Palestinians did not reject a one state solution. Most Israelis don't want that. I.e. annex the West Bank and Gaza and have a single country, let's call it "Israel-Palestine".
I think the Israeli Arabs are a model/proof that it can work. It might need a generation or two to get there.
If you want more radical ideas then if all Palestinian Arabs convert to Judaism we can also solve the problem pretty quickly...
Even though the current Israeli government may be more conservative than the ones previous, I see few possibilities for a more socially liberal government if Israel were to combine with the more-conservative majority-Muslim Palestinian states, given that there is not a single majority Muslim country in the world that is close to as socially liberal as Israel is, even now. Especially given that Muslim majority countries have a tendency to start employing Sharia law, even in Malaysia, far separated from the Middle-Eastern Muslim world.
> Even though the current Israeli government may be more conservative than the ones previous, I see few possibilities for a more socially liberal government if Israel were to combine with the more-conservative majority-Muslim Palestinian states
According to some forecasts, roughly 50% of all Israeli children born in 2065 will be Haredi. [0] If that's right, Israel could well end this century with a majority of the population being Haredi, and Haredi parties in control of the Knesset and Israeli government. I doubt a socially liberal Israeli government could be possible in that circumstance; whatever remains of the secular minority may not be "strong", it may be politically weakened, demoralised, and increasingly diminished by emigration and a low birth rate.
And all that's assuming there is no change to the relationship with the Palestinians. So maybe a change won't do as much as you think – it might just hasten the inevitable.
[0] https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-05-22/ty-article-opinio...
So destruction now or destruction some time after 2065? I know what I'd pick ...
Well, realistically, no big change is likely to happen to the relationship with the Palestinians in the near future. Maybe in another 20-40 years. So the time gap between the two scenarios may be smaller than you suggest.
October 7 was calculated to derail the peace negotiations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and in the short-to-medium term it succeeded. But, I expect that (privately) MbS is really angry at Hamas for doing that, and I think most other Arab governments likely feel similarly. That doesn’t bode well for Hamas in the long-run.
It also shows, of course, that Arab countries have not changed and have zero interest or respect for the ICC or the UN. But they do seem to respect that Iran wants to destroy them. And if stopping Iran requires war in Gaza, then they're perfectly ok with that. They have barely denounced Israel over it, in fact most haven't done that at all.
Because it would mean the end of a Jewish state. Combine Israel and Palestine and you get roughly 50% Jews, 50% Arabs. (5.3M Arabs in Palestine, 7.1M Jews in Israel and 2M Arabs in Israel).
What else is the long term trajectory here? Israel can't keep occupying Palestinians indefinitely (and I'm using the term "occupy" in the Israeli meaning, not in the Palestinian meaning, fwiw). Two states as we've seen is not going to work. Anyways, I know this is a hard time to talk about this.
Two states are much better than one in my opinion, and the PA-led pseudo-state is much better than Hamas-controlled Gaza. Israel and Palestine need a manageable divorce, not a forced and unhappy marriage.
Regardless, the PA does not advocate for one state, Hamas does not advocate for one state, and the vast majority of Israelis do not want one state, so I think this is kind of a moot point.
I think if Israel stated that is the goal, to make Palestinians equal citizens in the larger single country, and had a plan as to how that goal could be accomplished, that would be more constructive than the current stall until things blow up plan. I'd like to think many/some Palestinians would buy in and the rest would get no choice anyways.
This plan naturally involves dismantling the PA and taking complete civilian control over the entire territory including formally annexing it to Israel. It should also include some clear continuous benefits to Palestinians from where they stand today (which is pretty bad, so shouldn't be a problem).
A variation of this plan could be some sort of federation, where the country is "Israel" and there are two states under that country. Not unlike Canada or the US. That could also address the population ratios vs. democracy (just like democracy in the US or Canada isn't a proportional system). So we can have a parliament some fixed representation for different parts. I think Lebanon also has something along those lines. I'm sure over time we'll see coalitions that cross those "state" boundaries.
As long as there's a constitution, and there are the right mechanisms, checks and balances, to maintain that, and enough time to get beyond the current tribal let's kill everyone mindsets, it can work.
It it leads to a peaceful and stable state that would be a good thing.
Is there a need for a Jewish state? Lots of ethnic groups do not have their own state. Mine does not - a much smaller number of us, and we are disappearing through mixing.
So maybe there’s no strict need for a Jewish state, but I can see how going back to a collective of (often oppressed) minorities is not appealing.
But you don’t even need to look into history. Today Malaysia and Indonesia both have non-muslim minorities. Bosnia and Herzegovina has slight muslim majarity and is doing relatively fine.
When Turks left about 100 years ago Muslims were a minority but thanks to much higher birth rate they now want to set the rules in Bosnia. Serbs know that, that's why they resisted, and still resist, a unified Bosnia.
Ottoman Empire tolerated Christians, true, but to achieve anything in life you had to convert to Islam. Otherwise you could just remain a haraç-paying Christian peasant without any chance of education or growth. Haraç was a tax for being a non-Muslim.
It was super hard to be a thriving Christian under Turks. In fact the Turkish policy was to demographically and economically slowly bleed Christians and for those with ambition to convert to Islam.
The reason Arabs supported the British against the Ottomans was because they wanted to create a unified Arab nation: https://awayfromthewesternfront.org/campaigns/egypt-palestin.... And Arabs got the overwhelming majority of the territory they wanted (notwithstanding the many minority groups they had conquered in the Levant), with the exception of what became Israel. Put differently, you could say that Arabs got 0% of Israel, and that’s technically true. But it’s not an accurate description of what they got in comparison to what they actually wanted.
I was (obviously) referring to their share of the population of Mandatory Palestine specifically.
Talking about “how much of Mandatory Palestine the Arabs got” is contrived, when it was just a part of a much larger Arab territory under the Ottomans, and was planned to be part of a much larger Arab territory after the Ottomans.
> The war had two main phases, the first being the 1947–1948 civil war, which began on 30 November 1947,[19] a day after the United Nations voted to adopt the Partition Plan for Palestine, which divided the territory into Jewish and Arab sovereign states, and an international Jerusalem (UN Resolution 181). Partition was accepted by the Jewish leadership, but rejected by Palestinian Arab leaders and the Arab states.
Many of these purchases were from wealthy Ottoman landowners who had in many cases never seen the land they owned. The peasant families that actually lived on the land for generations had no say in the matter. I'm not faulting the purchasers for conducting legal business transactions, if anything the fault belongs to the feudal system of the Ottoman Empire—but none of that matters to someone who has suddenly lost their home and livelihood.
> Arabs weren’t to be expelled from the remainder
I don't think the historical record bears that out. Why did Israel not let the civilians it displaced return once the war ended, if the displacements were merely a temporary military necessity? And certainly massacres like Deir Yassin were not military necessities, though they did scare many Palestinians into fleeing.
The question we were talking about above is: What caused the Arabs to attack Israel the day after the UN Declaration? Note: it was not just Arabs in Mandatory Palestine, it was Arabs in Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, and Iraq. All of them attacked Israel. Why? It wasn’t Arabs in Palestine being forced to leave their land. That wasn’t part of the partition plan, and hadn’t happened yet. The Israeli Declaration of Independence specifically asks Arabs to stay and become equal citizens.
As to why Israel hasn’t allowed Arabs who fled to return, I suspect it’s because the Arab countries tried to kill Israel in its crib, and then expelled a million Jews from their own lands.
I must admit I don't know as much as I would like about this, so please correct me if I say something stupid (and share reading recommendations), but: my understanding is, "Israel" at this point was composed of several factions who disagreed greatly about methods. Probably Ben-Gurion did not have ethnic cleansing in mind, but Irgun and Lehi did, which was enough—the most radical factions were also most willing to fight, which gave them outsize power. (Though even Ben-Gurion did not intend to stay only within the borders allotted by the UN, he intended to take control of even Jewish settlements outside the partition borders.)
As for the war: the invasion by the Arab countries upon Israel's declaration of independence was an expansion of a civil war within Palestine that had already been going on for more than 5 months, and that the Palestinians were decisively losing. The Arab states hoped mostly to save face and to stop the flood of Palestinian refugees that would result if the current trajectory continued.
As well, there was fighting in the streets. They had to turn off the lights at night and hide in the basement to avoid raids. There was a sniper who was shooting at their apt from a nearby mosque and they would find shells on their balcony. They lived on Ben Yahuda St.
Just thought readers might appreciate a first hand account of what it was like to be a Jewish Israeli at the time.
We live in a post truth era and not sure what can be done about that. You'd think that with the Internet and access to information people can do research but research is hard. There are many, sometimes conflicting accounts of historical events. It's so easy to be sucked into echo chambers. Any thesis you have can be easily supported.
Unfortunately, it’s part of a larger victimhood narrative that has become an important part of Muslim identity. “Our once proud civilization has been oppressed by the west, including ripping away our holy city of Jerusalem and giving it to the Jews.” And because the Muslim world was an important participant in the worldwide socialist movement, that narrative has taken hold among European leftists who otherwise wouldn’t have a horse in the race.
Why do the Arab countries care so much about Palestine? It’s not like they go around spending their blood and treasure to protect other oppressed groups. Saudi just bombed the shit out of Yemen. The reason they want to get rid of Israel is because they view this as a matter of Arab territorial integrity.
My Bangladesh family is posting the paratrooper meme on my FB. Why? Because they view the existence of Israel as an affront to territorial integrity of the Islamic world. You cannot understand the situation Israel is in from a western secular point of view.
Since after Israel's founding, the Arab states have initiated war against it exactly once: the 1973 Yom Kippur war. (Technically, I guess you could count Iraq's 1991 rocket attacks as a second time?) In all other cases, either Israel attacked first, or Israel's opponent was not a recognized state actor.
The implicit assumption is that any place with a majority of "Arabs" would ethnically cleanse all the Jews or become an Islamic theocracy, so we must view everything through the lens of competing ethno-states. It's important to challenge this assumption. Ethno-states are inherently violent because every population is a mixture of different ethnicities, and an ethno-state needs to maintain a majority of a certain population. If the "wrong" group's population grows in an ethno-state, it becomes a "demographic problem" that the government needs to "solve". This is why carving up the world into such states is never a lasting solution for peace.
Aside: "Arab" and "Jew" are not mutually exclusive. You can be an Arab Jew in the same way you can be a Hispanic Jew - Arab is a distinction based on one's mother language not one's religion. This is why the Arab League includes countries in north Africa where most people aren't descended from ancestral Arabians. The history of and literature of Judeo-Arabic is an interesting rabbit hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Jews
I'm sure Hamas feels the same way! I'm not going to say whether one or two-state solution is best, that's for Palestinians and Israelis to decide, but something's gotta give.
Yes, I don't think Palestinian Christians would love the idea of a caliphate in any case…
> Territorial gains from their conquest of the Levant
Again, for the daily life of the average resident of Gaza or the West Bank, this matters not a whit.
This is simply not true. Almost none of the world is ethnostates.
The biggest cosmopolitan countries are the United States and Brazil if I remember correctly. Maybe Canada too. Europe is moving in that direction. Countries that have a diverse citizenry are more of an exception though. Not that I disagree with your probable view that we should all live in diverse secular democracies, I just think your claim that almost none of the world is ethnostates is somewhat suspect.
I agree with the idea that Israel would ideally be a single secular state, but navigating that transition while preserving it as the safest place the Jews of the world can go would be an enormous challenge. The situation sucks and resists simple answers.
The UN doesn't have the firepower to force Israel to do anything it doesn't want to do, and doesn't have the desire to force Palestine to do anything it doesn't want to do.
As an outsider to this feud, perhaps the best thing for me to do is not to judge either of them. I think it’s human to want to pick a side, but they’re not making it easy either way, by now. War is ugly, and I feel sad about and disappointed in that region for reminding me how bad people can be…
I wish they would stop fighting and dying but i got no power to change that. If that’s what they wanna do, it’s up to them.
I was really looking forward to a trip to Israel this year but now i guess that’s on hold…too dangerous
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-adopts-divisive-la...
Or this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaization_of_the_Galilee
These are simply not normal things for a country to do in the 21st century. That doesn't mean I don't have massive problems with what these other countries are doing, or what the US is doing, but to say they're ethno-states like Israel in my view is a false equivalency.
> but navigating that transition while preserving it as the safest place the Jews of the world can go
Is it though? I know Jewish folks in the US with family in Israel, and it doesn't seem like they'd feel safer in Israel. These policies don't seem to be making Jews safer.
> Saudi Arabia is named after the Arabs.
nit: It's named after Arabia which is a geographic region that's been named after the Arabs for centuries. The disturbing part of the name Saudi Arabia is that it's named after a specific family of despots, not that it refers to Arabia. But even being named after an ethnic group doesn't make your country an ethno-state.
I agree.
And I'm not saying that any countries are better or worse at being an ethnostate than Israel, just that there are many countries where racial identity is prominent. China as an ethnostate is complicated (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Dream for some examples), but 91% of people in China are Han Chinese. That culture is predominant and the Chinese state has an official language associated with that identity. Likewise, foreigners make up just about 2% of the population in Japan (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Japan). Japan is known to be an insular country that has a reputation for xenophobia. That's what I meant by de facto. Both countries have a dominant culture in a more pronounced way than the United States, for example. China also practices ethnic clensing with things like the Uyghur cultural genocide, which could be compared to some of the policies you linked.
Most European countries historically functioned like ethnostates. They’re trying to change that, but not successfully.
I don’t believe diverse countries are sustainable in the long run. Look at what happened to Jews in Europe. They were living in peace with their neighbors for hundreds of years, and then their neighbors turned on them and massacred them.
Progroms were not exactly a new thing in europe, but frequently happened over the centuries. The 19. and beginning of the 20. century was rather a quite peaceful episode, with jews getting equal citizen rights etc. but the hate did not go away, as can be seen, once the Nazis took over.
Calling France an ethnic state is saying the Normans are the same group as the Provençal. It's like doing the same in Spain; a sure way to lose new friends. France and Spain are also old empires.
Japan is something else. The description makes sense there. Maybe also for the Nordic countries of Europe.
At the level of spoken language, Han natively speak several mutually unintelligible languages; even at the written level, most of the mutually intelligibility only exists in the more formal registers. Are Han really one ethnic group then? Or more like a family of closely related ethnic groups?
> Japan is something else. The description makes sense there
Are Ryukyuans the same ethnic group as Yamato Japanese?
France officially rejects the idea of French ethnic nationalism. France’s nationalism is civic and linguistic - the French nation is defined in terms of citizenship and language, not in terms of ethnic ancestry - in fact, the French government does not even know the ethnic/racial composition of their country, since they refuse to collect statistics on it. So I disagree with the suggestion that France is an “ethnostate”
> Saudi Arabia is named after the Arabs
Both the Saudi royal family and the Saudi religious establishment have always opposed Arab nationalism; the only significant Arab nationalist force in Saudi politics was the outlawed Arab Socialist Action Party opposition, which was mostly crushed by the Saudi regime in the 1980s, and by 1991 or so was extinct.
If we waived a magic wand and made Palestine and Israel one country we wouldn't have peace. We'd have a a bloody civil war that makes the current conflict look like childs play.
Ethnostates are still highly relevant today, especially for Jews.
Freeing the slaves (a task which required us to fight the deadliest war in our history) was still the right and necessary thing to do. "You broke it, you bought it."
That's not what I'm asking for. In the US, Native Americans and descendants of slaves have full legal and political rights (in fact, Native Americans have extra political rights not granted to other citizens). Israel also can give Palestinians full legal and political rights, either in a separate state or as part of a one-state solution, without compromising its continued existence.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/unrwa-continues-to-teac...
Imagine that was done here (in the US), those teachers might get a talking to, but nobody would buy that they're teaching hate unless students or observers say something.
If someone were to scrub your social media accounts, would they find 0 likes or shares of 'hateful content'? Depending on who you follow, that could be anything from sharing videos of the IDF's attacks, Hamas' attacks, Likud's charter, or even some dude that edited their viral post to inject something positive about Mein Kampf
Hardliners in the current Israeli government (e.g Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Amichai Eliyahu) want to "annex Judaea and Samaria". There seems to be a bit of ambiguity about whether they mean only Area C, or the whole of the West Bank (or even annex Area C now as a precursor to annexing A and B later.)
If they did that, what would happen to the Palestinians living in those areas – would they become Israeli Arabs? Would they first have to request Israeli citizenship? Would they be entitled to it, or would it be up to the Israeli government to decide whether to extend it to them?
"One state solution" is an idea primarily associated with Israel's peacenik far left, but maybe the best way to achieve it might (paradoxically) be to let the Israeli far right get a big chunk of what it wants?
> If you want more radical ideas then if all Palestinian Arabs convert to Judaism we can also solve the problem pretty quickly...
Speaking of radical ideas, I find the "cantonization" proposals [0] for the future of Israel rather fascinating. Basically convert it into a federation of different "cantons" representing the different sectors of Israeli society (secular, religious, Haredi, Arab). These cantons might be partially geographical and partially personal – i.e. every citizen belongs to a canton personally, the canton also controls the territory where its members are a majority, but has to protect the rights of minorities from other cantons in its territory; individuals will receive some government services from the canton of residence (e.g. public utilities), others might be provided by their personal canton (e.g. education, family law)
[0] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-05-05/ty-article-ma...
Sort of apartheid.
It's more wishful thinking than a plan.
Under the "canton" proposal, there would still be a national government in charge of the military, intelligence agencies, diplomacy, foreign trade, the currency, the banking system, etc. The "cantons" would primarily control local matters, schools, housing, family law, religious affairs, etc. So I don't think it would make much difference to military.
It would basically be transforming Israel from a unitary state (like New Zealand) to a federal state (like the US, Canada, Australia, Germany, Switzerland) - however, with the added factor that the top-level national subdivisions would be based on cultural factors rather than purely geographical ones – which would be a system more like that of Belgium.
Regarding Lebanon-for all of Lebanon’s woes, it still survives, it hasn’t broken up into a new civil war; and for all the criticism of its political system, maybe its unique political system has been one of the factors preventing that outcome. And I think Lebanon’s biggest problem is that the national government lacks a monopoly on force, with sectarian political parties controlling their own militias beyond state control (of which Hezbollah’s is the most significant example.) I don’t think the “cantonalisation” proposal for Israel is going to lead to that, since all the versions of it I’ve seen have the military, intelligence, law enforcement, prisons, etc under the 100% control of the national government. Lebanon’s problem in that area is a leftover of its civil war; Israel is not going to have the same problem unless it has a civil war (which I still think is very unlikely)
I'm not doubting it will be grounded in peace, a stalemate can be a form of that as nothing will happen. A state not only keep residents safe (ideally they should try do this). It becomes a failed state when a state is no longer in control. When other government services like utilities are no longer delivered, that's when the failed state question can also come into being. Lebanon isn't quite there thank goodness but it's not great either.
Because they’re a minority. Look at what happens when Jews are a minority in a Muslim-majority country.
Even if Palestinian Arabs could get okay with Jews it would be a powder keg long term. Because the whole Muslim world hates the idea of Jews in the holy land, and uses Palestinians as a proxy against Jews. I’m from a “moderate” Muslim country. Out of thousands of Jews that used to live in the country, only a few families are left (openly). It’s really as bad as people think.