Preface

There is an apartheid state here. In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state.

Tamir Pardo, former head of Mossad (the Israeli intelligence service), interview with Associated Press, 6 September 20231

Towards the end of 1967, shortly after returning from combat in Jerusalem, I became a political activist. From that point on I began to write ‘Down with the occupation’ on the walls of Tel Aviv. Since then and until quite recently – in other words, for half a century – I remained stubborn in my support for the idea of creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel, within the 1967 borders. The right to self-determination for the two peoples that, over the course of a most painful and violent process, have become established between the sea and the river Jordan – this has been my guiding principle. As a soldier and as a citizen, I had to apply my anticolonialist ideas in my everyday life: just as I had fought for Israel to become a state for all Israeli citizens (and not the state of all Jewish people in the world, who, as is known, don’t live there), I have also wished wholeheartedly for the creation of an independent Palestinian republic alongside it.

With the passing years, Israel has continued to consolidate its hold on the occupied territories. Thousands of Israelis have set up home close to indigenous villages and Palestinian towns. They have acquired a great deal of land at low prices, and this has become the property of the new settlers, for whom a whole network of roads are exclusively reserved. Severe oppression and denial of the basic rights of the local population have engendered violent resistance, which in turn has fuelled ever harsher repression.

The outbreak in 1987 of the first Intifada, which led to the 1993 Oslo Accords, inspired new hopes for a potential end to the conflict. Many believed that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin would evacuate the settlements and return Israel to the 1967 borders, but the profound inequality of power between the two sides prevented them from reaching any sincere and balanced agreement; violence flared up again, while colonisation continued to expand.

The left-wing camp to which I had pledged allegiance continued to call for the evacuation of all territories occupied in 1967, hoping that the Israelis would see that, logically speaking, they simply could not expand their country at the expense of others while continuing to live in peace with them. We penned numerous articles, organised hundreds of demonstrations, and spoke at many meetings and public gatherings. None of it worked! The demographic balance has shifted; the Israeli presence in the West Bank – particularly in the vast belt around Al-Quds, which is officially annexed to Israel – was rapidly boosted by 875,000 new settlers. Four of the ministers of the actual government live in West Bank settlements, as do a number of senior state officials (the chief of the general staff, for example). In parallel, budget allocations to settlers have soared to unprecedented heights.

In 2023 there were mass protests against the new government’s arbitrary antiliberal measures, but the protestors made no mention of Israel’s presence in the occupied territories. Public calls to defend Israeli democracy have passed over in silence the fact that, for fifty-six years, millions of Palestinians have been living under a military regime, being deprived of civil, legal, and political rights. Worse still, Palestinians under occupation have to live side by side with colonisers in what is becoming ever more obviously an apartheid system. They are forbidden to live in the settlements; they are allowed only to work in them. They are forbidden to marry Jews and cannot apply for Israeli citizenship. Many Palestinian workers cross the old borders every day, to come and work in poor conditions in the Israeli economy, and must return to their homes before nightfall.

And then 7 October came upon Israel, with Hamas’s brutal attack on areas next to Gaza. This horrible massacre bears certain similarities to the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, which was carried out by Christian Phalangists while the Israeli Defence Forces under Ariel Sharon stood by, allowing the attack to take place. It was the same Ariel Sharon who, later, in 2005, evacuated the Gaza Strip and contributed to Hamas’s rise to power, further exacerbating the discord within the Palestinian leadership.

The events of 7 October came as an utter shock to the Israeli public. True, Gaza was under siege and the quality of life remained insufferable, but the Israeli settlements were now long gone, uprooted by Sharon. In addition, unlike the West Bank, Gaza lacked the oppressive presence of a foreign army. So what was the source of this raging hatred that translated into such terrible war crimes?

It was convenient for many Israelis to explain the massacre in terms of the traditional hatred of Islam towards Jews, thus ignoring the long history of Muslim–Jewish relations since the Crusades and Salah ad-Din. Others rushed to argue that Jews anywhere in the world have always been and will always be hated for no reason, and that 7 October was some kind of an encapsulated Holocaust.

In 1956 Moshe Dayan, an Israeli chief of staff at the time, eulogised a fallen Israeli soldier who had been cruelly murdered by insurgents from Gaza. He said: ‘Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate.’2 Not many Israeli leaders have dared to speak in such a manner.

Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, was born in 1936 in Al-Jura, a village that once stood where the Israeli city of Ashkelon now stands. After his parents were expelled to Gaza in 1950, he grew up in Al-Shati, a refugee camp. Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s political bureau on 7 October, was born in the same camp in 1963. His parents were also expelled from Al-Jura – in 1950, after the place was emptied and then annexed to Ashkelon. Yahya Sinwar, the military leader of Hamas on 7 October, was born in 1962 in the Khan Yunis refugee camp. In 1950 his parents were expelled from Al-Majdal, which later became part of Ashkelon as well. These leaders’ stories are not uncommon, nor are the stories of other leaders. More than 60 per cent of Gaza’s current population of 2 million consists of descendants of refugees who were driven from their land and homes after 1948 and have lived in the camps ever since.

The 7 October massacre was in some ways an indirect repercussion of the Nakba, which occurred seventy-five years ago. The origins of the Palestinians’ hatred and of the long, heart-breaking conflict lie in 1948 even more than in the occupation of 1967. Given these circumstances, can an exclusively Jewish state in the Middle East have any secure future? The only answer given by the Israeli government in response to the devastating blow was a war of revenge, without any clear political objectives and arguably just as cruel as the October 7 attack. A solution to the bloody conflict seems further away than ever.

At the time of writing this preface, the immediate consequences of the latest catastrophe are still unknown to me. The animosity between the two groups has only increased, and the occupation of the Palestinian people remains entrenched and unyielding. Meanwhile the world pays lip service to the idea that, at some point in the future, a Palestinian state may be recognised. What remains of the Israeli left continues to chant the hollow mantra ‘two states for two peoples’, with no real intention of making it happen. The Palestinian Authority, totally dependent upon Israeli power and without any real popular support, echoes the tragicomedy of these empty formulas and collaborates in this unbearable situation, while knowing perfectly well that Israel has no intention of recognising real Palestinian sovereignty.

It is this situation, in which hollow, abstract political discourse rubs shoulders with the reality of a binational situation, that prompted me to write this essay. I began writing it with a great deal of scepticism as to the possibility of ever seeing an egalitarian Israeli–Palestinian federation come about, and I am still wrestling with a great many theoretical doubts. My excursion into the dark corners of Zionism’s ideological past did, however, present me with some surprises. When I began writing, I had no idea that the great thinkers of the pacifist currents in Zionism, and those who came into close contact with them, had rejected the notion of an exclusive Jewish state in a land predominantly populated by Arabs and had instead supported moves to construct a binational political entity. Across generations, from Ahad Ha’am, one of the founders of spiritual Zionism at the end of the nineteenth century, through Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, and Hannah Arendt, to the famous writer A.B. Yehoshua, the intellectual elite worried that the future of a little Jewish Sparta at war with a hostile Middle East was by no means secure. They believed that only egalitarian integration within the framework of a common state would ensure that Israel becomes a safe haven for all of its inhabitants.

I am highly sceptical as to whether what is in actuality a binational existence can be embodied in a federal entity of the same type as Switzerland,...