In the summer of 2012, a group of some ten Israelis and a similar number of Palestinians gathered in Beit Jala. The meeting revolved around a text that I had written in consultation with Jewish and Palestinian friends over the course of the previous summer, at the height of the 2011 Israeli social justice protests. The unofficial title of that paper was “Practical Utopia.” The text was influenced by an encounter I had had several years prior with a Palestinian academic named Said Zidani who showed me a text he had written in which he set out a proposal that struck me as at once simple and revolutionary: to adopt a European-Union-like model as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Two independent states that belong to a broader framework which allows for freedom of movement and residence between them.
Zidani’s proposal stayed with me, and echoed in my mind on my travels as a journalist in the West Bank and East Jerusalem during the Second Intifada. Until then, I had believed that the classic two-state solution – ending the Israeli occupation that began in 1967 in return for a Palestinian renunciation of the Right of Return, a separation between Israel and Palestine and a partition of Jerusalem – was the right formula for resolving the conflict. These travels, which were the first time I directly witnessed the reality beyond the Green Line, shook this belief.
I met Palestinians for whom the right to return to the places and lands they had lost in 1948 was not a tactic designed to eradicate Israel, as I had been taught to think, but rather a profound expression of their connection to the whole of the land that stretches between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. I met settlers who reminded me of what I had preferred to forget: that a substantial part of the Zionist discourse was founded on the historical and emotional link to the “Land of Israel,” and that in this discourse, Hebron, Nablus and Bethlehem are no less a part of the “Land of Israel” than Ramat Hasharon or Ra’anana, perhaps even more.
I wrote extensively about East Jerusalem, and as a native of Tel Aviv, was surprised to witness the extent to which the Jewish and Palestinian neighborhoods of this city are intertwined, how mixed the city truly is, in the Old City and in general.
These experiences taught me that in order to contain the deep sentiments that members of both nationalities hold for the entire space between the Jordan and the sea, and in order to cope with the already existing reality of a mixed population, a new vision was needed. Not “Us here, them there,” as the two-state idea was marketed to the Jewish public, but a more complex approach. It seemed to me that the idea that Zidani had presented to me several years earlier expresses this complexity. And this is how the meeting in Beit Jala was born.
Already in that initial meeting we agreed on five basic principles: two independent states based on the 1967 borders; open borders and a freedom of movement; Jerusalem as an open and shared city; shared institutions for the two states; and a redressing of past injustices without creating new injustices. These principles remain to this day at the heart of what has since become a movement that first called itself “Two States, One Homeland” and is now known by the name “A Land for All.”
The five principles we wrote out on the blackboard in Beit Jala have since been re-articulated, sharpened and expanded in thousands of meetings, but the basic vision underlying our work has remained the same: two nations live here in this land, both see this space as their homeland, and in order to reach a stable solution, the members of both nations must enjoy full national and civil equality. This conflict is not a border conflict between “Israel” and “Palestine”; it is an intimate conflict, and its solution must also be intimate.
Ten years on, the thinking that guided us in that meeting in Beit Jala has moved from the margins into the heart of the public debate, and the idea of a Palestinian-Israeli confederacy has become a legitimate subject of discussion, alongside the classic two-state idea and the idea of a single state.
We could point to several reasons for this relative success, but I would emphasize two of them above all, one external and the other internal. Externally, the process of political negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians that began with the 1993 Oslo Agreements has been entirely frozen for nearly a decade. The Palestinian split between the Fatah and Hamas severely damaged the Palestinians’ ability to present a political position; the “Arab Spring” significantly weakened the Arab nations and shrank their interest in the conflict even further, a process that reached its height with the signing of the Abraham Accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco; and the international community lost faith in its ability to solve the conflict.
As a result, a kind of general agreement took hold that even if the two-state solution remains the preferred solution of the Israelis, the Palestinians, and certainly the international community, there is currently not enough political muscle to advance it. As Menachem Klein aptly analyzes, as soon as the “outside” – i.e., the international community, including the Arab world – abandoned the conflict, the “inside” – namely, the Jews and the Palestinians living between the Jordan and the sea – became more important. Two seemingly contradictory processes – the rise in the political power of the Palestinian minority within sovereign Israel, on the one hand, and the expansion of the settlements and effective erasure of the Green Line, on the other hand – together strengthened the realization that “separation” in the sense promoted by the Oslo process is no longer relevant.
The conclusion that the Israeli right drew from the collapse of the possibility of separation is that Jewish supremacy needs to be reinforced. This explains the Nationality Bill, and is the logic behind the various annexation plans. It also explains the success of “transferists” like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich in the last elections. To them, the only way out of the bi-national reality that has been created is to overpower the Palestinians or expel them; “consensually” if possible, forcefully if necessary.
On the opposite side, the shifting of the weight toward the “internal” dimensions of the conflict has reinforced what Ameer Fakhouri and I have defined in our essays as “the partnership current.” Up until five years ago, the notion of a Jewish-Arab partnership was marginal in Israeli politics. Today it has become obvious in the Jewish center-left, even if the conditions and syntax of this partnership have not yet been articulated adequately or have not been articulated at all. The decision of the Joint List, the predominantly Arab Israeli political alliance, to recommend center-left candidates, the participation of an Arab party in the previous coalition, the rise of “shared society” organizations like Standing Together, and the expansion of the network of bilingual Arab-Jewish schools – these are all examples of the change.
Against the backdrop of the collapse of the notion of separation on the one hand, and the rise of the partnership current on the other, the idea of a confederation, which is based on a partnership between two independent states in the entire space, can resonate more easily. This does not mean that the idea has majority support; far from it. It poses questions that are hard to answer adequately at the moment: the future of the settlements, the Right of Return, Jerusalem, the economic gaps between the two states, security, and many other issues. Above all, it is a new idea that requires trust between the two sides, a trust that is now almost entirely absent.
The idea of a partnership in the homeland also poses an enormous challenge to both nationalities. When the Jews in Israel talk about “homeland,” they imagine a “Jewish state”; in other words, the boundaries of the homeland are largely identical to the boundaries of Jewish supremacy. When Palestinians talk about “homeland,” they are hard put to include within it the “foreigners” who came to settle it, namely the Jews. And yet, the idea of a shared homeland expresses the shared fate of the two peoples that live in the space between the Jordan and the sea, alongside each other and amongst each other; and it expresses an acknowledgment of their mutual dependence, a factor that according to Du Toit lay at the heart of the process of ending apartheid in South Africa.1Fanie Du Toit, When Political Transitions Work: Reconciliation as Interdependence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). The idea of a shared homeland can take what is today perhaps the one thing that is shared between the two communities, the Jewish and the Palestinian – namely their deep connection to the same piece of land – and transform it from a source of conflicts to a lever for attaining an equitable political agreement, and even the beginning of a reconciliation process. All this, provided that the agreement and the reconciliation are built on foundations of equality, of national and personal freedom, and of mutual respect.
- 1Fanie Du Toit, When Political Transitions Work: Reconciliation as Interdependence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
