No Solution

The Forgotten and Failed History of Jewish Binationalism in Israel-Palestine

For more than twenty years now, we have been told, by an extraordinary range of voices and for an equally extraordinary range of reasons, that the two-state solution is dead. Some arrived at this conclusion reluctantly, as genuine believers in partition exhausted by decades of failure, bloodshed, and diplomatic collapse. Others, however, never truly accepted the framework to begin with and merely waited for history to furnish them with sufficient evidence to bury what they had always opposed in principle.

There are the Islamist one-staters, for whom the very existence of Jewish sovereignty in any part of the Middle East remains an intolerable rupture in the imagined continuity of Islamic history. There are Jewish-Israeli one-staters, some animated by messianic maximalism, others by ultra-nationalism, for whom partition represents an unforgivable concession. There are also antizionists, in the Middle East and the West, who disguise their desire for the dissolution of Israel behind the most sanctimonious language of inevitability and moral concern.

On this Substack, we have spent considerable time examining the ideologies, political traditions, and historical manipulations underlying these various projects. But there exists another camp that deserves separate treatment precisely because its motivations are fundamentally different. These are Israelis and diaspora Jews who genuinely believe in coexistence, compromise, and peace. Their argument emerges not from revolutionary romanticism or antizionist hostility, but from a seemingly sober observation: the history of the two-state process appears, after decades of negotiations, wars, intifadas, withdrawals, terror campaigns, and failed diplomacy, to have failed. If partition cannot work, they argue, then perhaps something else must be imagined.

That “something else” is usually described as binationalism in one form or another, and it is almost always sold as new and untested. The problem with this camp is not its intentions. Nor is it necessarily the sincerity of its convictions. The problem is that its foundational premise is historically illiterate. Binationalism is often treated today as though it were a fresh alternative. But this is simply untrue.

I received such a proposal a few months ago via email: a detailed ninety-eight-page document drafted by a group of Israeli activists with whom I have crossed paths over the years. This essay is, in essence, an extrapolation of my response to them.

Long before the modern peace process collapsed, long before Oslo, Camp David, or the Second Intifada, binationalism was debated intensely within Zionism itself. It attracted philosophers, pacifists, socialists, intellectuals, Marxists, rabbis, and even, at moments of crisis, some of the most important figures in mainstream Zionist leadership.

It failed. It failed because the idea could not solve the central problem that still continues to haunt every contemporary binational proposal: how two national movements, one Jewish and one Arab, could share sovereignty while fundamentally disagreeing on the legitimacy, purpose, institutions and future of the state itself. Above all, it failed because the overwhelming majority of Arab political actors at the time rejected political parity, rejected continued Jewish immigration to the territory, and rejected the principle of Jewish national equality altogether.

The tragedy is that many contemporary advocates of binationalism speak as though this history never occurred. But history did occur. And before declaring the two-state solution dead in favor of a binational future, it is worth revisiting the last time Jews attempted precisely that experiment.

The principal advocates during the Mandate period of a binational polity were Brit Shalom (the peace covenant), its successor organization, Agudat Ihud (the unity association), and the Marxist Hashomer Hatza‘ir Movement which later became an Israeli political party.