Israel Has Forfeited Its Right to Exist
The one-state solution is the moderate position
After the genocide of Gaza, we must ask whether Israel has forfeited its right to exist.
Not because it has committed unspeakable horrors – many nations do. But because ownership over the land is the one thing Israel has to award its victims that might come close to a fair payout for their claims.
A genocide includes efforts to exterminate a population either in whole or in part, which means Israel has murdered countless Palestinians yet has failed to exterminate the entire Palestinian people. When this is all over, there will be an aggrieved multitude, a Palestinian plaintiff class with a collective claim so vast that securing ownership of Israel’s land would be but a good start toward reasonable recompense for Israel’s crimes.
What would happen to the millions of current Israeli citizens? Israel has already told us: Israeli officials and Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” insist they can “humanely” resettle millions of Palestinians outside Gaza. If mass population transfer can truly be executed with compassion and international support, then the same mechanisms could assist Israelis in securing citizenship abroad.
While forfeiting sovereign authority over the land could enable Palestinians to demand the departure of those responsible for their suffering, a more reasonable and realistic alternative already exists: the one-state solution. Full-scale expulsion of millions of Israelis complicit in genocide is the maximalist – indeed the extremist – position. Truth, reconciliation, and amnesty under a merciful State of Palestine offering a pathway to citizenship for those complicit in genocide is the moderate position.
The two-state solution is not a position at all. It is a self-disqualifying, nakedly supremacist dream. From its introduction in 1937’s Peel Commission onward, partition has always rested on the belief that Arabs cannot live peacefully with Jews and Jews cannot accept Arabs as equals.
Of course, this has never been true. Yet one or both of these bigotries undergird every liberal zionist argument in favor of the fabled two-state solution. America’s preeminent liberal zionist organization J Street explains that Israel wants to (a) control all of the land, (b) have a Jewish majority, and (c) maintain its democratic character. Because it is only possible to reconcile any two of those things at a time, J Street argues that Israel must pursue a two-state solution.
At no time does J Street interrogate why Israel insists on forcing the square peg of a Jewish majority through the round hole of democracy. The bigotry is priced in and embraced.
The two-state solution is not just a political fantasy. Its very theoretical basis is morally bankrupt. Anyone trying to sell you on the two-state solution has failed not just in imagination but in basic moral reasoning. They’re not asserting a position. They’re revealing a hateful worldview that has no place in politics and no place in public life.
A part of me laments and fumes that the American Jewish mainstream that raised me has fully adopted this doubly chauvinist view of both itself and the other, but a much bigger part of me recognizes how these perverse presumptions have enabled Israel’s crimes against humanity. I’m less concerned with the struggle over the soul of Judaism than the ongoing need to stop the bloodshed committed in its name.
In the end, Israel will be held accountable for its actions. What form will that accountability take? Full expulsion is one path. The one-state solution – truth, reconciliation, and shared sovereignty – is another. I don’t often advocate for the moderate position, but when the alternative is ethnic cleansing in either direction, put me down for coexistence under a unified, democratic Palestine.
Brilliant framing tbh. The shift from seeing expulsion as the natural endpoint to positioning it as extremist while coexistence becomes moderate is probly the most compelling reframe I've encountered yet. I remeber following debates around South Africa's transition and that same inversion happened there when truth commissions replaced the assumed path ofretribution. Makes the so-called pragmatists look like they're actually clinging to fantasies.
What an interesting proposition. I am not a Jew. But I have profound admiration for both moderate educated Jews who have brought so much culture to my Western world for millennia, and for the ordinary Palestinians who have struggled through hell and high water, and yet maintained some sort of living (until 7 October 2023 that is).
I'm not sure that even liberal Jews will like your proposal. But I agree that liberal Jews and liberal Palestinians (or let's just say the non-extremists on either side) have always been able to work together. I have read so many reports pre 7 October 2023 and over many years of Palestinians crossing the border daily to work with Israelis, and a few the other way around.
But as you say, there is a deep, imperative need for compensation and restoration for the ordinary Palestinian people who have lost so many thousands of loved ones, entire communities and even their densest cities to Netanyahu's depredations and his thuggish armed forces.
I doubt that even the most generous of monetary war reparations could work - either in practice or because the damage has been far more symbolic and deep rooted for the Palestinians. They are as deeply rooted in their land as are the Israelis who have, let's face it, existed en masse in Israel for less than 80 years, and many for a matter of a decade or two only. The Palestinians, on the other hand, have lived there on and off for thousands of years.
So I do hope that your suggestion reaches powerful and sympathetic ears that can implement something like your moderate solution: a single Palestine, where Jews and Palestinians can work together in peace, and where some sort of "truth and reconciliation" process can begin and ultimately end in peace in the Middle East.