The only solution for a lasting peace in Israel-Palestine

It isn’t 2 states or 1 state, but getting rid of the nation-state all together.

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Over the last two months, congressional hearings and countless articles have touched on the same, seemingly insoluble, question: Is the very idea of Israel, of a “Jewish state,” justified, or is it fundamentally unjust towards the Palestinians who also live there? This question is difficult because we lack the basic ideas, the basic framework, needed to make sense of it. So let’s build up that framework and see how we can understand this question anew.

The project of creating a Jewish state was born out of the idea of “national self-determination” — that ethnic groups should be free to govern themselves. It’s called national self-determination because ethnic groups are also known as “nations” (think of the different First Nation peoples), so the idea is that the different ethnic-national groups around the world should be free to form their own states, what we then call “nation-states.”

Let’s pause here for a moment and make sure this picture is clear. An ethnic-national group is a cultural entity, consisting of people who share the same tradition, language, and worldview. It then creates a political entity — a state bureaucracy — in order to govern itself. The two entities merge and become one. It’s no longer just a nation. And it’s not just a state. Now it’s a nation-state.

So far this probably all seems pretty fair, right? Who would want to argue that ethnic groups shouldn’t have the right to govern themselves? And so we find this right to national self-determination enshrined as one of the very highest principles in international law.

So, coming back to Israel — of course, the Jewish people also want this right. They want their own homeland, their own state, which has been the goal of the Zionist movement since the 19th century. And why shouldn’t they? Why should their “national aspirations” be denied? Without their own state, many Jews feel that their people will forever be homeless, forced to perpetually live and wander through the homelands of others.

But, then… What about the “national aspirations” of the Palestinian people? Shouldn’t they also be able to govern themselves? From a recent article in the New York Times:

Around half the world’s Jews live in Israel, and destroying it, or ending its status as a refuge where they are assured of governing themselves, would imperil a people who have faced annihilation time and again.

“There is no debate,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, which has been defining and monitoring antisemitism since 1913. “Anti-Zionism [opposing the idea of a Jewish state] is predicated on one concept, the denial of rights to one people.”

Many Palestinians and their allies recoil just as fiercely: The equating of opposition to a Jewish state on once-Arab land… with bigotry is to silence their national aspirations, muffle political dissent and denigrate 75 years of their suffering.

There’s the predicament. Of course Jewish people should have the same right as every other people. But so should the Palestinians. So which side is right? To many, the obvious answer is to return to something like the UN’s original partition of the land into two separate nation-states (see the far left map above) — a nation-state for the Palestinians and a nation-state for the Jews.

This would seem to make sense, but really it would only perpetuate the problem. Why? Because the exact same issues would persist in the two newly-formed nation-states. Yes, one would be predominantly Jewish and the other predominantly Muslim, but they’d still be mixed, and they’d have other minority groups living there as well. Because people simply won’t be so easily partitioned (see the second and third maps above). There’s no way to keep a country ethnically pure, and why would you even want to? The fact is that Israel, like every other country in the world, will always be multi-ethnic.

So here’s the real problem in a nutshell: We’ve promised ethnic groups that they can form their own governments to express, protect, and maintain their own culture. But there are minorities in all of those countries and always will be, which means those minorities will always be second-class citizens — their culture won’t be afforded the same respect and privileges as the dominant culture. Not only that though, those minorities will also be feared and suppressed by the political majority because if they were to become the majority then they could use the government to express, protect, and maintain their culture instead.

Do you see the problem? Israeli Jews have to suppress Palestinians because they fear what would happen if Palestinians were to become the majority. Israel would no longer be a Jewish state. And this same fear inevitably arises in every country where the majority is at risk of being replaced by minorities (Great Replacement Theory anyone?). People simply don’t want to lose “their country.”

Can you begin to see how this idea of national self-determination is entirely absurd? To give political advantage to one cultural group means to disadvantage every other. And so by its very nature it breeds resentment and violence.

Even its basic logic doesn’t make sense: If every national group had the right to form its own nation-state, then minority groups in every country would secede, would break off into smaller and smaller countries. There are thousands of ethnic groups around the world that can argue they’re a distinct people with a distinct language, and a little less than two hundred existing nation-states. I can’t imagine a single one of those nation-states actually celebrating, and not immediately suppressing, a secession movement within its borders.¹

The only actual solution to this dilemma is to recognize that ethnic cultures and political states are actually two separate things, and need to be kept separate. Because no state should favor one culture over another. Everyone should be free to practice their own beliefs and traditions without losing their rights because of it.

So what’s needed today is actually to separate nation and state, to decouple every nation-state and end the project of national self-determination. Doing so would have an immediate impact on the conflicts in Israel and Ukraine (which I’ve previously written about), as well as the culture wars raging through the world. Because these too, are clearly just a result of different cultures, different worldviews, struggling to control the government in order to impose their beliefs on others (we can see this so clearly in the US in fields like education and medicine, as well as in seemingly innocuous questions like what national holidays we should celebrate).

But what should be done in the sort-term, especially in such a white-hot situation as Israel-Palestine? What’s needed is to work in this same direction. In the long-run, terrorism won’t be rooted out through violence, so other steps must be taken. As the political analyst Yousef Munayyer has argued, the only way for Israelis to undercut Palestinian support of Hamas and bring about a lasting peace is to give Palestinians full human rights, bring them into the state as equals, and then treat Hamas like any other gang that’s perpetrating violence against citizens.

Unfortunately Munayyer, like every other political analyst I’ve come across, doesn’t yet see that it’s the so-called “right” of nations to self-determination that is the fundamental obstacle in granting actual human rights to each individual, regardless of their national-ethnicity. We can only hope, and work, to spread this understanding as quickly as possible. Without it, the fires of nationalism, of racial and ethnic hatred, will only continue to spread.

1. In the United States alone there are some five hundred Indian nations, and in Europe there’s more than a hundred different ethnic minorities. Once you start looking for such stories, you find them everywhere, like the ongoing drama of the Catalan separatists in Spain or the different French regional cultures that are struggling to keep their dialects alive. And really at the end of the day, why do you need to have your own language to feel yourself to be a people, a nation? If Texas or Vermont feel that they’re sufficiently different from the rest of the US, why shouldn’t they be allowed to separate according to the logic of national self-determination? Why should they be forced to be part of the larger Federal government?