The One-State Colonial Delusion

Advocates for "One State with Equal Rights" may sound reasonable, but they deliberately ignore the true nature of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. That's nothing but colonialism.

“Progressive” antizionists and far right Israelis argue for a single state “from the river to the sea.” For liberal minded people, the far right’s rationale – and the particulars of their project – are easy to dismiss. But some pieces of the “progressive” argument, especially those of people like Peter Beinart, sounds and feel fair to the untrained eye. It’s important to explain why they are anything but.

The most seductive argument of the progressive one-staters is also the most misleading: They say there should be a single state with “one person, one vote”; equal rights for all; no ethnic privilege; no walls, no checkpoints, no hierarchy. Put that way, the proposal sounds not only reasonable but morally irresistible. Who, after all, could be against equal rights?

The problem is that the argument deliberately obscures the nature of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. That conflict is not only a conflict among individuals seeking civil equality. It’s not even a conflict between racial or ethnic groups; It is, mostly, a conflict between two peoples seeking national self-determination. And civil rights, indispensable as they are, do not exhaust the meaning of political freedom.

A Palestinian who can vote in a single state but is denied Palestinian national independence has not received Palestinian self-determination. A Jew who can vote in that same state but whose collective national home has been dissolved has not received Jewish self-determination. Both may be equal as citizens, but both have been dispossessed as peoples. And this is key because this conflict is not, at its core, a conflict over civic rights but over national rights. Western pseudo-progressive advocates, like Peter Beinart, redefine a conflict between two indigenous national groups to fit their preferred categories of “civil rights,” inherited, perhaps, from the American context of the 1960s. In other words, they speak beautifully about individual rights while brazenly removing the collective right that both Palestinians and Jews have claimed for more than a century: the right to be authors, not merely residents, of their national political futures.

To beef up their argument, these pseudo-progressives point to the few exceptions in which multinational states work (they generally use Switzerland and Belgium to “prove” that you can have prosperous and peaceful multinational states), but they ignore that the overwhelming majority of multinational experiences ended in literal bloodbaths. They neglect to say that multinational states can work only under very rare conditions: long-standing institutional habit, accepted borders, mutual vetoes, a long record of peaceful coexistence, low levels of existential fear, and a shared commitment to the state itself. None of those conditions exists between Israelis and Palestinians today. Walloons and Flemish never fought a war, let alone murder each other with suicide bombings.

Beinart also points out to the South African example. He claims that since the one-person-one-vote regime has been established, there haven’t been any major outbursts of sectarian violence in the country. While it’s true that South Africa hasn’t dissolved into permanent civil war, Beinart’s characterization is false. Equal citizenship did not abolish communal violence, racialized fear, xenophobic scapegoating, or political factionalism. Since 1994, South Africa has experienced national violence in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), repeated xenophobic riots, and racialized violence. In KZN alone, 500,000 people have been displaced and thousands killed.

But even if Beinart wouldn’t be using misleading data points about South Africa, he’s deliberately mixing categories. South Africa’s central constitutional conflict was racial — the struggle to end white supremacy and establish a “one person, one vote” system — not a conflict between two national peoples each seeking sovereign self-determination in the same territory. In KZN, the democratic settlement did not automatically quell a different kind of conflict that was ethno-regional and national. In fact, it might have accentuated it. Analyzing Israel/Palestine through the lens of South Africa is a deliberate muddying of categories, akin to measuring distances in kilograms.

Antizionists seem to believe that, magically, a Palestinian majority country with power over a Jewish minority will be the unicorn – the only Arab-majority democratic country that respects minority rights. To that undeniable flaw in his reasoning, Peter Beinart would give two answers. One, it is that Palestinians only resort to violence because they are denied rights. Give them rights, the argument goes, and they’ll lose any incentive to violence. The second is that Middle Eastern countries are not good examples, because they are dictatorships, and the new binational state would (I guess, magically) be a democracy. In fact, both are false. No. democracy doesn’t prevent nationalist violence. In Northern Ireland, individuals had full civic rights in a democracy, and the IRA still resorted to violence. ETA did the same, even though the Basques in Spain have full civil rights in a democratic Spain. This is, of course, without mentioning the most radical examples, like Yugoslavia, in which the transition to democracy coincided with the biggest bloodbath in European soil since WW2.

At the core of this constellation of fallacies lies a gross misunderstanding, if not willful ignorance. The one-state argument is not more committed to human rights; rather, it misunderstands the architecture of human rights. Human rights were never simply a free-floating individualism above nations. They developed through citizenship, national rights, self-determination, and the protection of minorities. They emerged from the fight for minorities’ national rights in the twilight of the European Central Empires, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian.

In “The Nationalism of Human Rights,” Loeffler writes that modern human rights “arrived tethered to the nation-state,” and that people may deserve rights as human beings, but historically they received them as citizens of a particular political community. The rights tradition encompassed both individual and collective rights, and individual emancipation went hand in hand with collective national emancipation.

If Loeffler is not enough of an authority for you, take it from Hannah Arendt: “The restoration of human rights has been achieved so far only through the restoration or the establishment of national rights.” Even Franz Fanon talked about national consciousness as the key to personal emancipation. There is nothing progressive about abolishing national self-determination, and the classical left often understood this better than today’s Western pseudo-progressives.

So don’t be fooled: Beinart et al don’t propose “full rights” for Israelis and Palestinians; they demand that both abandon some rights to, hopefully, receive others. Or to put it differently, they, in their infinite moral wisdom, decide for the natives that their national rights can be sacrificed to establish a “solution” they consider fair. They are like parents of two children who fight for a chocolate and say, “Well, if you can’t split the chocolate, none of you will have it.” Only that here, it is not a piece of chocolate that Beinart denies Israelis and Palestinians, but one of their most basic human rights.

We mentioned above the colonialist nature of this attitude. For starters, Western Progressives put themselves in the position of moral arbiters. Like Sykes and Picot in 1918, they know better than the indigenous peoples what’s the best solution to their plight. That most Israelis and Palestinians reject the idea of a single state with equal rights leaves them unfazed. After all, they imply, the natives are morally inferior and can’t be trusted to determine what’s good for them. As the French, Belgians, and Brits decided that people and tribes with different religious, ethnic, and national identities should be forced together into a single state, the pseudo-progressive antizionists dictate from the air-conditioned halls of Columbia University that Palestinians and Israelis should be forced into a single state, against their will. The 20th century offers enough examples of what happens when outside powers force antagonistic peoples into artificial political containers and then congratulate themselves on their cartographic elegance. Given that record, we should expect Bosnia and Rwanda instead of Switzerland or Belgium.

Peter Beinart is a smart man. What I exposed in the lines above is well known and virtually self-evident. Anybody who knows history – and Beinart does – knows that full human rights can’t exist without national rights. The fact that attempts to force the creation of binational states end in monumental bloodshed is not precisely an arcane piece of information, but something we see every day in the Middle East. And that is, of course, without even considering the impact of October 7^th on the naïve notion that Israelis and Palestinians can share a state in peace after that.

The question is then why does he espouse a vision that is at best false and at worst, reckless about the potential to produce massive violence? Ignorance is not the answer in this case. For some antizionists, the answer is simple: they are antisemitic and/or evil. They know that a binational state means, sooner or later, a genocide of Jews, and that’s why they support it. But Peter Beinart isn’t evil, but, as I could experience myself, kind and generous. And he’s not naïve either. So what is it?

I venture this hypothesis. Beinart is not advancing these ideas for Israel/Palestine as true templates for the solution of the conflict. He’s smart enough to know that Israelis will not agree to national suicide – and Palestinians won’t either. This may explain why he doesn’t devote any serious thought to the practical architecture of the one-state vision. He knows it won’t happen, and that’s why he seems unconcerned about the prospect of a bloodbath. His real audience is not Israeli or Palestinian (he famously boycotts Israelis and only speaks to a very small number of non-representative Palestinian activists). His audience is American Jewish. Beinart is not trying to solve the Middle East conflict; he is trying to redesign American Judaism. His project is not a diplomatic plan but an identity project — an attempt to create a Judaism for which Israel is irrelevant, or perhaps no longer morally admissible. That’s why he doesn’t care that a majority of Israelis and Palestinians reject his idyllic vision of a binational state. In this vision, Palestinians become the vehicle through which Western Jews can dramatize moral courage and feel they belong in the camp of justice. The problem is that these views are neither just nor fair and show moral cowardice rather than bravery. They are colonial for they dispossess both Israelis and Palestinians of political agency, and they could result in a real genocide, not the imagined one of today.

What’s most contemptible in this attitude is its underlying dehumanization. Israelis and Palestinians are not props in a morality play for the privileged, but real human beings, and what’s more, collective political actors. They are not metaphors, not placeholders in someone else’s ideological diagram, not interchangeable victims and villains in a drama staged from afar. They are peoples with memories, fears, languages, dead, children, collective hopes, traumas, and claims.

A just peace will not come from asking either people to disappear into someone else’s universalism, or from demanding that they submit to spurious ideas of fairness concocted in Western ivory towers. It will not come from telling Palestinians that their national aspirations are merely a subset of civil rights, or telling Jews that their longing for self-determination was a mistake history should now correct. Equal rights are indispensable. But equality that denies nationhood is not equality but oppression.

The task is harder, less elegant, and less satisfying than the slogans allow: to secure the full dignity of both peoples, as individuals and as nations. Anything less is not liberation but colonial condescension.

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