Debating Israel's One State Reality
Some revealing responses, if not for the intended reasons
About a month and a half ago, The One State Reality: What is Israel/Palestine? came out. Edited by me, Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown and Shibley Telhami, it featured over a dozen provocative and authoritative essays examining the structural, political, ideological, institutional and international factors which had ended the hopes for a two state solution for Israel and Palestine. We followed this with an article in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs entitled “Israel’s One State Reality.” That article generated a tremendous amount of debate. Today, Foreign Affairs released an advance online version of a symposium on the article that will appear in the July/August issue. The symposium features commentary by Michael Oren, Robert Satloff, Martin Indyk, Dahlia Sheindlin, and Asa’d Ghanem, and a response by us. Since Barnett, Brown, Telhami and I wrote our response collectively, I’ll let our words there stand on their own without saying more here. But I did want to offer a few reflections and context.
First, it’s important to note that the overwhelming public and private response has been positive – from academics, sure, but also from current and former US policymakers, Palestinians, Israelis, and many others invested in the issue. Critics have tried to portray our approach as extreme, motivated by anti-Israel bias, or out of touch with reality, but that’s not reflected in the extremely wide positive response we’ve received from very diverse quarters — basically, from everyone except the Israeli or pro-Israeli right wing. The general tenor of the responses has been that our points don’t break new analytical ground (a point I made myself in this piece last month) but that the venue and argumentation made it significant. A really quite remarkable swathe of the policy community (on all sides) conveyed their private agreement, even those that didn’t feel like saying so publicly. It really does feel like something has changed.
Sure, there’s been a predictable torrent of deranged abuse. I would like to note here my own privilege and positionality. As a tenured white guy with a long public track record of publications, commentary, and policy engagement, I can laugh off semi-literate, deranged emails, phone messages, tweets and screeds in obscure right wing blogs. My Palestinian colleagues suffer far worse on a daily basis, and have far fewer institutional protections. The number of people – real or not – who seem to live for nothing but slinging abuse over issues related to Israel and Palestine is just something everyone takes for granted – but they really shouldn’t. But again, something has changed. The old style of narrative policing just doesn’t work anymore. As we put it in our response,
Our goal was to state clearly the facts that supporters of Israeli policies and many U.S. officials would much prefer to remain unspoken. Policy must be based on clear-eyed analysis rather than ideological narratives, political conveniences, or wishful thinking. For some, a description of the unjust reality is evidently more upsetting than the unjust reality itself.
The most interesting thing about the critical responses, in the symposium and elsewhere, is how quickly — almost desperately — they attempt to shift the argument away from the one we made to the one they prefer to have. Bloggers like Elliott Abrams, like Robert Satloff in his astonishing symposium response, want us to be arguing for the destruction of Israel (or, more accurately, want their readers to think that we are arguing that) because that’s an argument that he prefers to have. But we aren’t. We didn’t advocate for a one state solution, either in the book or in the article. We describe the existing one state reality that has emerged over decades and is now inescapable. It’s hard to celebrate the unjust political order within that one state, or to see any path towards justice given the current political trends among both Israelis and Palestinians. But that grim horizon doesn’t make the one state reality any less real.
I don’t want to say any more about the contents of our response here, since you can check out the whole symposium, available with no paywall for now on Foreign Affairs. It features very smart reflections by Sheindlin and Ghanem, a remarkably reflective and thoughtful plea to hold on to the two state solution by Martin Indyk, an amusing but empty polemic by Michael Oren (who really should be more willing to own and defend the reality that he and the governments he served helped to create, and more judicious about invoking Nazis), and a frankly embarrassing performance by Robert Satloff which is refreshingly revealing in ways he certainly didn’t intend. Read the whole thing!