No, it isn’t.  That’s the conclusion reached by political scientist Jerome Slater in his 2021 book, Mythologies Without End: The US, Israel, and the Arab-Israel Conflict, 1917-2020.  But it is possible to craft a solution that minimizes unavoidable injustice.

Slater’s book actually isn’t mainly concerned with finding a solution, but with tearing down the false narratives–he calls them mythologies–that have forever governed American and Israeli views of the conflict.  The mythologies generally feature an embattled, constantly threatened Israel, seeking only peace and security, repeatedly rebuffed by the unremitting hostility of its Arab neighbors. The Israeli diplomat Abba Eban famously quipped in 1973 that “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity” to make peace with Israel.  Slater turns that claim on its head.  His book powerfully argues that

…[It] is Israel, not the Arabs, which has ‘never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.’  Unwilling to make territorial, symbolic or other compromises, Israel has not merely missed but sometimes even deliberately sabotaged repeated opportunities for peace with the Arab states and the Palestinians.”

Mythologies Without End is a work of synthesis and analysis, drawing on a huge body of scholarship.  (The “select bibliography,” which Slater tells us is very abbreviated, runs 22 pages.) I’m not going to attempt a summary: I’ll just say that if you are interested in a comprehensive, up to date and fair-minded history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the US role in it, this is the book to get. For example, Slater conducts a careful review of the literature on the 2000 Camp David negotiations, in which, according to prevailing myth, Yasser Arafat turned down a dream offer, scuttling a golden opportunity for peace.  Slater’s assessment is very different, and more complicated. While he finds fault on both sides, Slater puts the heavier burden of blame for the failure of the negotiations on the Israelis.

Slater has described himself as a disillusioned Zionist.  An elderly Jew, he empathizes strongly with the motivations that drove the historic campaign to establish a Jewish state and to continue to defend it uncritically. His disillusionment reflects his assessment of Israeli behavior over the decades. In his prologue, he claims a sense of responsibility, as a Jew, to correct the historical record, debunking the mythologies that have blinded his fellow Jews to the true history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “[In] their oppression of the Palestinian people they have abandoned enlightened Jewish traditions, which in my (secular) view constitute the best reason for Judaism to have survived for twenty-five centuries.”

So, what is the possible solution for Israel/Palestine? A just solution, in Slater’s view, would be a two-state solution along the lines advocated by the international community for decades.  It would involve the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel on the other side of the Green Line separating Israel from the Palestinian territories it has occupied. That solution is no longer possible because Israel’s relentless colonization of the occupied territories is effectively irreversible.  The creation of a genuine Palestinian state would require the repatriation of huge numbers of Israeli settlers. No Israeli government is going to attempt that, in the face of the real prospect of large-scale violent resistance, which the Israeli army could not be relied upon to oppose.  On the other hand, the alternative proposed by pro-Palestinian activists—a single democratic bi-national state in all of Palestine—is “a utopian fantasy,” if not a prescription for civil war. So, what’s left?

What’s left is a limited two-state settlement, one that would be much less fair to the Palestinians than a true two-state solution but still better than nothing.  It would involve the creation of a Palestinian mini-state that would contain most of the nearly 3 million Palestinians living on the West Bank and would be linked effectively to Gaza. Slater calls this a “Luxembourg solution,” citing that country as an example of how very small states can become prosperous, democratic and safe even while surrounded by much larger neighbors. Slater acknowledges that this Palestinian ministate solution

…would be inferior in every way to the kind of two-state solution embodied in the international consensus and would constitute yet another injustice to the Palestinian people. However, the key issue is, compared to what? It can only be recommended because the probable real world alternatives are much worse.”

Although he doesn’t put it that way, Slater is in effect saying regretfully what some Israelis assert triumphantly: that the Palestinians are a defeated people and they may as well accept that reality and try to make the best of it.  Coming from Slater, this is a compelling argument.  Another smart and knowledgeable disillusioned Zionist, Peter Beinart, believes that a one-state solution is desirable and possible. I wish I could believe that. Beinart argues that Jews and Arabs could coexist in a single democratic state, but he doesn’t explain how such a state might come about. I can’t see it any better than I could six years ago, when I asked, “Can we realistically expect the state of Israel to participate in its own effective dissolution? If a two-state solution risks provoking violent resistance from settlers, how would they react to the prospect of living in a bi-national democratic state destined to have an Arab majority?”

So, to summarize the alternatives.  There are two theoretically possible, relatively just solutions for Israel-Palestine: a genuine two-state solution and a single democratic state. Neither of these seems realistically achievable.  Another alternative—the status quo, with Israel continuing to expand its Apartheid regime in the occupied territories—is realistically possible but morally abhorrent. The final alternative is some version of Slater’s Luxembourg solution.  I’m not happy to say it, but I think that this last is the most likely eventual outcome.