FAQS
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FAQS •
GENERAL
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We’re uplifting a Palestinian vision of one democratic, secular, pluralist state of Palestine, from the river to the sea.
Democratic: Political, economic, and environmental decisions could be made equally by all, including returned refugees.
Secular: People of any or no religious expression could be guaranteed equal access to movement, worship, and all other rights.
Pluralist: The future of Palestine could reflect its past, as an interwoven fabric of identities without threat of assimilation or erasure.
DEMOCRATIC
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No– it’s an apartheid theocratic ethnocracy. While Israel is one of only 5 states with no written constitution, its basic laws, politicians, and Western supporters constantly proclaim it as the Jewish State– the state of one specific ethnoreligious group. Palestinians don’t have equal rights.
Apartheid in 1948 Israel
Adalah has compiled a list of over 65 Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinians. These include stop-and-frisk and “counter-terrorism” laws selectively applied to Palestinians, laws granting benefits based on military service (and thus excluding the vast majority of Palestinians), and Israel’s notorious “nation-state law,” which seeks to make Israel “the nation-state of the Jewish people alone.” Furthermore, within 1948 Israel, Habitat International Coalition and Adalah estimate that about 74% of land is off limits for lease to Palestinians.
Apartheid in Gaza
Israel’s current siege of Gaza is nothing new. Since at least 2007, Israel has controlled movement of people and goods into and out of the Gaza Strip. It has restricted the calorie intake of Gazans to near-starvation levels. It has required all children born in Gaza to register a birth certificate with Israel to get proper documentation. Its current genocidal bombing of Gaza is just the latest evidence of this Zionist campaign against anything resembling democracy.
Apartheid in the West Bank
Israel denies equal political rights to the 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank, which Israel has illegally occupied since 1967. The 300,000 Palestinians in “Area C” of the West Bank live under military law while Israelis live under civil law; Palestinians are restricted or barred from 99% of this land.
Apartheid outside Palestine
Zionist anti-democracy continues outside the land of Palestine. Israel denies Palestinians it expelled the right to return to their homes, while it allows Jews from anywhere on earth to become citizens.
The path forward
Democracy is impossible under Zionism. It is possible only under a democratic, secular, pluralist state of Palestine.
Sources:
Adalah’s Discriminatory Laws Database
"For Netanyahu, all Israelis are equal, but some are more equal than others" (Times of Israel)
Area C Is Everything - Planning for the Future of Palestine (Norwegian Refugee Council)
"Five ways Israeli law discriminates against Palestinians" (Al Jazeera)
"Myth: Israel is a democracy" (Decolonize Palestine)
“Israel used 'calorie count' to limit Gaza food during blockade, critics claim" (The Guardian)
SECULAR
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This question is asked in an effort to discredit the kaleidoscopic Palestinian Resistance, and by extension, to dehumanize all Palestinians by denying their right to resist occupation. The anti-Zionist resistance is fighting against a 75+ year settler colonial project that has sought to remove Palestinians from their homes by any means necessary, armed by the most powerful military in the world.
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The land of Palestine is holy to many groups, notably including Jews, Christians, and Muslims, as well as Druze, Baha'i, and others. It is also profoundly meaningful to Palestinians of no religion. A secular government is the only way to accommodate these overlapping realities.
PLURALIST
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A government (state) shouldn’t belong to one, or even two, specific ethnic or cultural groups (nations). In fact, Indian-Ugandan anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani argues that nation-states are fundamentally colonial. Spain created the first nation-state by expelling Jews and Muslims as a prelude to colonial genocide in the Americas. This is the tragic legacy of national (or binational) states. By contrast, Edward Said argues that Palestine has historically been home to a rich mosaic of peoples. A democratic, secular, pluralist State of Palestine is the way to uphold this history.
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No. The occupation hinders their safety and freedom just as much as it does that of any Palestinian, and liberation of Palestine is thus a pluralist effort to create a safe environment for all Palestinians. Beyond the current siege of Gaza, queer Palestinians refuse the weaponization of their sexuality by Zionism. They are part of a global struggle for queer liberation, which Zionism and other settler colonial movements cannot provide.
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A 2023 public opinion poll found 75% approval for a single Palestinian state among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. That survey found that only 17% of Palestinians support two state and 5% support a binational state. Palestinians have a wide range of ideas on what one state could look like. Self-determination is one of the fundamental principles of Palestinian liberation, and therefore Palestinians will determine their own outcome. The dominant Palestinian narrative is that one state must include the right of return and an end to zionism, a process that Mohammed el-Kurd, Mahmood Mamdani, and others call “dezionization.”
Source:
STATE OF PALESTINE
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“Palestine” is a place name that’s been used equally by people of all religions and ethnicities for millennia. Jewish Virtual Library argues that the name derives from Ancient Egyptian and Hebrew, and that the Philistines to whom it first referred were Aegean people, closely related to Greeks. Theodor Herzl, Arthur Balfour, the World Zionist Organization, and the League of Nations called the land Palestine, and Shimon Peres and Golda Meir held Palestinian citizenship.
By contrast, “Israel” has always referred exclusively to Jews. The name originally referred not to land but to the Jewish people– according to the Torah, the patriarch Jacob wrestled with an angel and was given the name Yisra-El, or “Wrestles with God”. The word then became a religious term for the Jewish Holy Land itself. In the context of a modern state, “Israel” has always implied privileging Jews at the exclusion of all others. Therefore, while “Eretz Yisrael” will of course live on as a religious term to refer to the Jewish Holy Land, “Israel” cannot be the name of a secular or democratic state. Only “Palestine” can.
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No. The “states’ rights” argument is no more persuasive for Israel than it was for the US Confederacy. No state has the “right” to exist– people do. And human rights cannot be protected in a state controlled by Zionism. Only a democratic State of Palestine can ensure full human rights for all.
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Zionism is anti-Semitic
No— Israel does not keep Jews safe as it relies on antisemitism. At the dawn of Zionism, Theodor Herzl correctly predicted that “the antisemites will become our most dependable friends.” In 1905, white supremacist Arthur Balfour passionately opposed allowing Jewish refugees from the Russian Empire into Britain. In 1917, he issued the notorious Balfour Declaration, supporting the Zionist movement in settling hundreds of thousands of displaced European Jews into Palestine. In the 1930s, Zionists broke a Jewish-led boycott of Nazi Germany via the Ha’avara Agreement, which transferred the property of German Jews to Palestine in the form of German goods. After the Holocaust, antisemitic nationalism has lived on in European support for Zionism. Today, the countries most supportive of Zionism are the ones with the deepest historical antisemitism. Meanwhile, Zionism has given Europe’s antisemites what they want– a Christian Europe free from Jews.
Judaism isn’t Zionism
Today, countless Jews have joined the movement for Palestinian liberation. Yet Israel has sought to convince the world that Judaism and Zionism are the same. This makes Jews even less safe, as some people fall for Zionist lies and incorrectly blame all Jews for Zionist violence. Resistance to Zionist violence has made Israel the most unsafe place for Jews on earth.
The path to Jewish safety
For Jewish futures to flourish, Zionism must fall. The only path forward is one democratic, secular, pluralist State of Palestine.
Sources:
FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA
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Palestinians and their supporters use the phrase “from the river to the sea” as a call for a just, free, and peaceful State of Palestine that covers the entire land, rather than a Jim Crow-style “solution” that divides the land and the peoples. Palestine has historically been a place for people of many backgrounds living together, and “from the river to the sea” upholds that history.
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Because Zionist media has weaponized Jewish memories of trauma in an effort to discredit Palestinian resistance. By contrast, when Likud and other Zionist parties use this phrase, it actually does mean genocide, as the world is witnessing in Gaza.
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When Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled was asked this question in 1971, she welcomed former colonizers to “live with us peacefully and have the same rights we do in a Palestine state.” While we don’t believe it’s the job of a colonized people to plan for the future of their colonizers, we nonetheless renew Khaled’s call for peace in Palestine. We recognize that Zionism has created serious structural obstacles to this peace, and propose dezionization as the process of overcoming those obstacles.
DEZIONIZATION
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Zionism has been the process of creating relationships around Palestine based on dispossession, expulsion, exclusion, and death. A key step towards justice and peace, then, could be dezionization: an ongoing process of dismantling Zionist relationships and institutions, and replacing them with those based on inclusion, wholeness, and life. Dezionization can help make possible a State of Palestine for all of its inhabitants.
Dezionization could have two main focal points: culture and land.
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Zionism has corrupted Jewish culture with the goal of reducing it to propaganda for a European colonial project in Palestine. Cultural dezionization, then, is the movement by Jews and their allies to reclaim their culture and render Zionist cultural institutions obsolete. As part of cultural dezionization, Jews draw on their traditions to create cultural works invested in justice and peace rather than Zionism. This work is the path towards Jewish futures in the Holy Land and beyond. We invite Jews within R2S to our Jewish affinity space, where they can support each other in unlearning Zionism, processing their own trauma, and being accountable to Palestinians, the primary targets of Zionism, as a step towards Jewish, Palestinian, and global freedom.
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Like all colonialism, Zionism is concerned with land. Through racist laws, the para-state Jewish National Fund, and Jim Crow-style local councils, Israel bars Palestinian citizens from leasing about 80% of land controlled by the state, or 74% of the total land of the State of Israel. This is apart from the millions of Palestinian refugees and exiles that Zionism bars from returning to their homes. The scenes of Palestinian Resistance fighters bursting over and through the illegal border fence in Gaza inspired millions of Palestinians and their supporters for precisely this reason. Land dezionization is the ongoing work of Palestinians and their allies to make Palestine a land belonging to and stewarded by not one religious or ethnic group above others, but all.
Dezionize the culture! Dezionize the land!
Further Reading:
"The Nakba did not start or end in 1948" (Al Jazeera)
"Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims" (Edward Said, 1979)
Our Approach To Zionism (Jewish Voice For Peace)
"Five ways Israeli law discriminates against Palestinians" (Al Jazeera)
"Just another battle or the Palestinian war of liberation?" (The Electronic Intifada)
Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd's speech attacking Zionism at London's Demo for Gaza on 1/14/24
WHAT ABOUT?
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The One State Solution acknowledges the expressions of all identities not just national ones.
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One State will be home to not just two peoples but all peoples in honor of Palestine’s past, present, and future.
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One State recognizes that Jerusalem is unique—some might say Holy— not because it is merely “binational” but because it is pluralist. This is not just true of Jerusalem, but Palestine as a whole. The only way to guarantee this uniqueness and religious freedom is through a fully secular State of Palestine.
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One State recognizes that Right of Return doesn’t require large-scale displacement. It is the right of Palestinians and their descendants displaced by Zionist settler colonialism to return to their homes, in accordance with international law. In cases where return to refugees’ physical homes is impossible, they will have adequate housing in their homeland.
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One State knows that the only way to peace is through justice. We are therefore accountable primarily to Palestinians, not settlers. Lifting restrictions on housing will give all people the freedom to move and live where they wish.
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One State promises peace through justice. The security system wouldn’t pit people against each other based on ethnicity, religion, or any other marker, but would work on behalf of all.
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One state is the only proposal that guarantees true freedom of movement for all citizens of the State of Palestine.
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One State will guarantee rights for all— regardless of ethnicity, gender expression, religion, and sexuality —not through threat, but through law.
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One State is the only proposal that respects the full reality on the ground, including militarized apartheid, ongoing setter dispossession, the Palestinian right of return, the desire to travel freely, the Jewish desire to build a future after zionism, and the desire of people all over the world for justice in Palestine. A pluralist One State is the only was to rid ourselves of the militarization of the land.
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One State isn’t interested in playing politics; it’s concerned with peace and justice.
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One State is the only proposal with broad support among Palestinians with 75% approval. Only 17% support two state and 5% support a binational state.
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One State is the most realistic proposal because it’s the one supported by the people. It is the least violent solution, because it demilitarizes the land. It can be implemented immediately, because it doesn’t require setting up separate bureaucracies of residency, citizenship, etc.
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One State proposes peace, justice, and economic democracy. It grants all people equal access to economic prosperity.
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The only catch is giving up Zionism. One State is based on true morality, justice, and equality— not just of the colonizer, not even the colonized, but of all people in Palestine as shared survivors of Zionism.