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PORTSIDE CULTURE

A “BLUEPRINT” FOR A DIFFERENT FUTURE IN ISRAEL-PALESTINE  
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Robert Gottlieb
October 25, 2025
The Guardian
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_ A new book, published just before the ceasefire deal, describes in
granular detail the conditions for dismantling apartheid in
Israel-Palestine. _

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_From Apartheid to Democracy__A Blueprint for Peace in
Israel-Palestine_Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man and Sarah Leah
Whitson University of California PressISBN: 9780520402003 

While languishing in prison during Benito Mussolini’s fascist reign
in Italy, Antonio Gramsci wrote in his Prison Notebooks about an
“interregnum”, a transition between the old order that was dying
and a new order that had yet to be born. That in-between time was, he
wrote, “a time of monsters”.

Those words, a “time of monsters”, could be used to describe the
period of death and destruction unleashed in the two years since 7
October 2023, in the narrow strip of land comprising the Gaza
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by Donald Trump [[link removed]]
continues to hold, it raises questions about what type of future
awaits the lands between the river and the sea – an
Israeli-government and settler-controlled land mass that both Israelis
and Palestinians inhabit, which represents Israel’s apartheid-based
one-state reality.

So what is next? The continuation of the apartheid regime? A two-state
solution where one state has no or limited capacity to function? More
Israeli military occupation? An accelerated Nakba that more
methodically expels Palestinians from the land? A new colonial
presence where some foreign entity or individuals are the de facto
interim rulers?

Or, eventually, something else – something requiring a
transformation of existing relationships through a new process, one
taking us firmly beyond our time of monsters.

When the ceasefire deal
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was struck, the Los Angeles Times
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in an article on reactions in Israel, quoted Udi Goren, an Israeli
celebrating at Hostages Square whose cousin was killed on 7 October.
Israel needed new faces to make change, he told the reporter: “Now
is the time for us – Israelis and Palestinians – to support a
better future, to draft a new narrative for ourselves.”

A new narrative seems hard to imagine, given the last hundred or so
years of history. But there are moments when transformation becomes
possible, when changes on the ground can rupture longstanding beliefs
and biases, and a new political and social set of relations make
possible what for so long seemed impossible. We are nowhere near that
moment, yet change is happening, including shifts in opinion, new
political realities, and a far more expansive global solidarity
movement for Palestine
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before.

The possibility of such rupture and transformation is an underlying
premise of Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man and Sarah Leah Whitson’s book,
From Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in
Israel-Palestine. Published just days before the ceasefire deal was
reached, the book describes in granular detail the conditions for
dismantling apartheid in Israel-Palestine.

Schaeffer Omer-Man and Whitson have been deeply engaged on the ground
for years. Schaeffer Omer-Man, the former editor of +972 Magazine, and
Whitson, who has been a human rights lawyer and former advocate at
Human Rights Watch, both currently work at Democracy for the Arab
World Now, which focuses on reforming US foreign policy
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East and north Africa from a human rights perspective. The group was
founded by the former Washington Post columnist and Saudi democracy
advocate Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered by Saudi assassins seven
years ago.

When I first learned about Schaeffer Omer-Man and Whitson’s
Blueprint concept a few months ago, I was skeptical given the horrific
genocide unfolding in Gaza [[link removed]].
The intent of the titular blueprint is to “design the process for
dismantling Israel’s military occupation of the Occupied Palestinian
Territory and dismantling its regime of apartheid”. To do so,
Schaeffer Omer-Man and Whitson created an actual working document for
a transition that would end apartheid and establish the basis for
democracy in Israel-Palestine. This will not occur, they argue, in the
next day, nor the next month, nor the next year. It can happen only
after a process that brings about a pivotal rupture that provides the
basis for something new.

We don’t know what that rupture will entail, but the ground has been
laid over these last two years. Perhaps a shift in attitudes about
Israel and Palestine in the US and Europe will finally bring about the
end of arms sales, or expanded boycott initiatives. Perhaps bodies
such as the international court of justice will bring new forms of
pressure to bear – pressure that the diplomatic community decides to
enforce. Such developments could combine with mass movements outside
Israel, making international isolation so extreme that Israel will be
forced to reconceive its underlying structures of inequality in order
to rejoin the community of nations.

Schaeffer Omer-Man and Whitson are realists: apartheid rule is deeply
entrenched, functioning in many ways beyond Israel’s military
occupation through an entire system of laws, practices and norms that
creates and maintains a system of domination, including in pre-1967
Israel. These laws affect everyday life, they write, including:
“political representation and organization, free expression, land
use, ownership, zoning and other property-related matters,
immigration, personal legal status, including family law; access to
natural and economic resources; the provision of state services and
benefits; policing and security; institutionalized distrust and
permanent suspicion of non-Jewish citizens and residents and
others”.

They conclude: “Simply ending the occupation and extending the
existing legal framework to the occupied territories is wholly
insufficient for dismantling apartheid.”

In each of these areas, the blueprint provides a map of how to begin
to dismantle a deeply unequal system and move toward meaningful
democracy in Israel-Palestine, whether through a single democratic
state, a confederation or even two states connected to each other,
with both populations engaged in a democratic process to select the
preferred option. One area where such a transition is fundamental is
the freedom to move or remain in place, they write, as restrictions on
movement, they argue, are one of the central tools the apartheid
regime has used to manage the Palestinian population.

The authors look to South Africa and Northern Ireland, both of which
saw political change that had seemed unimaginable. Relying on those
examples, the blueprint identifies a multilayered process of
co-conciliation, reparations and the creation of an inclusive
political framework.

The book was published before the ceasefire was reached, but it is
fair to say that the deal is not going to pave the way for the
blueprint anytime soon. We are not yet at the point of rupture. Once
we get there, it may reveal that new narrative that the blueprint will
help shape.

 

Robert Gottlieb is professor emeritus at Occidental College and the
author of more than a dozen books, including, most recently,
Care-Centered Politics: From the Home to the Planet (MIT Press)

* Israel
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* Palestine
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* Gaza
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* peace
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