Two Out of Three

Herodotus relates that the Athenian lawgiver Solon passed through Sardis when Croesus ruled Lydia and had subdued nearly all his neighbors, and that the king had his treasuries thrown open for the visitor before asking him who was the happiest of men, certain that he would hear his own name. Solon gave first place to a citizen of Athens named Tellus and second to two brothers from Argos, Cleobis and Biton, and explained to the offended king that no one could be called happy until his end was known. He added that no man gathered every good thing at once, just as each country had one thing and lacked another. Croesus sent Solon away, convinced that he had entertained a fool, and years later trusted the oracle at Delphi, which foretold the fall of a great empire if he attacked the Persians, without suspecting that the empire in question was his own.

Cyrus took Sardis after a siege of fourteen days, and the man who had reigned for fourteen years climbed in chains onto a pyre beside fourteen Lydian youths. There Croesus remembered Solon and called out his name three times, and when Cyrus’s interpreters asked whom he was invoking, he answered that he would give a great fortune to have that man speak with every ruler in the world. Cyrus heard the whole story, reflected that he was burning alive a man as fortunate as himself, and ordered the fire put out, but no one could master the flames until, as the Lydians tell it, a violent rain fell from a clear and windless sky.

Freed and seated beside his conqueror, Croesus watched the plunder of Sardis and asked what the crowd was doing, and when Cyrus answered that it was sacking his city and carrying off his riches, the Lydian replied that none of it belonged to him anymore and that the soldiers were robbing Cyrus himself. He advised the new master of Sardis to post guards at every gate and have them take the booty from the soldiers as a tithe owed to Zeus, before the richest Persian could turn against him. Cyrus liked the warning so much that he offered his prisoner whatever favor he might choose, and Croesus wanted nothing but leave to send his chains to Delphi and ask the god whether it was his way to deceive those who served him well.

On Thursday, September 24th, a few hours apart, the United Nations General Assembly heard the two men who have spoken for Palestinians and Israelis through most of the past twenty years. Mahmoud Abbas came first, in a video recorded the day before in his office in Ramallah, because for the second year running the Trump Administration had refused a visa to a man of ninety. The chairs of the Israeli delegation stood empty while he asked for a democratic, non-militarized state alongside Israel and declared himself an enemy of antisemitism, eight years after he had blamed the Holocaust on the social behavior of Europe’s Jews.

That afternoon, our Prime Minister reached the podium as dozens of delegates were leaving the hall, called them moral cowards, and invited anyone still seated to follow them. He then defended the strikes on Iran, described the accusation of genocide in Gaza as the greatest lie of the century, and blamed the violence of settlers in the West Bank on a handful of juvenile delinquents, about a hundred and fifty of them, who threw stones, cut down olive trees, and occasionally set fires.

I leave the mutual accusations aside and keep to what I consider decisive in the conflict between us and the Palestinians, the recognition each side grants to the other’s right to a state, a question on which the asymmetry can be dated to the day. On September 9, 1993, Yasser Arafat wrote to Yitzhak Rabin that the P.L.O. recognized the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security, and Rabin answered the same day by recognizing the P.L.O. as the representative of the Palestinian people and agreeing to negotiate with it, without a word about a Palestinian state.

Sixteen years later, at Bar-Ilan University, Netanyahu described a small land in which two peoples would live side by side, each with its own flag and anthem, and accepted a Palestinian state without an army or control of its own airspace, provided that the Palestinians recognized Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. Abbas’s spokesman denounced the speech that same night as sabotage of every peace initiative, and in his video to the Assembly the man who rejected those conditions offered the demilitarization they required, while the man who set them now declares that no Palestinian state will be born under his government. That refusal is as repugnant to me as the denial of Israel’s right to exist, the denial the P.L.O. renounced in writing thirty-three years ago.

The Israeli right has a serious argument, and Netanyahu summed it up at the podium when he asserted that on October 7, 2023, there was not a single Israeli in Gaza, neither civilian nor soldier. Our Prime Minister lied, because for years Hamas had been holding two Israeli civilians hostage, Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, along with the bodies of two soldiers killed in the war of 2014, Oron Shaul and Hadar Goldin. The lie does not cancel the argument, since we did leave the Strip in 2005, and Hamas did seize it two years later and turn it into the base from which the massacre was launched. From that sequence the right concludes that any territory we hand over will post the enemy on the other side of the fence, and the danger is real, but the answer to it is the demilitarized state that Netanyahu himself sketched at Bar-Ilan.

Five minutes’ thought is enough to show any Israeli that a country has one thing and lacks another, and that ours wants three things at once, a Jewish state, a democratic state, and mastery of all the land west of the Jordan, although no government can deliver all three. A two-state solution would keep the country’s Jewish character and its democracy at the cost of part of the land, and a single state with citizenship for all would keep the democracy and the land and give up the Jewish majority. Netanyahu’s government has chosen the Jewish character and the whole land, and what it believes it takes from the Palestinians it takes from our own democracy.

A Kurd without a state of his own usually holds the passport of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, or Iran, a Basque votes in Spain or France, and a Palestinian from Nablus or Khan Younis is a citizen neither of a sovereign homeland nor of the country that controls the ground he lives on. In Gaza, our army pushed the ceasefire line of October, 2025, deeper into the Strip and by July controlled nearly seventy per cent of it, the target the Prime Minister had set in May, while virtually all of its two million Palestinians were squeezed into the rest, under Hamas rule.

In February, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich spoke at a winery near Ramallah, not far from the office where Abbas would record his video seven months later, and promised to annul the Oslo Accords, which he called cursed. He also pledged to encourage the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank to emigrate, and declared that in the long run there was no other solution. I write this man’s name with disgust, because he promises us all three at once and means to deliver them in the most abject way there is, by removing the Palestinians who stand between the whole land and the Jewish majority.

Last year, according to Channel 12, the same man told the army’s Chief of Staff that the residents of Gaza City who refused to leave should go without water or electricity until they starved or surrendered. He calls it voluntary emigration when a people leaves its land under that kind of coercion, although driving a nation out with thirst and darkness goes by a plainer name, ethnic cleansing. Abbas told the Assembly that the Palestinians would stay and would not disappear, a promise that doubles as a prediction, since millions of people do not disappear at the pleasure of a settler who holds the Finance portfolio.

I favor two states, and the arrangement that seems to me best able to withstand two peoples’ attachment to the same soil is the Holy Land Confederation, a plan drafted by the former minister Yossi Beilin and the Palestinian lawyer Hiba Husseini that trades separation for cohabitation. There would be two sovereign states with their own laws and institutions, joined in a confederation for the security and infrastructure they would share, with Gaza and most of the West Bank in Palestine and both capitals in Jerusalem. No settler would be forced from his home, because anyone who wished to stay could become a permanent resident of the Palestinian state, and an equal number of Palestinians would have the same right in Israel, alongside the Arabs who are already Israeli citizens as fully as I am. The settler would remain on the biblical land he loves, under the authority of a state that would not be his own, the very condition the occupation imposes on the Palestinians today, except that he would keep his Israeli citizenship and his vote.

On October 27th, we will elect the next Knesset, and none of the slips we drop into the ballot box will carry the question that decides all the others, although all of them will answer it. The voter who returns this government to power will have chosen two out of three and given up the third, our democracy.