What Should Israel Do?

Like many Americans, I’ve spent much of the last six months arguing about Israel and Palestine online. In doing so, I’ve found myself perennially frustrated by how abstract the discussions always seem to be. No matter what, we end up arguing about the philosophical basis on Zionism or the minutiae of historical atrocities, or whether or not specific slogans are antisemitic or not. To me, this is mostly besides the point. The central question of “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is whether or not there is a legitimate justification for a state to indefinitely maintain a third of its population under military rule without self-government, self-determination, or political rights. Everything else is commentary. Arguing about the hypothetical benefits of a speculative One State Solution versus the potential problems of a theoretical Two State Solution is essentially pointless, given the actual situation on the ground.

I find this particularly frustrating when arguing with people who would probably describe themselves as Liberal Zionists; people who I think broadly share my values and my vision of what the future could look like, but who end up on the opposite “side” of so many of these debates from me. What I want to do today is try and bring this back to Earth. I want to try and ground this argument in reality, and articulate a practical path forward for people who genuinely want to see peace and equality between the River and the Sea.

To begin with, I want to lay down a few postulates. First, the State of Israel, as it currently exists, is an apartheid state. I know that’s a controversial statement, but I also think it’s an inescapable truth. There are 9.8 million citizens of Israel, and approximately another 5 million Palestinians who have been living under Israeli occupation since 1967. That’s 33% of the population, maintained without the right to freedom of movement, to participation in their government, to equitable justice or basic civil liberties, to any sort of self-government or self-determination, for fifty-seven years, with no end in sight. Israeli settlers in the West Bank are under a totally different set of laws and government than their Palestinian neighbors. That’s a caste system based on ethnicity and nationality. Put aside questions of fault, or blame, or justification for not. It just is what it is. Second, the existence of an apartheid state is, in of itself, bad. If you don’t agree with this, you can just stop reading here, because I’m not talking to you. Third, if Israel is an apartheid state through no fault of its own, it has a responsibility to prove it. That’s going to take some unpacking.

The existence of the Occupation is uncontroversial, and many people will agree that it is, at least abstractly, a Bad Thing. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo summed up the attitude of the US Jewish Community best, I think, as “Israel’s endless occupation of the 1967 territories was already a matter of frustration and embarrassment.” But so many of those same people also think that the situation is complicated, that Israel almost accidentally stumbled into conquering five million people and establishing five decades of military rule over them. There are security concerns, and the military threat of its Arab neighbors, there were negotiations in 1993 and 2006, and it’s not Israel’s fault they failed, the Palestinians could’ve gotten a better deal if they tried harder, they’re not ready for their own state, etc, etc. In this, many find themselves, perhaps inadvertently, echoing Thomas Jefferson’s famous warning about slavery:

But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.

Thomas Jefferson, 1820 (Source)

I think this is a naive reading of the situation, at best. But I think that if you believe this, then you should hold Israel to this standard.

If the Occupation is a regrettable and temporary security measure, you should expect it to look like one. What would that entail?

The simplest thing to demand would be a total freeze on construction of settlements in the West Bank. This has been proposed before, and a partial ban was imposed briefly in 2009-2010, but it remains completely insane to allow Israel to continue seizing land in territory that it maintains it does not control. The Israeli position that settlements beyond the Green Line are sovereign Israeli territory, but that the surrounding Palestinian villages have no rights because they’re only temporarily occupied is absurd. Making any US military aid conditional on a total shutdown of all settlement construction is, frankly, the bare minimum that anyone sincerely interested in peace should demand.

There are, of course, already 700,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank. Many of the settlements, such as Ariel, are major towns or small cities, integrated into mainstream Israeli society. There are also, however, the so-called ‘Hilltop Outposts‘, established by radical settlers to purposefully seize Palestinian land and confront Palestinian inhabitants. Many of these are not just illegal under international law but even under Israeli law, situated on stolen Palestinian land. Israeli courts and governments routinely ignore this. An Israeli government that was interested in laying the groundwork for a real peace settlement could begin evicting these doubly-illegal outposts, upholding Israeli law and removing major sources of contention and violence in the West Bank. As a corollary to this, Israel could reform its current de facto policy of refusing to grant construction permits to Palestinians in most circumstances, forcing Palestinians to build illegal structures that the State is then free to demolish at will. To quote an old internet adage:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

Frank Wilhoit, Crooked Timber, 2018 (Source)

As part of this set of polices, one could hope that the Israeli government and Israeli Defense Force could actually attempt to extend basic protections to the Palestinians of the West Bank, who face constant pogroms and harassment from settlers, with the IDF and Israeli police either ignoring the incidents or protecting the attackers. In November, 2023, the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din reported that since the outbreak of war in Gaza:

During this period, Yesh Din recorded 225 incidents of Israeli civilian violence in 93 Palestinian communities in the West Bank. Among other things, settlers killed nine Palestinians with live ammunition, expelled shepherding communities from their lands, set fire to houses and cars, cut down olive trees and vandalized property. As far as Yesh Din knows, out of the hundreds of settlers who participated in the attacks, no one was detained, interrogated or arrested in relation to these cases (except for one who was arrested and quickly released).

Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank under the guise of war, Yesh Din, (Source)

These are all pretty basic demands, in my opinion. I am essentially suggesting that Israel uphold its basic responsibility as an occupying power under international law, something it has never done. But an Israeli government that was sincerely interested in ending the Occupation someday could go much further. Under the 1993 Oslo Accords, the West Bank was carved up into a series of discrete pieces, with Areas A and B placed under the administration of the Palestinian Authority, and Area C remaining under “temporary” Israeli control. That transfer of authority never happened, as the peace process collapsed under the pressure of the Second Intifada and the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin. An Israeli government that wanted to end the Occupation could begin negotiations with the Palestinian Authority to try and begin this process once again. The 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and the subsequent takeover by Hamas, is usually cited as a reason why this is impossible, but Israel retains ultimate security control over Areas A and B in the West Bank. A gradual process of transferring civil authority to the Palestinian Authority would not entail a loss of safety, and would give Palestinian civil society and politicians a stake in engaging with Israel.

_{South African Bantustans in 1994}

One of the most-ignored aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that over the last twenty years, the police forces of the PA have successfully worked with Israel to crush most terrorism and resistance against the Occupation in the West Bank–for which they’ve been rewarded with a doubling in size of the settlement blocs and ever-escalating demands from Jerusalem. It’s hard to think of anything that has done more to scuttle the chance of a Two State Solution than this—and intentionally so. An Israeli government that actually hoped to achieve peace could reverse this process, creating a formal framework to tie security cooperation to gradual administrative transfers. One key part of this would be conceding that the Jordan Valley will be part of any future Palestinian State. The insistence by the Netanyahu government that it will not virtually guarantees that any Palestinian state established will be nothing more than a group of disconnected and isolated bantustans.

Of course, none of this deals with the much trickier situation of Gaza. Lately, Hamas has offered to dissolve its armed wing if a Palestinian state is established along the 1967 Green Line. Given the IDF’s persistent, decades-long failure to root out and destroy Hamas, this might be worth negotiating over, if Israel had any interest in a Two State Solution. But, given the atrocities of the 10/7 attacks, it’s hard to blame Israel for not wanting any kind of normalization or negotiation with the group. In that case, we should insist that they allow the Palestinian Authority to return to Gaza and attempt to establish a functional administration. The PA is notoriously corrupt and sclerotic, but it would be better than the anarchy emerging out of the rubble of the IDF’s indiscriminate bombardments.

All of these proposals, taken together, would not solve the conflict. They would not resolve the question of East Jerusalem, or that of the Palestinian Right of Return, or the status of the major settlement blocs, or whether an eventual Palestinian state would be demilitarized or not. What they would do is help prevent the current situation from devolving, prevent a great deal of human suffering and misery, keep open the pathway to an eventual peace deal, and demonstrate that the Occupation is simply a matter of security concerns, and not a colonialist land-grab by an ethnonationalist state. They are the bare minimum we should expect. There’s a lot of talk about “holding Israel to a higher standard”, but I don’t think that’s what we’re doing! As I said earlier, Israel is an apartheid state. If you don’t like that word, we can try and find another one, but it’s a state that denies basic civil rights to 33% of its population on the basis of nationality. If you are asking me to support Israel, you are asking me to support something that most people agree is unconscionable. It is your responsibility then, to prove why this exception is justified. If Israel really wants peace, it should show it.

But, of course, it doesn’t. That’s not editorializing on my part, that is the official position of the Israeli government. The official position of the Israeli government is that it has the right, and justification, to maintain indefinite military and political control over another people while simultaneously expropriating their land and constraining their rights. I don’t agree with that, and I don’t think most of the people reading this agree with this. And that’s what this post is really about.

I am under no illusions as to why Israel won’t pursue any of the policies I outlined above. There is nothing even close to majority support for any of them, and hasn’t been for decades. Arguably, ever. Even the martyred Yitzhak Rabin told the Knesset that the goal of Oslo was to give the Palestinians “an entity which is less than a state”, and initiated construction of thousands of homes in the settlements. The people I am trying to address are the Liberal Zionists, the people who believe deeply in the Zionist project of state-building, who truly want to see a democratic Palestine living at peace with a democratic Israel. I believe you. But if that’s what you want, you have to fight for it.

Israel right now is an apartheid state. The faults and causes of that, the blame and the historical process that led to that, we’ll put aside. It’s not important anymore. But I think I’ve shown here that there are a lot of policies that an Israel that actually wanted peace could pursue without jeopardizing its core security interests or conceding its core interests. They’re not doing that, and I don’t think you have to pretend that they are. Thomas Jefferson was right about the dangers of letting go of the wolf, but does anyone think that kicking the can down to road another four decades actually made that situation better?

For too many in the Jewish community, the existence of the Two State Solution as an idea inoculates the actual, existing State of Israel from blame or scrutiny for five decades of apartheid and occupation. When Peter Beinart, in his 2012 book The Crisis of Zionism, argued for a limited boycott of the settlements, he was attacked widely and excommunicated from many Jewish circles, an experience that I suspect helped lead to his decision in 2020 to endorse a One State Solution. J Street, a “pro-peace, pro-Israel” group that actively opposes a lot of Palestinian activism for being too radical, was still deemed too dangerous to be allowed to join the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. Too many people want to have it both ways.

The Israel you want to support doesn’t exist. If you want it to, you’re going to have to do something about it. My own personal preference is for the BDS movement, calling for a campaign of international boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against the Israeli State to pressure it. As long as Israel doesn’t have a reason to relinquish control of the Palestinian Territories, they’re not going to. But maybe you have a different set of tactics you want to try! That’s fine. Tactics are just tactics, a tool is just a tool. Anyone who believes in peace, justice, and freedom for everyone living between the River and the Sea is my ally in this.

But if you believe in something, you have to fight for it.

_{Poster from Librarians and Archivists with Palestine (Source)}