After Zionism (eBook)

Preface to the New Edition

We write this as bombs continue to fall on Gaza, obliterating families and hopes. Achieving true equality and justice for all Israelis and Palestinians is now more urgent than ever. This book presents a realistic alternative to the two-state fiction presented in the White House and the opinion pages of Western media. Clinging onto failed myths about two separate states is a grave disservice to the millions of people in the Middle East who deserve hope that a democratic nation for all is possible.

Some will accuse one-state advocates as unrealistic, dangerous dreamers at a time when Israelis and Palestinians are at war. But it’s precisely because we’re in this precarious moment that we believe discussing one-state options is so crucial.

The ideology of separatism favoured by the Israeli state – caging millions of Palestinians behind high walls, underground barriers and mass surveillance and under the constant watch of military drones – has failed. It is only through cooperation, sharing resources and addressing historical and present grievances that peace can be achieved.

Ten years ago, when we first published this collection, we believed that the prospects for a two-state outcome to the Israel/Palestine conflict had expired. The basic idea, separation of two people in a small place, a country the size of New Jersey, was a non-starter. In 2009, more than 500,000 Jewish settlers occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Today, that number stands at roughly 750,000 people – a 40 percent increase in just fourteen years. Practically, their presence is an effective coagulant to the Apartheid status quo. There can be no Palestinian state when Jewish Israelis occupy Palestinians, and when Israeli law – which is paramount in the land of Israel/Palestine – extends to Israeli Jews wherever they may live.

While predictions of the future are always fraught and unreliable, it seems reasonable to say that the number of Israeli settlers will continue to grow out of all proportion to natural population growth. In other words, Israel will continue to transfer large numbers of civilians into occupied territory, unopposed by a divided world.

Numbers comprised one pillar of our argument against the twostate paradigm, but the main force of the discussion was moral. As liberals we do not believe that ethnic, religious states are defensible as such. We conceive of political spaces in which voluntary participation is the basic principle underlying citizenship, in which people, in all their individual diversity, are the only currency that counts. An ethnoreligious state, Israel, and an ethnic state, Palestine, do not conform to our view of what a liberal democratic state should be.

So, ten years later we find that our arguments continue to resonate for all the same reasons. Yet much has happened in the intervening period to underline the urgency of the need for change in Israel/Palestine.

During the Obama administration, Washington’s once obsessive focus on the Middle East began to shift as US policy strategically redirected towards China and its ambitious foreign policy. This continued during the Trump administration, but with a new dimension: an effort to “normalise” relations between Israel and the autocratic Arab regimes in the Middle East, which began in 2016.

The Biden administration that came to power in 2021 quickly extended the Trump era “Abraham Accords” – the grandiose name ascribed to the series of economic and security arrangements brokered by the United States, linking a handful of anti-democratic regimes in the region to one another and Israel. Yet the effort to sideline the Palestinians has proven disastrous, as was witnessed on 7 October 2023 when the Palestinian group Hamas killed about 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers, and in Israel’s subsequent genocide in Gaza where at the time of writing, more than 20,000 Palestinians have been killed.

And still, despite everything, the two-state outcome has persisted among policymakers, a zombie whose grotesque aspect has only grown with the number of dead in Israel/Palestine. Less than two weeks after the horrific Hamas attack on Israel, US President Joe Biden was in Tel Aviv rehashing old talking points. “We must keep pursuing peace”, he said. “We must keep pursuing a path so that Israel and the Palestinian people can both live safely, in security, in dignity and in peace. For me, that means a two-state solution.”

As if on cue, the European Union Foreign Policy Chief, Josep Borrell, reiterated the same message soon after. “The solution can only be political, centred on two states,” he tweeted. Other Western governments followed suit, speaking as if the Oslo Peace Accords from the early 1990s were a fresh document full of potential, capable of bringing an enduring peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Seemingly, the White House and its Western allies had missed the rapid expansion of Israeli settlements across the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the last decade and the sharp turn to the far-right of the Israeli public and political establishment. Today, arguments for the forcible transfer of Palestinians into neighbouring states, a repeat of the Nakba, have entered the Israeli mainstream.

Eager not to be outdone, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was desperate to join in on the two-state bandwagon.1 In late November 2023, he was writing about the need to “revamp” the corrupt Palestinian Authority to enliven the prospects of the twostate solution because it is the “keystone for creating a stable foundation for the normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia and the wider Arab Muslim world.” Friedman acknowledged that two-state advocates, presumably including him, are looking tired and increasingly irrelevant. “These two-staters right now are on the defensive in both communities in their struggle with the one-staters”, he wrote. “Therefore, it is in the highest interest of the United States and all moderates to bring back the two-state alternative.”

We regard the renewed talk of a two-state outcome as a cynical diversion. It’s the “solution” stated ad nauseam when there is no interest in resolving the century-old conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. It’s the “solution” for fewer Israelis and Palestinians than ever before.

Unsurprisingly, the lack of any progress towards peace in the Middle East has negatively impacted the views of Israelis and Palestinians towards the two-state solution. In one Gallup poll, before 7 October, only around one in four Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza supported the idea of a two-state solution.2 Backing for two-states has plummeted in the last decade. In 2012, 59 percent of Palestinians had endorsed it.

This collapse was particularly acute for young Palestinians with only one in six between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five supporting it. As 69 percent of the population in the Occupied Territories is under twenty-nine years of age, disillusionment with the two-state solution will only grow. Unsurprisingly, the majority of Palestinians polled had no faith in US President Biden bringing peace either.

Israeli Jews were equally pessimistic about the two-state solution, although their lives were comparatively privileged compared to Palestinians living under occupation. According to a Pew poll released in September 2023, just 35 percent of Israelis thought it was possible “for Israel and an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully.”3 This percentage had dropped 15 points since 2013. Arab Israelis were especially despondent, far more than Jewish Israelis, concerning the likelihood of a two-state solution.

Yet it doesn’t follow that Israeli Jews will come around to a single shared state with equal rights for everyone. Indeed, people with privileges have rarely yielded them without some external pressure.

Ten years since the first publication of After Zionism, the need to explain and promote the necessity of the one-state solution has never been more vital. How do we put a stop to endless war and Apartheid? What will it take to achieve justice in Israel/Palestine? How do we secure the future? How do we move beyond Zionism – and what comes after Jewish nationalism?

This collection seeks to grapple with those questions. We are grateful to each writer who has contributed to this book. We are privileged to share their company and have learned much from each of them over the years.

The events of 7 October 2023 and since have shaken us profoundly. Hamas’s ruthless incursion into Israel and slaughter of Israeli civilians were horrific. But this did not happen in a vacuum. Gaza has been an Israeli laboratory for close to twenty years, blockaded and surrounded by electronic fences, drones and surveillance equipment. The majority of Gazans are unable to move freely outside the territory to work, study, live or receive medical care. Hamas may have sought to turn the world’s attention to the plight of the Palestinians, when the world had largely turned away – but their methods were indefensible.

The Israeli retaliation has been devastating. Vast swathes of Gaza are uninhabitable, rendered apocalyptic by relentless Israeli bombing and a merciless ground invasion. Most horrifyingly, Israel has killed more than 7,000 children.

Palestinians are the primary losers in this war between an extremist Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a Hamas leadership that...