Opinion | Israel’s ‘One-State Reality’

I’ve been trying to think about how to begin this episode, which is a very, very tricky one. And I found myself thinking about a debate I heard a lot in 2023 and 2024. “Free, free Palestine.” You would hear these chants and see these signs —— “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” From the river to the sea. And it flared into this huge controversy. “‘Free Palestine from the river to the sea’ means get rid of all the Jews.” “No. ‘From the river to the sea’ means the land in between is free. Everyone in between is free.” “No! They — this is a genocidal chant.” What was always so strange to me, so backward about this focus on college campus protesters, was that there was this reality people weren’t really admitting, that there is one power from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. That power, that sovereign — which, if you travel in that area, and I have, is just visually undeniable — is Israel. American politics has not grappled really at all with a level of day-to-day domination that Israel exerts over Palestinian lives. And the complete absence of any horizon at all for that to end. And this was true before Oct. 7. In early 2023, the political scientists Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami published an edited volume called “The One-State Reality.” Their argument, which they also made in a very controversial Foreign Affairs piece, was that “Palestine is not a state in waiting and Israel is not a Democratic state incidentally occupying Palestinian territory. All the territory west of the Jordan River has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where the land and the people are subject to radically different legal regimes, and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste.” What they were saying then is that the hope of a two-state solution in the future had become a way many in America particularly avoided reckoning with the one-state reality of the present. That reality was not accidental. It was not and is not intended to be transient. It was being etched into the land in stone and cement, in settlements and checkpoints, in the construction of walls and the demolition of homes. That might have been a controversial claim when they made it. What has happened since Oct. 7 has made it an undeniable reality. Israel now occupies more than half of Gaza. The more than two million Gazans have been herded into less than half of the land they formerly occupied. And Gaza, it should be said, was already one of the most overcrowded places on Earth. The conditions Gazans now live in? They’re hellish. And there is no near term, there’s no imagined, there’s no envisioned relief. This is and it remains collective punishment. Hamas, not the children of Gaza, attacked Israel on Oct. 7. The conditions the children of Gaza now live in are not — they’re not moral. In the West Bank, Israel has choked off money to the Palestinian Authority. It has built settlements, chosen to build settlements at a record pace. More settlements were approved in the last year alone than in the two decades before combined. Israel has allowed, has protected a terrifying rise in settler violence and military violence toward Palestinians. There is no doubt, if you go there, who rules the West Bank, and it is not the P.A. When Netanyahu signed a recent settlement project, a project the United States had opposed for a long time because it would effectively bisect the West Bank, making a Palestinian state physically unimaginable, Netanyahu made clear that that was exactly why he was signing it. He said, “We are going to fulfill our promise that there will be no Palestinian state. This place belongs to us.” In the north, Israel has used war on Iran as cover to invade Lebanon, displacing more than a million people, a million, and suggesting that up to 600,000 will not be allowed to return to their homes until Israel has established its security zone, whatever that proves to be, and that it is decided that Israelis in the north are safe. To put it bluntly, it is an open question whether any of those 600,000 Lebanese will ever be able to return to their homes, or if they will even have homes to return to. I do not want to underplay what Israel is actually dealing with here. I have immense sympathy for Israel’s war against Hezbollah. They are defending themselves in a way any state would. But this, again, is collective punishment. Those million Lebanese, They are not all Hezbollah. Israel’s security challenges are very real. Its horror, its fear, its trauma after Oct. 7 was very real. Its determination to make sure that never happened again is what any state and any people would do. Its right to reprisal against Hamas and Hezbollah were undeniable. I am not someone who wants to see the state of Israel cease to exist, but what Israel is choosing here — a one-state reality that already is and will continue to be understood the world over as apartheid — it endangers that state, too. The cost of Israel cannot morally be the permanent subjugation of millions of Palestinians. In February, Gallup found for the first time, more Americans sympathized with the Palestinians than the Israelis. Among Democrats, among young Americans, it is not even close. Israel maintains support among older Americans, and it has benefited from the advanced age of the last two presidents. Their views of Israel were forged in another time around another Israel. American politics has not yet fully grappled with what Israel has chosen to become. For decades, for my entire life, discourse in America around Israel has always been couched in the future tense. It has always sat in the language of solutions. Do you support a two-state solution? Do you support a one-state solution? I don’t think this is a time to talk about solutions. I think that is a way of sheltering ourselves from what is actually happening. I think what is needed now is simply a confrontation with realities.