Being Pro-Palestine is Pro-Israel

If Israel is ultimately to be secure, democratic in character and Jewish in nature, the Palestinian people will have to have freedom, security and self-determination in a state next to Israel.

A couple of weeks ago, I began a daunting task: fleshing out ten principles to define what it means to be “pro-Israel” for center-left Jewish Americans who support the state and people of Israel and oppose the policies and actions of its current extreme-right government.

Over the next couple of months, I’ll flesh out each principle in more depth. When I’m done, I hope the package as a whole speaks to and for large numbers of Jewish Americans at a challenging time in our relationship with Israel.

Last week, I tackled the first principle – that Israel is the national homeland of the Jewish people – and gave my take on what it means to be a “Zionist” in the 2020s.

This week, I dig into a second, and interrelated, principle: that Palestine is the national homeland of the Palestinian people.

Of course, it’s the tension between these two principles – the fact that both peoples regard the same land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as their homeland – that fuels the seemingly irresolvable conflict between them.

From my pro-Israel perspective, I recognize that the goal of freedom and safety for the Jewish people in the state of Israel will never be achieved if the Palestinian people don’t achieve the exact same goal for themselves in a state of Palestine. And the majority of Jewish Americans continue to share this belief even in the aftermath of October 7^th.

Getting there entails breaking free of zero-sum thinking around a conflict to which there is no acceptable resolution with only one winner. The only road forward is a win-win pathway that ends with a Palestinian state next to Israel. (I’ll lay out later in this series why that road should be paved with a comprehensive, regional agreement that I call the “23-state solution” rather than the much-maligned concept of a two-state solution.)

When Jewish pioneers like my great-grandparents began to return to the land of Israel in the late 19^th century, a mythology developed, not only in the Jewish community but among Christian Zionists who supported them, that the land of Israel/Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Some interpreted this literally to mean that there was no local population when the earliest Jewish pioneers arrived; others that there is no such thing as a “Palestinian people.”

My father, for instance, told me growing up of Mark Twain’s visit to the Holy Land in 1867 when he found “a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land… inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.”

Even those at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from my father like Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir publicly promoted the idea that there was never such a thing as a “Palestinian nation” or people – a view still heard in both Israeli and American Jewish politics.

These efforts to erase Palestinian history echo the mythology espoused by some pro-Palestinian activists who to this day deny the historical connection of Jews to the land of Israel and view Jewish return as “some European Jews [deciding] that the solution to solving antisemitism in Europe and Russia was the establishment of a state in Palestine.”

No self-serving one-sided narrative from either side will help the two peoples living on the land today to resolve their differences, stop killing each other or build a better future.

The reality is that when my family arrived in Palestine in 1882, the Jewish people constituted only 10 percent of a local population of roughly half a million. By the time the United Nations voted to establish two states in 1947, the population in the land that formed mandatory Palestine was about two-thirds Palestinian and one-third Jewish.

Demographic changes, immigration and population movements in the area have been large and complex, but the end result is that today just shy of 15 million people live in the land, roughly half Jewish and half Palestinian.

For the better part of the last 100 years, those who’ve studied how to resolve this conflict have consistently concluded that partition of the land into “two states” is the best and only way forward. And, even though they’ve lost faith it will ever happen, majorities of both peoples have for much of the past thirty years recognized that, of all the possible outcomes, two states for two peoples is the least unsatisfactory.

The case for Palestine is, of course, rooted in the Palestinian people’s historic, legal and moral claim to self-determination – a claim on its own merits to a state that can provide them freedom, hope, safety and more. For the Jewish people, that really should be enough of a reason to support Palestinian self-determination.

But, if it isn’t, there’s also a pro-Israel case for Palestinian statehood, rooted firmly in self-interest. It starts with the recognition that there are three questions for the Jewish people in shaping Israel’s future: will they control all the land, will the state be democratic in nature, and will it be Jewish in demographic character.

The reality is that Israel cannot have all three. If it controls all the land, the majority of the people who live there will not be Jewish. In that case, if the state provides full rights to all who live there, it will likely lose its Jewish character. And, if it chooses not to provide those rights, it won’t be a democracy.

The only way for Israel to be both Jewish and democratic is for there to be a second state that the Palestinian people can call home. That way, in less than all the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, the state of Israel can be secure, Jewish and democratic – while guaranteeing, as it must, full, equal rights to the remaining non-Jewish minority.

Failing to pave a realistic, achievable path toward Palestinian independence undermines moderate and pro-peace Palestinians while strengthening advocates of violence who hold an all-or-nothing view of the conflict.

As countless former Israeli security officials continue to argue, developing a Palestinian state – and ensuring it is stable, secure and prosperous – is in Israel's long-term security interests. That’s why, for me, being pro-Palestine is a second key principle of what it means to be pro-Israel.