Israel's One State Reality
Understanding Palestine and Israel as they actually are.
Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami (eds). The One State Reality: What is Israel/Palestine? (Cornell University Press 2023)
Today, Foreign Affairs published “Israel’s One State Reality,” an article I co-authored with Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown and Shibley Telhami based on our similarly titled book which Cornell University Press published last month. I’ve very grateful to Foreign Affairs for publishing our piece two weeks before the magazine itself comes out, and without a paywall. The premise is straightforward: “A one-state arrangement is not a future possibility; it already exists, no matter what anyone thinks. Between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, one state controls the entry and exit of people and goods, oversees security, and has the capacity to impose its decisions, laws, and policies on millions of people without their consent.”
The appearance of this article in Foreign Affairs is itself indicative of how quickly the terms of political discourse have changed, after decades of rigidly politically enforced terminological and analytical deadlock. As we put it in the article, “The fact of a one-state reality has long been obvious to those who live in Israel and the territories it controls and to anyone who has paid attention to the inexorable shifts on the ground. But in the past few years, something has changed. Until recently, the one-state reality was rarely acknowledged by important actors, and those who spoke the truth out loud were ignored or punished for doing so. With remarkable speed, however, the unsayable has become close to conventional wisdom.”
At the time we began our project four years ago, we felt like we were a bit ahead of the curve, pushing the boundaries, and taking some big risks by advancing the One State Reality framework. Only three years later, we feel that we are crystallizing an emergent consensus. In last year’s iteration of the Middle East Scholars Barometer survey which Telhami and I run, 60% of academic Middle East specialist respondents “described the situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories as a “one-state reality with inequality akin to apartheid”; in the recently conducted survey which will be released soon, let’s just say that that number has increased.
The book did not advance a common political agenda, theoretical approach, or set of policy recommendations. What united us was a shared understanding that Israel and Palestine as they currently exist could not be meaningfully understood through the lens of an incipient two state solution. As we put it in the Foreign Affairs article, “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." After grappling for a long time with whether that constituted “Apartheid” - as per the analysis of a range of recent critically important reports from organizations such as Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem anbd Amnesty International - we settled on my formulation: “It may not technically be Apartheid, but it rhymes.”
The One State Reality does not advocate for a one state solution. The book abstains from offering policy recommendations; the Foreign Affairs article is more prescriptive, but not in that particular direction. I see little reason to believe that the one state reality will be one based on justice, equality, or citizenship for all. Benjamin Netanyahu’s current extreme right wing government and its aggressive advances in the West Bank and Jersualem has done more to mainstream the understanding of Israel’s one state reality than anything else — and that vision is one of a single state premised on Jewish supremacy (a term we did not adopt lightly) and permanent structures of domination and inequality that resemble Apartheid in every way which matters.
I began working on The One State Reality about four years ago, when Barnett, Brown and I convened a POMEPS workshop bringing together a large group of Israeli, Palestinian and other scholars to try to discuss the political governance of Israel and Palestine in a rigorous and comparative way. Essays from that collection were published as a volume in the open access POMEPS Studies series. Telhami then picked up the ball, organizing a conference at the University of Maryland which brought together many of the scholars from the first workshop with policy oriented analysts. The One State Reality includes over a dozen chapters by a diverse group participants in that workshop.
The ideas themselves were out there already, of course, especially among younger Palestinian intellectuals and activists. I credit a few people in particular for shaping my thinking on this. Ian Lustick of the University of Pennsylvania has been tirelessly writing for decades about how ideas about things like Israel’s occupation change; his Gramscian arguments about wars of position and wars of maneuver and about tipping points driving sudden, rapid cascades of change, hold up really well (see his classic Unsettled States, Disupted Lands and his recent Paradigm Lost, as well as his chapter in our book). I’d also point to Yousef Munayyer, who really broke the ice by publishing his excellent article on “There Will Be a One State Solution” in Foreign Affairs a few years ago (see his chapter in our book as well). Tareq Baconi really pushed me to think seriously about how Gaza fit into the equation. Nora Erekat’s book Justice for Some really brought key issues of international law and practice into sharp focus. And, of course, Omar Shakir’s Human Rights Watch report “A Threshold Crossed” was a defining moment in the discursive and analytical transition. And I learned an immense amount from Yael Berda’s masterful analysis of the mobility regimes governing Palestinians (see her chapter and her new book) and Gershon Shafir’s insights into the profound changes of Israeli identity. I wouldn’t have gotten to the analytical vision of The One State Reality without all of these converging streams.
Our article does offer some policy suggestions, including shifting towards policies and rhetoric focused on equality and justice for everyone under Israel’s de facto rule. I would look to the younger generation of Palestinian activists and intellectuals, who have long seen this reality and discarded the two state illusion, for ideas about where to go next. There is something cathartic about shifting the lens and seeing Israel’s apartheid like vision for the one state for what it is. It’s easy to say that a system like that can’t possibly endure, but unfortunately such systems have proven their ability to endure for a very long time despite their manifest injustice. We live in a populist age, with liberal ideas on the retreat globally and here in the United States. That’s why, in my opinion, it’s critical to link these struggles and see their connections, as some (but not as many as you’d like) of the Israeli protestors against Netanyahu’s judicial coup have begun to do.
Once a profound truth has been seen, it cannot be unseen. Moral action requires getting the analysis right, and hopefully our book and article contribute to that cause. We build on the work of so many others, and we look forward to being part of the conversation as it moves forward.