First, a triune propaedeutic by way of historical, moral, and political presuppositions, assumptions, and presumptions as part and parcel of “facts on the ground (i.e., exemplifying ‘fact-value entanglement’).” That is followed by several important points that serve as prelude to introducing Jeff Halper’s latest book, Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State (Pluto Press, 2021). Americans often stand apart in being woefully misinformed and ill-informed (or in denial, etc.) about the history and politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the vast majority of its representatives in Congress and the major mass media outlets both in print and on television, have been far too long willing if not enthusiastic partners in propagating this ignorance, sometimes willfully so.
(i) “There are only two ways. The one currently pursued by the Israeli government, in all its agencies, is the path of violent, stubborn coercion. The extreme nationalists of the Israeli right have a vision that is easy enough to comprehend; it is embodied daily in a thousand acts and signs. They want to crush Palestinian nationalism as a historical force, and the Palestinian people as a collective; to hem the Palestinians within isolated enclaves and to cut off any hope of their sustaining a national existence with a basis on the ground; and, in the course of achieving this, to annex as much land (with as few living Palestinians attached to it) as possible. In short, this is an uncompromising vision of domination and control. The right, clinging to all the violent memories of the past, fears the Palestinians and inhabits a mental universe in which the only safe option is to attack, punish, destroy, incarcerate, and contain. Such people perceive any alternative approach or action, based on compromise and negotiation and on acknowledging one’s own responsibility for what has happened, as an existential threat. Thus they are prepared to live indefinitely with ongoing occupation, in one form or another; they are also willing to make occasional, relatively minor sacrifices, like the withdrawal from Gaza, in order to ensure the continuation of the main colonial enterprise. A regime of total control, constant application of brute force, the rape of the land—all these are acceptable, indeed necessary, if the Jews are to survive.” — David Shulman, Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine (University of Chicago Press, 2007)
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The following from G.A. Cohen [see the reference under ‘Recommended Reading’] hardly does justice to the complete substance of Cohen’s argument, as I had to leave much out owing to its length and complexity. Nevertheless, I trust it provides at least a sufficient taste of the questions and topics raised by Cohen, most of which are not, typically (indeed, hardly ever), addressed in the Palestinians’ pursuit of self-determination both within and outside the Israeli state. At least once Cohen refers to the Palestinians, or Arabs in Israel more generally, lacking “citizenship” status which, strictly speaking, is not true, the problem here being rather that, for a variety of reasons, “Arabs are very much second-class citizens in Israel,” for example, they have “passport citizenship” rights, but are excluded from several aspects of the Jewish welfare state and are therefore denied equal “democratic citizenship.” “While enjoying the fruits of Jewish civil rights (such as access to courts of law and private property) and political rights (access to the ballot and to government) they are denied social rights and economic rights in the form of social security, education and welfare, or access to land and water resources of the State.” Furthermore, while Israel “grants automatic citizenship to every Jew in the world, wherever he or she was born,” the state of Israel completely rejects “the Palestinian right of return—recognized internationally by the UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948. This rejection refuses to allow the Palestinian citizens of Israel to unite with their immediate families or with those who were expelled in 1948. Denying people the right of return to their homeland, and at the same time offering this right to others who have no connection to the land, is a model of undemocratic practice.” (See Pappé, 2011, 2017; and Peleg and Waxman, 2011, for these and other reasons Arabs in Israel are denied equal democratic citizenship within the state of Israel.)
(ii) … [W]e may be disposed to affirm what certain conditions of extreme injustice need not be tolerated, that people may do everything within their power to remove them, or, at any rate, that the sufferers of that extreme injustice may themselves do anything they can do to remove them. But we are also inclined to affirm that certain means of fighting injustice should never under any circumstances be used. Yet what can we say when our two inclinations come together because we are asked to consider circumstances that display the contemplated conditions of extreme injustice, in which forbidden means are the only means available? When we acknowledge that such circumstances are possible, we are forced to revise some of our convictions about what morality says. [….]
… [T]he force, the effect, of a moral admonition varies according to who’s speaking and who’s listening [this falls with the range of topics addressed in rhetoric]. Admonition may be sound, and in place, but some people may be poorly placed to offer it. When a person replies to a critic by saying: ‘Where do you get off criticizing me for that?’ she is not denying (or, of course, affirming) the inherent soundness of the critic’s criticism. She is denying here critics right to make that criticism, in a posture of judgment. Her rejoinder achieves its effect without confronting the context of her critic’s judgment. She challenges, instead, her critic’s right to sit in judgment, and to pass judgment. She couldn’t similarly challenge a critic whom she had overheard saying, to a third party: ‘I of course agree that what she did was morally wrong, but I’m not myself in a position to criticize her (It’s not for me to cast the first stone).‘ [….]
We can distinguish three ways in which a person may seek to silence, or to blunt, the edge of a critic’s condemnation. First, she may seek to show that she did not, in fact, perform the action under criticism. Second, and without denying that she performed that action, she may claim that the action does not warrant moral condemnation, because there was an adequate justification for it, or at least a legitimate excuse for performing it. Third, while not denying that the action was performed, and that it is to be condemned (which is not to say: while agreeing that it is to be condemned), she can seek to discredit her critic’s assertion of her standing as a good faith condemner of the relevant action. [….] What I mean is that there are facts about the critic that compromise her utterance considered as, what it purports to be, a condemnation: the focus is on the intended role, or illocutionary force of the utterance. [….]
This third way of deflecting criticism, that is, by impugning the right of the critic to condemn, is of great importance in the political world, where it matters enormously who can say what to whom, credibly and sincerely: that consideration helps to determine the fate of would-be critical interventions. The world of politics is not populated by saints with spotless track records, but by non-saints who have a better hope of deflecting criticism not by trying to justify what they themselves did, but by implicating their criticizing fellow non-saints in the same or similar charges [e.g., ‘Tu quoque,’ which is an informal fallacy, meaning there are occasions, as here, when it is not fallacious; nor is it, therefore, reducible to a fallacious ad hominem]. [….]
The Israelis have a tu quoque case to answer, because they kill and maim many more people, and deprive many more still of their homes and livelihoods, than Palestinian terrorists do. To be sure, there are Israelis who are oppressed by that fact and who are highly critical of their own government, but who believe that that government may nevertheless credibly condemn Palestinian terrorism because terrorism is morally much worse than any violence that the Israeli government itself commits. In response to the claim that Israeli condemnation of Palestinian terror is silenced by the fact that Israelis kill many more Palestinians, and a lot more children, these Israelis argue that Israeli killing is not as bad as Palestinian killing.
Some of these Israelis invoke the principle of double effect, which distinguishes between killing innocent people as an unintended but foreseeable side effect of otherwise targeted action, and killing innocent people who are your target, people, that is, whom you hope and intend to kill. ‘Our government can condemn them,’ these Israelis might say, ‘because although our government kills more innocent people than they do, our government does not aim to kill innocent people. [….]
I … believe that the only sane form of the principle of double effect is comparative, rather than absolute. I believe, for example, that, holding everything else equal, such as, for instance, the amount of justice that there is in the motivating cause, killing two hundred innocents through foreseeable side effect is actually worse than killing one innocent who is your target. It seems to me ludicrous for us to sat that you committed an outrage when you set your sights on, and killed, a civilian with your petrol bomb, but that we did not commit an outrage when our bombing destroyed not only the Hamas leader [presumably one believed ‘guilty’ of directing or implicated in terrorist acts] that we were aiming at but also fifteen people that lived near him, because we merely foresaw that effect, without intending it [forswearing intention may in any case be disingenuous, as we might conclude after the various wars and ‘operations’ in Gaza]. And we also have to take into account how careful combatants are to avoid killing civilians. It is possible not to aim at killing them yet to be utterly reckless of their safety, and it seems pretty clear that Israeli soldiers have become more reckless, in some cases willfully reckless, as the conflict has deepened. And worse still than (merely) reckless side-effect killing is the side-effect killing that is still not aimed at, that remains ‘mere’ side effect, but that is expected and welcomed, because it deters potential terrorists who care about their families and their neighbors. [….]
For you are yourself more or less implicated in the act you seek to condemn if you caused a legitimate grievance to which the act is a response. And how, therefore, can you reasonably expect your condemnation of the act to be received as made in good faith, unless you address the grievance of those you condemn? How can you suppose yourself to be free to set aside the size and character of that grievance, and your putative role in causing it, and proceed to condemn the responsive terrorist act, as a third party freely might? [….] For whoever caused a particular grievance, and whatever the weight of that grievance may be [in this instance, it happens to be ‘spectacular’], an agent who unjustifiably constrains the practical options that are available to the putatively aggrieved [the Israeli government has often treated predominantly or even exclusively nonviolent protest in much the same manner it responds to violent protest] is not well placed to condemn the choice of option (in our case, terrorism) that he, the constrainer, makes particularly eligible, from the point of the view of the constrained. [….]
… [I]f the Palestinians have a legitimate grievance, then it is against an Israel that both created their grievance and restricts their practical options of response. Accordingly, the question of the justice of the Palestinian grievance cannot be set aside by those who deprive them of conventional means of redress in a discussion of the particular unconventional means that they use to pursue their grievance, especially (but not only) if those who deprive them of conventional means are also the unjust causers of that grievance. [….] If the Palestinians had normal democratic sovereignty and normal civil liberty they would have a normal army which is not equipped merely to police its own people. It is central to their grievance that they lack a state, and therefore, among other things, the approved means of violence that a state possesses. … [This lack] contributes strongly to the explanation of their mode of pursuing their grievance which includes the grievance that you lack conventional means of pursuing grievances. [Please note that Cohen is here assuming the Palestinians want their own state, separate from the Israeli state, commonly termed the ‘two-state’ solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (a phrase that belies the grossly asymmetrical and fundamentally or genetically unjust nature of the colonial settler Zionist project in Palestine). But, as Jeff Helper explains, ‘[h]ad it been implemented, the two-state solution might have worked, even if it wasn’t fair. Palestinians would have had a viable sovereign (if small) state on 22 percent of historic Palestine.’ But Israel has steadfastly and intransigently rejected what the international community supported as far back as 1967. And both the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) (in 1988) and the Arab League (in 2002) officially accepted the two-state solution. (‘They even reject the very fact of occupation.’) ‘So, true, while the two-state solution may have worked, it was never accepted by Israel. Regardless, it is now dead and gone, buried under massive settlement blocs.’]
Cohen proceeds to clarify the truth of two conceptual claims:
… [Y]our having left me with no reasonable alternative does not itself entail that I was forced to do whatever it was you left me with not reasonable alternative to, if only because I might nevertheless not have done that thing. […. ] Therefore having no acceptable alternative do doing something does not entail being forced to do that thing. The second truth is that having no reasonable alternative to using terror may be a necessary condition of being justified in using terror, but it does not follow that it is a sufficient condition of being justified in using terror. For it might be true, I might be in the parlous position that, while I have no acceptable alternative to terrorism, terrorism is nevertheless more unacceptable than one or more of my other unacceptable courses. I might have to choose between disaster for me and a course so morally horrible that the only decent thing to do is to choose disaster for me [a real ‘Sophie’s choice?’]. But how can you in particular condemn me if I refuse to choose disaster for me, when it was you who deprived me of all acceptable alternatives, unless you can justify your having done so? If someone has no acceptable alternative, then there is a case to answer against whoever made that true. If the sad moral truth is that, although all of my alternatives to terrorism are unacceptable, my terrorism is nevertheless unjustified, then how, even so, can the person who deprived me of the acceptable alternatives, and so drove me to admittedly unjustifiable terrorism, condemn that resort, without justifying the action that thus disabled me? [….]
I have assumed, in order to expose some lines of moral principle, that Palestinian terrorism is an effective strategy. But certain non-terrorist strategies might in fact be more effective. Suicide protests [as seen, for example, during the American war in Vietnam, among both Tibetan monks and laypersons protesting Chinese cultural genocide, among peace protestors in the U.S., and in the Middle East] which kill only the protestors might be far more effective, because of the reaction of world opinion. [….] Or suppose that the Palestinians retire their anti-Israeli armed struggle and demonstrate wholly peacefully on a mass on a mass scale against the semi-apartheid/semi-colonial status that they are coming to have under Israeli rule [things have worsened on this score since Cohen wrote this]. Might this not, in time, produce a potent international, and Israeli, outcry against Israeli rule?
It has been a central claim [of Cohen’s argument] that one consequence of the difference between an expression of moral opinion and a condemnation is that it might be true both that terrorism is to be condemned (moral opinion) and that some particular person is not in a position to condemn it, But equally, so it follows, the fact that someone is not in a position to condemn something does not imply that the thing is not to be condemned.” — G.A. Cohen
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(iii) “Future historians may single out 2021 as the year the tide turned for the Palestinian struggle—though it was hard to see coming. The final months of 2020 were among the bleakest in decades, as a US administration bent on furthering Israel’s right-wing expansionist vision sought to dismantle, bit by bit, the central concerns that make up the Palestinian cause: the right of refugees to return to homes from which they were expelled in 1948, the status of Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, and the right to self-determination on lands currently occupied by Israel. At the year’s end, the coup de grâce came when several Arab states turned their backs on Palestine, normalizing diplomatic and economic relations with Israel despite its continuing subjugation of Palestinians. The Palestinian people seemed to have been vanquished, while Israel pursued its annexation of occupied territory.
But breakthroughs came unexpectedly. In January 2021, B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization, released a report unambiguously titled A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid. In it, the authors argued that their organization’s mandate from its founding in 1989—to bring to light Israeli human rights violations in the Occupied Territories—was no longer adequate. ‘The situation has changed,’ the report explained. ‘What happens in the Occupied Territories can no longer be treated as separate from the reality in the entire area under Israel’s control.’
The power of this report was not in the accusation, delivered by an Israeli organization, that Israel was practicing apartheid; Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organization committed to protecting Palestinians living under Israel’s military regime in the West Bank, had leveled that charge six months earlier, as had several leading Israeli public figures. Indeed, numerous Israeli and international voices have warned for years that Israeli practices, left unchecked, would amount to a system of apartheid. What was different about B’Tselem’s analysis was its challenge to a pervasive myth, one to which much of the international community subscribes, that Israel’s military rule in the occupied Palestinian territory can be treated as somehow separate from the state of Israel. Instead, the organization characterized Israel as a single ‘regime that governs the entire area.’
Three months later, Human Rights Watch, the world’s leading international human rights organization, echoed this finding when it issued an exhaustive report, including extensive legal analysis, which concluded damningly that a historic threshold had been crossed: Israeli authorities were committing crimes against humanity, in the form of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people. Beyond the South African origin of the term, apartheid is universally prohibited under the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which also prohibits the crime of persecution.
To justify their claim of a watershed, B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch cited a number of developments: Israel’s continuing de facto annexation of Palestinian territory; the laws with constitutional status within Israel enshrining Jewish supremacy; the entrenchment of Israel’s system of control over Palestinians; the demise of the peace process; and the efforts of the US to ratify and formalize this reality under the guise of a nominal commitment to a two-state solution. For both organizations, as for many other analysts, activists, and policymakers, the convention of treating Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip as temporary—and therefore a matter that could potentially be resolved outside the confines and control of the state of Israel—was no longer an accurate description of reality. There was no indication of anything other than the permanence of Israel’s hold over ‘the entire area,’ as B’Tselem had put it.
Then, in May, the uprising that Palestinian have come to dub the ‘Unity Intifada’ erupted, set off by Israel’s planned expulsion of several Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem. Within days, Israel was facing popular protests by Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank, a mass mobilization against state-sanctioned violence in Israeli cities, and protests among the Palestinian refugee and diaspora communities. As the crackdown by Israeli police in Jerusalem intensified in violence and scale, militants in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip offered armed resistance, sending barrages of rockets farther into Israel than they had in previous conflicts; this escalation inevitably drew a disproportionate military response from Israel. By the time a truce was called, at least 248 Palestinians in Gaza had been killed, including sixty-six children; a dozen Israelis had died, including two children.
The ground zero of the uprising, the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, had emerged as both a symptom and a symbol of the regime that B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch had identified: a sprawling nexus of legal, military, and economic institutions, both directly of the state and by proxy, whose primary purpose was to consolidate land for Jewish settlement by dispossessing Palestinians. Overnight, Sheikh Jarrah became emblematic of what Zionism has wrought in Palestine over more than a century, and the uprising across the land heralded a rejection of the regime’s decades-long efforts to divide and fragment Palestinian unity.” — Tareq Baconi, in The New York Review of Books, Nov. 5, 2021
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The Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination & the Right of Resistance to Occupation
Perhaps it goes without saying, but I’ll say it: no nation-state or group of such states has legal and political—let alone moral—authority, to ask or demand (as part of one or more conditions for negotiations, or ending a belligerent occupation, aggression or repressive forms policing or ‘security’) political groups or organizations struggling to realize their international legal right to collective self-determination to renounce all use of violence to achieve their ends—all the more so if the denial of self-determination is, as is often the case, part and parcel of collaboration with outside and more powerful parties systematically failing to enforce or recognize human rights: civil, political, social, cultural, and economic. Adding insult to injury, we note the states “demanding” such relinquishment have themselves more often than not achieved their own collective self-determination through violent means (war, rebellion, revolution, terrorism, what have you), while now resorting to means of violence when conventional and nonviolent political methods (diplomacy, negotiation, sanctions, etc.) appear to fail, ruthlessly exploiting a gross asymmetry in various forms of power while employing violence to assert its political will on others (for whatever reason: ideological domination, regime change, resource exploitation, a more congenial economic environment …). Conceding this does not amount to an implicit or roundabout justification or warrant for the particular means of violence such groups or organizations may choose in their struggle (although it’s not difficult to understand why those who are frequently subject to state terror often defend themselves with terrorist means readily available to them) for which they are morally responsible, hence accountable (consider the Sorelian-like celebration of violence or the romantic militarism that finds easy justification for acts of terrorism). Indeed, it may be the case that the humanitarian-inspired constraints of just war theory (especially jus in bello) should apply to groups like the Palestinians in their struggle for collective self-determination.
Speaking of the Palestinians, it’s useful to remind ourselves that, under international law, in the words of Richard Falk, “Palestinian resistance to occupation is a legally protected right,” one that arises in the first instance from two documents: the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples and the Fourth Geneva Convention and its subsequent protocols. As argued in a couple of articles Falk co-authored with Burns Weston,
“Israel’s failures as a belligerent occupant to abide by international law amount[s] to a fundamental denial of the Palestinian right of self-determination, and more generally of respect for the framework of belligerent occupation—therefore giving rise to a Palestinian right of resistance.”
In short, Palestinians have an inalienable moral and legal right to resist an illegal and violent military occupation.
For its part, Israel has reacted to all manner of Palestinian resistance, be it violent or non-violent, with routine reliance on “excessive and disproportionate use of lethal force, including the apparent targeting of civilians and children [including the demolition of housing, torture and various other forms of indiscriminate ‘collective punishment’].” Both the creation of “facts on the ground” (e.g., ever-expanding settlements) “and the use of such force … constitute repeated and fundamental violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention, violations that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
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Argument (part of an argument made by more than a few of our authors below): There is no longer a plausible or viable “two-state” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Assumptions (which case serve as premises): If one is still speaking of a “two-state” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it shows you have not been paying attention to the history and politics in the Palestinian territories, that you lack a basic understanding of the nature of Zionist settler colonialism and the role of Zionist nationalism in Israel politics, that you are indulging in ideological myths and fantasies that lack a meaningful orientation to social, economic, and political facts (on the ground, as we say), that you do not fully grasp the legal right and political principle of Palestinian self-determination, that you do not sufficiently appreciate the logic, values and principled practices of democratic theory and practice and the corresponding significance of human dignity and human rights … and so forth and so on.
A bit of relevant history
In 1939, Great Britain proposed a “one-state” solution in Palestine after concluding that the partition proposal was not acceptable to either the Jews or the Arabs. In its White Paper of the same year, the Government noted that the Mandate, which included the notorious Balfour Declaration, was not intended to convert Palestine into a Jewish state against the will of the Arab population:
“His Majesty’s Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State. They would indeed regard it as contrary to their obligations to the Arabs under the Mandate, as well as to the assurances which have been given to the Arab people in the past…. [….]
It is proper that the people of the country should as early as possible enjoy the rights of self-Government which are exercised by the people of neighbouring countries. His Majesty’s Government are [sic] unable at present to foresee the exact constitutional forms which Government in Palestine will eventually take, but their objective is self-government, and they desire to see established ultimately an independent Palestinian State. It should be a State in which the two in Palestine, Arabs and Jews, share authority in Government in such a way that the essential interests of each are secured.” — Malcolm MacDonald, Secretary of State for the Colonies, in a statement presented to the Parliament (1939).
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In the Los Angeles Times last year (May 23, 2019) George Bisharat argued the case for a democratic, one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
[….] “The two-state solution is dead, laid low by a thousand cuts – or, more precisely, by the hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, whose immovable presence ensures that no genuinely sovereign Palestinian state will ever emerge there. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have both played a role in delivering the final blows: Trump with his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and Netanyahu by promising voters prior to his recent reelection to begin annexation of the West Bank. [….]
It is time to face some undeniable facts: First, despite Israel’s every effort to establish and maintain a Jewish majority, the two peoples living under Israeli rule hover at near parity, at approximately 6.5 million Jews and 6.5 million Palestinians. Second, Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs are destined to live together in Israel/Palestine in perpetuity. Neither people can or should be forced to leave the land in which they reside and to which they are passionately committed. Third, segregation, of which the two-state solution was a form, is not the answer. As Americans know from our own historical experience, separate is never equal. Finally, it is only equal rights and justice that can provide the foundation for a durable peace for Israelis and Palestinians.” [….]
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I am reading, intermittently, Jeff Halper’s informative, perceptive, and persuasive book, Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State (Pluto Press, 2021). Halper, head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and a founding member of the One Democratic State, reminds us that the phrase “Arab – Israeli Conflict” [and since the first Intifada, ‘Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’] conceals a “deeper struggle,” that is,
“… the colonization of Palestine by the Zionist movement, culminating in a state of Israel ruling over the entirety of the country [that is, Palestine]. To be sure, colonization generates conflict. But ‘conflict’ did not simply erupt for one reason or another. Jews, in fact, lived in peace with the local Arab population for centuries, if not millennia. They were known in Arabic as yahud awlad ῾arab (Native Arab Jews), al-yahud al-῾arab (Arab Jews), al-yahud al-῾alin (Native Jews), abna al-balad (Sons of the Land) or, in Hebrew, Bnei Ha’aaretz (Children of the Land). Zionism shattered this historic relationship.
Driven by persecution and the rise of nationalism in Europe, it was European Jews with little knowledge of Palestine and its peoples who launched a movement of Jewish ‘return’ to its ancestral homeland, the Land of Israel, after a national absence of 2000 years. In their newly minted nationalist ideology, they were the returning natives. In their eyes, the Arabs of Palestine were mere background. They had no national claims or even cultural identity of their own. Palestine was, as the famous Zionist phrase put it, ‘a land without a people.’ The European Zionists knew the land was peopled, of course. But to them the Arabs did not amount to ‘a people’ in the national sense of the term. They were just a collection of natives—though not the Natives, a status the Jewish claimants reserved for themselves. They played no role in the Zionist story. Having no national existence or claims of their own, the Arabs were to removed, confined or eliminated so as to make way for the country’s ‘real’ owners.
This form of conquest—for that is what it was—took the form of settler colonialism. Zionism felt a deep sense of historical, religious and national connection to the Land of Israel. But in claiming Palestine for themselves alone and rejecting the society they found there, they chose to come as settlers—or more precisely, their choice of settler colonialism rested on formative elements in both Jewish and European societies, such as the notion of biblical ‘chosenness’ and a Divinely sanctioned ownership of the land; a self- and externally enforced ethno-national existence in the European ‘Diaspora:’ embeddedness in the rise of European nationalism, primarily the ‘tribal’ nationalism of Eastern Europe and European experiences of settler colonialism (particularly of Germans in Slavic lands); immediate pressures of economic and religious persecution; and more, …. The upshot is that Zionists intended to displace the local population, not integrate into it as immigrants would. And displacement is by definition a violent process. Zionist ideology justifying the displacement of the indigenous population. The ‘logic’ of settler colonialism worked itself through nationalist ideology. Early Zionist leaders presented the ‘conflict’ as one ethno-religious nationalism against another [which functioned on the order of a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’] so as to deflect attention from settler colonialism, garner the support of the Jewish people and stifle diasporic Jewish opposition. They also used arguments of self-defense to win support of non-Zionist Jews, especially allies in Britain and the U.S. As the only legitimate national group, the Zionists reduced ‘the Arabs’ into a faceless, dismissible enemy Other. Zionist ideologues like David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir knowingly altered the framework from one of settler colonialism to that of conflict between and aggressive (and foreign) Arab ‘Goliath’ and the peace-loving (native) Jewish ‘David.’”
Near the end of the book, Halper has a helpful chapter “addressing the fears and concerns of a single democratic state,” one home to both Palestinians and Jews, one in which a Liberal democratic constitution “protects both the individual civil rights of all the country’s citizens as well as the collective rights of all its ethnic, religious, and national communities.”
Recommended Reading (there is much worth reading left off this list, so one might browse through my Israeli-Palestinian Conflict bibliography):
- Abunimah, Ali. One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2006.
- Aly, Abdel Monem Said. “The Case for the One-State Solution,” The Cairo Review of Global Affairs (Winter 2019).
- Avnery, Uri and Ilan Pappé. “Two States or One State,” A debate sponsored by Gush Shalom (June 11, 2007): http://ilanpappe.com/?p=58
- Azoulay, Ariella and Adi Ophir (Tal Haran, trans.) The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.
- Baconi, Tareq. Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018.
- Baconi, Tareq. “What Apartheid Means for Israel,” The New York Review of Books, November 5, 2021.
- Barghouti, Omar. BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions—The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2011.
- Cobban, Helena. “Breakout: Hamas and the End of the Two-State Solution,” Boston Review (May/June 2008): http://bostonreview.net/BR33.3/cobban.php
- Cohen, G.A. “Casting the First Stone: Who Can, and Who Can’t, Condemn the Terrorists?” in Cohen’s posthumously published volume edited by Michael Otsuka, Finding Oneself in the Other. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013: 115-142.
- Cypel, Sylvain. Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse. New York: Other Press, 2006.
- Davis, Uri. Israel: An Apartheid State. London: Zed Press, 1987.
- Fari, Hani, ed. The Failure of the Two-State Solution: The Prospects of One State in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013.
- Hajjar, Lisa. Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005.
- Halper, Jeff. Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State. London: Pluto Press, 2021.
- Harding, Jeremy. “Subversive Activity,” London Review of Books (LRB) blog, 27 October, 2021.
- Hilal, Jamil, ed. Where Now for Palestine? The Demise of the Two-State Solution. London: Zed Books, 2007.
- Hiltermann, Joost. “Israel’s Latest Effort to Fragment and Disempower the Palestinians,” Middle East Report Online, November 10, 2021.
- Hussein, Cherine. The Re-emergence of the Single State Solution in Palestine-Israel: Countering an Illusion. New York: Routledge, 2015.
- Judt, Tony. “Israel: The Alternative,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. 50, No, 16 (Oct. 23, 2003): http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16671
- Kattan, Victor. From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1891-1949. London: Pluto Press, 2009.
- Kovel, Joel. Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel-Palestine. London: Pluto Press, 2007.
- Kretzmer, David. The Occupation of Justice: The Supreme Court of Israel and the Occupied Territories. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002.
- Lazare, Daniel. “The One-State Solution,” The Nation (Oct. 16, 2003): http://www.thenation.com/doc/20031103/lazare/single
- Lieblich, Eliav and Adam Shinar. “Counterterrorism Off the Rails: Israel’s Declaration of Palestinian Human Rights Groups as ‘Terrorist’ Organizations,” Just Security, October 24, 2021.
- Lim, Audrea, ed. The Case for Sanctions Against Israel. London: Verso, 2012.
- Lustik, Ian S. Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
- Makdisi, Saree. Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008: 281-298.
- Maoz, Zeev. Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel’s Security & Foreign Policy. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009 (2006).
- Middle East Monitor. “Israel outlaws six Palestinian human rights groups,” October 22, 2021.
- O’Malley, Padraig. The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine—A Tale of Two Narratives. New York: Penguins Books, 2015.
- Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford, England: One World Publications, 2006.
- Pappé, Ilan. “Blueprint for a One-State Movement: A Troubled History,” in Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé, Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2010: 125-144.
- Pappé, Ilan. The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.
- Pappé, Ilan, ed. Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid. London: Zed Books, 2015.
- Pappé, Ilan. Ten Myths about Israel. London: Verso, 2017.
- Peleg, Ilan and Dov Waxman. Israel’s Palestinians: The Conflict Within. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
- Rena and Milena. “Israel just declared our human rights work ‘terrorism.’ But it won’t silence us,” Los Angeles Times, November 6, 2021.
- Rodinson, Maxime. Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? New York: Anchor Foundation/Pathfinder, 1973.
- Salhab, Akram and Dahoud al-Ghoul. “Jerusalem Youth at the Forefront of 2021’s Unity Intifada,” Middle East Report Online, November 10, 2021.
- Shamas, Diala. “The Downstream Effects of Israel’s ‘Terrorist’ Designation on Human Rights Defenders in the US,” Just Security, November 4, 2021.
- Shehadeh, Raja. “What Does Israel Fear from This ‘Terrorist’?” The New York Review of Books, December 2, 2021 issue.
- Shenhav, Yehouda. Beyond the Two State Solution: A Jewish Political Essay. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012.
- Tilley, Virginia. “The One-State Solution,” London Review of Books, Vol. 25, No. 21 (6 November 2003): http://www.lrb.co.uk/.../virginia.../the-one-state-solution
- Tilley, Virginia. The One State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israel-Palestinian Conflict. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010.
- Tilley, Virginia, ed. Beyond Occupation: Apartheid, Colonialism, and International Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. London: Pluto Press, 2012.
- White, Ben. Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy. London: Pluto Press, 2012.
- Zertal, Idith and Akiva Eldar. Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007. New York: Nation Books, 2007.
Relevant Bibliographies (embedded links; freely available on my Academia page for viewing or download)
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