The single-state solution that must, and will, happen in Israel/Palestine

The single-state solution is possible, and we can start building towards it now.

Societies are modern when multiple ethnic, religious, and other social groups co-exist in a non-separated way. This is the basis of the modern republican nation-state that was instituted in the American and French revolutions, and to which is opposed, and absolutely, the ethnic nationalism of separate political entities based on cultural particularities of any kind. Israel/Palestine must become a modern state on the republican model, repudiating the nationalist one. Jews must decide that is no longer necessary. They have well achieved a presence in Israel/Palestine and that is not going to change. It can no longer be defended military. That solution, the one in force since 1948, is only going to lead to increasing barbarism. It will fail everyone involved, including Israel's Jews.

The mathematical model is that of the network replacing the set, social networks replacing communities. Communitarianism is the root problem, along with the identitarianism that entails it and is made possible by it. The 'community' I belong to in the sense of dense cultural particularities is my set of friends and associates. This is loose, porous, and changing. Its members may be scattered. It is not a group that people join and that is unified by a shared property, but rather is a set of relationships unified only by the contingent coincide of a dense set of 'family resemblances' between linked individuals. Gone is the idea that society works by way of a group of people collected in a single place, like a village or some business organizations, who must all think the same way, speak the same language, share the same mores. What connects us is mainly a market, but it may be becoming demonetarized, so that social life is sustained by exchanges that are regulated by ideational interest but not financial gain or contractual relationships specifying enforceable obligations. The society as a whole has enforceable laws, but they are minimal, meant not to determine what people do but only limit excesses at the margins. The nation-state I belong to is a purely political entity, which is based on some minimally shared political ideas, but not on any racial, ethnic, religious or other cultural particularities. The United States was the first modern nation-state of this type, and it is one of the best things about it. We Americans should promote this model, and in some cases, insist upon it.

Israel/Palestine will have to become a modern multicultural state. The Palestinians who were dispossessed must be compensated in terms negotiated with and agreeable to their representatives. The state can have any mixture of Jews and non-Jews but cannot belong to or represent the interests of a particular religious or national ethnic group. This will happen when sufficient pressure exists that Israel, which has a 20% Palestinian within its borders, and the occupied and encircled territories, are morphed into a state that is fully democratic and secular. No particular religious, literary, or cultural tradition may serve as a basis of legislation. The world's other nations and peoples must demand this and work to make it possible. I also do not see why a full right of return to Palestinians, moderated by offers acceptable to them of financial reparations if they choose to remain abroad, is not possible. Jews who live in Israel/Palestine should be able to countenance staying there whether or not they remain an overwhelming demographical majority, presently clung to on the basis of fear of strangers. Jewish religious leaders should take a lead also in beginning to imagine concretely how such a future might be possible. The alternative is simply unacceptable. The best way to honor the memory of Israel's own dead is to build a future where the Jews of Israel can live in peace and safety without the conditions of Apartheid, a racist police state, and permanent war. Also, the rest of the world should facilitate and insist on this partly because the division in Israel/Palestine is partly a class division, and that is a large part of its rationale. It is the division between the first and third worlds that is now internal to most countries and cities. This is perhaps the world's greatest division. Either it can be progressively overcome, or not. If not, we have to be prepared for continuing war and a further descent into barbarism. Perhaps a new middle ages, with every major locality a fortress, and at war, constantly, with people living in fear of most of their non-tribal neighbors.