It’s time to talk about the day after — but too soon to do anything about it
Israeli soldiers patrol near the border with Gaza on March 4, 2024 in southern Israel. Photo by Amir Levy/Getty Images
Elliot Cosgrove March 5, 2024
At last week’s convening of the World Zionist Organization in Jerusalem, the subject that kept coming up is what Israeli Jews call yom acharei — the day after.
It can feel unseemly — the war in Gaza is very much still underway, the families of those murdered on Oct. 7 remain shattered in their grief, the fate of more than 100 hostages is yet unknown. But the world is not waiting for the fighting to wane and the hostages, please God, to be returned. The ground has already begun to shift from beneath our feet.
President Joe Biden is preparing for Washington to recognize Palestinian statehood as the United Nations General Assembly and 193 of its member states have already done. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, has presented a plan that, beyond the use of the word “plan,” has virtually nothing in common with Biden’s — he says a Palestinian state would only be a reward for terror.
Pronouncements are being made, roadmaps are being drafted and resolutions are being sponsored, in Israel’s Knesset and in the United States Senate. Active as this war may be today, the train to tomorrow is leaving the station. And the only reasonable destination is a two-state solution.
Many who advocate against a two-state solution see it as a delusional, self-soothing and shortsighted siren song of liberal Jews who are oblivious to the harsh history, facts, and lived realities of the Middle East.
They are right that there has never been a good-faith Palestinian partner for peace, and there is none in sight now. I understand how calls for a two-state solution can feel like a vindication of Hamas’ strategy of Oct. 7. Why in the world should Israel legitimize a Hamastan as its next-door neighbor?
Especially since there is no sign that a Palestinian state would be governed democratically — most people in Gaza have never had the chance to cast a ballot, since the last Palestinian national elections were in 2006. Given the choice between a less-than-democratic Israel and a future filled with more Oct. 7-like massacres, global Jewry should certainly opt for the former.
None of these arguments bely the historical, practical, political, moral and Jewish cases for why a two-state solution is the only viable day-after plan.
As Gidi Grinstein recently pointed out, broad international consensus for two states goes back to the 1936 Peel Commission. Every American president since Bill Clinton has endorsed it, as have Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, Yair Lapid, and, yes, Netanyahu himself, back in 2009 at Bar Ilan University.
From a practical standpoint, if you are invested in the security of the Jewish state, the Palestinians must be given the opportunity and burden of self-governance. While there is nothing that justifies the terror of Oct. 7 or any other attack, common sense dictates that unless a people — Palestinian or otherwise — are given a path to self-rule, the cycle of violence will continue.
Also, Israel’s present war remains just only insofar as it takes place alongside a diplomatic path toward ending the underlying conflict. Netanyahu’s half-baked postwar plan, his recent boasts of having stymied the two-state solution, and his finance minister’s plan to add 3,000 new settlement homes to the West Bank undercut Israel’s short- and long-term global standing and security.
Israel’s founding documents enshrine the promise of it being both a Jewish and democratic state. The present path to what some call “the one-state non-solution” stands in opposition to those values. Israel can be a Jewish state. Israel can be a democratic state. But it can’t be both unless Palestinians also have a state.
And as Jews, if the promise of Israel is the right to be a free people in our own land, then how can we possibly deny another people that same right? Everyone deserves a place to call home. Nobody knows that better than us Jews.
Liberal Zionism — the belief in a Jewish and democratic state, in two states for two peoples, — may be on the wane, in decline, or even dead. That does not mean it is any less of a noble — and necessary — idea to pursue.
Having just returned from Israel, I understand the country is emotionally threadbare right now. There is zero trust in the Palestinians; the Jewish left is moribund. Now is positively not the moment for a full-court press on two states. Israel is in the midst of a war, there are hostages to be saved, we are traumatized. The time is not ripe.
Still, we must speak openly and proudly about the day after we seek. We can seed and fund ideas and initiatives around a two-state vision, support those leaders in Israel and the diaspora who are working toward it, and oppose those who don’t.
To hold onto an ideal, to publicly affirm it, and to work toward it — even if its realization is not possible today or tomorrow — is not an obvious position, and it contains, no question, a bit of an inner contradiction. It is also the spirit that has impelled our people since our very beginning.
What is the story of the wilderness wanderings if not the journey to a Promised Land whether we get there or not? What is the vision of the prophets — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel — if not the aspirational return from exile? What is the story of our last 2,000 years if not the tale of a people who, no matter what, never lost hope?
There is nothing wrong — in fact, there is everything right and everything Jewish — about staying true to an ideal, whether we realize that ideal in our lifetime or not.
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