Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via AP
People check buildings destroyed in an Israeli strike on the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on November 2, 2023.
Since the latest conflict in Israel and Gaza exploded early last month, one major question is what the Israeli endgame can possibly be. At the time of writing its brutal bombing and invasion have killed a reported 9,000 civilians, obliterated a large chunk of Gaza’s already rickety infrastructure, and led to gigantic internal displacement.
The stated objective of the Israeli government is to defeat Hamas permanently. But what then? Israeli officials insist that they won’t govern the territory, but there is no one aside from Hamas in a position to run anything. Even if Gazans were to cobble together some group to run what remains of Gaza’s shattered civil administration, the boiling hatred and despair that fuel Hamas’s terrorism will remain—indeed, it likely will get much worse.
It has been obvious for decades that the only path forward is to end the occupation and grant some kind of government to the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Whether this should be as two separate states or as a single one is the question.
The case against the two-state solution is mainly one of practicality. Just about every functioning state has territorial integrity, because otherwise its citizens will have to travel across international borders to visit other parts of the same country. Exclaves like Alaska or the Kaliningrad Oblast do exist, but they tend to be low-population parts of a much larger country, and be accessible via the sea.
A functioning state also needs at least a somewhat successful economy. If a country is desperately poor, most of its citizens are unemployed, and it relies on international aid to simply survive from day to day, it can’t be said to exist like other states. A country helplessly dependent on the goodwill of neighbors and the international community is a mere geographical expression.
A new Palestine not only would have a major population exclave in the Gaza Strip, its main territory in the West Bank would be cobwebbed with Israeli settlements. The economy of a new Palestine would of course be in shambles, particular in Gaza where the unemployment rate and poverty rate were 46 percent and over 50 percent respectively, even before this latest campaign of bombing and invasion. It would be highly likely to remain de facto under the thumb of Israel for the foreseeable future, and hence essentially a perpetuation of the status quo.
So, surely it would make a lot more sense just to create one country for all the people living in Israel-Palestine? At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall argues that the one-state solution is even less practical. “Any democratic polity, even by the most elastic definition, relies on some threshold level of consensus among a large majority of the population,” he writes. “Imagine looking at these two damaged peoples, capable of brutalizing each other to the extremes we are now seeing and actually thinking they could all be piled into a single state that wouldn’t immediately break down into paramilitary violence and civil chaos.”
I am unconvinced. As an initial matter of human history, there are many examples in history of peoples that fought each other repeatedly and brutally over decades or centuries, only to later coexist relatively peacefully—the French and the Germans, for instance, who while in different countries are still in the same polity in the form of the European Union. About any hatchet can be buried given enough time, peace, and prosperity.
But the history of South Africa, where I lived for two years—the most prominent example of an apartheid state, a term that also describes Israel—is more telling. To be sure, nothing that happened during apartheid was as bloody as the current invasion of Gaza, or Hamas’s attack on October 7 for that matter, but it still was a brutal system that created seething, bitter resentment.
In 1960, for instance, white police shot and killed some 69 people during a protest against the apartheid passbook system, which controlled the movement of Black people. In 1976 students in the Soweto township demonstrated against the introduction of Afrikaans as the default school language; police slaughtered hundreds of child protesters.
And those were just the most prominent examples of what was a system of constant violence and degradation. Apartheid, like Jim Crow segregation, was not about “separateness” but rather a system of white supremacist domination. Whites controlled politics and all important economic resources. Black, Indian, and mixed-race people had few rights, were subject to constant petty humiliations and controls, and faced an omnipresent threat of psychotic violence should they step out of line.
There is a man currently in Israeli prison, Marwan Barghouti, who bears an eerie similarity to Nelson Mandela.
The violence wasn’t entirely one-sided either. Nelson Mandela embraced violent resistance against apartheid early in his career, and founded uMkhonto we Sizwe as the paramilitary arm of the African National Congress (ANC). That group carried out a bombing in Pretoria that killed 19 people and injured 217 (though Mandela was already in prison by that point).
More importantly, the end of apartheid was a much more violent and close-run thing than popular history—with its focus on the saintly figure of Mandela, the ANC, and ultimate happy ending—tends to suggest. Mandela and his allies faced competition from many groups with alternative visions of the future, and serious, violent opposition from right-wing nationalists both Black and white.
In 1991, members of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), a white neo-Nazi group, started a gun battle with police near a planned speech by then-President F.W. de Klerk, leading to three deaths and dozens of injuries. In 1992, members of the right-wing Zulu nationalist Inkhata Freedom Party massacred a reported 45 ANC supporters. In 1993, thousands of AWB members and other right-wing Afrikaners stormed the Klempton Park World Trade Centre in an attempt to disrupt the negotiations happening there, and subsequently wrecked the place.
Throughout the 1980s and early 90s, general street violence between various factions was common. Anti-apartheid activists would sometimes lynch suspected police informers by “necklacing” them, meaning putting a tire filled with gasoline around their necks and burning them alive.
Probably the biggest crisis happened in 1994, when Lucas Mangope, then president of Boputhatswana—the Bantustan for the Tswana people, scattered across several patches of territory—refused to agree to the end of apartheid, as it would have meant the end of his power. Civil authority disintegrated, and white conservatives, including the AWB, attempted to prop up Mangope as leverage to obtain a whites-only state of their own. But local police and military were enraged at the presence of the AWB fascists, whose militia members took to driving around murdering Black passers-by at random. It all culminated in a gruesome scene caught on video, in which three AWB members on their way out of town were shot dead by an enraged Black police officer.
It would be hard to imagine a more difficult foundation for a multi-racial democracy. But against all odds, it worked, mostly. Democratic South Africa was established, and it remains.
Now, the subsequent post-apartheid history of South Africa is not very encouraging. Inequality is extreme, violent crime is rampant, the former Bantustans remain desperately poor, and unemployment regularly tops 30 percent. The economy has decayed significantly over the past decade despite the country’s enormous mineral wealth.
Apartheid was always going to leave deep scars. But the proximate problem with modern South Africa is that Mandela’s ANC, thanks, perhaps ironically, to the deep loyalty among the majority Black population created by the ending of apartheid, has faced no serious political competition in any election since 1994. As a result, it has degenerated into a deeply corrupt and incompetent organization. The major lesson here is that thirty years of one-party rule tends to lead to poor governance, not that the idea of a democratic South Africa was a bad one.
One could argue that the violence in Israel-Palestine is so much worse than what happened in South Africa that it is a difference in kind, not degree. But South Africans of all races would have had more than enough justification to cling to bitterness and resentment if they wished, and keep fighting until the country disintegrated. They simply chose not to do. Say what you will about white South Africans, they elected de Klerk, who did grudgingly agree to end apartheid, and they also voted overwhelmingly to end the system in a 1992 referendum. The reason is they looked around them—especially at the Rhodesian example, where an apartheid regime fought and lost a decades-long guerrilla war—and figured that they had no other way out.
The question for Jewish Israelis—who hold most of the power in this situation and therefore must take the lead on any lasting resolution—is whether they can muster this kind of sensible farsightedness. The biggest difference between the South Africa’s late apartheid regime and that of Israel is that there has not been any serious attempt to reach lasting peace from the latter party for decades now, since the pro-peace Israeli Prime Minister Yitzakh Rabin was assassinated by an ultra-Zionist terrorist. As Jerome Karabel writes here at the Prospect, there is a man currently in Israeli prison, Marwan Barghouti, who bears an eerie similarity to Mandela. Like Mandela, he once advocated violent resistance but turned against it in prison; like Mandela he is by far the most popular potential leader among Palestinians. If Israel wanted a credible negotiating partner, there he sits. But he remains locked up.
Instead the Netanyahu government has consistently prioritized the maintenance of apartheid and occupation, to the point of propping up Hamas to prevent the formation of a united Palestinian front, and undermining the idea of nonviolent resistance by regularly gunning down unarmed protesters.
If October 7 proved anything, it is that this decision gravely undermined Israeli security. Indefinite domination of Palestinians will produce more terrorist violence. Lashing out in berserk rage in response, as Israel is doing now blowing up children by the hundreds, is shredding its relationships with neighboring Arab states and poisoning its reputation around the world.
I believe that a one-state solution—perhaps as a Belgium-style federation with Zionist and Palestinian sub-units—really is the most realistic possibility to reach lasting peace. Maybe a two-state solution could be made to work somehow. But not without summoning the wisdom and decency that a one-state solution would also require. Just shoving off a Palestinian state consisting of the smoking Gaza crater and shreds of the West Bank will not solve the suffering that is at the root of Hamas’s murderous attacks.
