[ Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power with a narrow, extreme
right-wing coalition has shattered even the illusion of a two-state
solution. His government has not been shy: a Greater Israel in which
law enshrines Jewish supremacy over all Palestinians]
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ISRAEL’S ONE-STATE REALITY – IT’S TIME TO GIVE UP ON THE
TWO-STATE SOLUTION  
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Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami
April 14, 2023
Foreign Affairs
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_ Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power with a narrow, extreme
right-wing coalition has shattered even the illusion of a two-state
solution. His government has not been shy: a Greater Israel in which
law enshrines Jewish supremacy over all Palestinians _

Credit: Guillem Casasus / Foreign Affairs,

 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power in Israel with
a narrow, extreme right-wing coalition has shattered even the illusion
of a two-state solution. Members of his new government have not been
shy about stating their views on what Israel is and what it should be
in all the territories it controls: a Greater Israel defined not just
as a Jewish state but one in which the law enshrines Jewish supremacy
over all Palestinians who remain there. As a result, it is no longer
possible to avoid confronting a one-state reality.

Israel’s radical new government did not create this reality but
rather made it impossible to deny. The temporary status of
“occupation” of the Palestinian territories
[[link removed]] is now
a permanent condition in which one state ruled by one group of people
rules over another group of people. The promise of a two-state
solution
[[link removed]] made
sense as an alternative future in the years around the 1993 Oslo
accords, when there were constituencies for compromise on both the
Israeli and the Palestinian sides and when tangible if fleeting
progress was made toward building the institutions of a hypothetical
Palestinian state. But that period ended long ago. Today, it makes
little sense to let fantastical visions for the future obscure deeply
embedded existing arrangements.

It is past time to grapple with what a one-state reality means for
policy, politics, and analysis. Palestine is not a state in waiting,
and Israel is not a democratic state incidentally occupying
Palestinian territory. All the territory west of the Jordan River has
long constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where the land and
the people are subject to radically different legal regimes, and
Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste. Policymakers
and analysts who ignore this one-state reality will be condemned to
failure and irrelevance, doing little beyond providing a smokescreen
for the entrenchment of the status quo.

Some implications of this one-state reality are clear. The world will
not stop caring about Palestinian rights, no matter how fervently many
supporters of Israel (and Arab rulers) wish they would. Violence
[[link removed]],
dispossession, and human rights abuses have escalated over the last
year, and the risk of large-scale violent confrontation grows with
every day that Palestinians are locked in this ever-expanding system
of legalized oppression and Israeli encroachment. But far less clear
is how important actors will adjust—if they adjust at all—as the
reality of a single state shifts from open secret to undeniable truth.

U.S. President Joe Biden
[[link removed]] seems
fully committed to the status quo, and there is no evidence that his
administration has thought about the issue or done much beyond crisis
management and mouthing displeasure. A strong sense of wishful
thinking permeates Washington, with many U.S. officials still trying
to convince themselves that there is a chance of returning to a
two-state negotiation after the aberrant Netanyahu
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leaves office. But ignoring the new reality will not be an option for
much longer. A storm is gathering in Israel and Palestine that demands
an urgent response from the country that has most enabled the
emergence of a single state upholding Jewish supremacy. If the United
States wants to avoid profound instability in the Middle East and a
challenge to its broader global agenda, it must cease exempting Israel
from the standards and structures of the liberal international order
that Washington hopes to lead.

FROM UNSAYABLE TO UNDENIABLE

A one-state
[[link removed]] arrangement
is not a future possibility; it already exists, no matter what anyone
thinks. Between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, one state
controls the entry and exit of people and goods, oversees security,
and has the capacity to impose its decisions, laws, and policies on
millions of people without their consent.

A one-state reality could, in principle, be based on democratic rule
and equal citizenship. But such an arrangement is not on offer at the
moment. Forced to choose between Israel’s Jewish identity and
liberal democracy, Israel has chosen the former. It has locked in a
system of Jewish supremacy, wherein non-Jews are structurally
discriminated against or excluded in a tiered scheme: some non-Jews
have most of, but not all, the rights that Jews have, while most
non-Jews live under severe segregation, separation, and domination.

A peace process in the closing years of the twentieth century offered
the tantalizing possibility of something different. But since the 2000
Camp David summit, where U.S.-led negotiations failed to achieve a
two-state agreement, the phrase “peace process” has served mostly
to distract from the realities on the ground and to offer an excuse
for not acknowledging them. The second Intifada
[[link removed]],
which erupted soon after the disappointment at Camp David, and
Israel’s subsequent intrusions into the West Bank transformed the
Palestinian Authority into little more than a security subcontractor
for Israel. They also accelerated the rightward drift of Israeli
politics, the population shifts brought about by Israeli citizens
moving into the West Bank, and the geographical fragmentation of
Palestinian society. The cumulative effect of these changes became
evident during the 2021 crisis over the appropriation of Palestinian
homes in East Jerusalem, which pitted not just Israeli settlers and
Palestinians but also Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel
against each other in a conflict that split cities and neighborhoods.

Netanyahu’s new government
[[link removed]], composed of
a coalition of right-wing religious and nationalist extremists,
epitomizes these trends. Its members boast of their mission to create
a new Israel in their image: less liberal, more religious, and more
willing to own discrimination against non-Jews. Netanyahu has written
that “Israel is not a state of all its citizens” but rather “of
the Jewish people—and only it." The man he appointed as minister of
national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has declared that Gaza should be
“ours” and that “the Palestinians can go to . . . Saudi Arabia
or other places, like Iraq or Iran.” This extremist vision has long
been shared by at least a minority of Israelis and has strong
grounding in Zionist thought and practice. It began gaining adherents
soon after Israel occupied the Palestinian territories in the 1967
war. And although it is not yet a hegemonic view, it can plausibly
claim a majority of Israeli society and can no longer be termed a
fringe position.

The fact of a one-state reality has long been obvious to those who
live in Israel and the territories it controls and to anyone who has
paid attention to the inexorable shifts on the ground. But in the past
few years, something has changed. Until recently, the one-state
reality was rarely acknowledged by important actors, and those who
spoke the truth out loud were ignored or punished for doing so. With
remarkable speed, however, the unsayable has become close to
conventional wisdom.

DEMOCRACY FOR SOME

To see the reality of a single state, many observers will need to put
on new glasses. These are people who are used to seeing a distinction
between the occupied territories and Israel proper—that is, the
state as it existed before 1967, when Israel captured the West Bank
and Gaza—and think Israel’s sovereignty is limited to the
territory it controlled before 1967. But the state and sovereignty are
not the same. The state is defined by what it controls, whereas
sovereignty depends on other states’ recognizing the legality of
that control.

These new glasses would disaggregate the concepts of state,
sovereignty, nation, and citizenship, making it easier to see a
one-state reality that is ineluctably based on relations of
superiority and inferiority between Jews and non-Jews across all the
territories under Israel’s differentiated but unchallenged control.
Consider Israel through the lens of a state. It has control over a
territory that stretches from the river to the sea, has a near
monopoly on the use of force, and uses this power to sustain a
draconian blockade of Gaza and control the West Bank with a system
of checkpoints, policing, and relentlessly expanding settlements. Even
after it withdrew forces from Gaza in 2005, the Israeli government
retained control over the territory’s entry and exit points. Like
parts of the West Bank, Gaza enjoys a degree of autonomy, and since
the brief Palestinian civil war of 2007, the territory has been
administered internally by the Islamist organization Hamas
[[link removed]],
which brooks little dissent. But Hamas does not control the
territory’s coastline, airspace, or boundaries. In other words, by
any reasonable definition, the Israeli state encompasses all lands
from its border with Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea.

It has been possible to overlook that reality because Israel has not
made formal claims of sovereignty over all these areas. It has annexed
some of the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem and
the Golan Heights
[[link removed]].
But it has not yet declared sovereignty over the rest of the land that
it controls, and only a handful of states would be likely to
recognize such claims if Israel were to make them.

Many lifelong residents of Israel have been rendered stateless.

Controlling territory and consolidating institutional domination
without formalizing sovereignty enables Israel to maintain a one-state
reality on its terms. It can deny responsibility for (and rights to)
most Palestinians because they are residents of its territory but not
citizens of the state, cynically justifying this discrimination on the
grounds that it keeps alive the possibility of a two-state solution.
By not formalizing sovereignty, Israel can be democratic for its
citizens but unaccountable to millions of its residents. This
arrangement has allowed many of Israel’s supporters abroad to
continue to pretend that all this is temporary—that Israel remains a
liberal democracy and that, someday, Palestinians will exercise their
right to self-determination.

But even within its pre-1967 borders, Israel’s democracy has limits,
which become apparent when viewed through the lens of citizenship.
Israel’s Jewish identity and its one-state reality have produced an
intricate series of legal categories that distribute differentiated
rights, responsibilities, and protections. Its 2018 “nation-state”
law defines Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish People” and
holds that “the exercise of the right to national self-determination
in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish People”; it makes no
mention of democracy or equality for non-Jewish citizens.

According to this hierarchy of membership, the fullest class of
citizenship is reserved for Israeli Jews (at least those whose
Jewishness meets rabbinical standards); they are citizens without
conditions. Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship and reside in
pre-1967 Israel have political and civil rights but confront other
limits—both legal and extrajudicial—on their rights,
responsibilities, and protections. Palestinian residents of Jerusalem
theoretically have the option of becoming Israeli citizens, but most
reject it because doing so would be an act of disloyalty. Palestinians
who reside in the territories are the lowest class of all. Their
rights and responsibilities depend on where they live, with those in
Gaza at the bottom of the hierarchy—a position that has only
deteriorated since Hamas took control. Asking a Palestinian to
describe his or her legal status can elicit an answer that lasts for
several minutes—and is still full of ambiguities.

Heading toward an Israeli checkpoint in the Palestinian territories,
June 2017  (Mohamad Torokman / Reuters  //  Foreign Affairs)
 

As long as hope existed for a two-state solution that would see
Palestinians’ rights recognized, it was possible to view the
situation within Israel’s 1967 boundaries as one of de jure equality
combined with de facto discrimination against some citizens—an
unfortunate but common reality in much of the world. But when one
acknowledges the one-state reality, something more pernicious is
revealed. In that one state, there are some whose movement, travel,
civil status, economic activities, property rights, and access to
public services are severely restricted. A substantial share of
lifelong residents with deep and continuous roots in the territory of
that state are rendered stateless. And all these categories and
gradations of marginalization are enforced by legal, political, and
security measures imposed by state actors who are accountable to only
a portion of the population.

Naming this reality is politically contentious, even as a consensus
has formed about the abiding and severe inequalities that define it. A
flurry of reports by Israeli and international nongovernmental
organizations documenting these inequalities have driven the term
“apartheid” from the margins of the Israeli-Palestinian debate to
its center. Apartheid refers to the system of racial segregation that
South Africa’s white minority government used to enshrine white
supremacy from 1948 to the early 1990s. It has since been defined
under international law and by the International Criminal Court as a
legalized scheme of racial segregation and discrimination and deemed a
crime against humanity. Major human rights organizations, including
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have applied the term to
Israel. So have many academics: according to a March 2022 poll of
Middle East–focused scholars who are members of three large academic
associations, 60 percent of respondents described the situation in
Israel and the Palestinian territories as a “one-state reality with
inequality akin to apartheid.”

The term may not be a perfect fit. Israel’s system of structural
discrimination is more severe than those of even the most illiberal
states. But it is based not on race, as apartheid was defined in South
Africa and is defined under international law, but on ethnicity,
nationality, and religion. Perhaps this distinction matters to those
who wish to take legal action against Israel. It is less important
politically, however, and is virtually meaningless when it comes to
analysis. What matters politically is that a once taboo term has
increasingly become a mainstream, common-sense understanding of
reality. Analytically, what matters is that the apartheid label
accurately describes the facts on the ground and offers the beginnings
of a road map to change them. Apartheid
[[link removed]] is not
a magic word that alters reality when invoked. But its entry into the
political mainstream reveals a broad recognition that Israeli rule is
designed to maintain Jewish supremacy throughout all the territory the
state controls. Israel’s system may not technically be apartheid,
but it rhymes.

RUDE AWAKENING

It is primarily Israelis and Palestinians who must grapple with the
one-state reality. But that reality will also complicate Israel’s
relationship with the rest of the world. For half a century, the peace
process allowed Western democracies to overlook Israel’s occupation
in favor of an aspirational future in which the occupation would come
to a mutually negotiated end. Israeli democracy (however flawed) and
the nominal distinction between Israel and the occupied Palestinian
territories also helped outsiders avert their gaze. All these
diversions are gone. The one-state reality has long been embedded in
Israeli law, politics, and society, even if it is only now being
broadly acknowledged. No ready alternatives exist, and it has been
decades since there was any meaningful political process to create
one.

Perhaps the recognition of these facts will not change much. Many
enduring global problems are never resolved. We live in a populist
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and human rights are under threat. Israeli leaders point to the
Abraham Accords, which established Israel’s relations with Bahrain,
Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), to argue that
normalization with Arab states never required resolving the
Palestinian issue. For their part, Western leaders may simply continue
to pretend that Israel shares their liberal democratic values while
many pro-Israel groups in the United States double down on their
support. Liberal Jewish Americans may struggle to defend an Israel
that has many characteristics of apartheid, but their protests will
have little practical effect.

Yet there are reasons to believe that the transition from an
aspirational two-state world to a real one-state world could be rocky.
The mainstreaming of the apartheid analogy and the rise of the
Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement—and the intense backlash
against both—suggest that the political terrain has shifted. Israel
may enjoy more physical security and regional diplomatic recognition
than ever before, with few international or local constraints on its
activities in the West Bank. But control requires more than brute
strength. It also requires some semblance of legitimacy, with the
status quo sustained by its taken-for-granted nature, its
naturalization as common sense, and the impossibility of even
contemplating justifiable resistance. Israel still has the
material power to win the battles it picks. But as those battles
proliferate, each victory further erodes its fighting position. Those
wanting to defend the one-state reality are defending colonialist
principles in a postcolonial world.

 

Demonstrations against Netanyahu, Tel Aviv, March 2023  (Ilan
Rosenberg / Reuters  //  Foreign Affairs)
The struggle to define and shape the terms of this one-state reality
may take new forms. In the past, dramatic interstate wars created
openings for negotiations and high-stakes diplomacy. But in the
future, U.S. policymakers are not likely to confront conventional
conflicts such as those that broke out between Israel and Arab states
in 1967 and 1973. Instead, they will face something closer to the
first and second Intifada—sudden outbursts of violence and mass
popular contestation such as those that occurred in May 2021. At that
time, clashes in Jerusalem sparked a wider conflagration involving
rocket fire between Israel and Hamas, demonstrations and violence in
the West Bank, and ugly incidents where Israelis of Jewish and
Palestinian ancestry (and the Israeli police) behaved as if ethnicity
trumped citizenship. Daily acts of violence and sporadic bouts of
popular upheaval—perhaps even a full third Intifada—seem
inevitable.

Policymakers in the United States and elsewhere who have long talked
about the need to preserve a two-state solution are increasingly being
forced to react to crises for which they are unprepared. The problems
engendered by the one-state reality have already sparked new
solidarity movements, boycotts, and societal conflicts.
Nongovernmental organizations, political movements supporting various
Israeli and Palestinian causes, and transnational advocacy groups are
seeking to alter global norms and sway individuals, societies, and
governments with new and old media campaigns. Increasingly, they aim
to label or boycott goods produced in places controlled by the Israeli
government (or outlaw such boycotts) and invoke civil rights laws to
mobilize their supporters and find alternatives to the feckless
diplomatic efforts of government leaders.

But all these movements and campaigns seek to mobilize constituencies
that are deeply divided. The Palestinians are divided between those
who bear Israeli citizenship and those who have other forms of
residency, as well as among those who live in East Jerusalem, the West
Bank, and Gaza. They are divided between those living in the one-state
reality and those living in the diaspora. They are divided between the
Fatah political faction that holds sway in the West Bank and the Hamas
organization that controls Gaza. They are also increasingly split
along generational lines. Younger Palestinians feel less attached to
the movements that channeled the political commitments and energies of
their parents and grandparents and are more likely to gravitate to new
groups and adopt new tactics of resistance.

A Palestinian demonstrator in the Gaza Strip, January 2023  (Mohammed
Salem / Reuters  //  Foreign Affairs)
Israeli Jews are similarly divided about the nature of the state, the
role of religion in politics, and a host of other matters, including
the rights of gays, lesbians, and other sexual minorities. Liberal
Israeli Jews have organized massive protests against the Netanyahu
government
[[link removed]]’s
assault on democracy and the judiciary, but they have mobilized around
the Palestinian issue far less, showing how internal disagreements
have edged aside questions about a peace process that no longer
exists.

The result is that leaders on both sides do not lead. There are
politicians in all camps who want to keep a lid on the conflict,
generally not in service of any strategy for resolution but out of a
sense of inefficacy and inertia. Other politicians want the opposite:
to shake things up and move in a sharply different direction, as U.S.
President Donald Trump
[[link removed]] did with
his “deal of the century,” promising an end to the conflict in a
matter that virtually erased Palestinian rights and national
aspirations. Jews pushing formal annexation of the occupied
territories and Palestinians advocating for new modes of resistance to
Israeli rule also hope to upend the status quo. But all such efforts
founder on the firmly established structures of power and interests.

Under these conditions, any diplomacy undertaken in the name of
resolving the conflict in a just manner will likely fail because it
misreads both the possible alternatives to the current impasse and the
will among all parties to achieve them. Policymakers wishing to
construct better choices will have to pay attention to the ways in
which the one-state system operates and evolves. They will need to
understand how its various inhabitants imagine their homeland, how
rights are enforced or violated, and how demographics are slowly but
portentously changing.

GHOSTS OF THE ARAB SPRING

Acknowledgment of the one-state reality has important—and
contradictory—implications for the Arab world. The argument for the
two-state solution has long assumed the importance of the Palestinian
cause to Arab publics, if not to their governments. The 2002 Saudi
peace initiative, which offered normalization of relations between
Israel and all Arab states in exchange for complete Israeli withdrawal
from the occupied territories, established a baseline: peace with the
Arab world would require a resolution of the Palestinian issue.

The Abraham Accords
[[link removed]],
brokered by the Trump administration and enthusiastically sustained by
the Biden administration, explicitly targeted that assumption by
accelerating political normalization and security cooperation between
Israel and several Arab states without requiring progress on the
Palestinian issue. This decoupling of Arab normalization from the
Palestinian issue went a long way toward entrenching the one-state
reality.

Thus far, the Abraham Accords have proved durable, surviving the
formation of Netanyahu’s government with its extremist ministers.
The normalization of relations between Israel and the UAE, at least,
will likely outlast the next round of Israeli-Palestinian violence and
even overt Israeli moves toward annexation. But since the accords were
signed, no additional Arab countries have sought to normalize
relations with Israel, and Saudi Arabia
[[link removed]] has continued
to hedge its bets by holding off on establishing formal ties with
Israel.

Arab normalization is likely to remain tethered to the Palestinian
issue indefinitely outside of the Gulf countries. It is all too easy
to imagine a scenario in which Israel moves to confiscate more
property in Jerusalem, provokes widespread Palestinian protests, and
then responds to this unrest with even greater violence and faster
dispossession—eventually triggering the final collapse of the
Palestinian Authority. Such an escalation could easily spark
large-scale protests across the Arab world, where long-simmering
economic hardship and political repression have created a tinderbox.
There is also the even graver threat that Israel will expel
Palestinians from the West Bank or even Jerusalem—a possibility,
sometimes euphemistically called a “transfer,” that polls suggest
many Israeli Jews would support. And that is to say nothing of how
Hamas or Iran might exploit such conditions.

Arab rulers might not care about the Palestinians, but their people
do—and those rulers care about nothing more than keeping their
thrones. Fully abandoning the Palestinians after more than half a
century of at least rhetorical support would be risky. Arab leaders do
not fear losing elections, but they remember the Arab uprisings
[[link removed]] of
2011 all too well, and they worry about anything that invites mass
popular mobilizations that could rapidly mutate into protests against
their regimes.

EXIT, VOICE, OR LOYALTY?

Acknowledging the one-state reality could also polarize the American
conversation about Israel and the Palestinians. Evangelicals and many
others on the political right might embrace this reality as the
realization of what they consider legitimate Israeli aspirations. Many
Americans who are left of center may finally recognize that Israel has
fallen from the ranks of liberal democracies and may abandon the
fanciful promise of two states for the goal of a single state that
grants equal rights to all its residents.

The United States bears considerable responsibility for entrenching
the one-state reality, and it continues to play a powerful role in
framing and shaping the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Israeli settlement
construction in the West Bank would not have survived and accelerated,
and occupation would not have endured, without U.S. efforts to shield
Israel from repercussions at the United Nations and other
international organizations. Without American technology and arms,
Israel would probably not have been able to sustain its military edge
in the region, which also enabled it to solidify its position in the
occupied territories. And without major U.S. diplomatic efforts and
resources, Israel could not have concluded peace agreements with Arab
states, from Camp David to the Abraham Accords.

Yet the American conversation about Israel and the Palestinians has
willfully neglected the ways in which Washington has abetted the
occupation. U.S. support for the peace process has been couched both
in terms of Israel’s security and in terms of the idea that only a
two-state solution could preserve Israel as both Jewish and
democratic. These two goals have always been in tension, but a
one-state reality makes them irreconcilable.

The United States bears considerable responsibility for the one-state
reality.

Although the Israeli-Palestinian issue has never been high on the
American public’s list of priorities, U.S. attitudes have shifted
notably: support for a two-state solution has declined, and support
for a single state that ensures equal citizenship has risen over the
past few years. Polls show that most American voters would support a
democratic Israel over a Jewish one, if forced to choose. Views on
Israel have also become far more partisan, with Republicans,
especially evangelicals, growing more supportive of Israeli policies
and the overwhelming majority of Democrats preferring an evenhanded
U.S. policy. Young Democrats now express more support for the
Palestinians than for Israel. One reason for this shift, especially
among young Democrats, is that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is
increasingly viewed as an issue of social justice rather than
strategic interest or biblical prophecy. This has been particularly
true in the era of Black Lives Matter.

The one-state reality has especially roiled the politics of Jewish
Americans. From the earliest years of Zionism, most Jewish American
supporters of Israel held as sacrosanct the aspiration for Israel to
be simultaneously Jewish and liberal. Netanyahu’s latest government
might be the breaking point for this group. It is difficult to square
a commitment to liberalism with support for a single state that offers
the benefits of democracy to Jews (and now seems to tread on some of
those) but explicitly withholds them from the majority of its
non-Jewish inhabitants.

Most Jewish Americans see basic liberal principles such as freedom of
opinion and expression, the rule of law, and democracy not only as
Jewish values but also as xxxxxxs against discrimination that ensure
their acceptance and even survival in the United States. Yet
Israel’s commitment to liberalism has always been shaky. As a Jewish
state, it fosters a form of ethnic nationalism rather than a civic
one, and its Orthodox Jewish citizens play an outsize role in
determining how Judaism shapes Israeli life.

In 1970, the political economist Albert Hirschman wrote that members
of organizations in crisis or decline have three options: “exit,
voice, and loyalty.” Jewish Americans have those same options today.
One camp, which arguably dominates major Jewish institutions in the
United States, exhibits loyalty enabled by denial of the one-state
reality. Voice is the increasingly dominant choice of Jewish Americans
who were previously in the peace camp. Once focused on achieving a
two-state solution, these Americans now direct their activism toward
defending Palestinian rights, safeguarding the shrinking space for
Israeli civil society, and resisting the dangers posed by
Netanyahu’s right-wing government
[[link removed]].
Finally, there are the Jewish Americans who have chosen exit, or
indifference. They simply do not think much about Israel. That might
be because they do not have a strong Jewish identity or because they
see Israel as misaligned with or even opposed to their values. There
is some evidence that the more Israel lurches to the right, the larger
this group becomes, especially among young Jewish Americans.

REALITY CHECK

So far, the Biden administration has sought to sustain the status quo
while urging Israel to avoid major provocations. In response to
continued settlement construction in the West Bank and other Israeli
violations of international law, the United States has issued empty
statements calling on Israel to avoid actions that undermine a
two-state solution. But this approach misdiagnoses the problem and
only makes it worse: Netanyahu’s far-right government is a symptom,
not a cause, of the one-state reality, and coddling it in an attempt
to coax it toward moderation will only embolden its extremist leaders
by showing that they pay no price for their actions.

The United States could instead meet a radicalized reality with a
radical response. For starters, Washington should banish the terms
“two-state solution” and “peace process” from its vocabulary.
U.S. calls for Israelis and Palestinians to return to the negotiating
table rely on magical thinking. Changing the way the United States
talks about the Israeli-Palestinian issue will change nothing on the
ground, but it will strip away a facade that has allowed U.S.
policymakers to avoid confronting reality. Washington must look at
Israel as it is and not as it has been assumed to be—and act
accordingly. Israel no longer even pretends to maintain liberal
aspirations. The United States does not have “shared values” and
should not have “unbreakable bonds” with a state that
discriminates against or abuses millions of its residents based on
their ethnicity and religion.

A better U.S. policy would advocate for equality, citizenship, and
human rights for all Jews and Palestinians living within the single
state dominated by Israel. Theoretically, such a policy would not
prevent a two-state solution from being resurrected in the unlikely
event that the parties moved in that direction in the distant future.
But starting from a one-state reality that is morally reprehensible
and strategically costly would demand an immediate focus on equal
human and civil rights. A serious rejection of today’s unjust
reality by the United States and the rest of the international
community might also push the parties themselves to seriously consider
alternative futures. The United States should demand equality now,
even if the ultimate political arrangement will be up to the
Palestinians and the Israelis to determine.

To that end, Washington should begin conditioning military and
economic aid to Israel on clear and specific measures to terminate
Israel’s military rule over the Palestinians. Avoiding such
conditionality has made Washington deeply complicit in the one-state
reality. Should Israel persist on its current path, the United States
should consider sharply reducing aid and other privileges, perhaps
even imposing smart, targeted sanctions on Israel and Israeli leaders
in response to clearly transgressive actions. Israel can decide for
itself what it wants to do, but the United States and other
democracies can make sure it knows the costs of maintaining and even
intensifying a deeply illiberal, discriminatory order.

Israel no longer even pretends to maintain liberal aspirations.

The clearest global vision articulated by the Biden administration has
been its full-throated defense of international laws and norms in
response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
[[link removed]]. Even if one ignores
the one-state reality, the same norms and values would surely be at
stake in Israel and Palestine, as is widely understood across
the global South [[link removed]].
When Israel violates international laws and liberal norms, the United
States should denounce Israel for those violations as it would any
other state. Washington needs to stop shielding Israel in
international organizations when it faces valid allegations of
transgressions against international law. And it needs to refrain from
vetoing UN
[[link removed]] Security
Council resolutions that aim to hold Israel accountable, stop
resisting Palestinian efforts to seek redress in international courts,
and rally other countries to demand an end to the siege of
Gaza—another supposedly temporary measure that has become a cruel
and an institutionalized reality.

But the one-state reality demands more. Looked at through that prism,
Israel resembles an apartheid state. Instead
of exempting Israel from the strong norm against apartheid,
enshrined in international law, Washington must reckon with the
reality it helped create and begin viewing that reality, talking about
it, and interacting with it honestly. The United States should stand
up for international, Israeli, and Palestinian nongovernmental
organizations, human rights organizations, and individual activists
who have been demonized for courageously calling out structural
injustice. Washington must protect Israeli civil society organizations
that are the country’s last refuge of liberal values and Palestinian
ones whose efforts will be critical to avoiding bloody conflict in the
months to come. The United States should also oppose Israeli arrests
of Palestinian leaders who offer a nonviolent vision of popular
resistance. And it should not seek to stop or punish those who choose
to peacefully boycott Israel because of its abusive policies.

Although Washington cannot prevent normalization of relations between
Israel and its Arab neighbors, the United States should not lead such
efforts. Nobody should be fooled by the mirage of the Abraham Accords
thriving while the Palestinian issue festers. Decoupling such
normalization agreements from Israel’s treatment of Palestinians has
only empowered the Israeli far right and cemented Jewish supremacy
within the state.

These U.S. policy changes would not immediately bear fruit. The
political backlash would be fierce, even though Americans—especially
Democrats—have grown far more critical of Israel than have the
politicians they elect. But in the long run, these changes offer the
best hope for moving toward a more peaceful and just outcome in Israel
and Palestine. By finally confronting the one-state reality and taking
a principled stand, the United States would stop being part of the
problem and start being part of the solution.

 

_[MICHAEL BARNETT is University Professor of International Affairs and
Political Science at the Elliott School of International Affairs at
George Washington University._

_NATHAN J. BROWN is Professor of Political Science and International
Affairs at George Washington University and a Nonresident Senior
Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace._

_MARC LYNCH is Professor of Political Science and International
Affairs at George Washington University._

_SHIBLEY TELHAMI is Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at
the University of Maryland and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the
Brookings Institution.]_

_They are the editors of The One State Reality: What Is
Israel/Palestine?
[[link removed]]_

_MORE BY MICHAEL BARNETT
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A Palestinian demonstrator in the Gaza Strip, January 2023
Mohammed Salem / Reuters
Israeli Jews are similarly divided about the nature of the state, the
role of religion in politics, and a host of other matters, including
the rights of gays, lesbians, and other sexual minorities. Liberal
Israeli Jews have organized massive protests against the Netanyahu
government’s assault on democracy and the judiciary, but they have
mobilized around the Palestinian issue far less, showing how internal
disagreements have edged aside questions about a peace process that no
longer exists.

The result is that leaders on both sides do not lead. There are
politicians in all camps who want to keep a lid on the conflict,
generally not in service of any strategy for resolution but out of a
sense of inefficacy and inertia. Other politicians want the opposite:
to shake things up and move in a sharply different direction, as U.S.
President Donald Trump did with his “deal of the century,”
promising an end to the conflict in a matter that virtually erased
Palestinian rights and national aspirations. Jews pushing formal
annexation of the occupied territories and Palestinians advocating for
new modes of resistance to Israeli rule also hope to upend the status
quo. But all such efforts founder on the firmly established structures
of power and interests.

Under these conditions, any diplomacy undertaken in the name of
resolving the conflict in a just manner will likely fail because it
misreads both the possible alternatives to the current impasse and the
will among all parties to achieve them. Policymakers wishing to
construct better choices will have to pay attention to the ways in
which the one-state system operates and evolves. They will need to
understand how its various inhabitants imagine their homeland, how
rights are enforced or violated, and how demographics are slowly but
portentously changing.

GHOSTS OF THE ARAB SPRING
Acknowledgment of the one-state reality has important—and
contradictory—implications for the Arab world. The argument for the
two-state solution has long assumed the importance of the Palestinian
cause to Arab publics, if not to their governments. The 2002 Saudi
peace initiative, which offered normalization of relations between
Israel and all Arab states in exchange for complete Israeli withdrawal
from the occupied territories, established a baseline: peace with the
Arab world would require a resolution of the Palestinian issue.

The Abraham Accords, brokered by the Trump administration and
enthusiastically sustained by the Biden administration, explicitly
targeted that assumption by accelerating political normalization and
security cooperation between Israel and several Arab states without
requiring progress on the Palestinian issue. This decoupling of Arab
normalization from the Palestinian issue went a long way toward
entrenching the one-state reality.

Thus far, the Abraham Accords have proved durable, surviving the
formation of Netanyahu’s government with its extremist ministers.
The normalization of relations between Israel and the UAE, at least,
will likely outlast the next round of Israeli-Palestinian violence and
even overt Israeli moves toward annexation. But since the accords were
signed, no additional Arab countries have sought to normalize
relations with Israel, and Saudi Arabia has continued to hedge its
bets by holding off on establishing formal ties with Israel.

Arab normalization is likely to remain tethered to the Palestinian
issue indefinitely outside of the Gulf countries. It is all too easy
to imagine a scenario in which Israel moves to confiscate more
property in Jerusalem, provokes widespread Palestinian protests, and
then responds to this unrest with even greater violence and faster
dispossession—eventually triggering the final collapse of the
Palestinian Authority. Such an escalation could easily spark
large-scale protests across the Arab world, where long-simmering
economic hardship and political repression have created a tinderbox.
There is also the even graver threat that Israel will expel
Palestinians from the West Bank or even Jerusalem—a possibility,
sometimes euphemistically called a “transfer,” that polls suggest
many Israeli Jews would support. And that is to say nothing of how
Hamas or Iran might exploit such conditions.

Arab rulers might not care about the Palestinians, but their people
do—and those rulers care about nothing more than keeping their
thrones. Fully abandoning the Palestinians after more than half a
century of at least rhetorical support would be risky. Arab leaders do
not fear losing elections, but they remember the Arab uprisings of
2011 all too well, and they worry about anything that invites mass
popular mobilizations that could rapidly mutate into protests against
their regimes.

EXIT, VOICE, OR LOYALTY?
Acknowledging the one-state reality could also polarize the American
conversation about Israel and the Palestinians. Evangelicals and many
others on the political right might embrace this reality as the
realization of what they consider legitimate Israeli aspirations. Many
Americans who are left of center may finally recognize that Israel has
fallen from the ranks of liberal democracies and may abandon the
fanciful promise of two states for the goal of a single state that
grants equal rights to all its residents.

The United States bears considerable responsibility for entrenching
the one-state reality, and it continues to play a powerful role in
framing and shaping the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Israeli settlement
construction in the West Bank would not have survived and accelerated,
and occupation would not have endured, without U.S. efforts to shield
Israel from repercussions at the United Nations and other
international organizations. Without American technology and arms,
Israel would probably not have been able to sustain its military edge
in the region, which also enabled it to solidify its position in the
occupied territories. And without major U.S. diplomatic efforts and
resources, Israel could not have concluded peace agreements with Arab
states, from Camp David to the Abraham Accords.

Yet the American conversation about Israel and the Palestinians has
willfully neglected the ways in which Washington has abetted the
occupation. U.S. support for the peace process has been couched both
in terms of Israel’s security and in terms of the idea that only a
two-state solution could preserve Israel as both Jewish and
democratic. These two goals have always been in tension, but a
one-state reality makes them irreconcilable.

The United States bears considerable responsibility for the one-state
reality.
Although the Israeli-Palestinian issue has never been high on the
American public’s list of priorities, U.S. attitudes have shifted
notably: support for a two-state solution has declined, and support
for a single state that ensures equal citizenship has risen over the
past few years. Polls show that most American voters would support a
democratic Israel over a Jewish one, if forced to choose. Views on
Israel have also become far more partisan, with Republicans,
especially evangelicals, growing more supportive of Israeli policies
and the overwhelming majority of Democrats preferring an evenhanded
U.S. policy. Young Democrats now express more support for the
Palestinians than for Israel. One reason for this shift, especially
among young Democrats, is that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is
increasingly viewed as an issue of social justice rather than
strategic interest or biblical prophecy. This has been particularly
true in the era of Black Lives Matter.

The one-state reality has especially roiled the politics of Jewish
Americans. From the earliest years of Zionism, most Jewish American
supporters of Israel held as sacrosanct the aspiration for Israel to
be simultaneously Jewish and liberal. Netanyahu’s latest government
might be the breaking point for this group. It is difficult to square
a commitment to liberalism with support for a single state that offers
the benefits of democracy to Jews (and now seems to tread on some of
those) but explicitly withholds them from the majority of its
non-Jewish inhabitants.

Most Jewish Americans see basic liberal principles such as freedom of
opinion and expression, the rule of law, and democracy not only as
Jewish values but also as xxxxxxs against discrimination that ensure
their acceptance and even survival in the United States. Yet
Israel’s commitment to liberalism has always been shaky. As a Jewish
state, it fosters a form of ethnic nationalism rather than a civic
one, and its Orthodox Jewish citizens play an outsize role in
determining how Judaism shapes Israeli life.

In 1970, the political economist Albert Hirschman wrote that members
of organizations in crisis or decline have three options: “exit,
voice, and loyalty.” Jewish Americans have those same options today.
One camp, which arguably dominates major Jewish institutions in the
United States, exhibits loyalty enabled by denial of the one-state
reality. Voice is the increasingly dominant choice of Jewish Americans
who were previously in the peace camp. Once focused on achieving a
two-state solution, these Americans now direct their activism toward
defending Palestinian rights, safeguarding the shrinking space for
Israeli civil society, and resisting the dangers posed by
Netanyahu’s right-wing government. Finally, there are the Jewish
Americans who have chosen exit, or indifference. They simply do not
think much about Israel. That might be because they do not have a
strong Jewish identity or because they see Israel as misaligned with
or even opposed to their values. There is some evidence that the more
Israel lurches to the right, the larger this group becomes, especially
among young Jewish Americans.

REALITY CHECK
So far, the Biden administration has sought to sustain the status quo
while urging Israel to avoid major provocations. In response to
continued settlement construction in the West Bank and other Israeli
violations of international law, the United States has issued empty
statements calling on Israel to avoid actions that undermine a
two-state solution. But this approach misdiagnoses the problem and
only makes it worse: Netanyahu’s far-right government is a symptom,
not a cause, of the one-state reality, and coddling it in an attempt
to coax it toward moderation will only embolden its extremist leaders
by showing that they pay no price for their actions.

The United States could instead meet a radicalized reality with a
radical response. For starters, Washington should banish the terms
“two-state solution” and “peace process” from its vocabulary.
U.S. calls for Israelis and Palestinians to return to the negotiating
table rely on magical thinking. Changing the way the United States
talks about the Israeli-Palestinian issue will change nothing on the
ground, but it will strip away a facade that has allowed U.S.
policymakers to avoid confronting reality. Washington must look at
Israel as it is and not as it has been assumed to be—and act
accordingly. Israel no longer even pretends to maintain liberal
aspirations. The United States does not have “shared values” and
should not have “unbreakable bonds” with a state that
discriminates against or abuses millions of its residents based on
their ethnicity and religion.

A better U.S. policy would advocate for equality, citizenship, and
human rights for all Jews and Palestinians living within the single
state dominated by Israel. Theoretically, such a policy would not
prevent a two-state solution from being resurrected in the unlikely
event that the parties moved in that direction in the distant future.
But starting from a one-state reality that is morally reprehensible
and strategically costly would demand an immediate focus on equal
human and civil rights. A serious rejection of today’s unjust
reality by the United States and the rest of the international
community might also push the parties themselves to seriously consider
alternative futures. The United States should demand equality now,
even if the ultimate political arrangement will be up to the
Palestinians and the Israelis to determine.

To that end, Washington should begin conditioning military and
economic aid to Israel on clear and specific measures to terminate
Israel’s military rule over the Palestinians. Avoiding such
conditionality has made Washington deeply complicit in the one-state
reality. Should Israel persist on its current path, the United States
should consider sharply reducing aid and other privileges, perhaps
even imposing smart, targeted sanctions on Israel and Israeli leaders
in response to clearly transgressive actions. Israel can decide for
itself what it wants to do, but the United States and other
democracies can make sure it knows the costs of maintaining and even
intensifying a deeply illiberal, discriminatory order.

Israel no longer even pretends to maintain liberal aspirations.
The clearest global vision articulated by the Biden administration has
been its full-throated defense of international laws and norms in
response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Even if one ignores the
one-state reality, the same norms and values would surely be at stake
in Israel and Palestine, as is widely understood across the global
South. When Israel violates international laws and liberal norms, the
United States should denounce Israel for those violations as it would
any other state. Washington needs to stop shielding Israel in
international organizations when it faces valid allegations of
transgressions against international law. And it needs to refrain from
vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that aim to hold Israel
accountable, stop resisting Palestinian efforts to seek redress in
international courts, and rally other countries to demand an end to
the siege of Gaza—another supposedly temporary measure that has
become a cruel and an institutionalized reality.

But the one-state reality demands more. Looked at through that prism,
Israel resembles an apartheid state. Instead of exempting Israel from
the strong norm against apartheid, enshrined in international law,
Washington must reckon with the reality it helped create and begin
viewing that reality, talking about it, and interacting with it
honestly. The United States should stand up for international,
Israeli, and Palestinian nongovernmental organizations, human rights
organizations, and individual activists who have been demonized for
courageously calling out structural injustice. Washington must protect
Israeli civil society organizations that are the country’s last
refuge of liberal values and Palestinian ones whose efforts will be
critical to avoiding bloody conflict in the months to come. The United
States should also oppose Israeli arrests of Palestinian leaders who
offer a nonviolent vision of popular resistance. And it should not
seek to stop or punish those who choose to peacefully boycott Israel
because of its abusive policies.

Although Washington cannot prevent normalization of relations between
Israel and its Arab neighbors, the United States should not lead such
efforts. Nobody should be fooled by the mirage of the Abraham Accords
thriving while the Palestinian issue festers. Decoupling such
normalization agreements from Israel’s treatment of Palestinians has
only empowered the Israeli far right and cemented Jewish supremacy
within the state.

These U.S. policy changes would not immediately bear fruit. The
political backlash would be fierce, even though Americans—especially
Democrats—have grown far more critical of Israel than have the
politicians they elect. But in the long run, these changes offer the
best hope for moving toward a more peaceful and just outcome in Israel
and Palestine. By finally confronting the one-state reality and taking
a principled stand, the United States would stop being part of the
problem and start being part of the solution.

[MICHAEL BARNETT is University Professor of International Affairs and
Political Science at the Elliott School of International Affairs at
George Washington University.

NATHAN J. BROWN is Professor of Political Science and International
Affairs at George Washington University and a Nonresident Senior
Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

MARC LYNCH is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs
at George Washington University.

SHIBLEY TELHAMI is Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at
the University of Maryland and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the
Brookings Institution.

They are the editors of The One State Reality: What Is
Israel/Palestine?]

* Israel
[[link removed]]
* one-state solution
[[link removed]]
* Two-state Solution
[[link removed]]
* Palestine
[[link removed]]
* Palestinians
[[link removed]]
* Benjamin Netanyahu
[[link removed]]
* Israeli politics
[[link removed]]
* Israeli Supreme Court
[[link removed]]
* Right-Wing Extremism
[[link removed]]
* right-wing Zionists
[[link removed]]
* Religious Zionist Party
[[link removed]]
* zionism
[[link removed]]
* Occupied Territories
[[link removed]]
* Settler violence
[[link removed]]
* West Bank
[[link removed]]
* Gaza
[[link removed]]
* Biden Administration
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

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