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.
"I'm not anti-Semitic, I just want half the world's Jews to be democratically ruled by the people who have been trying to kill them for the last 100 years."
Great essay. I especially appreciated the author’s analysis of Beinart, and by extension others in that camp. The idea is exactly to remake Judaism, shorn of its Zionist corruptions. Years ago (2020 or 2021, can’t remember offhand) Beinart even said as much in his essay for Jewish Currents calling for a
new Yavneh. A new Judaism emerged after the destruction of the Temple, and so too it can again on the ashes of the modern state. I find recourse to the Yavneh legend distasteful not only because it is crass, but also because it does analogous cultural work to the Christian trope of the New Jerusalem, from which it derives.
Agree but there’s something even worse - they want to be like Yavne, but they haven’t created a Talmud. In other words, they want to create a Judaism without Israel but all they talk about is israel
What resonated for me is the distinction between dignity as an individual and dignity as a member of a people. Communities, nations, and identities matter because human beings rarely experience themselves as isolated individuals. The question of how to honour both individual equality and collective self-determination may be one of the defining political challenges of our time.
Exactly - this is even more pronounced given the hyper-emancipation and empowerment of the individual, which poses even a greater challenge to collective identities. But that’s precisely the issue, the “one staters” like Beinart know this, and yet they choose to ignore it when talking about Israel/Palestine.
I suspect one reason these debates become so difficult is that many people now view collective identities as inherently suspect while treating individual autonomy as the highest political good. Yet most human beings still derive meaning, belonging, and responsibility through families, communities, nations, and traditions. The challenge for us all isn’t choosing between the individual and the collective, but figuring out how both can flourish together.
While masquerading as a fair minded argument in favor of both Palestinian and Israeli Jewish rights to a nation it is actually an article in favor of maintaining the status quo. The author makes no attempt to propose a solution but simply presents arguments against a one state solution. The final giveaway is at the end of the fourth to last paragraph wherein the author denies the State of Israel’s genocide of its Palestinian population (and by State I mean all areas controlled by Israel including the West Bank and Gaza). I am always amazed by how apologists for Israel seem so terrified of Jews being massacred by Palestinians in a single state with equal rights for all yet seem not troubled by the horrific violence meted out against the Palestinians by the Jewish half of what is now in reality a single state. And no mention of how a two state solution has been thwarted for years by Israeli politicians. During a meeting of the Likud party's Knesset members in March 2019, Netanyahu reportedly said: "Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas... This is part of our strategy…” ( source: Haaretz).
As for the author’s assertion of a centuries old Jewish longing for national self determination let’s be honest. This was a Zionist creation from the late 19th century. It is actually a universal and transnational outlook that is one of the most significant contributions of Jews to modernity.
Even if everything you said was true (it isn't), it wouldn't change the argument. A one-state solution, as proposed by both the far left and the far right, denies national rights to both Israelis and Palestinians. That is not an opinion, but a fact. In a binational state, nobody has the right to national self-determination. You haven't said anything that denies that. Basically, you are saying, "because Israel is bad, the Palestinians shouldn't have national rights". I don't know how that makes sense.
In the last century trinitarians murdered half the world's Jews with the help of half a million Muslims as they lost 20 trinitarian Nations enabling the islamics to accumulate 57 in 14 centuries 🖕🏾
Let them come so they can be wiped off the face of the world along with all who aid and abet them. The west has allowed this pestilence, the satanic cult masquerading as a religion for 1440 years of unabated war, death, misery and slavery. Let's eliminate the entire world of this man-made, satanic inspired cult. Let's not just do it for the Jews. Let's do it for the Armenians, the Greeks, the Christian Lebanese, the millions of brave warriors who have fallen fighting this horde driven by, the Egyptians, the north who have been brutally conquered and forced to accept this rule of Satan. Now is the time. We must not look back, just eliminate all of them Now and forever. The Israelis, Bibi, and the IDF are showing us the way. Let them complete the job in Israel while we complete it throughout the world. Let's make the world safe 4 for the, the Jews, the Hindu, the indigenous and Aboriginal, and even for the agnostics🤔
🌝☺️bring it on Bring on this🤗🌚
Know peace no Islam 🤗
Know Islam no peace 😖
Equivocation brings Euro trash depravity where the trinitarians enable the Islamic to violate the native trinitarians with gentile guile incessantly with Islamic malice illustrating toxic trinitarianism with its two-tiered policing only previously wielded against its Jewish residents that it murdered just 80 years ago. Yet Israel thrives despite gentile guile and toxic trinitarians all the while with their falsifying and Truth denying and false Messiah narrative and the house of falsity teaches that the child shall not be held responsible for the sins of the parent and follow that with the Jew is perpetually responsible for the death of the failed Messiah at the hands of the Romans who were coming to conquer for a decade Judea and Samaria the land of the Jews and they crucified Jesus for being a Zionist in the land that the OG Zionist, the god of Israel bestowed upon his people in perpetuity despite the falsity and toxic trinitarian truth denial of the trinitarians who proclaim such falsities with gentile guile 🖕🏾
The reason it's called the crucifixion is if it was real it would be called the crucifact and the more you keep on turning your cheeks and spreading them for Mohammed as you Baja incessantly the more you lose 💔
Those who islamically deflect are defective duds when Jews and Israel are the qualified studs thriving as the fifth happiest nation in the real year 5786 in their third millennium as the OG God of Israel the Zionist intended blessed abundantly and continually doing what God told them to do in the land that God gave them to dwell in yet the islamic's crave a 58th Islamic State yet there's no letter p in Arabic thus illustrating more of the falsity and Truth denial of the islamics adapting the name of the Roman imperialists who soaked the land of Judea and Samaria with the blood of Jews and named it the falsity of Palestine, yet Israel is mentioned 43 times in that war manual called the Quran as the home of the Jews 👀
Wonderful article. The only reason why Anti-Zionists want the "one state solution" is because they hope that would bring to a Palestinian state, practically cleansed of Jews, in less than a generation.
I think it's a wonderful idea, but being a bit overcautious, and given that Palestinians will be the majority, may I ask what their track record is in treating their own minorities?
If you start with the premise that European Jews have the same right to Palestinians land that Palestinians have then it's easy to see your confusion about two competing nationalisms.
The fact that Palestinians ever formally recognized Israel's right to exist, which they did at the PNC meeting in Algiers in 1988, is a testament.
It's a testament to Palestinian's willingness to seek solutions however misguided their charity towards European Jews was.
You're absolutely correct, the one state solution will never work.
Eretz Yisrael killed that baby in the crib.
Young people the world over are rejecting the tsunami of hasbara that has flooded the world for the last 80 years.
Hopefully that will be the change that allows the unseen future to play out.
I generally don’t answer to anonymous account. If you have the courage of your convictions say who you are. I’m going to just correct the falsehoods in your post. If you want to engage further, identify yourself.
1 - 70% of Israelis are non-European, but Levantine and Middle Eastern, so there was no “generosity towards European Jews.” But even if Jews were “European”, imagine a situation in which, say, the Sioux are exiled to Australia. The Sioux start returning to America. Would you say that “Americans are being generous towards the Australian Sioux,” or would you say that the Sioux are just returning to their ancestral land?
2 - There was no “generosity”, but rejection of the two states solution from 1947 onwards.
3 - My beef here is not with the Palestinian but with the colonialist Western one-state advocates.
On number two... I read the recent Finkelstein essay regarding recently declassified Israeli intelligence on the Oslo accords.
It exposed the Israeli and American lie regarding the Palestinian position on "parameters". That's just Oslo, but of course in the 80-year history that's not the only lie regarding the Palestinian position.
All the lies help to create the upside down myth that has been Israel and not the Palestinians who have accepted less than they want.
I've read about the Arab Israeli conflict for a half century now, and I can see there's something different now. Something I never saw before. The speed at which false israeli narratives are getting shut down.
Well, the Swiss case is very interesting - and, most importantly, UNIQUE. Switzerland, historically, has been determined by geography. Communities separated by high mountain ranges, etc. They were localists, without having designs on the territory of other cantons. The Swiss national identity emerged BEFORE the cantons could develop their own national identities. The confederacy didn’t have to demand that every canton renounces to something they had been fighting for centuries… It’s a very different ballgame. Bosnia is more like it.
Two state solution to start. Then eventually some kind of confederation. There I fixed it. Again, I'm not optimistic about timelines - 50 to 500 years seems reasonable. But what about the West bank settlements?
No one seems to remember that Israelis were presented with a binational state option by the Meretz party back in the 90s and it was summarily rejected, so anyone talking about this now, assuming they know about this seems to want to impose a binational state by force on a public in which some 80% are unwilling...
Israelis and Palestinians are both unwilling, so that it’s true. But your characterization of Meretz in the 90s is incorrect. Meretz was in favor of an expanded autonomy, leading perhaps to a two states solution.
Huh, I was in Israel at the time and I could swear Meretz was in favor of a binational state but looking it up online it says Meretz was against it. *Somebody* was talking about a binational state back in the 90s and was summarily rejected...
"I'm not anti-Semitic, I just want half the world's Jews to be democratically ruled by the people who have been trying to kill them for the last 100 years."
Great essay. I especially appreciated the author’s analysis of Beinart, and by extension others in that camp. The idea is exactly to remake Judaism, shorn of its Zionist corruptions. Years ago (2020 or 2021, can’t remember offhand) Beinart even said as much in his essay for Jewish Currents calling for a
new Yavneh. A new Judaism emerged after the destruction of the Temple, and so too it can again on the ashes of the modern state. I find recourse to the Yavneh legend distasteful not only because it is crass, but also because it does analogous cultural work to the Christian trope of the New Jerusalem, from which it derives.
Agree but there’s something even worse - they want to be like Yavne, but they haven’t created a Talmud. In other words, they want to create a Judaism without Israel but all they talk about is israel
Indeed. Israel and Zionism ghosts their discourse, a hole in the fabric of their identity. In the name of building “a new Judaism” they are following in the footsteps of Paul’s detached universalization (minus the christology). I wrote a two-part critique of the antizionist Jewish project centered on Shaul Magid’s shtick. Here https://marciakupfer.substack.com/p/jew-vs-jew-today-a-reply-to-shaul?r=3izp9u and here https://marciakupfer.substack.com/p/jew-vs-jew-today-a-reply-to-shaul-f27?r=3izp9u
What resonated for me is the distinction between dignity as an individual and dignity as a member of a people. Communities, nations, and identities matter because human beings rarely experience themselves as isolated individuals. The question of how to honour both individual equality and collective self-determination may be one of the defining political challenges of our time.
Exactly - this is even more pronounced given the hyper-emancipation and empowerment of the individual, which poses even a greater challenge to collective identities. But that’s precisely the issue, the “one staters” like Beinart know this, and yet they choose to ignore it when talking about Israel/Palestine.
I suspect one reason these debates become so difficult is that many people now view collective identities as inherently suspect while treating individual autonomy as the highest political good. Yet most human beings still derive meaning, belonging, and responsibility through families, communities, nations, and traditions. The challenge for us all isn’t choosing between the individual and the collective, but figuring out how both can flourish together.
While masquerading as a fair minded argument in favor of both Palestinian and Israeli Jewish rights to a nation it is actually an article in favor of maintaining the status quo. The author makes no attempt to propose a solution but simply presents arguments against a one state solution. The final giveaway is at the end of the fourth to last paragraph wherein the author denies the State of Israel’s genocide of its Palestinian population (and by State I mean all areas controlled by Israel including the West Bank and Gaza). I am always amazed by how apologists for Israel seem so terrified of Jews being massacred by Palestinians in a single state with equal rights for all yet seem not troubled by the horrific violence meted out against the Palestinians by the Jewish half of what is now in reality a single state. And no mention of how a two state solution has been thwarted for years by Israeli politicians. During a meeting of the Likud party's Knesset members in March 2019, Netanyahu reportedly said: "Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas... This is part of our strategy…” ( source: Haaretz).
As for the author’s assertion of a centuries old Jewish longing for national self determination let’s be honest. This was a Zionist creation from the late 19th century. It is actually a universal and transnational outlook that is one of the most significant contributions of Jews to modernity.
Even if everything you said was true (it isn't), it wouldn't change the argument. A one-state solution, as proposed by both the far left and the far right, denies national rights to both Israelis and Palestinians. That is not an opinion, but a fact. In a binational state, nobody has the right to national self-determination. You haven't said anything that denies that. Basically, you are saying, "because Israel is bad, the Palestinians shouldn't have national rights". I don't know how that makes sense.
In the last century trinitarians murdered half the world's Jews with the help of half a million Muslims as they lost 20 trinitarian Nations enabling the islamics to accumulate 57 in 14 centuries 🖕🏾
Let them come so they can be wiped off the face of the world along with all who aid and abet them. The west has allowed this pestilence, the satanic cult masquerading as a religion for 1440 years of unabated war, death, misery and slavery. Let's eliminate the entire world of this man-made, satanic inspired cult. Let's not just do it for the Jews. Let's do it for the Armenians, the Greeks, the Christian Lebanese, the millions of brave warriors who have fallen fighting this horde driven by, the Egyptians, the north who have been brutally conquered and forced to accept this rule of Satan. Now is the time. We must not look back, just eliminate all of them Now and forever. The Israelis, Bibi, and the IDF are showing us the way. Let them complete the job in Israel while we complete it throughout the world. Let's make the world safe 4 for the, the Jews, the Hindu, the indigenous and Aboriginal, and even for the agnostics🤔
🌝☺️bring it on Bring on this🤗🌚
Know peace no Islam 🤗
Know Islam no peace 😖
Equivocation brings Euro trash depravity where the trinitarians enable the Islamic to violate the native trinitarians with gentile guile incessantly with Islamic malice illustrating toxic trinitarianism with its two-tiered policing only previously wielded against its Jewish residents that it murdered just 80 years ago. Yet Israel thrives despite gentile guile and toxic trinitarians all the while with their falsifying and Truth denying and false Messiah narrative and the house of falsity teaches that the child shall not be held responsible for the sins of the parent and follow that with the Jew is perpetually responsible for the death of the failed Messiah at the hands of the Romans who were coming to conquer for a decade Judea and Samaria the land of the Jews and they crucified Jesus for being a Zionist in the land that the OG Zionist, the god of Israel bestowed upon his people in perpetuity despite the falsity and toxic trinitarian truth denial of the trinitarians who proclaim such falsities with gentile guile 🖕🏾
The reason it's called the crucifixion is if it was real it would be called the crucifact and the more you keep on turning your cheeks and spreading them for Mohammed as you Baja incessantly the more you lose 💔
Those who islamically deflect are defective duds when Jews and Israel are the qualified studs thriving as the fifth happiest nation in the real year 5786 in their third millennium as the OG God of Israel the Zionist intended blessed abundantly and continually doing what God told them to do in the land that God gave them to dwell in yet the islamic's crave a 58th Islamic State yet there's no letter p in Arabic thus illustrating more of the falsity and Truth denial of the islamics adapting the name of the Roman imperialists who soaked the land of Judea and Samaria with the blood of Jews and named it the falsity of Palestine, yet Israel is mentioned 43 times in that war manual called the Quran as the home of the Jews 👀
Genocides don’t have growing populations of those being genocided… so cut out the nonsense argument and try to be intelligent.
Wonderful article. The only reason why Anti-Zionists want the "one state solution" is because they hope that would bring to a Palestinian state, practically cleansed of Jews, in less than a generation.
I think it's a wonderful idea, but being a bit overcautious, and given that Palestinians will be the majority, may I ask what their track record is in treating their own minorities?
Who is the “self” in “self-determination”?
If you start with the premise that European Jews have the same right to Palestinians land that Palestinians have then it's easy to see your confusion about two competing nationalisms.
The fact that Palestinians ever formally recognized Israel's right to exist, which they did at the PNC meeting in Algiers in 1988, is a testament.
It's a testament to Palestinian's willingness to seek solutions however misguided their charity towards European Jews was.
You're absolutely correct, the one state solution will never work.
Eretz Yisrael killed that baby in the crib.
Young people the world over are rejecting the tsunami of hasbara that has flooded the world for the last 80 years.
Hopefully that will be the change that allows the unseen future to play out.
I generally don’t answer to anonymous account. If you have the courage of your convictions say who you are. I’m going to just correct the falsehoods in your post. If you want to engage further, identify yourself.
1 - 70% of Israelis are non-European, but Levantine and Middle Eastern, so there was no “generosity towards European Jews.” But even if Jews were “European”, imagine a situation in which, say, the Sioux are exiled to Australia. The Sioux start returning to America. Would you say that “Americans are being generous towards the Australian Sioux,” or would you say that the Sioux are just returning to their ancestral land?
2 - There was no “generosity”, but rejection of the two states solution from 1947 onwards.
3 - My beef here is not with the Palestinian but with the colonialist Western one-state advocates.
On number two... I read the recent Finkelstein essay regarding recently declassified Israeli intelligence on the Oslo accords.
It exposed the Israeli and American lie regarding the Palestinian position on "parameters". That's just Oslo, but of course in the 80-year history that's not the only lie regarding the Palestinian position.
All the lies help to create the upside down myth that has been Israel and not the Palestinians who have accepted less than they want.
I've read about the Arab Israeli conflict for a half century now, and I can see there's something different now. Something I never saw before. The speed at which false israeli narratives are getting shut down.
I like it.
Quoting Finkelstein is like quoting Mein Kampf. But, as I said, I’m not engaging with anonymous accounts.
Maybe google "Swiss Confederation".
I suspect that Israel and Palestine will be something like that in maybe 50 to 500 years. I'm being optimistic here.
Well, the Swiss case is very interesting - and, most importantly, UNIQUE. Switzerland, historically, has been determined by geography. Communities separated by high mountain ranges, etc. They were localists, without having designs on the territory of other cantons. The Swiss national identity emerged BEFORE the cantons could develop their own national identities. The confederacy didn’t have to demand that every canton renounces to something they had been fighting for centuries… It’s a very different ballgame. Bosnia is more like it.
Two state solution to start. Then eventually some kind of confederation. There I fixed it. Again, I'm not optimistic about timelines - 50 to 500 years seems reasonable. But what about the West bank settlements?
The settlements are a real problem, but there’s a solution. Settlement blocks and land swaps.
15 percent of the settlers are citizens of my country (USA) perhaps we can help “motivate them”.
No one seems to remember that Israelis were presented with a binational state option by the Meretz party back in the 90s and it was summarily rejected, so anyone talking about this now, assuming they know about this seems to want to impose a binational state by force on a public in which some 80% are unwilling...
Israelis and Palestinians are both unwilling, so that it’s true. But your characterization of Meretz in the 90s is incorrect. Meretz was in favor of an expanded autonomy, leading perhaps to a two states solution.
Huh, I was in Israel at the time and I could swear Meretz was in favor of a binational state but looking it up online it says Meretz was against it. *Somebody* was talking about a binational state back in the 90s and was summarily rejected...