[“You need to take reality as it is, not the way you imagine it
to be,” says Yousef Munayyer.]
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IS THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION DEAD?  
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Noah Lanard, Yousef Munayyer
October 27, 2023
Mother Jones
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_ “You need to take reality as it is, not the way you imagine it to
be,” says Yousef Munayyer. _

A group of Palestinian refugees walking along a road from Jerusalem
to Lebanon, carrying their children and belongings with them in 1948.,
Jim Pringle/AP

 

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In a 2019 article for _Foreign Affairs_, Yousef Munayyer declared
[[link removed]] the
two-state solution dead. Munayyer, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who
leads the Palestine/Israel Program at the Arab Center Washington, DC
[[link removed]], wrote that the time had
come to “consider the only alternative with any chance of delivering
lasting peace: equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians in a single
shared state.”

The next year, Peter Beinart, an Orthodox Jewish journalist who
has moved left
[[link removed]] since
editing the then-pro-Iraq War _New Republic_, made his own case
[[link removed]] for
a single state. The articles, along with others
[[link removed]] like
them, brought renewed attention to a similar proposal
[[link removed]] made
by the late Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said in 1999.

A one-state solution would make all Palestinians and Israelis equal
citizens of one nation that encompasses the land on both sides of what
is called the Green Line, which refers to the borders established by
Israel’s 1949 armistice with Arab nations.

During the 1967 war, Israel expanded beyond the Green Line by seizing,
among other territory, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East
Jerusalem. Those areas now include more than 5 million Palestinians
who have been living under direct or indirect Israeli rule for more
than 50 years. Unlike the roughly 1.6 million
[[link removed]] Palestinian citizens of Israel
within the pre-1967 borders, Palestinians beyond the Green Line are
not Israeli citizens and cannot vote in national elections. They are
not afforded the rights given to the hundreds of thousands of Jewish
settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem who, despite illegally
occupying Palestinian land, are Israeli citizens.

Under a one-state solution, Israel would cease to be a Jewish state
and would instead become like the United States and other nations that
are not organized on ethno-religious grounds. Abandoning this
commitment to Zionism remains anathema to a large majority
of Israeli Jews
[[link removed]] and American
Jews
[[link removed]].

It would also be a major break from the longstanding push for a
“two-state solution,” which would entail establishing a
Palestinian state alongside the Jewish-majority state of Israel. Those
who favor two states generally call for Palestine to be based in the
West Bank and the much smaller Gaza Strip. (Israel withdrew from Gaza
in 2005 but has effectively turned it into what critics call an
“open-air prison
[[link removed]]”
by maintaining almost complete control over who and what is allowed to
come and go from the area.)

In practice, many Israeli and American proponents of a two-state
solution have not been willing to accept a Palestine that has
true sovereignty
[[link removed]].
Beyond that, Israel has spent decades building settlements and other
infrastructure designed
[[link removed]] to
effectively annex much of the West Bank and render the possibility of
a coherent Palestinian nation impossible
[[link removed]].
Israel’s current far-right government has expanded settlement
construction and has treated
[[link removed]] the
West Bank as part of a “Judea and Samaria” that Jews have a
right to control. 

Munayyer argues that a one-state solution is necessary to provide
dignity and democratic representation to multiple Palestinian
populations: those who are citizens of Israel, those living under
Israeli occupation in the West Bank, those under siege in Gaza, and
Palestinian refugees denied the ability to return to where they once
lived in Israel. The alternative, he says, is to continue with the
“apartheid
[[link removed]]”
system that many human rights groups have concluded Palestinians
experience today.

When we spoke on Tuesday, Munayyer made clear that he did not see
Israel-Palestine as an entity that would emerge overnight, or as a
cure-all for resentments that have been building for more than a
century. More immediately, Munayyer is calling for a ceasefire to
prevent further suffering in Gaza, where more than 7,000
[[link removed]] people
have now been killed, according to the local health ministry,
[[link removed]] following
the October 7 attack by Hamas that took the lives of more than 1,400
people in Israel.

_The conversation has been edited for length and clarity._

YOU AND OTHERS HAVE WRITTEN ABOUT HOW THERE IS A “ONE-STATE REALITY
[[link removed]]”
THAT ALREADY EXISTS IN ISRAEL AND PALESTINE. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? WHAT
DOES IT LOOK LIKE FOR PALESTINIANS?

We have heard a lot about Israelis and Palestinians and this idea of a
two-state solution. These are things that we hear repeated over and
over. It creates the idea that there are two sides and two parties and
two countries that are in conflict with each other. It contributes to
a failure to understand that the reality on the ground is one where
there is only one state: That is the state of Israel, which controls
the entirety of the territory, in one form or another, between the
Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, in a land that was once known
as Palestine—and today contains an Israeli state, which is
recognized internationally by many people on part of that territory,
as well as occupied Palestinian territory, which that Israeli state
also controls. When we talk about a one-state reality, and this is a
condition that has been in place effectively since 1967, this is what
we are talking about.

And that means that there is ultimately one power that determines the
vast majority of what takes place within this space, especially as it
relates to political outcomes, the use of power, the monopoly of
force, how resources are allocated, who has what rights, and who can
go where and do what. That is the reality of millions of Palestinians
and also Israelis. Of course, that state exerts far greater control
over the lives of Palestinians than it does over Israelis.

WHETHER IT’S ONE STATE OR TWO STATES, WHAT ARE THE BASIC CONDITIONS
THAT NEED TO BE MET BY ANY LONG-TERM RESOLUTION TO THE CONFLICT?

Solutions are tools to address problems. When it comes to this issue
there is a misunderstanding, particularly in the West, of what the
problem is. The problem continues to be the fundamental denial of
freedom and self-determination to Palestinians in their homeland. When
you look at the situation, when you look at the map, when you look at
the demographics, when you look at the realities on the ground, when
you look at to whom rights are denied, you realize that this isn’t
a two-state problem. This isn’t a problem that is solved by drawing
some artificial line on paper. This is a problem that can only be
solved by addressing the lack of those rights, which is not about
separating people. It’s about affording them the rights that
they’ve been denied by these systems.

HAS THIS BEEN AN IDEOLOGICAL EVOLUTION FOR YOU, OR HAVE YOU ALWAYS
SUPPORTED A ONE-STATE SOLUTION?

As someone who is a Palestinian citizen of Israel, and someone who has
been part of the American political experiment as well, I have felt
that the two-state framework fails to address the rights and
grievances of all of the Palestinian stakeholders that are involved in
the Palestinian struggle for freedom. I also have a deep appreciation
for the extent to which equality before the law, and political
constructs that address people’s rights, are able to mitigate
conflict and violence. 

“I think a two-state framework…would not be an outcome that
reduces the conditions that create political violence, but probably
one that only prolongs them.”

I have always been skeptical of partition being a solution to these
things. But I think that over time, that’s become more and more
clear to me. It should be clear that a one-state solution, or a
two-state solution, is not going to turn this space into a utopia. We
need to be honest about that. The question is what kind of system can
be created that would most mitigate the conditions in which political
violence grows. I think a two-state framework, especially the way that
it is primarily discussed as what would be acceptable to Israel and
the West, does not come close to addressing all of the issues. It
would not be an outcome that reduces the conditions that create
political violence, but probably one that only prolongs them.

LIBERAL ZIONISTS HAVE OFTEN SUGGESTED THAT IF ISRAEL HAD STUCK TO ITS
PRE-1967 BORDERS AND NOT EMBARKED ON THE SETTLEMENT-BUILDING THAT’S
BEEN GOING ON FOR DECADES NOW, THERE COULD POTENTIALLY NOW BE A VIABLE
PALESTINIAN STATE ALONGSIDE ISRAEL. YOU’VE CALLED
[[link removed]] THIS _“_GREEN-LINED
VISION.” WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY THAT?

First of all, there is this failure to see that there are rights
denied outside of the occupied territory both to Palestinian citizens
of Israel, who are fundamentally unequal within the Israeli system,
and to Palestinian refugees, whose valid claims to land and life
within the towns and villages from which they’ve been forced out
exist in that space. I use green-lined vision to talk about that
failure. 

Part of what comes along with that is this ability to circumvent the
real problem. People say, “Well, look, if you just don’t look at
the West Bank and Gaza, Israel is not that bad.” I say to people,
“Sure, if you don’t look at the extra 40 pounds around my waist,
I’m a swimsuit model.”

You need to take reality as it is, not the way you imagine it to be.
Israel has been occupying and controlling and entrenching itself
within these territories for far longer than it hasn’t been. From
1949 to 1966 is a short period of Israel’s history compared to the
remainder of it, which has largely been defined by this occupation.
The green-lined vision allows people to ignore that reality.

The other part is that it contributes to a romanticization of this
period from 1949 to 1966. Many people, particularly liberal Zionists,
imagine an Israel that was in its golden age. But for anyone who knows
what that period meant for Palestinians—both in terms of the ones
who were ethnically cleansed
[[link removed]],
the repression of Palestinian citizens of Israel under martial law
inside Israel during that time, and numerous massacres that
were committed
[[link removed]] in that period
as well—we know that that’s not a period to romanticize. I talk
about green-lined vision as a willing embrace of a series of myths
that need to be busted for people to begin to grapple with the extent
of the problem so that they can genuinely solve it.

IN YOUR CONVERSATION
[[link removed]] WITH _NEW
YORK _MAGAZINE’S ERIC LEVITZ, HE POINTED TO POLLING SHOWING THAT
ONE-STATE WITH EQUAL RIGHTS FOR JEWS AND PALESTINIANS IS NOT
PARTICULARLY POPULAR WITH PALESTINIANS. THE SAME POLL
[[link removed]] SHOWED
THAT PALESTINIAN AND ISRAELI SUPPORT FOR TWO-STATES WAS NOT
PARTICULARLY HIGH, EITHER. HOW DO YOU SEE CURRENT PALESTINIAN
ATTITUDES TOWARD A ONE-STATE SOLUTION? 

What Israelis and Palestinians are saying is they want to be free of
each other. It’s not necessarily because it’s impossible for them
to imagine living with each other. It’s because their experiences of
being in contact with each other have been experiences of conflict.
The question is: Is there a way of creating conditions in which their
experiences cannot be those of conflict? I think that is possible. If
that idea can be nurtured and promoted—and moved in the direction of
actual policy—public opinion changes. Public opinion is far more
movable than billions upon billions of dollars of settlements that are
entrenched in the West Bank, and billions and billions of dollars that
have been entrenched in the infrastructure of apartheid across the
entirety of the country.

“Public opinion is far more movable than billions upon billions of
dollars of settlements that are entrenched in the West Bank.”

The vast majority of people in the West Bank and Gaza have never known
a day of freedom. They’ve never known an interaction with Israelis
that has not been one of military occupation or apartheid. When you
ask them about whether or not they want to live in one state with
Israelis, you have to understand that their entire experience has been
shaped through the prism of their lived reality. That produces a lot
of these trends. 

FOR MORE LIBERAL AND SECULAR ZIONISTS, A KEY PART OF THE IMPORTANCE OF
A JEWISH STATE IS THE IDEA THAT IT PROVIDES A PLACE WHERE JEWS CAN BE
SAFE FROM PERSECUTION. HOW DO YOU ADDRESS THE CONCERNS JEWS HAVE ABOUT
BEING OPPRESSED IN A SINGLE STATE IN WHICH THEY ARE IN THE MINORITY?

I would say that Palestinians have every reason to be as equally
concerned for their safety in such a space. Palestinian history with
Israelis has not exactly been one where they have been shown
tenderness and love and kindness. Again, when we think about what a
process like this could actually look like, it’s not going to happen
with a flip of a switch where one day all the Jews in the land wake up
and suddenly they’re governed by a completely different regime
that’s made up of Palestinians and they don’t know what’s going
to happen to them. That boils down to a fear-mongering that prevents
any reasonable thinking about how to move from one place to the next,
and has left us stuck in this reality that just gets increasingly
uglier.

MORE IMMEDIATELY, WHAT DO YOU THINK NEEDS TO HAPPEN IN RELATION TO
GAZA?

We need an immediate ceasefire. This is the biggest no-brainer in the
history of no-brainers. You’ve got thousands of people who’ve been
killed. Thousands of more who probably will be killed. This is not
making anybody safer. It is contributing to more deaths, more
insecurity, more fear, more hatred. There’s no justification for it.
There are so many in Gaza right now who are being killed for nothing
other than just being alive in Gaza. That has to come to an immediate
end.

WHAT DO YOU THINK PRESIDENT BIDEN AND HIS ADMINISTRATION SHOULD BE
DOING THAT THEY HAVE NOT BEEN DOING? 

I think that their message has been devastatingly poor. They need to
immediately call for a ceasefire. Immediately. They are saying,
“Well, look, Israel has a right to defend itself.” First, the
people who are being killed, including some 2,000 kids at the moment
that we’re speaking, are not the people who carried out the attack
on Israel on October 7. 

The kids who are the lone survivors of families of 18 or 19 people
who are being buried in mass graves, do you think those kids are going
to think well of the military that killed their families? Do you think
they’re going to be any more inclined to see Israelis in a peaceful
way? Or Americans for that matter? We are sowing the seeds of
resistance for generations to come by supporting this kind of
insanity. 

“The messaging from the Biden administration has been—it’s hard
to even find the words to describe this. It’s as if it’s been
designed to insult the feelings and intelligence of everybody in the
region outside the Israelis.”

If there was a military solution to this, Israel, statistically, would
have stumbled upon it by mistake, given all the different bombardments
of Gaza in the past. But all that we’ve seen is an increase in the
capabilities of Hamas in Gaza, and no less support among Palestinians
for armed resistance against Israel.

IN HIS OVAL OFFICE ADDRESS LAST WEEK, PRESIDENT BIDEN FRAMED THE NEED
TO SEND TENS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN MILITARY AID TO ISRAEL AND
UKRAINE AS PART OF A BROADER EFFORT TO DEFEND DEMOCRACY. IS ISRAEL A
DEMOCRACY?

The messaging from the Biden administration has been—it’s hard to
even find the words to describe this. It’s as if it’s been
designed to insult the feelings and intelligence of everybody in the
region outside the Israelis. This is not about democracies coming
under attack. The Israelis run a military occupation and an apartheid
regime. Half the Israeli public was up in arms over the direction that
its government was going to undermine the rights that they had as
Israeli Jews, and you have Joe Biden talking about democracies coming
under attack. For people in the Third World who hear this, it sounds
like it’s coming from another planet. It does incredible damage to
American credibility, and it makes it that much harder for American
diplomacy to be successful all over the world. 

At some point, this is going to end. Afterward, I believe, we are
going to be in a deeper one-state reality than we’ve ever been. The
Israelis are going to be less and less inclined to ever relinquish
control of territory. They are going to leave Gaza in a state of
complete devastation and disarray. Palestinian politics is going to
continue to be a mess, as well as Israeli politics. At the same time,
the risks of failing to address this issue in a comprehensive and
lasting way have never been higher. That is the morning after this. We
have a choice to make about where we go from there. 

_NOAH LANARD: I’m a reporter at Mother Jones where I’ve covered
immigration since 2017. Before Mother Jones, I was a fellow at
Washingtonian. I got started in journalism while freelancing from
Mexico City for The Guardian, Splinter, and Vice. I’m based in New
York. Email me at nlanard [at] gmail [dotcom] or message me on Twitter
at [at] nlanard._

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