The One-State Delusion

F our left-wing academics recently made a case for giving up on a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In a piece in Foreign Affairs titled “Israel’s One-State Reality,” Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami argue that the Israeli presence in the West Bank has rendered political separation a near impossibility and assert that the U.S., rather than clinging to an Oslo-era anachronism, should abandon its support for a two-state resolution to hostilities and forsake its closest ally in the Middle East.

What the authors are really saying, however, is much simpler — the pernicious underlying message is only thinly concealed. “There is one Jewish state in the world. In the end, and after one removes all the academic posturing, theirs is a proposal to eliminate it,” Elliott Abrams, former foreign-policy adviser to Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump, explained. “I put this article down as fundamentally one more effort to bring the existence of the State of Israel to an end.”

Progressive intellectuals and activists pay little mind to the centuries of persecution Jews have faced at the hands of hostile governments in the Diaspora and negate the importance of Jewish self-governance. A single, binational state would comprise Jews and Arabs, including those currently living in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza and Palestinians currently living in Arab countries who have long been deemed “refugees.” Jews would become the minority, with an Arab majority many of whose members have repeatedly expressed the desire to rid the land of Jews “from the river to the sea.” One can assume that life for Jews in their ancient homeland would become unbearable under these conditions.

None of this is particularly novel for the academic Left, which has established itself as decidedly anti-Israel. What’s striking about the authors’ proposal is that it is as unworkable as the one-state solution advocated by the most hardened Israeli nationalists. For decades, Israel’s far Right has agitated for total Israeli control of the entirety of the West Bank. The outcome would be identical to that of the plan outlined in Foreign Affairs: the end of Jewish life in the Holy Land.

If Israeli sovereignty were to be extended over the entirety of the West Bank, either Israel’s Jewish character or its democratic character would be jeopardized. In this hypothetical scenario, if the millions of Palestinians absorbed by the Jewish state were given the right to vote, Israel would lose its Jewishness. And if it did not grant them that right, the implications for democracy are obvious. A one-state solution would also pose an immense existential risk in the same way binationalism does. In this scenario, Israeli Jews would be forced to govern a hostile populace in Arab cities like Jenin and Nablus.

The only solution to this conflict is some form of separation. That is what made the Trump administration peace plan so attractive. The proposal laid the groundwork for a viable, contiguous future state of Palestine while safeguarding Israel’s legitimate national-security interests. The proposal was also novel in emphasizing the importance of economic prosperity. It endeavored to secure a future Palestinian state’s financial stability by providing “investors with confidence that their assets will be secure by improving property rights, the rule of law, fiscal sustainability, capital markets, and anti-corruption policies.”

While many in the media sought to discredit the proposal when it was announced, decrying its supposed pro-Israel bias, this plan presented what David Harsanyi called “the only plausible path to a new Palestinian state.” Rejection by Palestinian leaders of practically workable plans over many years has led to defeatism among the Palestinian people. And defeatist opposition to negotiations or compromise exacerbates violence, as was seen most recently in the nihilistic terror attack in which two British-Israeli sisters and their mother were murdered by a Palestinian extremist.

Admittedly, an arrangement as envisioned in the Trump administration plan will not materialize anytime soon. The current Israeli government is too embroiled in domestic controversy over proposed judicial reforms, and beyond its double-dealing, the Fatah leadership in the Palestinian Authority is too weak to ensure that Hamas militants wouldn’t exploit negotiations for their own Islamist, terroristic ends.

But we can’t stop striving toward what might admittedly be the least-bad solution. Couched in social-justice terms or not, a one-state proposal would render the Jewish people stateless once more. The existence of Israel is the primary bulwark against the recurrence of the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Today, as Israel marks its 75th birthday, it is essential to recognize the necessity of Jewish self-determination in the Jewish people’s homeland. The United States must continue to reject the false promise of a one-state future. A flourishing Jewish state is not only in America’s national interest — it is a moral and just imperative.