Yavne: A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine

Summary

Peter Beinart, a self-described liberal Zionist writing in Jewish Currents, argues that the traditional Two-state solution has failed and now camouflages permanent Israeli control of the West Bank, and that liberal Zionists should abandon Jewish–Palestinian separation for Jewish–Palestinian equality — reviving, he argues, an older Zionism whose essence was a Jewish home, not a Jewish state, in the land of Israel, achievable through confederation or a democratic binational state in which Jews and Palestinians enjoy equal individual and national rights (Yavne: A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine, lines 78-82).

What the file is

• An essay in Jewish Currents, published July 7, 2020 as displayed in the text copy (title, author and date at lines 49-54) and in the original HTML’s structured data (datePublished 2020-07-07T03:00:00-04:00), downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/yavne-a-jewish-case-for-equality-in-israel-palestine (access basis: publisher-free). The original is the HTML page; the text copy supplied with it (about 7,325 words, lines 1-292, line 292 being the empty line after the final newline) is a plain-text rendering of that page, with no page markers, so locators are line numbers.
• The essay itself runs lines 68-188. The rest of the text copy is the page frame as captured in October 2026: navigation and a header dated October 11, 2026 (lines 1-67), photo captions at lines 56, 112 and 138, an update note and research credits (lines 190-192), and after the essay a donation appeal, author biography, featured-article listings, newsletter signup and magazine footing referring in part to events after 2020 (lines 194-291). That post-article frame is not part of the 2020 essay’s argument.
• Text quality: the essay’s prose is clean and complete in both copies. Printed slips are recorded under Open questions, not corrected.

Section by section

• Opening — Jewish standing and the red line (lines 68-76): In the broad centre of Jewish life, being a Jew in good standing means above all supporting a Jewish state; rejecting Israel is a greater heresy than rejecting God, and dissenters once called apikorsim are now called kapos. “Through a historical sleight of hand that turns Palestinians into Nazis, fear of annihilation has come to define what it means to be an authentic Jew.” Beinart, who grew up with and still lives inside these assumptions and has respected the red line against questioning Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, begins to cross it.
• Reality and thesis (lines 74-82): Jewish statehood now includes permanent control of the West Bank, settlement subsidised across the Green Line, and Palestinians there without citizenship, due process, free movement or a vote, while Netanyahu vows annexation. Human beings, not states, are created b’tselem Elohim, in the image of God. The two-state project has failed; liberal Zionists should embrace equality, distinguishing form from essence: “The essence of Zionism is not a Jewish state in the land of Israel; it is a Jewish home in the land of Israel” Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai asking for Yavne in 70 CE, when Temple sacrifice gave way to prayer and study, is the model: supporting a Jewish state is no more essential to being a Jew than animal sacrifice was.
• Why two states died — the Palestinian compromise (lines 84-86): Palestinians moved from a state in the whole land to a “mini-state” in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza (PLO recognition of Israel, 1988; Hamas embracing a mini-state for a long-term truce), on two conditions stated by Walid Khalidi in “Thinking the Unthinkable” (1978): full sovereignty — “Not half-sovereignty, or quasi-sovereignty or ersatz sovereignty. But a sovereign, independent Palestinian state.” — and no further territorial whittling beyond 22% of the land.
• Why two states died — Israel’s redefinition (lines 88-94): Israel violated both conditions. Territory: Meron Benvenisti warned in 1982 that 100,000 settlers would make statehood near the 1967 lines impossible (“five minutes to midnight”); by 2000, with more than 365,000 settlers, Barak proposed annexing 9% of the West Bank for one-ninth as much land in return; by 2020, with settlers approaching 650,000, Trump with Netanyahu proposed annexing up to 30% for roughly half as much, much of it desert. Sovereignty: Barak proposed Israeli troops on the Jordan border for 12 years; Netanyahu requires Palestinians to “consent to complete Israeli security control everywhere.” Palestinian violence does not explain the hardening: Israelis killed by Palestinians fell from more than 450 in 2002 to an average of less than 30 a year since 2005, largely through Palestinian security cooperation, yet settlement growth quickened and support for a Palestinian state fell — the “revealed preference,” in Noam Sheizaf’s term as Beinart cites it, for one state without Palestinian rights.
• Palestinian opinion and the realism question (lines 96-98): Per pollster Khalil Shikaki’s data shared with Beinart, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who preferred two states outnumbered one-state supporters two to one in 2011; by 2020 the options were virtually tied, and in 2019 Palestinians aged 18-22 preferred one state by 5%. Both visions are now unrealistic; the question is which can generate a movement for fundamental change.
• Hopelessness, violence and expulsion (lines 100-106): Two states as now meant — a fragmented Palestine under de facto Israeli control — gives no hope; the 2015 “stabbing intifada” was, in Gershom Gorenberg’s phrase, “despair expressed with knives.” The Trump plan spiked support for “armed struggle,” which would license greater Israeli brutality, and leaders who have made separation impossible could inch toward mass expulsion: between one-third and one-half of Israeli Jews regularly tell pollsters Palestinians should be encouraged or forced to leave; in 2019 the Israeli Democracy Institute found physical removal the most popular answer for Area C Palestinians after annexation; B’Tselem says East Jerusalem residency policy “is geared toward pressuring Palestinians to leave”; and the Trump plan revived Avigdor Lieberman’s proposal to redraw the border to deposit roughly 300,000 Palestinian citizens outside the country. “Annexation is not the end of the line. It is a waystation on the road to hell.”
• Equality as vision and strategy (lines 108-118): Equality retains the moral power of the civil rights, anti-apartheid and Black Lives Matter movements; Ehud Olmert warned in 2003 that a Palestinian “struggle for one-man-one-vote” would be “a much more popular struggle—and ultimately a much more powerful one.” Its most effective spokespeople are inside the Green Line — the Joint List, whose leader Ayman Odeh in his 2015 inaugural Knesset speech cited a country that has built “700 Jewish towns and not a single Arab town” and pledged to safeguard vulnerable Jews because “they too, as are we, are worthy of equality”; in 2018 Joint List members countered the Basic Law reserving national self-determination to Jews with a bill affirming “the principle of equal citizenship for every citizen,” which five Democratic congressmembers privately preferred; a 2018 University of Maryland poll found Americans aged 18-34 preferring one equal state by nine points. An equality movement would seek the Palestinian Authority’s abolition as Israel’s occupation subcontractor, raising occupation’s cost and laying bare the one country between river and sea; and East Jerusalem Palestinians (almost 40% of the city), whom Ian S. Lustick in Paradigm Lost reports would prefer equal Israeli citizenship to Palestinian state citizenship, could by voting locally model shared power in Jerusalem.
• Already binational; exclusion, not equality, breeds violence (lines 120-130): The territory Israel controls already contains two nations of roughly equal population; its binationalism is unspoken only because most Palestinians under its rule cannot vote and Palestinian citizens are generally excluded from coalitions. Cederman, Wimmer and Min (2010) found ethnic groups excluded from state power more likely to initiate conflict; Limor Yehuda’s dissertation “Collective Equality” reports strong correlations between exclusion/discrimination and civil wars. Northern Ireland (IRA killing more than 1,750 people, 1969-1994, ending with full Catholic participation) and South Africa (roughly 75% of whites in 1987 fearing black government; Mahmood Mamdani, quoted in Ali Abunimah’s One Country, on how a nonviolent alternative discredited “necklacing”) support the claim. Palestinian citizens, closest to Israeli Jews, commit extremely rare terrorism because they can vote for the Joint List.
• A democratic binational state is feasible (lines 132-144): The claim that Arabs cannot sustain democracy echoes the 1988 South African cabinet minister’s claim about Africans. Preconditions exist: combined per capita income more than three times Lebanon’s, six times Jordan’s, ten times Egypt’s; adult literacy 97% in Israel and the occupied territories against 79% regionally; a competent bureaucracy, a military largely deferring to civilians, and independent journalists and judges — a system functioning for the privileged group, as in post-apartheid South Africa. PA and Hamas not holding elections reflects joint repression, including Israel and the US encouraging Abbas to disregard Hamas’s 2006 election victory. Palestinian citizens are by cited 2019 Nathanson/Scheindlin/Weiss and Israeli Democracy Institute surveys more committed than Israeli Jews to free expression, gender equality, repudiating political violence, integrated neighbourhoods and teaching both perspectives, and trust the supreme court most. “The more equal it becomes, the more peaceful and democratic it is likely to be.”
• What an equal state would look like (lines 146-160): Individual rights on the South African model, strengthened per Yousef Munayyer (rights overturnable only by 90% of the legislature), plus national rights, which South Africa did not need because the ANC claimed one South African nation: models are Belgium (regional and community governments; 75% of either language community’s representatives can block important legislation; 589 days to form a government in 2010-2011) and Northern Ireland (dual heads of government, cross-community support for key decisions) — Consociationalism. Federal and confederal variants: A Land for All proposes refugees returning to Israel as citizens of Palestine and settlers remaining in Palestine as citizens of Israel; Edward Said in 1999 proposed that “[t]he Law of Return for Jews and the right of return for Palestinian refugees [would] have to be considered and trimmed together.” A constitutional haven obligation for any Jew — and any Palestinian — in distress, not automatic day-one citizenship, preserves refuge; a diaspora ministry for Palestinians would parallel the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs. Jews, roughly 50% of Israel-Palestine against South Africa’s 12% white at apartheid’s end, with a strong diaspora and enduring economic privilege, would be well positioned; the likelier long-term worry is change coming too slowly.
• The founders did not require sovereignty (lines 162-168): Dmitry Shumsky in Beyond the Nation-State argues the demand for a Jewish state did not define Zionism until the 1940s: Herzl, Pinsker, Jabotinsky and, for much of his life, Ben-Gurion sought self-determination and autonomy, not sovereignty — Herzl’s “state” in 1896 meant, in Shumsky’s account, an autonomous district; his Altneuland (1902) makes the Jewish area an Ottoman district; Jabotinsky in 1909 located the ideal in “not a Jewish state but a Jewish collective life”; Ben-Gurion in the 1920s imagined Jewish and Palestinian “states within the state”. Early Zionists, Brit Shalom figures (Buber, Scholem, Magnes, Szold, and earlier Ahad Ha’am) excepted, were not concerned with Palestinian rights, but their openness to autonomy arrangements aligns, per Shumsky, with Ahmed Tibi’s proposal of a “state for all its nationalities”. Partition (Peel Commission, 1937) and above all the Holocaust — a 1940s “new contract” trading a state expressing Jewish national identity alone for the extermination of European Jewry — made sovereignty definitional.
• The Holocaust lens (lines 170-184): Jews retroactively project Nazism’s exterminationist program onto Palestinian opposition, which Beinart presents as ordinary national resistance: demands for representative institutions, insistence that Jews already in Palestine deserved equal rights, opposition to mass immigration that would come at Palestinian expense after the Balfour Declaration promised a Jewish but not a Palestinian national home, rejection in 1937 and 1947 of states far smaller than Palestinian land ownership, and violence in 1929 and 1936 comparable to anti-colonial uprisings elsewhere (and to Zionist violence); Amin al-Husseini’s Nazi collaboration was despicable but not unique among leaders under British/French domination. Jabotinsky in 1923: “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized”. Yehuda Elkana: Israeli relations with Palestinians are motivated by “a particular interpretation of the lessons of the Holocaust”; Begin in 1982 — “The alternative to this is Treblinka” — and “Is It 1938 Again?”, “Auschwitz Borders” and “Judenrein” structure the discourse; deeper internalisation of a persecution narrative correlates with less sympathy for Palestinians. The lens sustains the textbook-hatred claim (academic studies find dehumanizing rhetoric about Jews rare in Palestinian textbooks), warnings to Amira Hass in Gaza (four years of “welcoming warmth”), and dismissal of Menachem Froman and Michael Melchior on Hamas leaders’ willingness for peace. “This dehumanization masquerading as realism is a cancer”: it brands boycott activists a greater threat than white supremacists who attack synagogues and teaches propaganda instead of Judaism. Odeh, 2015: “The prisoner dreams of freedom and the prison haunts the dreams of the prison guard”; “We must liberate both peoples.”
• Close — tikkun and Yavne again (lines 184-188): A Jewish state seen as tikkun (repair) for the Holocaust has instead kept its legacy alive by requiring Palestinians to be seen as Nazis; “The real tikkun is equality, a Jewish home that is also a Palestinian home”; shalom is connected to shlemut, wholeness. Imagined closing scenes: Jewish and Palestinian co-presidents at Yad Vashem on Yom HaShoah as an imam delivers the du’a’ for the dead, and on May 15 at Deir Yassin, at a future Museum of the Nakba commemorating the roughly 750,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled during Israel’s founding, as a rabbi recites El Malei Rachamim. “That’s what Yavne can mean in our time. It’s time to build it.”
• Apparatus and frame (lines 190-291): Update note on the textbook-studies description; research assistance by Amitai Abouzaglo, Eliot Cohen and Philip Johnson; then the captured page’s donation appeal, biography, featured listings and footing, not part of the essay.

Key passages

• “The essence of Zionism is not a Jewish state in the land of Israel; it is a Jewish home in the land of Israel” (line 80)
• “Give me Yavne and its Sages.” (line 82, Beinart quoting Yochanan ben Zakkai’s request as he presents it)
• “Not half-sovereignty, or quasi-sovereignty or ersatz sovereignty. But a sovereign, independent Palestinian state.” (line 86, Beinart quoting Walid Khalidi)
• “Annexation is not the end of the line. It is a waystation on the road to hell.” (line 106)
• “The real tikkun is equality, a Jewish home that is also a Palestinian home” (line 184)
• “That’s what Yavne can mean in our time. It’s time to build it.” (line 188)

Evidence the work relies on

• Polling Beinart cites: Khalil Shikaki data shared with him on Palestinian one-state/two-state preferences (2011, 2019, 2020, line 96); Israeli Democracy Institute polls on Area C removal (2019, line 104) and Palestinian citizens’ democratic attitudes (line 142); a 2018 University of Maryland poll on Americans aged 18-34 (line 114); a 1987 poll of white South Africans (line 128); Nathanson, Scheindlin and Weiss (2019) on young adults (line 142); polling reported by Ian Lustick on East Jerusalem Palestinians (line 118).
• Casualty and population figures as Beinart gives them: more than 450 Israelis killed by Palestinians in 2002, less than 30 a year on average since 2005 (line 94); settler populations of 100,000 (Benvenisti’s 1982 threshold), more than 365,000 (2000) and approaching 650,000 (2020) (line 90); IRA killings of more than 1,750, 1969-1994 (line 126); roughly 750,000 Palestinians fleeing or expelled in Israel’s founding (line 186).
• Scholarship Beinart cites: Dmitry Shumsky, Beyond the Nation-State, on pre-1940s Zionism (lines 164-168); Cederman, Wimmer and Min, World Politics (2010), on exclusion and conflict (line 124); Limor Yehuda, “Collective Equality” dissertation (line 124); Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything, and academic studies of Palestinian textbooks and of persecution narratives and sympathy (lines 120, 176-178).
• Works and speeches quoted: Walid Khalidi, “Thinking the Unthinkable” (1978, line 86); Ayman Odeh’s 2015 inaugural Knesset speech and 2015 Haaretz conference remarks (lines 110, 182); Ehud Olmert’s 2003 warning (line 108); Yousef Munayyer in Foreign Affairs (2019, line 146); Ali Abunimah, One Country, quoting Mahmood Mamdani (line 128); Edward Said (1999) on the Law of Return and right of return (line 154); Jabotinsky (1909, 1923, lines 164, 174); Sam Bahour on Joint List leadership (line 110); B’Tselem on East Jerusalem residency policy (line 104).

Analysis

• Method: a first-person programmatic essay by a participant — Beinart argues as a liberal Zionist addressing liberal Zionists and the Jewish centre, combining his own communal position, a history of the two-state idea’s terms and their violation, polling trends, comparative cases (Northern Ireland, South Africa, Belgium) and a recovered pre-state Zionist tradition (via Shumsky) to argue that equality, not separation, is both morally required and strategically generative.
• Perspective and limits: the frame is Jewish self-liberation as much as Palestinian freedom — Palestinian liberation is argued to be integral to Jewish liberation and a tikkun for the Holocaust’s grip (lines 82, 184) — and Palestinian voices enter mainly as quoted leaders, pollsters and writers supporting the equality claim. The essay concedes its proposal is unrealistic now, “enormously messy and complex,” and that detailed foreign-policy and constitutional design would require further work (lines 98, 158-160); it treats confederation and a single binational state as variants of one equality goal rather than choosing between them (lines 80, 154).
• Support: the death-of-two-states claim is supported inside the essay by the sequence of annexation percentages and sovereignty conditions against the Palestinians’ two stated requirements, and by casualty and polling trends against the violence explanation (lines 88-96). The feasibility claims rest on comparative analogy and cited social-science correlations, presented as suggestion (“more likely,” line 144), not demonstration. Figures are given as Beinart states them, with their as-of dates, and are not independently checked in the essay.

People, organizations, places and events

Peter Beinart, Yochanan ben Zakkai, Yavne, Walid Khalidi, Meron Benvenisti, Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, Noam Sheizaf, Khalil Shikaki, Mahmoud Abbas, Ayman Odeh, Joint List, Sam Bahour, Ian S. Lustick, Ehud Olmert, Israeli Democracy Institute, B’Tselem, Avigdor Lieberman, Palestinian Authority, Dmitry Shumsky, Beyond the Nation-State, Theodor Herzl, Leon Pinsker, Vladimir Jabotinsky, David Ben-Gurion, Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Judah Magnes, Brit Shalom, Ahmed Tibi, Amin al-Hussaini, Yehuda Elkana, Menachem Begin, Amira Hass, Yousef Munayyer, A Land for All, Edward Said, Ali Abunimah, Mahmood Mamdani, Limor Yehuda, Nelson Mandela, Jewish Currents, Palestine Liberation Organization, Hamas, Peel Commission, Deir Yassin, Yad Vashem

Concepts

Liberal Zionism, Zionism, Two-state solution, One-state solution, Binationalism, Consociationalism, Right of Return, Law of Return, Nakba, Partition, Political Zionism, Cultural Zionism

How it relates to other sources

• With Liberal Zionism: A Pillar of Israel’s Settler Colonial Project: direct disagreement, held side by side. Beinart writes from inside liberal Zionism and argues it should abandon the Jewish state for a Jewish home under equality; Ayyash argues liberal Zionism is a pillar of Israel’s settler-colonial project providing its democratic veneer, holds the 1948 conquest itself illegitimate in Palestinian experience, and prescribes rejecting liberal Zionism as a “partner in peace” in favour of decolonial liberation and de-Zionization. Both treat support for two states along 1967 lines as bound up with preserving a Jewish state, but draw opposite conclusions about whether a reformed Zionism can be part of the remedy.
• With A Textbook Case of Genocide and From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine: shared publisher. Jewish Currents also published Segal’s genocide analysis and, earlier, material republished in the Englert/Schatz/Warren collection; Beinart’s essay is an earlier (2020) programmatic statement from the same magazine’s editor-at-large, arguing equality on Jewish-traditional grounds rather than through genocide law or a documentary record.
• With sources presenting one-state or binational proposals (the confederal proposal of A Land for All as Beinart presents it, and Edward Said’s 1999 proposal as Beinart presents it): Beinart explicitly builds on Said’s 1999 suggestion that the Law of Return and the right of return be “considered and trimmed together” and on A Land for All’s reciprocal-citizenship confederation, adding a Zionist-genealogical argument (via Shumsky) that such arrangements recover, rather than betray, pre-1940s Zionist imagination.
• What is new: the wiki’s first source arguing the equality/binational case from inside liberal Zionism, with a named mechanism for the argument’s resistance — the Holocaust lens — and a full statement of the Yavne form/essence distinction (Jewish home versus Jewish state) that later equality arguments presuppose.

Open questions

• Spelling of Tibi: this essay prints “Ahmad Tibi” (line 166); the existing page Ahmed Tibi is titled “Ahmed Tibi” from its earlier source. Both spellings are held; the variant is recorded in that page’s aliases.
• Printed slips, byte-checked and held as printed, not corrected: “which advocated a binational state” (line 166) and “long advocated by former Defense and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman” (line 104) — “advocated” as printed in both places; “the central principal aspects of Zionist political imagination” (line 166), “principal” as printed, in a sentence Beinart attributes to Shumsky’s argument but does not place in quotation marks.
• The captured page’s header dates the site day October 11, 2026 and its footing reads © 2026 (lines 41, 268 in the frame), while the essay is dated July 7, 2020 and the HTML’s structured data gives datePublished 2020-07-07; the 2026 dates are the capture frame’s, held as printed.
• Beinart says the combined per capita income of Israel and the occupied territories is more than three times Lebanon’s, more than six times Jordan’s and more than ten times Egypt’s (line 136), without giving the underlying figures or a source; the ratios stand as his claim.
• Whether the roughly 750,000 Nakba figure in the closing vision (line 186) and the “more than 750,000” figure used elsewhere in the wiki for the same displacement are the same count stated differently is not addressed in this essay.
• The update note (line 190) says the article “has been updated” on Palestinian textbook studies but does not date the update or identify what changed.

Coverage

lines 1-292 of 292, read in full