Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinians! My anti-Zionism comes from the same place as my opposition to every other system of domination: no people should have to live beneath another people in order for somebody else’s national project to survive. Zionism, as it has been realized through the Israeli state, created and preserves a political order in which Jewish national self-determination is structurally privileged over Palestinian self-determination. Israel’s own Basic Law declares that the state is the nation-state of the “Jewish people” and that national self-determination within it is unique to the “Jewish people”.

That is exactly the kind of ethnonational political structure we reject everywhere. I do not oppose Jews having safety, culture, religious life, community, or collective flourishing. I oppose building those things through a state that structurally privileges one ethnoreligious people over another population living on the same land. That is why I reject Netanyahu and the political project he represents. The issue is larger than one politician, however. Replacing Netanyahu while leaving occupation, settlement, Palestinian dispossession, unequal national rights, and ethnonational supremacy intact would not solve the underlying problem. The structure itself has to change.

The two-state solution does not solve the fundamental contradiction because it asks Palestinians to accept the permanent survival of an ethnonational state built through their dispossession while receiving a fragmented state beside it. Even in its most generous imagined form, it preserves the idea that this land should be divided into a state fundamentally organized around Jewish national privilege and another state designated for Palestinians. I do not believe liberation means perfecting separation. I believe liberation means ending the political structure that makes separation necessary.

The future has to be one democratic political community throughout historic Palestine, with equal citizenship and equal rights regardless of whether someone is Palestinian Arab, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Druze, atheist, religious, secular, immigrant, refugee, or descended from people who arrived generations ago. This is not a call to drive Israeli Jews into the sea, deport them, dispossess them, or make them subjects beneath Palestinians. That would simply reproduce the same logic of domination with the hierarchy reversed.

Jewish communities have a future there. Hebrew culture has a future there. Jewish religious life has a future there. What does not have a legitimate future is a state structure requiring Jewish political supremacy in order to exist. When I say there is no Israeli future, I mean there is no legitimate future for Israel as an ethnonational state standing above Palestinians. States are institutions, not human beings. Institutions can end while the people living under them continue living, loving, worshipping, speaking their languages, raising families, and participating in a new political order.

Apartheid South Africa ended without requiring the destruction of white South Africans. Jim Crow was legally dismantled without demanding the disappearance of white Americans. Those transitions were incomplete and their inequalities survived in other forms, which is exactly why Palestine would need something deeper than a change of flag or constitution. It would require genuine social reconstruction.

A one-state solution therefore cannot merely mean putting everyone under the existing Israeli government and declaring them equal on paper.

That would preserve too much of the old structure. The entire political relationship would have to be rebuilt around equal citizenship, Palestinian return and restoration, protection of Jewish life, redistribution of political power, democratic control of land and public resources, reparative justice, and constitutional protections preventing either population from dominating the other. The point is not Palestinian supremacy replacing Jewish supremacy. The point is that supremacy ends.

Palestinians must recover the political agency that colonialism, occupation, displacement, and military domination have denied them. Refugees and their descendants cannot simply be erased from the political future because acknowledging their claims is inconvenient. Palestinian communities must be able to return, rebuild, govern, preserve their culture, and participate as equals in determining what the shared society becomes.

At the same time, equality means that Jews born there or living there cannot be treated as foreign contaminants who must disappear. Decolonization is not ethnic cleansing in reverse. It is dismantling the political structure that turned ancestry into unequal rights. This is why the model we have to imagine is multicultural and pluralistic rather than nationalist in the old sense. There would not be one officially superior people. Arabic and Hebrew would both belong. Islamic, Jewish, Christian, Baháʼí, secular, and other spiritual communities would belong.

Local communities could preserve distinct cultures while sharing equal political citizenship. Jerusalem would not need to become the exclusive possession of one people because sacred places do not become safer by placing them beneath ethnic sovereignty. They become safer through institutions in which everyone has enforceable rights and nobody possesses the authority to exclude everyone else. Communalism gives this future a political form that ordinary nationalism cannot. Instead of creating one gigantic centralized state and hoping whoever wins the national election behaves benevolently, political power can be rooted in municipalities, neighborhoods, villages, cities, and assemblies.

Palestinian towns could govern themselves locally. Jewish communities could govern themselves locally. Mixed cities could build genuinely shared assemblies. Those communities could confederate around transportation, water, healthcare, ecological restoration, energy, education, and regional planning. Nobody would need an ethnic state in order to preserve communal life because political autonomy and cultural freedom would exist inside a democratic confederation. That also changes what self-determination means. Nationalists usually define self-determination as giving each ethnic group a sovereign state. But when populations are geographically intertwined, that logic produces borders, population transfers, minority problems, enclaves, military frontiers, and endless arguments about who truly owns which piece of land.

Democratic confederalism offers a different answer: people can exercise collective self-determination through their communities without requiring every identity to possess an exclusive territorial state. Getting there would be extraordinarily difficult because the existing political and military order is enormously entrenched. Israel has a powerful state, military, international alliances, settlements, property systems, and institutions built around preserving the existing arrangement.

Palestinians have endured generations of dispossession, occupation, imprisonment, displacement, and war. Fear between communities is real, trauma is enormous, and people who have spent their lives being told the other population represents an existential danger will not suddenly trust one another because somebody writes a beautiful constitution. That is why the transition would require international involvement on a scale far beyond ordinary diplomacy. The outside world has helped sustain the existing order and therefore cannot simply announce that Palestinians and Israelis should work it out privately.

A serious transition would require international guarantees for physical security, reconstruction, refugee return and compensation, disarmament or transformation of institutions of domination, transitional justice, protection of religious and cultural sites, economic reconstruction, and long-term guarantees against renewed ethnic supremacy. The point of international intervention should not be to impose another colonial administration. It should be to create enough safety and material stability for the people themselves to build shared democratic institutions.

The comparison with South Africa matters precisely because apartheid did not end by creating a permanently white state beside a permanently Black state. The principle was that citizenship could no longer depend upon racial supremacy. The same principle has to govern Palestine. The answer to ethnonational domination cannot be a cleaner partition of ethnonational domination. The answer has to be political equality throughout the land. And the comparison with American integration matters because legal equality by itself is not enough. Jim Crow ended legally while enormous racial inequalities survived through property, policing, wealth, housing, education, and inherited institutions. Palestine would face the same danger on an even greater scale.

If formal equality arrived tomorrow but settlements, land inequality, refugee dispossession, segregated infrastructure, economic hierarchy, and military power remained untouched, then the old order would survive beneath democratic language. Political liberation has to be accompanied by material and social transformation. That is what makes this a social revolution rather than simply a diplomatic settlement. It would require changing property relations, political institutions, citizenship, policing, military power, education, historical memory, land access, and the way communities relate to one another.

People accustomed to sovereignty would have to learn equality. People accustomed to subjection would have to acquire real power. Communities would need institutions where they actually encounter one another as political equals rather than as occupier and occupied, soldier and civilian, settler and displaced person.

Jewish people are not the Israeli state. Judaism is not Netanyahu. Jewish history, including centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust, is real and deserves reverence rather than cynical dismissal. That history explains why many Jews experience the prospect of losing a Jewish state as terrifying.

Palestinian liberation is necessary because Palestinians have been denied freedom and self-determination, not because Palestinian ethnicity should become a new qualification for superior citizenship. A Palestinian-led decolonization has to produce a society larger than nationalism itself. Otherwise the movement would reach liberation from one domination only to construct another.

That is why the one-state horizon makes sense to us only as a post-national and pluralistic horizon. It is one political space because the people and land are already inseparable. It is Palestinian in the sense that Palestinian dispossession has to be repaired and Palestinian political existence restored. But it cannot be an Arab ethnostate replacing a Jewish ethnostate. It has to belong equally to everyone who lives there and to those whose legitimate claims of return have been denied. This is a land sacred to several traditions that have spent centuries interpreting the same soil through different memories. A liberatory society should not solve that plurality by deciding whose God owns Jerusalem. Sacredness does not have to produce sovereignty. It can produce responsibility. Muslims, Jews, Christians, and others can understand the same places differently while accepting that another person’s relationship to the sacred does not cancel their own.

There is therefore no contradiction between saying Israel as an ethnonational political project must end and saying Israeli Jews must live freely and safely. Those statements belong together. The abolition of domination means dismantling structures, not eliminating peoples. It means transforming citizenship, institutions, borders, property, and power so that nobody requires supremacy to feel secure. The horizon is one land, one equal citizenship, many peoples, many religions, many languages, many communities, and no master people. Palestinians free. Jews safe. Refugees restored. Settlements and territorial domination dismantled as systems of supremacy. Local communities governing themselves. Shared institutions confederating across the region. The genocide ended, occupation ended, apartheid ended, and ethnonational sovereignty replaced by democratic equality.