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Marching in a recent Ithaca, New York, demonstration in solidarity with Palestine was one of the truly gratifying moments of my life as an internationalist.
Organized by Cornell University undergraduates, the protest against Israel’s latest, massive bombardment of the Gaza Strip and assault on Palestinians within and beyond Jerusalem proved that even in Ithaca — a sleepy college town in upstate New York — one finds some of the legions of civilians around the world who have mobilized against Israel’s brutal policies of occupation and collective punishment.
The Ithaca demonstration, which featured a rally on Cornell’s campus followed by a march to the downtown commons, was heartening for another reason: The crowd of roughly 300 included a generous smattering of Black and brown faces. Indeed, almost half of the participants were people of color, most of them students.
That a critical mass of young people was willing to openly support Palestinian freedom — a cause many progressive activists once viewed as a third rail — reflects the extent to which public discourse on this issue has shifted. Even in the US, the citadel of support for Israeli might, some mainstream news outlets now supplement conventional assertions of Israel’s “right to defend itself” with forthright themes of Palestinian liberation.
In some ways, the visible presence of African Americans in many pro-Palestine mobilizations of recent weeks, including rallies in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, constitutes an equally remarkable cultural transition. While no wholesale pivot to the anti-imperialist left is underway, there are signs of a revitalization of some of the most vibrant traditions of Black internationalism.
It may be an exaggeration to suggest that the upsurge of mass resistance to white supremacy that propelled the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has also reenergized ideals of global solidarity among African Americans. But there can be no doubt that BLM, which some have dubbed the “American Intifada,” has driven to the center of Black political awareness questions of human rights and state violence — and principles of popular revolt — that are germane to Palestinian struggle.
Still, transformations of consciousness are never absolute. If Palestinian suffering is increasingly legible to some African Americans, especially those younger progressives who have radicalized the practice of domestic anti-racism, many remaining barriers must be overcome before Black solidarity with Palestine becomes a genuinely grassroots phenomenon in the US.
The Black Lives Matter movement reenergized Black-Palestinian solidarity
African American militants have long been among the staunchest allies of Palestinians. During the heyday of the US civil rights era, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee all embraced the demand for Palestinian liberation.
After the 1960s and ’70s, the strands of African American-Palestinian solidarity waxed and waned. But those bonds were strengthened in recent years when new bouts of state violence led both populations to cultivate overseas support.
Some of the most powerful exchanges occurred after the advent of BLM as a mass movement in 2014. Palestinians played a crucial role in the Ferguson, Missouri, uprising that flared that year in the wake of the police killing of Black teenager Michael Brown.
Palestinian activists used social media to share with African American protesters tactics for dealing with tear gas attacks by militarized police forces — an experience with which many subjects of Israeli occupation are all too familiar.
In 2015, more than 1,000 Black organizers and intellectuals signed a solidarity statement condemning Israel’s lopsided war on Gaza and stranglehold on the West Bank. That year also saw the release of a stylish video titled “When I See Them I See Us” that featured African American figures, from activist Angela Davis to singer Lauryn Hill, highlighting the “similarities, but not sameness,” of Black and Palestinian subjugation and resilience.
BLM, which rejuvenated mass African American protest amid the bourgeois racial politics of the Obama years, also provided a new framework for fashioning Black and Palestinian affinities.
Progressive, youthful Black organizations, from the Dream Defenders to Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100) to the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, embraced Palestinian liberation as a core element of their global agenda.
Some members of these and other African American groups toured Palestinian territories as part of international delegations, then returned to the US to circulate accounts — overwhelmingly absent from Western reportage — of the barbaric conditions of life under Israeli occupation. Often, such travelers were struck by the warm hospitality of the Palestinians, who appeared eager to forge cultural and social links to Black America.
Meanwhile, African American thinkers such as journalist Marc Lamont Hill and author Michelle Alexander braved vilification to denounce Israeli practices of “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing.”
Similar acts of solidarity unfolded during the recent, bloody siege of Palestinian civilian populations by the Israeli military. Groups such as Black Lives Matter of Paterson, New Jersey, have decried the wildly uneven violence unleashed on Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and Israel, and have called on the US, which funnels $3.8 billion to Israel in military aid annually, to stop sponsoring the carnage.
Such expressions of kinship do not erupt spontaneously. Many of the latest manifestations of African American-Palestinian mutuality reflect the work of US organizations such as Existence Is Resistance that have designed political education campaigns to counter Western erasures and distortions of Palestinian socio-historical realities.
But to gain a fuller picture of African American outlooks, one must weigh such comradely efforts against deep dimensions of ambivalence. In truth, the Palestine issue generates no more consensus among Black Americans than it does among Americans more broadly.
Black people aren’t immune to the American ignorance of foreign conflicts
There will always be those African Americans who oppose, on ideological grounds, the right of Palestinians to self-determination and territorial restoration. Many such individuals belong to churches that propagate essentialist theories of “Judeo-Christian” values or otherwise promote Christian Zionist beliefs.
Some African Americans are simply accommodationists who refuse to challenge the foreign policy dictates of US elites. Others harbor real admiration for Israel, in some instances seeing the state as a model of uncompromising sovereignty and ethnocentrism that Black nationalists should attempt to emulate.
But the opposite of solidarity is not antagonism; it is indifference. Black people are hardly immune to the ignorance with which so many Americans view foreign, nonwhite populations. Victims of white supremacy, African Americans are nevertheless fully capable of internalizing and reproducing the racist, Orientalist tropes that have buttressed imperial ventures within and beyond the Arab world.
As members of a marginalized population, some Black Americans are loath to bear the social costs of open identification with Palestinians, a stigmatized group located thousands of miles away. In the end, many Black people may lack the desire or knowledge to contest framings of Israel-Palestine as a hopelessly intractable conflict rooted in ancient hostilities.
Nor has the compass of African American political conscience always pointed toward Palestine. Prior to the mid-1950s and ’60s, when events such as the 1956 Suez Crisis and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War underscored the imperialist nature of the Zionist project, many African Americans supported statehood for Jewish refugees. Like other Westerners, they tended to overlook the violent displacement of Palestinians that accompanied the creation of Israel in 1948.
Still, it is safe to say that African American perspectives on Palestine remain well to the left of those of the American majority.
Solidarity is never predetermined — it must be reconstructed by each generation
As demands for Palestinian liberation gain international momentum, buoyed by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, the relative independence of social media, and the painstaking labor of countless activists, expressions of Black kinship with Palestinians may continue to expand.
But if they do so, it will not be the result of mere similarities between African American and Palestinian oppression. Connections, of course, do exist; both populations face conditions of “internal colonialism,” including racialization, dispossession, underdevelopment, and state violence. However, no perfect analogy exists between Black and Palestinian suffering. Parallelism alone cannot foster a sense of shared fate.
For African American camaraderie with Palestine to become a truly popular ideal, broad segments of the Black rank and file must recognize the global scope of white supremacy. They must see the need to form insurgent, international alliances across lines of color and culture. These principles must transcend the ranks of seasoned organizers, galvanizing those who lack firsthand experience with anti-racist and anti-imperialist campaigns.
The complexity of African American political aspirations suggests that such an awakening is entirely possible. The Black working classes have never equated their own freedom with the demise of formal segregation, or with the prospect of greater social inclusion within the apparatus of American empire. They have rarely let parochialism constrain their visions of a more just and egalitarian world.
I suspect that in the final analysis, many Black people can fully appreciate the Palestinian cause, a protracted struggle for land, autonomy, and cultural redemption that posits the total dismantling of domination as the horizon of human dignity.
Solidarity is never predetermined. It must be reconstructed by each generation. I draw hope, therefore, from the scattered evidence that, practically everywhere, an insurgent spirit is spreading.
During the recent Ithaca march, I spotted on the sidelines a cluster of young African American men. They appeared to be non-students — members, perhaps, of the town’s tiny, working-class Black community. They watched intently but did not join the throngs of chanting protesters. “Black and Palestinian liberation,” I shouted in their direction, and raised a fist. They said nothing. Yet one of them signaled his approval by wrapping me in a spontaneous hug.
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Russell Rickford is an associate professor of history at Cornell University.
As the Israel-Gaza war raged, President Joe Biden made clear to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that there was a problem.
Full-throated support for Israel among Democrats was waning, namely because of progressives. Among the clearest signs were moves in the House and Senate to block a $735 million weapons sale to Israel, a deal that only weeks earlier Democratic congressional aides said they hadn’t considered controversial or even noteworthy.
On May 19, about nine days into the conflict, Biden told Netanyahu that unless he wanted to risk losing bipartisan support for Israel in Congress, he “expected” the Israeli premier to wind down the fight. The next day, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire.
Progressives in and out of government say their actions both pressured Biden and gave him a convincing talking point in conversations with Netanyahu. “Progressives deserve a little credit for the ceasefire,” said Ben Rhodes, a former top national security aide to President Barack Obama and an outspoken advocate for a more progressive foreign policy. “Biden was looking over his left shoulder and told Netanyahu, ‘You have to move on this.’”
The true extent to which progressives directly played a role in ending this round of Israeli-Palestinian fighting is unclear. The administration insists no members of Congress changed Biden’s mind during the conflict, and the president openly stated last week that “my party still supports Israel.”
But what is clear is that progressives no longer play a fringe role in the American national security discussion. They’re a real force, and their time is now.
“Looking at where this debate was 10 or even five years ago and where it is now, I think we can’t help but be encouraged,” said Matt Duss, Sen. Bernie Sanders’s national security adviser and a leading figure of the progressive foreign policy movement.
Biden’s presidency gave progressives a clear opportunity
Progressives have made their voices heard on foreign policy throughout US history. From the Wilsonian era to the Vietnam and Iraq wars, they’ve long pressured American leaders to avoid conflicts abroad and focus on economic and social issues at home.
The current progressive movement upholds those ideas and also places primacy on tackling climate change and promoting human rights while curbing support for authoritarian regimes.
The problem is that it didn’t have much success swaying either the Obama or Trump administrations.
Obama didn’t end the war in Afghanistan, for example, and supported Israel’s bombing campaign during the previous Israel-Hamas fight in 2014. “I think that undercut us with respect to human rights, and it didn’t help us make any progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue,” Rhodes told me.
And though President Donald Trump shared some of the antiwar tendencies of progressives, namely not initiating long wars in the Middle East, he ignored all left-leaning advice while cozying up to dictators, minimizing human rights, calling climate change a “hoax,” and exacerbating racial tensions at home.
But progressives did achieve one moral victory with Trump in office. After years of trying and failing, in 2019 Congress passed a resolution, spearheaded by progressives such as Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), to end US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, though Trump vetoed it. Still, it proved progressives could have a serious impact on the broader national security debate.
“The Yemen success was important and it gave momentum to the whole movement,” said Tommy Vietor, a former Obama White House official and now co-host with Rhodes of the left-leaning foreign policy podcast Pod Save the World.
Biden’s rise, though, was a boon to the progressive foreign policy movement.
Since the campaign, Biden’s team has remained closely connected to progressive climate, veteran, and other groups to hear their views on myriad national security issues. They’ve helped influence some of the president’s decisions, such as ending most offensive support for the Yemen war, withdrawing all US troops and contractors from Afghanistan by September 11, treating climate change as the top global threat, and waiving intellectual property protections for US-made Covid-19 vaccines.
That’s not to say the president is pursuing a purely progressive foreign policy, or that progressives are entirely pleased with him. “The left thinks it’s getting a raw deal from Biden on foreign policy generally,” said Van Jackson, a former Obama-era Pentagon official now at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. That perception, he said, has to do with Biden tying domestic issues to competition with China and resisting making deep cuts to defense spending.
Still, Jackson acknowledges, “there is a greater opportunity to influence policy from the left than any time since I’ve been alive.”
But privately, progressives share their concern that their wins so far came in areas where Biden already agreed with them. On the campaign trail, Biden said he would end “forever wars” and focus his attention on motivating the world to confront climate change.
The real test would be when progressives and Biden differed on a major issue. Then came the Israel-Gaza war.
The progressive pushback on Israel proved their staying power
Following weeks of aggressive and at times violent Israeli actions toward Palestinians in Jerusalem, the militant group Hamas launched rockets at Israel on May 10. Israel responded with devastating airstrikes and artillery fire on the group’s positions in Gaza.
The disparity between the two sides — Hamas has thousands of imprecise rockets while Israel has one of the world’s strongest militaries and most effective missile defense systems — meant it wasn’t a fair fight. Before a ceasefire ended the nearly two weeks of fighting, Israel had killed nearly 250 Palestinians, including 66 children, while Hamas had killed 12 Israelis, including two children.
Biden, as he has throughout his career, backed Israel’s “right to defend itself” while initially saying very little about the plight of the Palestinians. Progressives countered the president, saying support for Israel could and should be coupled with defending Palestinian rights.
Among the most vocal critics was Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress. On May 13, she gave an impassioned speech on the House floor about the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and why the US should reconsider its unconditional support of Israel.
“When I see the images and videos of destruction and death in Palestine, all I hear are the children screaming from pure fear and terror,” she said, holding back tears. A statement from a Palestinian mother she read about putting her kids to bed during the bombings “broke me a little more because … my country’s policies and funding will deny this mother’s right to see her own children live without fear and to grow old without painful trauma and violence.”
Five days later, Tlaib confronted Biden on a Detroit tarmac during the president’s visit to a Ford electric vehicle center and spoke to him quietly for eight minutes.
“Palestinian human rights are not a bargaining chip and must be protected, not negotiated,” a Tlaib aide said to NPR that day. “The US cannot continue to give the right-wing Netanyahu government billions each year to commit crimes against Palestinians. Atrocities like bombing schools cannot be tolerated, much less conducted with US-supplied weapons.”
In a speech at the Ford center after their conversation, Biden addressed Tlaib directly, saying: “I admire your intellect, I admire your passion, and I admire your concern for so many other people.”
“From my heart,” he continued, “I pray that your grandmom and family are well. I promise you, I’m going to do everything to see that they are, on the West Bank. You’re a fighter. And, God, thank you for being a fighter.”
And Tlaib did keep fighting. In response to reports that the administration had approved the sale of $735 million in precision-guided weapons to Israel, Tlaib and two other progressives, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Mark Pocan (D-WI), put forward a resolution on May 19 to block the transaction.
The next day, May 20, Sanders filed his own resolution with the same goal in mind. And by May 21 in Israel, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire, with some crediting the congressional pressure for ending the fighting after just 11 days.
US officials, including previous presidents from both parties, had sought to condition aid to Israel before. But to consider doing so while Israel engaged in a war with Gaza was different, and underscored the shift in Washington.
“The politics of Israel have changed,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX), a progressive House Foreign Affairs Committee member. “People are standing up for what they believe, to be fair, but also to speak out against injustice, and I’ve seen many of my colleagues do it sincerely.”
The question now is if the progressive momentum can be sustained.
Foreign policy progressives are getting wins. Can they keep winning?
Progressives make three main arguments for their recent success and why they believe they’ll remain a force in years to come.
The first is that Trump’s disregard for human rights and relationships with autocrats like Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and right-wing leaders like Netanyahu brought disparate progressive factions together.
“The Trump years gave the progressive community time to formulate what their ideas really were,” said a senior House Democratic aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press.
Progressives expect the misbehavior of foreign leaders to continue, providing endless fodder for their case. Netanyahu, for example, “is all about short-term, Pyrrhic victories and he’s fucking himself in the long run,” said Vietor, the progressive podcast host.
The second is that the ubiquity of social media will continue to broadcast atrocities around the world. That will allow progressives to unite around whatever injustice goes viral online and then do something about it.
“The burden of knowing, and being faced with reality, is acting on that reality you’re aware of. That wasn’t true for generations,” said Castro. “Now you’re faced with the facts and you have to govern accordingly.”
And the third is that the progressive ranks in government keep swelling. “Progressives are saying things about foreign policy interests and values that a lot of Americans believe in and agree with, and have for a while,” said Duss, the Sanders adviser. “Thanks to years of hard organizing and policy work, there are more and more people in Washington who reflect those views.”
New progressive voices keep arriving. In one 2020 election result that many saw as a sign of the times, Jamaal Bowman defeated pro-Israel House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel in New York.
During the Israel-Gaza fight, now-Rep. Bowman put out a statement that was far more sympathetic to Palestinians than anything Engel likely would have offered. “It is imperative that the United States have an even handed approach and ensure our nation is not complicit in stoking the flames of conflict through continued settlement expansion and home demolitions that undermine the two-state solution, perpetuate endless occupation, and threaten the long-term security of both Israelis and Palestinians,” Bowman said on May 11.
More support in the capital gives progressives like Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Tlaib even more political space to push their views and challenge Biden from the left.
But experts wonder what will happen if the progressive foreign policy movement becomes too successful.
One possibility is that receiving more attention and notoriety could force progressives to concretize and homogenize their views. “The risk of movements becoming more institutionalized is they lose their radical edge,” said Marie Berry, an associate professor at the University of Denver.
And what if the movement becomes so successful that some of its proponents become the national security adviser, defense secretary, secretary of defense, or even president? That, ironically, could be a problem.
“When you have to make hard choices about what you care about, things are going to get messy very fast,” said Josh Shifrinson, an associate professor at Boston University. And if a progressive finds themselves in the Oval Office, the problem will be that “you’re no longer the leader of the progressive movement, but the leader of US, which requires different choices, priorities, and thinking.”
The progressive foreign policy movement will have to contend with those risks as it moves from the wings to center stage. But for now, their perceived successes during the Israel-Gaza crisis will likely keep them in the spotlight.
“It will give us more confidence to conduct more foreign policy from the House and Senate,” said Khanna, one of the leading progressive lawmakers. “The voice of members of Congress can make a huge difference in standing up for human rights and for peace.”
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Last week, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in a conflict that claimed nearly 250 lives. But the underlying status quo makes another round of fighting all but inevitable, and a fundamental solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems further away than ever.
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Worse, the long-running American solution for the problem — a US-mediated peace process aimed at creating a “two-state solution,” with an independent Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank existing alongside Israel — has proven to be a dismal failure.
Israel has become more and more entrenched in the West Bank, building new Jewish settlements that make it increasingly difficult to imagine a viable Palestinian state on that land. Meanwhile, the Palestinian leadership remains deeply divided: The militant group Hamas controls Gaza, while Fatah, a secular nationalist political party, nominally administers the West Bank through the Palestinian Authority (with Israel still ultimately in control).
This has led to a growing sense among analysts and experts that the two-state solution is no longer possible. Writing in the New York Times last week, the Arab Center’s Yousef Munayyer proclaimed “a growing global consensus” that “the two-state solution is dead. Israel has killed it.” Last year, influential Jewish American writer Peter Beinart declared that “the project to which liberal Zionists like myself have devoted ourselves for decades — a state for Palestinians separated from a state for Jews — has failed.”
But while pointing out the failings of the current approach is vital, its critics go too far. As far away as it may seem, the two-state solution is still the best possible option available for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That’s in large part because the alternatives are even less plausible.
The most commonly proposed replacement is a “one-state solution,” which would merge Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip into a single democratic country with equal rights for Arabs and Jews. Under this scenario, Arab Muslims would outnumber Jews, thus ending Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. Nor would Palestinians have a state purely to call their own, instead having to accommodate a large Jewish minority.
One state is even less likely to happen than a two-state solution. It would involve the most powerful player in the conflict, Israel, choosing to abandon its raison d’être. It’s far more likely to abandon West Bank settlements than to give up on Zionism wholesale.
This speaks to the deeper reason the two-state solution remains better than the leading alternative: It is the only realistic way of dealing with the fact that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one between two distinct nations. Israelis and Palestinians have fundamentally different identities and different ideas about how they want to be governed; in one state, one of their political projects would necessarily be defeated. This would make future violence more likely, not less.
Reviving the goal of a two-state solution is vital. But to do that, it needs to be separated from the moribund peace process. Instead, the US should pursue a strategy that could be termed “deoccupation”: one that aims to weaken the Israeli occupation’s hold on Israeli minds and Palestinian lives while, ultimately, creating the conditions under which its dismantling may become possible.
Why a two-state solution seems impossible right now
The reason for the surge in one-state advocacy is fairly simple: Developments on the ground have created a kind of one-state reality, one that is slowly but surely eroding the conditions that make partition thinkable.
There are currently 650,000 Jewish settlers living in the West Bank. Many of these settlers live near the “Green Line,” Israel’s border prior to conquering the West Bank, in communities that would likely be ceded to Israel in any peace agreement. Many others reside in settlements across the West Bank, an archipelago built on occupied Palestinian land that cuts Palestinians off from each other by design.
These settlers are governed by Israeli law and protected by Israeli troops, and drive on separate Israeli roads. Palestinians, by contrast, live under a military occupation — given limited self-government under the aegis of the Palestinian Authority, but ultimately subject to the whims of the Israeli occupiers.
The growth of these settlements has made a two-state solution much harder to envision. The more settlements grow, the harder it will be to physically undo all of the infrastructure that has been put in place to separate them from Palestinians in the West Bank.
And the more settlers there are, the harder it will be politically for Israel to remove large numbers of them — a necessary condition for a two-state solution. When Israel evacuated settlers from Gaza in 2005, it was a brutal internal conflict that prompted a vicious right-wing backlash. There were only about 9,000 settlers in Gaza at the time.
Life in Gaza today is controlled by Israel in a more indirect way. While Hamas rules inside Gaza, Israel (in partnership with Egypt) tightly controls exit and entry. The stifling Israeli blockade, in theory designed to limit Hamas’s ability to arm itself, has destroyed ordinary Gazans’ ability to build a functional and healthy society. A 2018 UN report estimates that the combination of the blockade and three different wars did damage to Gaza’s economy worth roughly six times its GDP — leading to a poverty rate nearly four times what it would have been otherwise.
Israel’s approach to Gaza and the West Bank, together with its rule over heavily Arab East Jerusalem and its treatment of the Arab Israeli minority inside Israel, prompted two leading human rights groups — the Israeli organization B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch — to issue landmark reports this year declaring the current situation a form of “apartheid.”
In their view, there is one governing power applying different and unequal sets of laws to two different peoples, defined in ethnonational terms — a unified system of inequality and discrimination, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, that is becoming increasingly difficult to separate into two distinct states in practice.
As if this weren’t bad enough, the politics on both sides currently make a two-state solution nearly unthinkable.
Since the failure of the 1990s peace process, left-wing parties in Israel that championed the two-state solution have been in terminal decline, with voters blaming their vision of territorial compromise for the violence of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, and the rise of Hamas in Gaza.
The political right, which favors either the status quo or outright annexation of the West Bank, dominates the political scene. The settlement enterprise is primarily driven by the annexationist right, their ever-expanding enclaves planned to make an Israeli withdrawal more logistically difficult and politically costly. Israel’s rightward political drift, the growth of settlements, and waning public support for the two-state solution are all linked and mutually reinforcing — pushing Israel away from any kind of territorial compromise.
On the Palestinian side, the biggest problem is political division.
During the 1990s peace process, the Palestinians had a unified leadership. The Fatah party controlled both the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority, giving its leader, Yasser Arafat, clear authority to negotiate on behalf of Palestinians as a whole. Then, Palestinian elections held in January 2006 delivered a split verdict, with Hamas winning a plurality of seats in the Palestinian parliament.
But Hamas and Fatah, now led by Mahmoud Abbas, couldn’t come to terms on how to share power — a disagreement partly fueled by an international community that rejected the idea of a Hamas-led government. Tensions between the two factions ultimately exploded into a brief civil war, which ended with Hamas in control of Gaza and Fatah in charge of the West bank.
Since then, repeated efforts to reconcile the two sides have failed; Abbas, whose term as Palestinian Authority president was supposed to end in 2009, rules indefinitely without a popular mandate. Before the war this year, Abbas canceled parliamentary elections, fearing he’d lose — a decision that points both to his lack of legitimacy and fundamental unwillingness to compromise with Gaza’s rulers. Hamas, for its part, runs a repressive Islamist regime in Gaza and hopes to extend its laws to the West Bank.
As a result, the political unity that once gave Arafat the ability to negotiate with Israel authoritatively no longer exists. There is no political entity that could make a deal on behalf of the Palestinians and enforce it in all of what would become Palestine — and it’s not clear that one will emerge in the near future.
Under these circumstances, it’s easy to see why people are proposing a one-state alternative.
Israel would not be forced to evacuate the settlements or come to some kind of negotiated compromise with the Palestinians on borders. Instead, it could unilaterally grant equal citizenship to everyone living in the territory and open up elections to all — the first step toward a system that would, in theory, deliver a better future than the status quo perpetuated by endless final status negotiations.
A two-state solution is hard. A one-state solution is even harder.
While one state may sidestep the political barriers to two states, it has its own problems — barriers considerably more serious than those standing in the way of two.
The most prominent one-state advocates are, primarily, supporters of Palestine abroad — not Palestinians on the ground. The official position of Fatah remains support for two states, and Hamas accepts it as the starting point for an end to hostilities. Ayman Odeh and Mansour Abbas, the leaders of the major Arab factions in Israel’s Knesset, its parliament, are both two-staters.
A March 2021 poll found that, while support for one state has risen over time among the Palestinian public, it’s still very much a minority position — only one-third of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians support abandoning the pursuit of two states in favor of one.
“I don’t see one state as politically viable when there is currently no party or movement advocating for it inside Palestine,” says Khaled Elgindy, the director of the program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli affairs at the Middle East Institute.
Meanwhile, the nature of the Palestinian factions makes a two-state solution even less thinkable. Israelis see Hamas, with ample evidence, as a group bent on murdering Jewish civilians. Is their armed wing supposed to unify with the Israeli military into a new, jointly administered military? If not, how do you convince them to disarm? And what about the many other Islamist militant groups in Palestine, like Islamic Jihad?
Perhaps if the political reality on the Palestinian side changes radically, these questions might have answers. But in the short term, there is little prospect for Hamas and Fatah to get over their own differences and somehow unite behind one-state advocacy — let alone for Hamas to change so radically that Israelis would be willing to integrate it into their own government and society.
And the politics on the Israeli side poses an even bigger problem.
Today, more Arabs than Jews live between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Any one-state solution would also include some version of the right of return, in which Palestinians displaced in 1948 and their descendants are permitted to move back to the new binational state. In a one-state arrangement, Arabs would outnumber Jews by a significant margin.
The result would be the end of Zionism, the vision of a specifically Jewish state that exists to protect Jews in a hostile world. The political structures of the Israeli state as they currently exist would have to be completely unraveled, replaced with some alternative that isn’t oriented around the state’s Jewish identity.
This is more than unacceptable to Israeli Jewish political leaders and citizens: It would, in their minds, amount to total defeat.
A 2020 poll found that a scant 10 percent of Jewish Israelis supported a one-state solution in which Palestinians and Jewish Israelis are equal citizens. And only 13 percent of Israel’s Arab citizens supported such an option. By contrast, 42 percent of Jewish Israelis and 59 percent of Arab Israelis supported two states — with much of the opposition among Jews stemming from a sense that two states were not currently achievable rather than a principled unwillingness to compromise.
The Israeli commitment to Zionism creates an insuperable political problem for a one-state solution. Israel holds the preponderance of the power in the current situation; getting to one state would require a nuclear-armed state with one of the world’s best-equipped militaries to unilaterally agree to dismantle itself.
“There’s no conceivable possibility that Israel would agree to disappear in favor of a Palestinian state with a Jewish minority, and there is no one on earth outside of some social media supporting the idea,” Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor and prominent pro-Palestinian intellectual, told me via email.
Compared to that, the barriers to a two-state solution seem more surmountable.
While evacuating settlements will be challenging for Israel, it has the capacity to do so. Daniel Seidemann, a leading expert on Jerusalem and the geography of the conflict, told me that Israel would have to withdraw and rehome about 185,000 settlers to make a two-state solution viable. This is a logistical challenge but hardly an impossibility: Seidemann points out that, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Israel successfully absorbed roughly a million Jews seeking a new home in Israel.
The politics of evacuating Israelis from settlements are much harder than integrating Jewish immigrants from abroad. And yet they are infinitely easier than those of asking Israel to commit what Jewish citizens see as national suicide. If forced to choose between withdrawal and destruction by some kind of pressure campaign, Israel would have both the power and the will to choose the former.
“Even if you demand one state, and even if you generate enough pressure on Israel, Israel will retreat to two states,” Yehuda Shaul, the founder of the Israeli anti-occupation activist group Breaking the Silence, tells me. “Once we end the occupation and retreat to the Green Line, no one will support your struggle anymore. It doesn’t matter what you demand; what matters is the geographic and demographic reality on the ground.”
Similarly, while the divisions between Hamas and Fatah run deep, it’s much easier to imagine them agreeing to share power under the current Palestinian political framework than some new one-state movement. Since the split, there have been repeated negotiations between the two sides and several interim agreements on power-sharing.
These agreements, of course, broke down. But part of the problem is that the Palestinians were working with limited international support. A 2018 report on Gaza and Palestinian division written by a group of leading experts in Washington — including Hady Amr, Biden’s current deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli and Palestinian affairs — argues that a more robust international effort to foster Palestinian unity could offer stronger incentives and security guarantees for all sides, increasing the chance that an agreement might stick.
“Getting agreement from Israel, Hamas, and the PA/PLO will still be extraordinarily difficult, but a campaign coordinated between all the external actors has the greatest likelihood of success,” the report argues.
Support for a one-state solution is born of a justified sense that the two-state paradigm is failing to deliver. But the argument that it is somehow more realistic than two states only works if one ignores the basic realities on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides of the conflict.
“Out of despair, people turn to magic,” as Shaul puts it.
Two states are worth fighting for
One-state advocates are not unaware of these barriers. They believe they can be overcome by the moral force of the one-state democratic vision: an ideal that could galvanize a political movement akin to the South African anti-apartheid struggle, changing the way that people on both sides of the conflict think about themselves and their historic enemies.
“A struggle for equality could elevate Palestinian leaders who possess the moral authority that Abbas and Hamas lack,” Beinart writes. “Progress often appears utopian before a movement for moral change gains traction.”
But there’s a moral core to the two-state vision as well: self-determination for two peoples, each of which have a history of victimization that leads them to desire a government for and by their own people. And that makes two states not only more feasible than one, but also in certain respects more desirable.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not just a fight for individual rights, though it is that. It’s a struggle for collective rights between two distinct groups of people. Depriving Israeli Jews of a Jewish state or Palestinians of a Palestinian state would represent a subordination of one group’s aspirations to someone else’s vision.
To overcome that, leaders and ordinary citizens on both sides would need to fundamentally change their national aspirations: Jews would need to reject Zionism and Palestinians reject Palestinian nationalism. That would involve not just changing political institutions, but changing the sorts of identities people have and care about. That is not impossible, but it is exceptionally difficult to imagine in this case.
“Abandoning the desire for self-determination, something that has been the very raison d’etre of Palestinian nationalism since the 1960s and something that has actually been achieved by Zionists, is a steep demand to make of both,” Nadav Shelef, a University of Wisconsin professor who studies national identity and ethnic struggle, wrote in a recent essay applying academic research on how nationalist sentiment declines to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Given the entrenched identities on both sides, it would likely be nearly impossible to create a truly “democratic” single state in which both communities feel authentically represented. Far more likely is a situation in which one national vision dominates the other, either by force of arms or force of numbers. In either case, one side will feel unrepresented by a one-state reality — which is a recipe for disaster.
“I don’t think there’s anyone that thinks that, right away, a one-state solution would lead to political equality between Jews and Arabs,” Shelef tells me in a phone interview. “In that context, you would expect a one-state solution would lead to violence.”
This analysis depends, crucially, on exclusive national identities on both sides running quite deep. Syracuse University professor Yael Zeira, an expert on nationalism, tells me that identities can be altered: that “physically separating ethnic groups in conflict is not necessarily required to achieve peace.”
But if anything, these national identities seem to be hardening, not softening.
For instance, during the recent war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, communal violence between Jews and Arabs erupted on the streets of demographically mixed cities within Israel. This fighting reflected the deepening mistrust between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel, fed by anti-Arab sentiment among Jews and a justified sense among Arabs that the Jewish majority does not consider them full and equal citizens.
And yet, Arab Israelis, also known as Palestinian citizens of Israel, had been part of the Jewish state for decades — and, in recent years, had made significant strides toward integration in Israeli social and cultural life. If tensions between Israelis and Palestinians can cause major internal violence in this context, it’s hard to imagine that a one-state reality would be remotely stable.
“It’s like saying Israelis and Palestinians hate each other so much that they can’t get divorced — and that they’ll have to have a successful marriage instead,” Seidemann, the Jerusalem expert, told me.
To save the two-state solution, ditch the “peace process”
Even if the prospect of a two-state solution seems impossible right now, it’s not impossible to imagine eventually getting there — if the right steps are taken.
“We can ignite a process that will create the reality of two states,” Ami Ayalon, former commander in chief of the Israeli navy and now peace activist, told me. “Probably it will take 10 or 20 years to execute, but we can achieve [it].”
Recent reports from the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — prominent think tanks that recently employed some of Biden’s top foreign policy officials — have outlined ways to shift American policy away from immediate negotiations and toward changing the reality on the ground.
The first step, these experts say, should be to abandon the US-led peace process as traditionally conceived. This doesn’t mean Washington shouldn’t still be involved; America is by far the most important international actor here, given its close relationship with Israel and traditional role leading Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Rather, it just means the US focus needs to shift from trying to negotiate a final peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians to trying to create the conditions under which one is possible — a strategy Seidemann suggests could be called “deoccupation.”
The goal of a deoccupation strategy is to halt and eventually reverse the processes that are pushing the two sides further away from two states, with the ultimate aim of returning to final status negotiations when conditions have changed. It involves three key aspects: 1) raising the costs of the status quo for Israel; 2) changing the political equation on both sides; and 3) rethinking what an acceptable two-state solution might look like.
1) Raise the costs of the status quo for Israel
“The United States needs to send a clear and consistent signal to Israel that the violation of norms and the undermining of U.S. policy goals will have consequences,” the Carnegie report argues. “Absent these messages and the policies to back them up, the trajectory of Israeli policy and politics will not change and the door on peaceful conflict resolution and a two-state outcome will further close.”
As a baseline, this requires openly rejecting the Trump administration’s “peace plan,” which gave Israelis everything and Palestinians nothing.
It also means using US leverage over Israel to push it back on a better path. This could involve ending the US practice of vetoing UN Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, and putting conditions on the $3.8 billion of military aid the US gives to Israel every year, requiring the Israeli government to do things like ease the blockade of Gaza and freeze settlement expansion in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
This kind of approach used to be unthinkable in Washington, given staunch pro-Israel sentiment on both sides. But a dramatic shift in attitudes on the Democratic side — both in public opinion and on Capitol Hill — has created an opportunity for the US to use its leverage over Israel in pursuit of peace.
There’s even a bill in the House right now, written by Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN), that aims to block the use of US-provided weapons in Israeli human rights abuses. It has the support of both prominent legislators like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and J Street, the pro-peace Israel lobby that regularly attracts leading Democrats to its annual gathering.
2) Foster the political conditions under which genuine negotiations are possible
This means both supporting the pro-peace camp in Israel and, more controversially, working to reconcile Hamas and Fatah to create a unified Palestinian leadership that could make authoritative promises.
Mechanisms for achieving that include increasing funding to pro-peace civil society groups, negotiating with Hamas through third parties like Egypt, and investing significant resources in repairing broken Palestinian political institutions.
This will mean the US having to abandon its longstanding skepticism about including Hamas, which it considers a terrorist group, in a Palestinian government — working not only to making such an outcome happen, but to create a world in which Israel could accept and even negotiate with its longtime enemy.
“The United States must encourage intra-Palestinian reconciliation by becoming more flexible about the composition of the government that the Palestinians form,” the CNAS report explains.
3) Rethink what an acceptable two-state solution could look like
Finally, the US and other international actors need to think more flexibly about the conditions that make two states so difficult — and what a solution to them might look like.
For example, a final agreement could allow some West Bank settlers to stay if they agree to Palestinian rule — an option once proposed by the late Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said as the only viable alternative to his preferred one-state solution.
Another option would be a confederal solution, a kind of 1.5-state arrangement in which Israel and Palestine are separate governments that maintain an EU-like open borders agreement. Israeli citizens could live in the West Bank, and many Palestinian refugees could return to their homes inside the Green Line — but they would vote in Israeli and Palestinian elections, respectively.
This sort of modified two-state solution is hardly easy. Much like the one-state solution, there are no meaningful factions on the ground lobbying for it. And leaving a large number of settlers in the West Bank has the potential to reignite violence even after an agreement. Erin Jenne, an expert on ethnic conflict at Central European University, told me that “stay behind” minorities are one of the key reasons why partitions have failed to solve conflicts in other cases (like India and Pakistan).
But the purpose of proposing ideas like confederation is not to present a silver bullet replacement for two states. It’s to broaden the scope of diplomatic discussions, ultimately changing the contours of negotiations in a way that actually makes a two-state approach more plausible.
“Confederation can help expand the range of possible options and negotiating tools available to the two sides — particularly at a time when physical realities have all but foreclosed the classic two-state model and political conditions do not yet allow for an egalitarian, one-state option,” Elgindy, the Middle East Institute scholar, wrote in a 2018 report for the Brookings Institution. “In order to salvage the possibility of a two-state solution we may first need to abandon it on some level.”
There is no guarantee that this three-pronged approach will succeed. But if implemented, it would represent a radical shift away from the current American approach — abandoning the conceit that the US-Israel alliance alone would give Israel the confidence it needed to sacrifice land for peace.
And the very fact that this new approach is available, and that it’s being proposed by leading experts with real clout in Washington, suggests that the world hasn’t exhausted every avenue for pursuing two states.
Thinking of the available options as a binary between the traditional approach and a one-state solution is a mistake. There are other, more realistic possibilities — ones that do not involve wishing away the fundamental facts of Israeli military dominance, strong Jewish attachment to Zionism, and the Palestinian quest for independent statehood.
No one should be too hopeful about the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the best hope for avoiding a future of apartheid or violence isn’t trying to achieve the unachievable; it’s thinking of new ways to reach a solution that both sides have already said they can live with.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken had a choice to make. It was mid-May, and in a few days he’d travel to Europe for talks with allies on the Arctic and climate change, and to meet with his Russian counterpart ahead of a presidential-level summit in June.
But a fight broke out between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, threatening to explode into a larger, bloodier conflict.
Looking at his agenda and the events in the Middle East, Blinken consulted with his staff and the White House on what he should do. There were discussions about having him drop everything to shuttle back and forth between Middle Eastern capitals and help broker a ceasefire. Instead, Blinken decided he should keep his long-planned commitments in Europe but, along with other administration officials, get on the phone with key players in the brewing war.
He made that choice, the opposite of what previous secretaries of state had done during recent Israel-Gaza conflicts, for two main reasons.
The first was that he could still engage in “telephonic diplomacy” while in Europe, in the words of a senior State Department official, without the risk of having to potentially fly home empty-handed and embarrassed.
The second reason, though, speaks to the Biden administration’s view of foreign policy writ large: Less is sometimes more.
“I find that in the current moment in Washington, although it’s been true for a long time, the answer is to do more. Everyone wants more, more, we should be doing more,” said a senior State Department official who, like two others, spoke to me on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. “Of course, more of everything is not a strategy.”
Blinken and others in the administration simply don’t believe solving a regional crisis requires top officials like Blinken to drop everything and fly to the hot spot, especially if there are larger, more consequential, longer-term issues to focus on elsewhere.
“I think it’s very important, given the geostrategic situation, the challenges we face, we be very disciplined and focused on the strategic direction,” the official continued, adding that the US can still “walk and chew gum at the same time.”
It’s not that the US was disengaged from the Israel-Gaza conflict. Top administration figures made more than 80 calls to world leaders during the conflict — with Blinken on the phone for at least 15 of them while in or traveling between Denmark, Iceland, and Greenland — in service of the ceasefire reached after 11 days of fighting.
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But Biden’s team felt keeping to the European itinerary was better for the administration’s agenda in the long run and for the conflict in the short run.
“If Blinken had gone [to the region], it actually would’ve slowed things down,” said Dennis Ross, a distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, because neither Hamas nor Israel would’ve wanted to look like it was caving to the US.
Critics say much of that is beside the point. When it mattered most, it looked as though the US washed its hands of the situation and let the bombs fall where they may.
“It seemed from the outside that the administration was less interested in intervening and more interested in running interference for Israel’s own operations in Gaza,” said Omar Rahman, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center. “They damaged their own claim to lead the world on human rights, even if they were working hard behind the scenes to bring a halt to the fighting.”
This episode underscores a challenge the Biden administration will likely continue to face. Many will clamor for the US to visibly involve itself in crises in lieu of keeping a laser focus on longer-term challenges. But strategy is one thing; public perception is another.
For now, that doesn’t bother Biden’s team. “We shouldn’t allow reflexive thinking and unevolved thinking to dictate what we do and how we do it,” said another senior State Department official.
“We’re a country that’s big enough and capable enough to do multiple things at once”
When I discussed Blinken’s European schedule with one of the State Department officials, it was clear the secretary and his staff agreed canceling his appearances there would be the wrong call.
The first part of Blinken’s trip was to Denmark, a nation that needed tending to after its bad relationship with the Trump administration. Then it was off to Iceland for a meeting with the Arctic Council, the eight-country organization that coordinates policy in the High North. It would’ve been “unfortunate” if Blinken’s was the only empty seat at the table, the official said, especially as Russia takes over as temporary chair of the council for two years.
Blinken and his staff also felt it was important to hold bilateral meetings with his counterparts to discuss matters ranging from climate change to pandemic response. The most important of these was a one-on-one with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Their discussion set the table for next month’s summit between President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
All this “gives you an idea of what would have been put at risk if he had pulled it down,” the State official said.
The key message from my conversations with US officials was that sending Blinken to Cairo or Jerusalem would’ve kept him from reassuring allies, defending US interests in the Arctic, pushing for actions on climate change, coordinating global coronavirus efforts, and preparing Biden for a tense meeting with Putin. Though no one minimized the importance of ending the violence between Israel and Hamas, most experts I spoke to said the European agenda was robust enough to keep it.
“I think they made the right call,” said Heather Conley, senior vice president for Europe, Eurasia, and the Arctic at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, DC. “Usually it’s the urgent overshadowing the important, but this was working on the important while also managing the urgent.”
What’s more, she said, it’s never a good idea to send your top diplomatic official by themselves to solve thorny problems. “The secretary of state doesn’t always have to be the desk officer of the crisis of the moment,” Conley told me.
Martin Indyk, who served as the US special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations from 2013 to 2014, recapped for me the last two times a secretary of state flew to the region during a flare-up.
Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to Egypt and other nations in 2012 when calls to counterparts weren’t working. Her efforts helped secure a ceasefire, making it seem like that should be the playbook: When there’s a crisis, send the secretary.
But the new secretary of state, John Kerry, wasn’t as successful two years later. Despite drafting a ceasefire document for Israel and Hamas to work from, he came back to Washington “really humiliated,” Indyk said.
Watching those events from within the Obama administration was Jake Sullivan, now Biden’s national security adviser. What he took away from both cases, per Indyk, was that the nation’s top diplomat should travel to the area only to finalize terms that could make the ceasefire a success. Otherwise, the chances of in-person engagement working remained low, leading to inevitable embarrassment for the secretary and the administration.
That seems to have informed some of the thinking for why Blinken is in the region now, and not earlier. Once both sides agreed to stop fighting, he went to Israel to demonstrate that America still has its back and to meet with Palestinian leadership to announce more financial support for Gaza.
That trip was more effective than, say, spending time to quash Israel and Hamas’s beef amid the fighting.
“A premature intervention would’ve prolonged the crisis, it wouldn’t have ended it,” said Indyk, now at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The way to move Israel forward is to put your arm around them, reassure them that you’re in their corner, and push them in the direction you want to go.”
Threatening to place conditions on arms sales or call for a ceasefire early, as some critics from the left wanted, likely wouldn’t have worked. “The Israelis would dig in their heels and say, ‘Screw you, we’ve got rockets falling on our people and we’re going to respond,’” Indyk continued. Plus, he and others said, Hamas surely would’ve defied the US by launching more than the 4,500 rockets they did.
That a ceasefire came together after 11 days, and that Blinken was welcomed by both warring parties shortly after the fighting, has led Biden administration officials to consider their efforts a clear success.
“It was an affirmation that we’re a country that’s big enough and capable enough to do multiple things at once,” said a State official.
The Israel-Gaza strategy may have worked. The messaging didn’t.
One of the senior State officials I spoke with hinted they may consider this play again.
Blinken “was able to keep an important agenda moving forward on long-term strategic interests while maintaining a focus on the near-term crisis. That’s probably how we need to look at things going forward, as well,” the official told me.
In other words, don’t expect top officials such as Blinken, Sullivan, or even Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to divert from their schedules during the next crisis if they have more strategic issues (in their minds) to attend to.
That’s not to say the administration’s handling of Israel-Gaza was perfect or should necessarily be a model.
Ross, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy fellow who spent more than a decade working on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in government, noted that deploying Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israel and Palestinian Affairs Hady Amr — an experienced and capable senior aide, but still ultimately an aide — to the region fed perceptions that the US cared little about the fighting. “There’s no doubt that sending someone at that level didn’t signal a level of engagement at a high enough level,” Ross said.
But Brookings’s Rahman said his problems with the administration’s play had less to do with Blinken’s absence and more to do with what the US did on the whole. “I think there are ulterior motives at work, and it had very little to do with the ceasefire itself,” he said. Namely, “they weren’t interested in pursuing a ceasefire until Israel had done what it wanted to do.”
Which brings it back to the messaging issue Biden’s team will struggle with. Again, it’s all well and good to focus on strategic priorities, but the US still has to show where it stands on certain crises. And when the administration had the chance early on, it appeared to many that the US was only worried about Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself from rocket attacks, not how the war might affect innocent Palestinians in Gaza.
The overall play to end the fighting may have worked, then, but the administration didn’t necessarily win the perception battle. Biden’s handling of Israel-Gaza may not be just a flashpoint of his early presidency; it may serve as an example of a recurring problem in the years to come.