on his arm.” While the Holocaust was certainly a defining traumatic event for many Israeli and Jewish families, in Israel it became weaponized as the justification for Zionism. Without an imagined second Holocaust just on the horizon, and without a new Nazi to fear — or as of October 7th the biblical enemy Amalek — Zionism is little more than a 19th century nationalist ideology in search of a contemporary raison d’etre.
Outside Israel, AIPAC and dozens of “lobbying” groups that fly high above FARA registration requirements hold American foreign policy captive and provide Israel with all the armaments and diplomatic cover it needs to continue operating its 76 year-old occupation. Lustick presents little new information here, but this mention is necessary because the United States is the only — as of yet unrealized — hope for applying leverage on Israel. Owing to the shared colonial (and genocidal) history of both the US and Israel, any solution would have distinct American fingerprints on it. Lustick believes that there is hope yet that Americans may yet decide to “save Israel from itself” and show some tough love leading to a breakthrough. This is going to require a paradigm shift.
Lustick regards the Two State Solution (TSS) as a dead paradigm, albeit one that politicians and liberal Zionists cling to desperately. Amusingly, Lustick compares the TSS to the old theory of phlogiston, a non-existent element related to combustion. Only after trial after trial after experiment after experiment was phlogiston debunked. Similarly, there is now enough proof of the impossibility of the TSS so that policy makers ought to stop talking about it.
In fact, over one hundred years of schemes and negotiations have demonstrated that, given Israel’s refusal to permit a Palestinian state, the idea of two states is a dead letter. Lustick systematically shows how each of the assumptions underlying Two States were undermined by different facts or contrasting assumptions. For example, Israelis wanted “two states” to mean no territorial concessions, but for Jordan to provide land for a Palestinian homeland. It wasn’t until the Oslo process that both sides saw TSS as a real possibility. Right after Oslo Israel slowed down settlements and there was discussion of land swaps. But by 1983 it was clear that annexation of “Judea” and “Samaria” had progressed too far to ever support two states. The window had been closed. Hope had become fantasy.
Lustick has tried to formulate a solution given his understanding of the facts on the ground. And the facts are that there is already a One State Reality (OSR) “from river to the sea.” Sorely lacking, however, are evenly-applied freedoms within that space. Lustick writes:
Though there is no “solution” in sight, there is a reality. There is today one state, the State of Israel, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. It is an apparatus of power, recognized by the international community, whose policies and actions decisively affect the lives of everyone in the area. It collects taxes from West Bank and Gaza Palestinians and determines who enters and leaves those areas, who enjoys rights to property, and who can live, build, or even visit where. In its current form, the state is no group’s pretty picture. It was achieved by no one’s carefully implemented plan. It is not a solution but an outcome — a one-state reality (OSR).
Palestinians of Gaza and of the West Bank are citizens of no other recognized state. As measured by the State of Israel’s impact on the intimate details of their lives and indeed on whether they live at all, they are as much its inhabitants as black slaves were of the United States and as Africans in the Bantustans were of apartheid South Africa. The five-decade occupation of the West Bank and the twelve-year blockade of Gaza, combined with the exposure to state violence that these populations regularly endure, do not mark their exclusion from the Israeli state. Rather, they simply register the fact that Israel rules different populations in different regions in different ways. Though the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip came within the ambit of the Israeli polity fifty-two rather than seventy-one years ago, the palpable fact is that they live within it.
Officially, the Israeli government views lands west of the Jordan River but across the Green Line – the 1949 armistice line that separates Israel from territories occupied in 1967 — as “disputed,” which implies that from their perspective they are part of the country, Thus, when Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reports the number of Israelis in the country, it counts every Israeli living west of the Jordan River, not just those living in the part of the country surrounded by the Green Line.
Most official Israeli maps feature no divisions between the sea and the river other than administrative boundaries of districts and regions. Textbooks show lines surrounding the Gaza Strip and around Area A clusters and a slightly different shading for Area B clusters. But the only lines indicating a border between Israel and another sovereign country are those along its borders with Arab states — and these separate both Gaza and the West Bank from the Arab states. A map accessed in December 2018 on Israels Ministry of Foreign Affairs website was titled “Israel within Boundaries and Ceasefire Lines.” The map labels the Gaza Strip as “under Palestinian jurisdiction” and the Oslo demarcated areas of “A” and “B” in the West Bank as characterized by Palestinian responsibility for “civil affairs.” The country’s international boundary includes both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank within the state. All mail that enters or leaves the West Bank or the Gaza Strip does so via Israel. The undeclared OSR is also revealed in the ordinary language of public communications: images of the country used by Israeli ministries, weather maps, maps of annual average temperature and rainfall, maps of the topography of the “State of Israel,” road maps, and iconic depictions of the country’s borders used for tourism and other purposes.
In 2009 I visited Palestine and Israel. I spoke to Sam Bahour, a Palestinian-American I met in Ramallah, who expressed the view that the Palestinian demand for a separate nation, if frustrated, would lead to a Civil Rights movement in which Palestinians demanded equal treatment within the Israeli state. In this scenario, would American decision-makers take Palestinian demands for equal rights and civil liberties seriously, or pretend that two states are still possible, deciding that Palestinians need another 75 years of martial law and repression? Most of today’s Congress would opt for the latter, I’m sure of it.
To democratize Israel would require abolishing Zionism’s discriminatory laws and injustices. Zionism itself would finally have to be discarded. The “Basic Law: Israel as a Nation-State of the Jewish People,” which assigns rights of citizenship only to Jews, would have to be repealed in an expanded democracy. As it is, the law discriminates against 20% of Israeli citizens of Bedouin, Druze, Christian, and Muslim heritage for whom Israel resembles the Jim Crow South.
Finally, Israelis and Americans have to come to terms with the fact that Israel cannot be — and never really has been — a “democratic AND Jewish” state. Just as a “democratic and Christian” state is a similar impossibility in the US, American liberals and liberal Zionists will have to be among the first to recognize and reject this incongruity. In a land where Jews are actually a slight numerical minority, Zionism has no moral right to crush the hopes and lives of the majority. But for many Israelis and Jews who cannot see where Judaism ends and Zionism begins, this is going to be enormously challenging.
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