Beyond the Two-State Solution

Yehouda Shenhav is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University.Dimi Reider is an Israeli journalist and blogger, co-founder and contributing editor at +972 Magazine and occasional contributor to the New York Times, Foreign Policy, the New York Review of Books and the Daily Beast website.

"America's renewed push to save the two-state solution is going nowhere fast. We need a new paradigm — and Shenhav's analysis is one of the best places we can start. It has profound implications for how we think of solving the Israel/Palestine conflict."—Mondoweiss"Poses interesting historical insights and assessments of present-day Israel."—Morning Star"Offers a meaningful critique to the ideology that the state has become undemocratic only because of the Six Day War."—Jerusalem Post"Finding it timely and noteworthy for its original insights into Israeli society, Palestinians in Ramallah promptly translated into Arabic this political commentary on the precarious state in which Israel finds itself. This updated version now appearing in English promises to further widen the circle of those who are beginning to realize that relevant political paradigms have undergone radical change, that a classical two-state solution to the conflict is a fantasy (and perhaps always has been), and that new realities require new ideas. This work certainly belongs to a new genre of writing on the conflict."—Sari Nuseibeh, Al-Quds University"Yehouda Shenhav makes an unusual and unsettling argument ... what appears on its face a 'progressive' position on the question of Israel and Palestine, is in fact censorial and duplicitous. The Israeli left's sanctimonious insistence in the face of the Jewish settlers of the West Bank that the settlements were illegal and that the proper borders of Israel are those of 1967, is nothing short of an ideological manoeuver. The purpose of the manoeuver is to obfuscate the fact that Israel itself is nothing short of a huge settlement project that was founded upon the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the systematic expropriation of the land they left behind."—Lama Abu Odeh, from the foreword"Shenhav does not accuse sides for the ongoing conflict, but is rather willing to offer peaceful alternatives in hopes of overcoming jingoist or chauvinist attitudes. In a very logical and clear way, he examines the reasons for the political struggle and contends that they lay deeper than just the foundation of the Israeli nation state itself." —Human Rights Review, 2015

• Foreword: Yehouda Shenhav's Beyond the Two-State Solution, Lama Abu Odeh page viiAcknowledgments xviiiIntroduction and Overview: The Crisis Facing Zionist Democracy 1A line drawn with a green pencil 3Time and space 6The degeneration of the 1967 paradigm 7The Zionist-liberal left and the peace accords 15The liberal new nostalgia 22Separation 26The settlers 29The political rights of the Jews 321 The Roots and Consequences of the Liberal New Nostalgia 35The "no partner" approach 35Chasing the yellow wind 38The academic and intellectual discourse 522 Was 1967 a Revolutionary Year? 55The "inevitability" of the 1967 Occupation of Palestinian territories 55The denial of political theology 603 The "Political Anomalies" of the Green Line 68The refugees of 1948 68The Arabs of 1948 74The Jewish settlers 92The Third Israel and its political economy 1064 1948 and the Return to the Rights of the Palestinians 116The Nakba 117Eradication and denial 122The present time of the Palestinian Nakba 131A shared time 1405 The Return to the Rights of the Jews 146Post-Westphalian sovereignty 149The possibility of sharing one space 154A comment on the role of intellectuals in times of crisis 164Notes 169Index 230