The Urge to Imagine the Unimaginable
You’re looking at Picasso’s Pursuit of Peace
What’s so absurd about a single democratic Israel-Palestine?
Is it too early or too late to ask this question? Is it idiotic? Naïve? Utopian? Is it clueless, cruel, to pose it to Israelis after October 7; to the Palestinians in the throes of a year-long genocide?
Is it truly unreasonable, offensive, antisemitic, to propose equality for the 7.5 million Palestinians living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, 5.5 million of whom are facing mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank?
I cite these figures with dread that they are grossly outdated. The Lancet, a leading international medical journal, estimated in July that Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza has already killed directly and indirectly close to 200,000 Palestinians. Other sources are far less conservative, estimating 300,000 hitherto killed, and another 200,000 by December.
Is it fathomable, let alone rational, for Israel to claim that equal rights for the Palestinians would be a mortal threat to Israelis? The power that has been actually committing these horrific crimes between the river and the sea, the power that has imposed a decades-long increasingly brutal occupation, established 150 settlements, allowed another 196 outposts, and supports 750,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The power that ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinians in 1948.
Is such an argument–that a people must be permanently oppressed, dehumanized, frequently mowed down, and forced out of their land to guarantee the security and safety of their tormentors and oppressors–not comically Orwellian? A straightjacket? A trap?
Alone, in the early evening, in the quiet of the room, with a drink in hand, do those making this argument ever hear themselves? Do they ever wonder what they would call such reasoning if it were made by the Palestinians about Israelis or by any other state about a people it subjugates?
Do Israel’s die-hards seriously believe that the blanket defense–They Made Me Do It–concocted by Nationalist Zionism a long time ago to help the Jewish state live with its sins and help its friends justify them still persuade anyone but themselves?
Do they see the world applauding and cheering Israel on as a beacon of light unto the nations? Do they see the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court ruling in its favor? Do they still see that old warm American embrace? Are the millions of protestors against its crimes just a mob of anti-Semites? Are dissenting younger American Jews nothing more than self-haters? Is AIPAC’s flagrant muscle-flexing, arm-twisting, and money spending to demonize and silence its critics a sign that the trends are moving in its favor?
Why is murdering hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the name of self-defense sensible, but respecting their right to self-determination and a decent, dignified life isn’t? Why is the former a better guarantee of a secure and peaceful future for Israel than the latter?
In full sight of this ever deepening tragedy, when does the human imagination at its most creative and magnanimous get its moment? We’ve seen, after all, the havoc it is capable of at its most sinister.
Why is it ludicrous to think the impossible is doable when the actual has proved inconceivable? Genocide, mass displacements, brutalization, conquest, ethnic cleansing…: are these heinous policies really more acceptable and understandable to defenders of Israel’s exclusive Jewishness than the realization of Palestinian statehood?
Why is it a given to them that an Israel-Palestine would be the stuff of civil wars, much like what we have in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq? Was it ever a given for us? Was our fratricide preordained, fate, a product of our DNA? Does the history of this land tell a different story, many different stories? More promising ones? Does the history of the US, Europe, Korea, Japan, Vietnam…have the same mix as ours? Worse? World War I and II, for example? Was a thriving, peaceful Europe a silly intellectual exercise at the end of WWII?
Why are we forbidden to imagine and work hard for the same path out of this pain and suffering? What is it about Israel-Palestine that is not amenable to a just and merciful end to the war over it?
Never a binational state?
Then a two-state solution? Not according to the Israeli Knesset which in July overwhelmingly passed a resolution against the establishment of a Palestinian state:
The Knesset of Israel firmly opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state west of Jordan. The establishment of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel will pose an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens, perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and destabilize the region.
If Palestinian freedom between the river and the sea is at best ridiculous and at worst antisemitic, where do we file this latest Knesset resolution? Are permanent subjugation, apartheid, genocide, and ethnic cleansing the strategy of a sound state? The makings of prosperity for its children? The pillars of a liberal democracy, with “the most moral army” in the world and peace-loving settlers?
Why then are so many of those who dearly love Israel so very fearful for its future now?
Why does Major General Yitzhak Brik, once a brigade, division, and troop commander in the Armored Corps and Israel Defense Forces ombudsman, declare with such certainty that “the country really is galloping towards the edge of an abyss. If the war of attrition against Hamas and Hezbollah continues, Israel will collapse within no more than a year”?
Why do his warnings echo those of Israel’s best economists, historians, novelists, philosophers, genocide scholars, journalists, lawyers, even its security chief Ronen Bar?
Many questions! But I am not the only one asking them. And I am certain I am not the only one imagining the unimaginable.
So I ask again: what’s so absurd about a single democratic Israel-Palestine?
In pondering the answer, Israelis and Palestinians might want to ask themselves two fundamental questions?
Does recognizing Palestinians’ historic rights to Palestine necessarily mean forfeiting Israelis’ right to remain there as citizens of the new state?
Does recognizing Israelis’ right to remain as citizens of the new state necessarily mean acceptance of Zionism’s claims over Palestine?
Because, in the end, Israelis and Palestinians are two people equal in number living in what Israel itself has, in fact, ensured is one state. Neither can hope for any meaningful and lasting salvation and peace if tyranny is the method of one of them and the life of the other. And to propose, as far too many Israelis do, that apartheid, butchery, and expulsion are the only path forward is to renounce the mind and heart.
It’s really as simple as that.
I leave you with Edward Said’s thoughts on the binational state, an idea as old as the struggle itself:
…so tiny is the land area of historical Palestine, so closely intertwined are Israelis and Palestinians, despite their inequality and antipathy, that clean separation simply won’t, can’t really, occur or work. It is estimated that by 2010 there will be demographic parity. What then?…
The question, I believe, is not how to devise means for persisting in trying to separate them but to see whether it is possible for them to live together as fairly and peacefully as possible.
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On Another Note
A fan of Jackson Brown’s? Your favorite song? Mine is “Stay.”
But apparently, “These Days” has had quite the journey since Brown wrote it when he was a junior in high school, in 1965.
…a remarkably durable composition, reinterpreted by Cher, St. Vincent, Glen Campbell, Miley Cyrus, Paul Westerberg and Drake, to name a handful. It inspired Wes Anderson’s 2001 film “The Royal Tenenbaums,” and more recently has become the unlikely soundtrack to a series of TikTok trends.
It’s Jackson Brown’s weekend, then. Enjoy!