As Israel inches closer to annexing the West Bank and Gaza, the illusion of the two-state solution collapses, exposing the apartheid reality of governance between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
As Peter Beinart has argued convincingly, Donald Trump’s choice of advisors, combined with the messianic fanatics who hold the balance of power in the Israeli government, virtually guarantee the annexation by Israel of the West Bank, and, ultimately Gaza.
Annexation will completely expose the apartheid nature of the State of Israel. Today, there are approximately 7.2 million Jews and 6.3 million Arabs between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. All of the Jews are citizens of Israel with full rights and access to public services. The myth of Israel as a “Jewish democracy” depends on the fact that only 2.1 million of the Arabs are citizens of Israel, though with fewer rights and limits on their access to public services. 362,000 Arabs in East Jerusalem are citizens of the city but not of the state. The remaining approximately 4 million Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza are stateless, and subject to either military rule or open aggression. The lack of an agreed international status for the territories conquered by Israel in 1967 has left them with what we might call a maliciously ambiguous status. Their Palestinian residents have a supposedly temporary status as subjects of Israeli occupation (a term Israel rejects), pending a mutually agreed solution to the conflict. They are the people that the two-state solution needs – their ambiguous status will supposedly turn into citizenship of a Palestinian state. The malicious way they are ruled, allows Israel to hold so-called “democratic” elections in which more than a third of the population under its rule is ineligible to vote.
Defenders of Israel rebut charges of apartheid as ridiculous: Palestinian Arabs (about 21% of the total number of Israeli citizens) have the right to vote, they are represented in the Knesset, and some are judges and members of the armed forces. This specious argument depends on the fiction that the West Bank and Gaza are not in Israel. In fact, Palestinians constitute nearly 49% of the population ruled by the State of Israel, and most of them cannot vote or participate in the government that rules them.
Annexation of these territories will officially proclaim that they are part of Israel. But annexation will not involve extending citizenship and its rights to all Palestinians. Members of the Israeli cabinet like security minister Itamar Ben Gvir have been openly calling for the “voluntary” transfer of most of the Palestinians out of Israel. The genocidal campaign in Gaza and the accelerating ethnic cleansing of the West Bank provide a glimpse of what they really mean to do: confront Palestinians with a choice of emigration or perpetual violence, so they “voluntarily” choose emigration.
Most of those who claim to oppose such an outcome today advocate the two-state solution. But Ian Lustick, in his book Paradigm Lost, shows that the long-dead corpse of the two-state solution lies buried in the rubble of Gaza. The two-state solution is a fiction that has served for too long as a cover for Israeli apartheid. Once the cover is ripped off, the two-state solution is not a solution but an obstacle to overcome on the way to the only alternative there is to apartheid: equality.
Therefore opposition to the Jewish supremacist policy of annexation should organise not around the now-empty slogan of “two states for two peoples,” but around the slogan: “No to Annexation, Yes to Reunification.” Reunification was what happened in Germany. East Germans were not kept as stateless serfs of the West Germans; they received the full rights of citizenship.
It is not hard to show that it would be almost as difficult for these two peoples to coexist in a single state in Palestine/Eretz Yisrael as it would be to disentangle them to form two separate states. In fact, the so-called “two-state solution” never offered Palestinians a sovereign state; it hinted that the Palestinians might one day pick up their own garbage, while Israel controlled their borders, limited their security forces and dominated their economy.
The rights of the Palestinians require not mere opposition to annexation, but the demand that the inevitable annexation should become an initial step toward the democratic reunification of Palestine. The naked racism of the one-state reality would surely power a global movement as powerful as that against South African apartheid and, most importantly, shatter the now crumbling pro-Israel consensus in the United States. Reunification will not happen during the duopoly of Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu but it is time to cut through the confusion, recognise the inevitability of what Lustick calls the “one-state reality” and demand that those who will impose rule by a single state upon the land between the river and the sea will set before us a blessing, not a curse.
Barnett R. Rubin is Director, Afghanistan Regional Project and Associate Director, Center on International Cooperation of New York University. He is the author of Blood on the Doorstep: the Politics of Preventing Violent Conflict, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System, Afghanistan from the Cold War through the War on Terror, and other books.
