A Radical Vision for Israelis and Palestinians

Produced by Jack McCordick

A Radical Vision for Israelis and Palestinians

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

I’ve been reluctant to talk too much on the show about imagined solutions for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I don’t think any of the underlying conditions for a political solution are present. We’re in a presolutionary space.

I worry about it as a form of escapism. It’s more comfortable to debate two-state models or one-state imaginings rather than confront the realities of what is happening right now.

But the other reason I have backed off from these conversations is that the old solutions don’t fit the present reality.

I don’t see how a two-state solution is still possible given the number and size of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. They’re not going away. Or the insistence on a right of return for Palestinians.

I don’t think a one-state solution is plausible or likely. The Jewish people in and around Israel want self-determination and sovereignty. So, too, do the Palestinians. Neither side, given their history, is going to willingly give the other that kind of power.

But a number of people I trust have written to me saying I should look at the A Land for All plan. A Land for All was founded in 2012 by a group of Israelis and Palestinians. It’s attempting something different, something I find in some ways beautiful: Not a two-state model of separation, not a one-state model of unification, but a confederation model that centers both peoples’ connections to the land and tries to combine the free movement of people with separate political entities. In this model, you would have an Israel and a Palestine. There would be free movement, but political separation. The borders would be open, but, they say, hopefully secure.

There’s a lot to unpack about all this. I have a lot of questions. I would describe my own thinking here as intrigued — not convinced. But I do think it is worth considering a new political vision, even though I think we’re far from the conditions that might make one possible. Because if you don’t have any idea of where you’re going, how do you get there?

Rula Hardal is a Palestinian citizen of Israel who received her doctorate in political science from the University of Hannover in Germany. May Pundak is an Israeli lawyer, activist and social entrepreneur. Her father, Ron Pundak, was an Israeli historian who played an important role in the Oslo peace process in the 1990s.

Hardal and May Pundak are the co-executive directors of A Land for All, and so I wanted to ask them both about the proposal, as well as the politics, questions and social forces that have undermined every other plan.

Ezra Klein: Rula Hardal, May Pundak, welcome to the show.

May Pundak: Thank you so much.

Rula Hardal: Thank you.

I think that people listening are familiar with the two-state solution concept: an Israel and a Palestine separated and side by side.

People have heard ideas for a single state, where you would have people throughout the territory, throughout the land, all voting within the same political system. I don’t think that they are as familiar with what you’re offering — a confederation model.

So May, let me begin with you. How does this differ from the two-state solution that has been pursued for so long?

Pundak: So first of all, let me say that we are offering what we call a new vision. But in that new vision, it is still based on two sovereign independent states — Israel and Palestine.

The two-state solution, the classic version of it, was based on a paradigm of segregation and separation, and we are moving away from that and offering a model that is based not on a zero-sum game but rather on acknowledging two very important components of the conflict.

No. 1: Both Israelis and Palestinians have an immense psychological and social connection and sense of belonging to the entire homeland — from the river to the sea. That’s a fact.

No. 2: The intertwined reality on the ground — meaning that today Israel-Palestine, in a way, is already shared — the intertwined reality is everywhere we look. And so the model says yes to sovereignty, yes to nation states, yes to identity, yes to borders.

And there’s another layer to that, of a shared mechanism of shared institutions that take care of things that have to be taken care of jointly. So there is a human rights court, and there is cooperation around the economy, and climate challenges are dealt with together. Because you can’t deal with these things separately — but also because it’s a mechanism to ensure a sustainable peace.

So that word “shared” is important in your vision. Your father was one of the negotiators at Oslo. He spent his life working on the two-state solution paradigm, and that paradigm is built on the idea of security through separation, at least on the Jewish side — that if we can just separate, everybody can live in peace. Everybody can leave each other alone.

What led you to move away from that vision and toward this idea that peace doesn’t come through separation, that it comes through a shared set of institutions and interests?

Pundak: Well, I would say two main things. The first one was that I found myself advocating for the two-state solution for many, many years. I was doing much more anti-occupation work. I wasn’t really interested in solutions. We kept that separate from each other.

But at a certain point, and this was after my father passed away — and I think that was part of my reckoning process, of grief, of just coming to terms with the fact that I’ve been fighting for the two-state solution.

But at a certain point, I started feeling that this model is crumbling between my fingers, and I don’t believe in it anymore. The reality is telling me something else. Meeting Palestinian friends who are telling me something else. Meeting the international community, I’m learning something else. Living in Israel, I’m learning something else.

So I’m there, advocating for the two-state solution as an activist, but everywhere I’m hearing the two-state solution is dead. It’s impossible.

And at the same time, in Israel, this idea of peace, of negotiations, of two-state solution, is becoming irrelevant in the public discourse. There’s no conversation about this.

In 2018, I had my first son, and we were living in the States for a couple of years. Coming back to Israel, no one was talking about a future for my child — about security, about safety, about vision, about horizon, about hope. No one was telling me what we’re fighting for, and that two-state solution has become an empty shell for people to talk about something but not take any action.

And by not taking any action, we’ve been led to Oct. 7. By not presenting a viable vision and not organizing ourselves around that, we’ve succumbed to managing the conflict.

So we’ll talk about the two-state solution, but everyone knows it’s not going to work. And we find ourselves in international, very important forums with serious decision makers who say: Two-state solution — we know it’s never going to happen.

So in a way, for me, I was taking the life of my children into my own hands. I was like, OK, that’s just not good enough. We have to reimagine a two-state solution that can work or a new vision that will actually be able to be pragmatic and practical to work, but also organize and excite Palestinians and Israelis.

And I’ll just say one more thing about that kind of transformation: For me, coming from a human rights background, I wanted to be a human rights lawyer to end the occupation. And I understand that sounds a little naïve today. I still think that Israelis who are doing that work are saints, and this is the most important work to be done.

But at the same time, we haven’t seen Palestinians as equal politically. We can maybe save them, we can control them — there’s a dynamic, that power dynamic, always underneath. And for me, the positionality of realizing, in my skin, that until Rula and the Palestinian people are safe and free, we will never be free and liberated and safe, either. Our security is dependent on each other.

Rula, I know that you previously were a supporter of a one-state solution. Tell me about how you came to this idea and how your thinking evolved.

Hardal: I came to this idea because I started realizing two things: First of all, we already have a one-state reality, or one-state construction on the ground, between Jordan and the sea, but under one regime and one power, which is the Israeli one. And the Palestinians live under daily domination and occupation and military control and apartheid, and, needless to say, in the last two and a half years, ethnic cleansing and genocide and annexation of their tiny, small part of the land. I mean the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

I’m not sure that even you, the audience, is understanding what’s happening in the West Bank. People hear about having checkpoints, and there is military control, terrorism and violence of the settlers, but the reality on the ground is way worse.

The daily domination and control of people’s lives in the West Bank is just immense. I don’t know if there is something similar, or has been, in other places under other conflicts. And because we are not speaking about a very direct war, it’s ongoing, long-term, daily atrocities and restrictions and humiliation of people.

So to start from this fact and reality on the ground, it will be hard for us to move — especially now after what has happened in the last two and a half years — immediately toward an equal one-state reality, where actually all Palestinians and all Israelis are equal in the same one state.

The second point: I claim, from my research and observations, that the majority of the Palestinians and the Israeli Jews on the ground in Israel-Palestine are not in a post-national mind-set the way I thought, and the way that a lot of people here think. The sense of ethnonational belonging and interests, and national symbols, and the desire for each group to have its own political, national entity is still very strong, and we need to acknowledge that and to respect that.

The last few years have been staggering in their violence. You’ve used the word “genocide” and “domination,” and here you are also advocating for a plan that, at its core, would require people to treat each other with trust, as equals in a shared enterprise.

It feels hard not only to imagine the plan but to imagine the people who would engage in this plan.

So this may seem like a simple question, but I think it’s an important one to try to feel: Why are you not held back by the belief that this is impossible to solve?

Hardal: Well, I think it’s very hard. It’s very complicated. We are now facing a very — maybe the ugliest — phase of the history of both people since Oct. 7. We are not ignoring all of that. I’m not ignoring that.

We were speaking, a couple of days ago, with some friends and policy experts in Washington. And one of them, who is an Egyptian American, we’d been speaking about Gaza, and he brought an Arabic word to describe what all of us feel and felt while watching the second Nakba, the genocide, 24/7 on our screens. The word, which doesn’t exist in the English language, is “qahr.”

Qahr is a combination of being angry and the humiliation of your humanity, existence and who you are, and being helpless that you cannot — you don’t have anything to do.

That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. Because if there is something to save in our souls as Palestinians, and if there is something to save in terms of dreaming about Palestine — even in part of historic Palestine — this is something that I’m committed to do after what happened in Gaza.

Gaza is gone. And we are involved with a lot of people who are involved with what’s going on in Gaza: the Board of Peace, the executive committee and so on, and the many actors in the international community. The amount of helplessness, the lack of orientation and ability to make decisions and to do things on the ground is just insane. I don’t want to see that in the coming years when it comes to the whole Palestinian situation.

Because what is threatened now, since Oct. 7 — in a very direct, intensive way — is the collective, political and national being of the Palestinians in Palestine. And I’m doing this work in order to just maybe save what is to be saved there.

If we don’t offer new arrangements, a new political vision, if we don’t see this very bad situation as an opportunity to start — I don’t have any illusions, I cannot promise anybody that this solution, or any other solution, similar or different, is going to be implemented tomorrow or next year. Or I don’t know when. But history is not static, and we cannot know now when this opening is going to come.

We Palestinians are not going to give up. We are there, and we insist to be there. This is our place, and we are going to continue to struggle.

Pundak: Can I say something about trust? As an Israeli, I think that’s an important question for us to deal with.

What is the alternative? The alternative right now is either continuing in the footsteps of this government, which is to destroy the Palestinian peoplehood, or a fake status quo — I don’t know if that would be the right term — this belief that we can just not solve this conflict.

And so the first thing that we need to commit ourselves to is realizing that if we’re not going to solve this conflict, it will solve us. That is what led us ——

What does that mean? Because, as you know better than I do, most Israelis — the center of Israeli political opinion, actually — do not think there is no alternative.

The alternative is the path they’re on. The opposition party, even in this election, is not hugely different from Benjamin Netanyahu on this.

The idea, as best I understand it, is basically: The alternative is that there is Jewish Israeli security supremacy over the land. And the conflict, so to speak, can be controlled and managed.

They’re not going to let their guard down the way they did before Oct. 7. There’s going to be more settlement building. There’s going to be more control — Israel controls roughly 65 percent of Gaza now.

Pundak: Absolutely. This is absolutely true.

To some people, this is not just an alternative. This is a pathway to realizing quite ancient hopes.

So when you’re in conversation with that ——

Pundak: Yeah, so that is all true, and what we are seeing play out right now in Israel-Palestine, this is the reality. And my question to us Israelis is: Has this ensured your safety and security?

If you are messianic, and you have dreams that are beyond life, that are about eternity, that’s a different timeline. But for people who are actually concerned with safety and security for their children, and a better future and life, the current paradigm has not ensured our safety and security until this day.

It’s not only Oct. 7. What about what’s happening now with Israel re-entering Lebanon? What’s happening with Iran? What’s happening in the south?

There’s no place where we actually feel safe right now, and I think that’s an important realization that we have to say out loud and confront: We’re not safe now. This has not given us safety.

I’ll give you a more concrete example: In the place where we have seen the utmost commitment to segregation and separation, and the billion-dollar wall, and these mechanisms, and all of the I.D.F. security measures and technology, that is where all hell broke loose. That’s Gaza.

So when people say that big walls will ensure my safety, I say: No, they won’t. I live in Jaffa. There’s a lot to say about the inequality of Palestinian citizens of Israel, but the truth of the matter is that Palestinians who are living within Israel and have more rights — not equal rights at all — that is where we’re not slaughtering each other. Those are the kindergarten teachers of my baby.

So no one will convince me that security will be given to me or ensured to me by bigger and more walls and more separation. That’s No. 1.

The other thing that I want to say about this is history. History shows us, also, in Israel — I think that Egypt is probably the best example. After 1973, Anwar Sadat was considered Adolf Hitler, and Egypt was considered the next biggest threat to Israel. And then we got to ’79. There’s a peace agreement, and that today ensures my safety. Israelis take........

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