Reckoning With Israel’s ‘One-State Reality’

Produced by Jack McCordick

Reckoning With Israel’s ‘One-State Reality’

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

I’ve been trying to think about how to begin this episode, which is a very tricky one, and I found myself thinking about a debate I heard often in 2023 and 2024.

Back then, when you had more protests around cease-fires and “Free Palestine,” you would hear these chants and see these signs: “From the river to the sea.” It flared into this huge controversy.

What was always so strange, so backward, to me about this focus on college-campus protesters was that there was this reality people weren’t really admitting — that there is one power from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

That power, that sovereign — which, if you travel in that area, as I have, is visually undeniable — is Israel.

American politics has not grappled at all with the level of day-to-day domination that Israel exerts over Palestinian lives — and the complete absence of any horizon at all for that to end.

And this was true before Oct. 7, as well: In early 2023, the political scientists Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami published an edited volume called “The One State Reality.” Their argument, which they also made in a very controversial Foreign Affairs piece, was:

Palestine is not a state in waiting, and Israel is not a democratic state incidentally occupying Palestinian territory. All the territory west of the Jordan River has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where the land and the people are subject to radically different legal regimes, and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste.

Palestine is not a state in waiting, and Israel is not a democratic state incidentally occupying Palestinian territory. All the territory west of the Jordan River has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where the land and the people are subject to radically different legal regimes, and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste.

What they were saying then is that the hope of a two-state solution in the future had become a way by which many in America, particularly, avoided reckoning with “the one-state reality” of the present. That reality was not accidental. It was, and is, not intended to be transient. It was being etched into the land — in stone and cement, in settlements and checkpoints, in the construction of walls and the demolition of homes.

That might have been a controversial claim when it was made. But what has happened since Oct. 7 has made it an undeniable reality.

Israel now occupies more than half of Gaza. More than two million Gazans have been herded into less than half of the land they formerly occupied. And Gaza, it should be said, was already one of the most overcrowded places on Earth.

The conditions Gazans live in are hellish. And there is no near-term, imagined, envisioned relief. This is — and it remains — collective punishment. Hamas, not the children of Gaza, attacked Israel on Oct. 7. The conditions that the children of Gaza now live in are immoral.

In the West Bank, Israel has choked off money to the Palestinian Authority. It has chosen to build settlements at a record pace. More settlements were approved in the last year alone than in the previous two decades combined.

Israel has allowed — has protected — a terrifying rise in settler and military violence toward the Palestinians who live there. There is no doubt, if you go there, who rules the West Bank — and it is not the P.A.

When Netanyahu signed a recent settlement project — one the United States had opposed for a long time because it would effectively bisect the West Bank, making a Palestinian state physically unimaginable — he made clear that was exactly why he was signing it. He said: “We are going to fulfill our promise that there will be no Palestinian state. This place belongs to us.”

In the north, Israel has used the war in Iran as cover to invade Lebanon, displacing more than a million people and suggesting that up to 600,000 will not be allowed to return to their homes until Israel has established its security zone, whatever that proves to be, and when it has decided that Israelis in the north are safe. To put it bluntly, it is an open question whether any of those 600,000 Lebanese will ever be able to return to their homes, or if they will even have homes to return to.

I do not want to underplay what Israel is actually dealing with here. I have immense sympathy for Israel’s war against Hezbollah. They’re defending themselves in a way any state would. But this is collective punishment. Those million Lebanese are not all Hezbollah.

Israel’s security challenges are very real. Its horror, its fear, its trauma after Oct. 7 is very real. Its determination to make sure that never happens again is what any state and any people would do. Its right to reprisal against Hamas and Hezbollah is undeniable.

I am not someone who wants to see the state of Israel cease to exist. But what Israel is choosing here — a one-state reality, which already is and will continue to be understood the world over as apartheid — endangers that state, too. The cost of Israel cannot morally be the permanent subjugation of millions of Palestinians.

In February, Gallup found, for the first time, that more Americans polled sympathized with the Palestinians than the Israelis. Among Democrats, among young Americans, it is not even close.

Israel maintains support among older Americans, and it has benefited from the advanced age of the last two presidents, whose views of Israel were forged in another time, around another Israel. American politics has not yet fully grappled with what Israel has chosen to become. But it will — and soon.

So what does it mean to grapple with Israel’s one-state reality? To see what Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon are now, without illusion?

Shibley Telhami is the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland. Marc Lynch is the director of the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University. Lynch is the author, most recently, of “America’s Middle East: The Ruination of a Region.” And together they were two of the editors on “The One State Reality.”

Ezra Klein: Marc Lynch, Shibley Telhami, welcome to the show.

Shibley Telhami: Pleasure.

I want to start, Marc, before Oct. 7. You and Shibley and a few coauthors published a book of essays and a big Foreign Affairs article called “Israel’s One-State Reality.” And the argument you make is that the two-state solution is a fantasy. It’s dead.

There is a reality that we are failing to apprehend in Israel, which is that there is one sovereign from the river to the sea. I want to ask you: What were you seeing that convinced you to make your argument? How did this work in your view, say, in the West Bank?

Marc Lynch: Sure. I think it is important to put this into a bit of a trajectory, historically.

Back in the mid-90s, during the Oslo years, you actually had a situation where, if you’re living in Jerusalem, if you’re living in Ramallah, if you’re living in Nablus or Jenin, you can actually feel a state emerging around you. You can see the Palestinian legislature is active.

They have ministries, the checkpoints are coming down. You’re able to travel. If you have an olive oil business, you can actually load it into the back of a truck and sell it in Bethlehem. And so it actually was this idea that it’s not just that we were negotiating toward a two-state solution, but people could feel two states coming into existence.

Fast-forward 10 years, after the second intifada: That’s just not true anymore. Right now, you’ve got a whole range: You’ve got the big security wall, which is a de facto new border. You’ve got a whole range of checkpoints that have come into place, making it impossible to move freely across the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority has basically been destroyed, and it’s being rebuilt from scratch.

If you’re just an average Palestinian living in the West Bank, you no longer feel like you’re on the path toward a state. You might follow the negotiations, but now you feel that you’re living under occupation.

Then fast-forward another 10 years, and you’re in a situation where nothing has happened, in all of that time, that would make you believe that a two-state solution has become more likely. There are more settlements, more settlers, more settler-only roads, more repression, no presidential elections — nothing that would make you feel like you’re moving toward something else.

So there is this real sense of stagnation, and we’re looking at this, and we’re trying to understand, as political scientists: What is this entity? It’s clearly not something on a path to two independent sovereign states.

It’s clearly not anything that is familiar to us as just an occupation or just a transitional phase. But it also isn’t really formally, yet, a single Israeli state.

It hasn’t been annexed; it hasn’t come fully under Israeli law. It’s just this limbo, which goes on forever. And so that’s what we were trying to capture with “The One-State Reality” — that, in reality, everybody living in the territory that was once British Mandatory Palestine, everything from the river to the sea, is under the effective power of a single sovereign, which is the Israeli government. But the Palestinians experience it very, very differently: They have different rights; they have different responsibilities; they have different security concerns.

If you’re born in one place, you are trapped within Gaza. If you’re born in Ramallah, you have one set of rights, but your family who lives just a couple of kilometers away in Jerusalem, they might have a few more rights. And so it was a highly differentiated legal regime, but one in which Israel ultimately holds all the cards.

Shibley, one thing that Israeli Jews say to me when I say something like this to them is: No, the Palestinian Authority is the government in the West Bank.

What do you think about that?

Telhami: That’s a really good starting point. Think about what Palestinians are facing now in terms of settler attacks. Meaning, the settlers are obviously civilians who are very often in the West Bank illegally and going into homes of Palestinians or burning them or going into properties and stealing them or going into cars and burning them and, in some cases, shooting people.

And that’s in Palestinian territory, on Palestinian land. There is not a single policeman stopping them, not a single one, because they don’t dare: They’re not supposed to, and the Israeli military would shoot them to death.

At the same time, look at what they’re doing: They are working hard, around the clock, to make sure that there are no attacks on Israelis — one reason we haven’t seen a lot of attacks, or even demonstrations during what happened in Gaza, in the West Bank.

So the Palestinian Authority is a joke if you’re thinking about it as a real government. It certainly has no real control. It’s more of a municipality. It plays some functional role that’s important — but it is not a government.

To think about the asymmetry of power that has defined the past few decades — think again that Israel could put Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, under arrest in his compound. They did it with Yasir Arafat, the founder of the Palestinian movement. He was confined to his compound, not able to move, until his death.

We could describe the awfulness of life in the West Bank. A lot of people don’t understand, for example, how important the prisoner issue is to Palestinians. You’ve got probably more than a million Palestinians who have been arrested by Israeli forces throughout the occupation since 1967. It’s a very small population, as you know, and there’s not a family that has not been touched by it.

Many of them, thousands of them, are held without charges. And if they’re taken to court, they go into military court. In that military court, the conviction rate is close to 100 percent.

A settler who kills a Palestinian in the West Bank — they probably will not even be charged. And if they ever get charged, they go to civil court, and rarely do they get convicted.

So you have to be evenhanded here — you know, say: Yes, Palestinians should reform, too. Right — they probably should, for sure. Even if it’s a municipality, there’s corruption that could be repaired. But to think that’s going to matter at the strategic level, it’s really a joke.

The other thing I want to say about this is that there is a religious narrative, even in secular Israel, about the entitlement to the land, particularly after 1967, and holding on to the West Bank as part of Israel. And I think the entitlement, to at least the occupied territories, is tied to a legitimacy of Israel as derived from the biblical narrative and not from the fact that it’s recognized by the United Nations as a legitimate state.

And I think that narrative has really grown in a way that subconsciously, even for people who are not religious, really dominates the thinking and, in a visible way, in the West Bank. That’s why a lot of people look away when they don’t agree with the crazies who are killing or doing something, and they want to pretend it doesn’t exist, but they’re not entirely uncomfortable with the outcome.

Something that I wanted to zoom in on a bit is the American narrative that you’re getting at, which thinks a lot about the failure of the peace process — the failure of Camp David in 2000 and, to some degree, you’ll hear about the failure of negotiations between Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas in 2008.

In 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu came back into power. He has now been prime minister, with short interruptions, since then — which is a long time.

I was going to bring this quote in later, but I think it’s worth talking about now. This is something that Netanyahu said recently, which I think helps shift the understanding of whether or not what we are looking at is the failure of a process or the success of a project. Netanyahu said:

There will be no Palestinian state to the west of the Jordan River. For years I have prevented the creation of that terror state, against tremendous pressure, both domestic and from abroad. We have done this with determination, and with astute statesmanship. Moreover, we have doubled the Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria, and we will continue on this path.

There will be no Palestinian state to the west of the Jordan River. For years I have prevented the creation of that terror state, against tremendous pressure, both domestic and from abroad. We have done this with determination, and with astute statesmanship. Moreover, we have doubled the Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria, and we will continue on this path.

Marc, when you listen to that, what do you hear?

Lynch: I think it’s a very honest and direct statement of the reality.

Again, I do think that there was a serious effort to negotiate a two-state solution under Oslo. For all of its flaws, it was real.

But Netanyahu opposed that at the time and was very happy to bring it grinding to a halt when he first became prime minister, in 1996. And I think he’s been extremely consistent his entire career. I think that has really been part of his political success, in a way, of being able to position himself as the one who is able to advance this particular project.

And I don’t think that Americans are blind to this. They tend to look at it as: Netanyahu is the problem. He’s always pushing back. He’s always slowing things down. He’s always giving us problems. And if we could just get rid of Netanyahu — if we could just find a way to get a more reasonable alternative as Israel’s prime minister — then we could get back to the business of two-state negotiations and the like.

And that’s always been a very willful misreading of the situation. I think that Netanyahu isn’t a magician who is somehow convincing the Israeli public to accept this. He’s reflecting what is a real and a steadily growing center position in Israel, which is that they really don’t see the need for there to be two states.

The left wing in Israel, back in the 1990s, were consumed with the idea that Israel had to make a choice between being Jewish or being democratic.

If you annex the West Bank, if you control the West Bank and Gaza, then you get to a demographic situation where Jews are no longer a majority in this territory. And I think that dilemma was resolved a long time ago. They chose to be Jewish — not democratic. The vehicle for doing that was the perpetuation of this idea that eventually, someday, there will be a two-state solution. Maybe we don’t need to think about giving any kind of rights to Palestinians.

And again, I don’t think that Americans were blind to this. I think that they were just willing to go along with it because it was convenient to do so.

We often talk about the West Bank, we talk about Gaza, but there are many Palestinians living in Israel proper, Israel’s traditional borders, however you want to call it. One of the arguments you make is that the one-state reality is:

based on relations of superiority and inferiority between Jews and non-Jews across all the territories under Israel’s differentiated but unchallenged control.

based on relations of superiority and inferiority between Jews and non-Jews across all the territories under Israel’s differentiated but unchallenged control.

Israeli Jews I know have to make the point of telling me that Palestinians in Israel have equal rights — that they are equal citizens in Israel proper, such that Israel is a democracy. In fact, it is a multiethnic democracy.

Telhami: We didn’t say we didn’t agree. Actually, we put it on a scale. From, on the one end, you have citizens who do have civil rights and can vote and get elected. They’re discriminated against in a very real way, structurally and in practice, for sure. But then, on the other hand, you have Gaza and the West Bank on the other end of the spectrum.

So we look at it as a spectrum. The reality is, if the national security minister is supremacist Itamar Ben-Gvir, who thinks a Jewish life is more valuable than an Arab life, it’s not about citizenship, it’s about ethnicity, it’s about religion.

And there are fears already. You could see the tension. It’s hard to also decouple, particularly in times of war and crisis. But what happens is that, let’s say you are in a factory together. You have an Israeli citizen who’s Jewish and an Israeli citizen who is an Arab, and they’re working together. And they post on social media, and the Palestinian says: This is genocide, what’s happening, what the Israelis are doing. And the Israeli says: Go, go to the army. And they’re sitting next to each other. What do you think is going to happen to them?

So then, where on the spectrum, prior to Oct. 7, is Gaza for you? Because when I speak to Israeli Jews about this, their view is that they did not have control of Gaza.

They had withdrawn from Gaza, and after they withdrew, Gazans chose Hamas, a group dedicated to Israel’s destruction. And eventually the result was Oct. 7.

And so to many Jewish Israelis, the lesson of the Gaza withdrawal is not that they had too much control but that they had too little — that they had offered too much autonomy and more than a thousand of their citizens paid a terrible price for that.

So when you include Gaza in this period, in the single-state reality, how do you explain that?

Telhami: Well, first of all, with regard to Oct. 7 — obviously, it’s a horrific attack, and there’s nothing justified. We can analyze it, politically. Explanation, justification — not one and the same thing. A lot of people conflate the two sometimes when you talk about it.

But control doesn’t mean you have to be there physically. Certainly, Gaza didn’t have sovereignty. Gazans couldn’t go in and out without Israeli permission. So when you’re controlling the water, when you’re controlling the electricity, when you’re controlling the trade, when you’re controlling the movement of people, when you’re controlling the money, even that goes in and out — I know many Israelis buy that.

It’s an easy way out, but, in reality, this was not the case.

Lynch: Can I add something here? Because what’s very interesting about this is that if you look at the role that Gaza played in all of this, and in Israeli politics, that, in effect, this became, actually, what........

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