Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality

Ian S. Lustick

In my book, published in 2022 with Resling, I address the confusion and distress experienced by advocates of the two-state solution. Many of those people find themselves frustrated with their inability to imagine a plausible path to realizing that objective and bored by ways of thinking about the conflict that lead to nothing but stale observations, unproductive obsessions, and deus ex machina fantasies. By understanding the two-state solution, including the assumptions surrounding it, as both a paradigm for analysis and a program for action, I draw on the philosophy of science to explain how natural those feelings are when a paradigm fails. I also show how to move beyond paradigm failure to more productive and liberating assumptions, questions, and guidelines for action.  

The basis of my argument is to appreciate both the historical success, and the ultimate failure, of the two-state solution as a paradigm for both action and scholarship.  For decades it oriented political action and guided the lives, work, and scholarship of activists, politicians, academics, pundits, journalists, and think-tanks.  Understanding why Israel failed to achieve a historic compromise with Palestinians along these lines, one that very well could have normalized its existence in the region and protected the size of its Jewish majority, is the task of three chapters.  Each explains how the unintended consequences of either partially successful or overly successful strategies combined to doom prospects for that kind of land-for-peace compromise.   

First, I show how the partial implementation of Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” strategy for making peace with the Palestinians backfired by producing an extremization of Israeli demands just as the Arab-Palestinian side was responding, in the real but ambiguous way Jabotinsky expected it would, to Israel’s forcible demonstration that it could not be destroyed by war.  Instead of compromising from a position of strength, however, successive Israeli governments adopted either a policy of “deciding not to decide” or a “nothing is burning” approach designed to either avoid or prevent sincere negotiations. After decades of settlement, enabled by the psychological and political radicalization of the Israeli polity, de facto annexation of the territories captured in 1967 has destroyed the one option for a negotiated territorial compromise that has ever had the potential to accommodate the minimum demands of both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. 

I then contend that both the Holocaust’s role in Israeli political culture and the effects of the Israeli lobby’s veto over US policies toward Israel made equally important contributions to Israel’s failure to exploit opportunities for peace. As I show in the book’s second chapter, the Holocaust did not have to have the effect that it did.  All depended on how Jews, and Israeli Jews in particular, were guided to remember it and to learn from it.  By studying competition among four different ways the Holocaust has appeared in Israeli and Jewish collective memory, I show how the winner in that competition, what I call “Holocaustia”—the Holocaust as a template for Jewish life--made it politically difficult if not impossible to build winning coalitions in favor of taking risks or making compromises with gentiles. Remembering the Holocaust in this way, instead, for example, as an object lesson in the imperative to protect all peoples from systematic discrimination and genocide, helped paralyze Israeli responses to the Palestinians and is crucial to understanding Israel’s failure to embrace negotiated routes to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict.  

The third factor that made it difficult if not impossible for Israel to negotiate a land-for peace settlement of the conflict was the unintended consequences of the superabundant power of the Israel lobby in the United States.  In Chapter 3 I begin by noting that nothing the United States does about Israel is likely to endanger the integrity or future of the United States. By contrast, the implications for Israel of U.S. policy toward Israel have been immense.  The Israel lobby’s hammerlock on American foreign policy toward the conflict spun a cocoon around Israeli democracy, making the world seem very different to Israeli voters than it would have seemed without that virtually unconditional support.  In this way Washington’s uncritical largesse and protection helped prevent Israelis from appreciating how negatively their governments’ policies would impact prospects for the Jewish state’s future, thereby destroying the credibility and careers of moderate Israeli politicians while encouraging the ascendance of right-wing maximalism.

In Chapter 4 I go deeply into what failure of negotiated two-state solution means, not just as a political program but as an entire framework of beliefs about what Israel is and can be.  The failure is complete and profound and requires an entire change of gestalt—the transformation of concepts, assumptions, agendas, questions, commitments, and beliefs associated with a partitionist approach to the “problem of Palestine” that have become the common sense of so many for so long.  There is no manual for changing basic, ontological beliefs to accommodate realities that have made established assumptions invalid. Yet, there are ways to bring our naturalized and thereby invisible beliefs into view so they can be assessed, and, if found wanting, discarded for more productive ways of thinking.  By tracing the seemingly endless “death” of the two-state solution in the blather of pundits and politicians I highlight the absurdity that cherished but outmoded ideas have forced upon so many.  By considering how new paradigms arise in science, and how radically new ideas take hold in politics, I suggest the requirements for thinking clearly and acting usefully under the conditions of the one-state reality can be identified.  

 The book concludes with a chapter devoted to the future.  For although there is no “solution” in sight—no pretty picture of the future combined with a plausible strategy for getting there--there is a reality.  The State of Israel, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River is an apparatus of power whose policies and actions decisively affect the lives of everyone in the area. Effective thinking about how today’s problems can be traded for better ones in the future means abandoning short-term expectations of successful diplomatic solutions to the conflict.  For the problem is not external to Israel.  The problem is what Israel is and will be.  A first step is to expose disingenuous support of a two-state solution designed to avoid rather than confront necessary questions about citizenship and democracy in a binational society. Effective thinking about the future also means exploiting comparisons of Israel with other partial democracies faced with the problem of emancipating large populations traditionally excluded from political life (for example women, blacks in America and South Africa, or Irish Catholics in the United Kingdom).  A better future requires new political and scholarly strategies:  the commitment of resources to political struggles for equality over decades and even generations and the organization of intellectual and scientific projects to understand the transformative dynamics of the one-state reality and the decisiveness of the unintended consequences of de facto annexation.

Finally, regarding the events following the October 7 massacre, then a key message of the book is pessimism in the short-run, but optimism in the long-run, based on study of how difficult it is, over generations, for democratic institutions to contain pressures to extend democratic rights to all those who are governed by them. I will not live to see whether my optimism was justified, but the Gaza War has shown that my pessimism certainly was. There are many ways the war that began on October 7, 2023, has been described, for example, as a savage terrorist attack; a skilled act of resistance that triggered a genocidal response; a desperate prison revolt and the wanton brutality typical of the revolt’s suppression; and a civil war between Palestinians and Jews. Whichever way one thinks about the war and the traumas it has inflicted; two things are clear. First, it will take generations before effective alliances that cross the boundary between these communities can form the basis for a new kind of polity.  Second, it is not the grand schemes of the protagonists, or of do-gooders from the outside, that will determine how humane the future of the country will be.  What matters will be the shifting alliances, identifications, priorities, mobilization patterns, and interests of the different parts of both Jewish and Palestinian Arab populations as they struggle to survive in a land they are doomed to share.

Ian S. Lustick is the Bess W. Heyman Professor, Emeritus, in the Political Science Department of the University of Pennsylvania. www.paradigmlostbook.com.

This post is based on the following book:

Lustick, Ian S. 2019. "Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality." University of Pennsylvania Press. https://www.pennpress.org/9780812251951/paradigm-lost/.