Reckoning With Israel’s ‘One-State Reality’
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What is the current state of the Israel-Palestine conflict?
I'm Dane Brugler. I cover the NFL draft for The Athletic. Our draft guide picked up the name The Beast because of the crazy amount of information that's included. I'm looking at thousands of players putting together hundreds of scouting reports. I've been covering this year's draft since last year's draft. There is a lot in The Beast that you simply can't find anywhere else. This is the kind of in-depth, unique journalism you get from The Athletic and The New York Times. You can subscribe at nytimes.com slash subscribe.
Thank you for watching!
Thank you.
I've been trying to think about how to begin this episode, which is a very, very tricky one. And I found myself thinking about a debate I heard a lot in 2023 and 2024. Back then, when you had more protests around ceasefires and free Palestine, you would hear these chants and see these signs, from the river to the sea, from the river to the sea. And it flared into this huge controversy. Free Palestine from the river to the sea means get rid of all the Jews. They have no interest in having just the West Bank and Gaza as their homeland, as they purport to.
No, this is a genocidal chant that you've heard for years. From the river to the sea means you have the Jordanian River, the Mediterranean Sea, the land in between is free. Everyone in between is free. I am not going to allow you guys to try and use Hamas's words and say that's my word.
From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.
What was always so strange to me, so backwards about this focus on college campus protestors, was that there was this reality people weren't really admitting, that there is one power from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. That power, that sovereign, which if you travel in that area, and I have, is just visually undeniable, is Israel. American politics has not grappled really at all with the level of day-to-day domination that Israel exerts over Palestinian lives and the complete absence of any horizon at all for that to end. And this was true before October 7th. In early 2023, the political scientists Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Mark Lynch, and Shibley Telhami published an edited volume called The One-State Reality.
Their argument, which they also made in a very controversial foreign affairs piece, was that, quote, "...Palestine is not a state in waiting, and Israel is not a democratic state incidentally occupying Palestinian territory. All the territory west of the Jordan River has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where the land and the people are subject to radically different legal regimes, and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste." What they were saying then is that the hope of a two-state solution in the future had become a way many in America particularly avoided reckoning with the one-state reality of the present. That reality was not accidental. It was not, it is not intended to be transient.
It was being etched into the land in stone and cement, in settlements and checkpoints, in the construction of walls and the demolition of homes. That might've been a controversial claim when they made it. What has happened since October 7th has made it an undeniable reality. Israel now occupies more than half of Gaza. The more than 2 million Gazans have been herded into less than half of the land they formerly occupied. And Gaza, it should be said, was already one of the most overcrowded places on earth. The conditions Gazans now live in, they're hellish. And there is no near term, there's no imagined, there's no envisioned relief. This is and it remains collective punishment. Hamas, not the children of Gaza, attacked Israel on October 7th.
The conditions the children of Gaza now live in are not, they're not moral. In the West Bank, Israel has choked off money to the Palestinian Authority. It has built settlements, chosen to build settlements, at a record pace. More settlements were approved in the last year alone than in the two decades before combined.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the current state of the Israel-Palestine conflict?
0:00–6:53
2
How has the one-state reality emerged in Israel and Palestine?
6:53–11:59
3
What are the implications of settlement expansion in the West Bank?
11:59–17:21
4
How does the October 7th event impact the region's dynamics?
17:21–21:56
5
What challenges do Gazans face under current conditions?
21:56–26:58
6
How is Israel's military strategy evolving in Lebanon?
26:58–32:14
7
What role does the U.S. play in Israel's security strategy?
32:14–38:11
8
What future scenarios are being considered for Israel and Palestine?
38:11–1:28:49