Staying Zionist

October 7 had paradoxical repercussions for Zionism. In the days that followed, the global wave of antisemitism demonstrated once again the urgent need for Zionism. Antisemitism was rampant everywhere, including in North America, where Jewish schools and synagogues had previously not needed police vans. While the crisis renewed the need for Zionism, it also exposed its dysfunctional nature, already evident on the eve of October 7 with the formation of the far-right coalition. All the safeguards had then been removed, and in the aftermath of October 7, everything that had been latent in Israel came pouring out: unbridled hatred of Arabs, calls for a “second Nakba”.

Above all, Zionism has become completely demonized abroad. It is no longer taken for granted, with even President Macron reminding us that Israel owes its existence solely to the goodwill of third parties.¹ We must take stock of this demonetization of Zionism and stop believing that it disqualifies its authors. From the outset, Zionism was already about coming to terms with defeat, namely the continuing hostility towards Jews after emancipation: it was a matter of responding to it in concrete terms rather than listing the faults of antisemites in the face of an indifferent power. Today, we must ask ourselves what responsibilities Zionism itself bears in the contemporary defeat.

This exercise in internal criticism is difficult to carry out, even privately, because the trials of Israel’s legitimacy act as a protective shield, preventing us from letting our guard down and looking at our history and the state of Israel today. For two or three decades now, the ideal image we have of Israel—democratic, ready for land for peace—has no longer really been a reality. Yet this image has survived among us, not because of our own blindness, but because of a complete questioning of Israel’s very existence by an anti-Zionist discourse that likes Jews only as pariahs and irresponsible people, and that “condenses” all criticism of the West, the state, and political modernity onto Israel. Such enemies channel our energy and put us on the defensive. Yet the real Israel is drifting toward illiberalism and radicalization, allying itself with the European far right², deepening colonization to prevent the advent of a Palestinian state, and waged a war that became illegitimate. Everyone can see that.

This exercise in internal criticism is difficult to carry out, even privately, because the trials of Israel’s legitimacy act as a protective shield, preventing us from letting our guard down and looking at our history and the state of Israel today.

The following text is by a French Jew, a Zionist, who feels uneasy about Zionism as it is today, as it is conceived and transmitted—particularly in French Jewish institutions—and as it has been realized. And who, despite all this, remains a Zionist. Because Zionism is indeed the solution to the impossible modern Jewish condition, the one that can prevent a new Jewish tragedy. To overcome this unease, new foundations are needed so that Zionism can be achieved legitimately. This work is not prompted by the world’s injunction to condemn Zionism, but for reasons internal to the Jewish world. For the younger generations—who have only known Israel under Netanyahu, an expansionist Israel that has abandoned the peace process—the Jewish world has nothing to offer but a calcified version of Zionism that is incapable of updating itself. In the absence of questioning, they can only distance themselves from Zionism and, by the same token, from the Jewish world.

Before beginning this examination, let us define the term of the debate, which has become somewhat distorted today. Zionism is a doctrine that emerged at the end of the 19th century out of disappointment with the failure of Jewish emancipation in Europe and the rise of antisemitism. Zionism responds to this by demanding a national definition for Jews and pursuing self-emancipation as a sovereign majority in the land of Israel. Put more simply, Zionism cannot be reduced to the simple formula “I believe in Israel’s right to exist”, but rather assigns a prescriptive value to this right: the establishment of a Jewish state was and is a good thing for the Jewish people. All variants of Zionism can accept this foundation.

Zionism since the diaspora

Zionism as a response to antisemitism

This basic definition covers many blind spots and impossibilities. To illustrate its meaning, I will try to explain how Zionism is transmitted and taught in French Jewish communities and in the Jewish education system.

We have been taught that Zionism restores our dignity, that Zionism was the autonomous solution to antisemitism. It is a performative idea: if we believe in it, Israel does indeed restore our dignity. You don’t even need to make aliyah to benefit from the decline in antisemitism following this transformation of the Jewish condition. Antisemitism is a psychosis, according to Pinsker, but like all cruel behavior, it only takes shape when directed at those weaker than oneself. It operates in cliques, identifying weakness in order to accuse and enjoy it. Zionism has a pessimistic analysis of human nature and its relationship to irreducible otherness, but it responds to it in concrete terms. Antisemitism is, and morality is not of any help against it. Zionism therefore proposes to respond to it in two ways: by leaving, and by ceasing to give it any leverage.

Antisemitism is mimetic: when it sees violence against Jews permitted, it authorizes it even more. It is this cruel logic that befalls little Ilyusha at the end of The Brothers Karamazov. His father is humiliated, the children sense his agitation and the smell of blood, and conspire to attack him. The more he protests, the more he realizes his loneliness, the more they attack him. “Hey, you rag!” they shouted at him, “we dragged your father out of the tavern by his beard; you ran alongside begging for mercy.”

The more he is designated as weak, as a canonical victim, the more he arouses the same hateful passion. This passion is multiplied tenfold when the victim is a “top of the class” student with no support. Zionism aims to change the perception of Jews, to stop exposing our inherent weakness, and to stop being victims who must rely on the protection of a third party.

Thus, in the aftermath of October 7, it was not a question of taking revenge on the Palestinians, but of responding to a signal. The same as after Ozar HaTorah, “in the 10 days following March 19, more than 100 antisemitic acts were recorded”.³ It was necessary to strike again and again in the same place.

Zionism aims to change the perception of Jews, to stop exposing our inherent weakness, and to stop being victims who must rely on the protection of a third party.

The existence of Israel prevents antisemitism from taking hold. Whether physically, by going to Israel to no longer be at the mercy of a hostile majority (this is the main motive for aliyah: to no longer suffer the loneliness of insecurity). Or simply by feeling invigorated by this autonomous Jewish existence there. By reassuring Jews against their precariousness, Israel’s existence effectively secures them and confounds old antisemitism. Zionism is not solely responsible for this decline in antisemitism. The guilt of the Holocaust, which “dishonored antisemitism“, as Bernanos writes, obviously plays a part. However, the Kielce pogrom in 1946, which left 42 survivors of the camps dead, shows that despite this guilt, if Jews are pitiful, then antisemitism can run rampant.

I wrote above: whether or not to go there, that’s not entirely true. Institutions and schools that explicitly claimed to be Zionist assumed that the Jewish destiny in the diaspora would ultimately be impossible, valued the Kibutz Galuyot, and worked concretely toward it through the Jewish Agency and the Bac Bleu Blanc (similar program to Birthright in France). This was what was positively called “Zionism”, since Zionism was the common foundation of Jewish institutions and no longer needed to be named.

The exceptional nature of the Jewish people and the ethic of irresponsibility

Another mindset of mainstream Zionism is the exceptional nature of the Jewish people. This exceptionality exempts Israel from all responsibility, no doubt because the ethos of the diaspora—which does not imply any responsibility of its own—continues. However, as Denis Charbit writes in L’impossible État normal (The Impossible Normal State)⁴, Israel is not a completed project. As long as there is a diaspora, and as long as there is antisemitism, the lack of agency of the diaspora condition is projected onto Israel.

The Zionism taught in Jewish schools in the 1990s and 2000s was certainly not liberal, but it was de facto pacifist. We were optimistic about peace, and while we might have lamented the dreamy nature of the Smolanim, they nonetheless represented a greatness of spirit, even if it was unrealistic or impractical. In any case, at the time they were in no way considered traitors (bogdim). We ardently wanted peace. But we were unable to see our own responsibilities. As the peace process bogged down, we saw only Arab intransigence and their repeated refusals, repeating these refusals as intangible truths, never our own responsibility as the occupying power.

However, we were well aware that there was a spectrum ranging from pacifism to Zionism: we did not describe the most irredentist or expansionist elements as such, but rather as the most vocal Zionists. Traditional Judaism has always had a deferential relationship with the most vocal: we may not want this for ourselves, but we cannot condemn excessive piety, as it is what keeps the Jewish identity alive. This most vocal Zionism was embodied by figures such as Michael Bar Zvi, Gil Taïeb, Jacques Kupfer, and Michaël Gurfinkiel. It was embodied by them because, since the electoral turning point of 1977, the first victory of the Likud, the French Jewish left had gradually ceased to be the transmission belt to Israel, and more right-wing figures could now legitimately embody it. We had the same relationship of deference to this maximalist Zionism as we did to Jewish orthodoxy. We became silent in the face of the settlements because they embodied a pioneering vanguard—how could we refuse to allow a Jew to live between Jerusalem, Shechem, and Hebron? We tolerated religious Zionism because we thought it was the long-awaited reconciliation between secular Zionism and Judaism. We tolerated the dehumanization of Palestinians during the second Intifada because they had disappointed us. The song “Mahmoud mon petit Palos”, which mocked a Palestinian child from Jenin, a future terrorist, was quite popular among teenagers. This was a reaction to the deadly attacks and the antisemitism taught to Palestinians, but it was also, and above all, a mystification of the inherent evil of Palestinians, when we Jews claimed to love life. This continued with Jacques Tarnero’s Décryptage, broadcast on L’Arlequin, rue de Rennes: a series of documentaries on anti-Israeli media bias, and a way of reassuring ourselves that the Palestinians were solely to blame for the failure of the peace process.

Not seeing ourselves as responsible for ourselves or for others has tangible consequences: we are unaware of what we are inflicting on the Palestinians by administering their destinies.

Closer to home, to explain a little this silence in the face of territorial irredentism, Rabbi Amnon Bazak, a figure from Har Etzion, the great yeshiva of Gush Etzion, was received with great pomp and ceremony by community leaders at the end of 2024. The fact that he was a figurehead of colonization was of no importance. Far-right ministers were also received, before October 7 by the Consistory, but not by the CRIF, and this time the unease was palpable because it was clear that these ministers were no longer the best representatives of Zionism, but a monstrous version of it. However, when it comes to second-tier figures, rabbis, French-speaking deputies, such as Yomtob Kalfon of Yamina, and figures from the Yesha Council, things happen more naturally and the green line disappears from our minds.

Israel as an idea

Our attachment to Israel, as the source of our self-emancipation and as the agent of Jewish destiny, went hand in hand with a relative ignorance of Israel as it is. We can gauge this by what we read, what we find in “Jewish” bookstores, on the shelves of the educated Jewish public. There are numerous reflections on the Jewish question and antisemitism, from emancipation to the Holocaust, and a wealth of literature on Zionism and the birth of Israel, but that seems to be where it ends. Israel appears through its writers, from Amos Oz to Etgar Keret. But very little Israeli historiography has been translated. We know Zionism inside out, but Israel remains an idea. And for good reason: we need Israel as an idea, as the assurance of a refuge state. We know it, it’s true, for two weeks a year, in Netanya or Tel Aviv. We are surprised, and I don’t know if it’s enthusiasm or mistrust, at the lack of kosher restaurants in Tel Aviv.

Because the surrounding society is Jewish, transgressing Judaism no longer poses any risk to Jewishness. Similarly, in the case of mixed marriage, a judge of the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in the Shalit case in 1970 that exogamy no longer endangered Jewish identity—on the contrary, the risk lies with non-Jewish identity, which is a minority in Israel—and that it was therefore appropriate to relax the matrilineal definition of Jewishness.

By creating a Jewish society, Israel loosened the conservative stranglehold on Judaism that its minority status had maintained. I am not saying that it is not possible to be Jewish and secular in the diaspora, simply that we should not delude ourselves: this secularized state is not transferable to the next generation. With secularization comes commensality, a cognitive dissonance with regard to Jewish exceptionalism, and it is impossible to justify three generations in a row of this wide gap between de facto assimilation and the preservation of the Jewish name. Here again, there is no need to make alyah to benefit from the secularization of the Jewish fact made possible by Israel, since we entrust Israel with the mandate of the Jewish name.

Zionism as it has been constructed

The difficult transformation of the majority

This is not just about the dead ends of Zionism as it is transmitted in the diaspora, but about the fundamental characteristics of Zionism. Zionism is a project that does not know how to end. In doing so, it retains characteristics specific to the minority status in which it was born, characteristics that are not acceptable for a firmly established state and a Jewish majority society. When minorities are helpless, messianism is benign and often even beneficial; it is a “refuge value” that provides reassurance. In a sovereign state, it is a disinhibitor, a justification for everything that can be done, and now we can do whatever we want. It can lead to disastrous theological-political undertakings. Being a majority now comes with duties and sacrifices.

The first is civic transformation. The state guarantees rights to minorities among its citizens within the Green Line, often improperly, but is this sufficient in terms of its relationship with its minorities? There may still be a tacit distinction between the national identity of the majority group and the civic identity of all, but whether this is true or not, democratic countries all claim to transcend ethnicity and religion and to base their nationality solely on the idea of adherence to values—which happen to be the same everywhere. Israel does not have a civic identity that merges with the national identity, nor does it claim to have one. The idea of civic identity, defined culturally by its majority base and welcoming towards its minorities, does not set any paradigm to conform to in the long term. There are Jews, there are Druze, there are Arabs (or Palestinians), and it is difficult to see how to overcome this division of the country, which has remained unchanged since the Ottoman millet.

The ethos of diaspora, which does not imply any responsibility of its own, continues and exonerates Israel from any responsibility.

But the most serious problem with Zionism, in my opinion, is its inability to conceive of Israel as responsible for itself. Since we were not responsible for ourselves when we were a minority, we are unable to recognize our real responsibilities today. This has been even more pronounced since 1967, when we began to exercise responsibility over the Other. Here is an example to illustrate this. In 2002, in the midst of the second Intifada, History of the Other was published, a short history textbook on Israel and Palestine, written by historians from both countries. The even-numbered pages tell the Israeli story, while the odd-numbered pages tell the Palestinian story. The aim of this publication was to encourage mutual listening and understanding of the Other’s experience. What struck me when reading it was that in the Palestinians’ account of themselves, they are completely absent until the eve of the first Intifada. Consciously or not, the Palestinian historians who wrote their half of the book told the story of… the Other: the Israeli Jewish society. During those same years, from Balfour to 1986, Israeli historians tell a story in which the Yishuv, Israel, and the Jews have agency. The turning point in the book comes with the first Intifada. The Palestinians make their entrance into both narratives. It is at this point in history that the book becomes symmetrical. When Israel begins to realize that it has de facto responsibility for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the tone of the book changes, and Israel no longer has agency, becoming purely reactive to Palestinian violence. What is evident in these Israeli pacifist historians is generally true throughout Israel: the idea of being responsible for oneself, the primary goal of Zionism, stumbles when one is also responsible for the Other. We then re-adopt the irresponsible ethos of the diaspora, it is within us, Israel’s existence continues to be threatened, antisemitism persists, and we are then unable to measure our own responsibilities. Israel fails in its mission to bring Jews out of abnormality. The ethos of the diaspora combined with finally effective sovereignty exacerbates this all-too-human myopia. 

Not seeing ourselves as responsible for ourselves or for others has tangible consequences: we are unaware of what we are inflicting on the Palestinians by administering their destinies. The word “occupation” is virtually taboo in the Jewish world. East Jerusalem is annexed, a unified Jerusalem is a fiction: we refuse to exercise our full sovereignty there, to make all its residents citizens. We do not perceive the settlers as such, that is, as settlers protected by the Israeli metropolis and exercising domination over the surrounding population. The “we” here is perhaps exaggerated: the rejection of colonization is not insignificant in Israel, its danger is fairly well understood and is not taboo. But the thing is, we act as if we have no choice. We recognize that there is indeed a “messianic” occupation of the territory, which must be criticized, but that the “security” occupation is a necessity imposed by the terrorist threat. We are not responsible for this; we cannot leave even if we disapprove of the settlements, and all responsibility lies with the refusal of the Palestinian Other. If Abbas had accepted Olmert’s plan, then we would have left, but he did not, so we are staying and expanding the settlements. We do not see the occupation. The outrage provoked by the Oscar won by No Other Land shows this once again. We do not want to see what it means to occupy a territory and its population, to administer it militarily.

In a way, since Israel assumes that it is not judged for what it does, but for what it is, it deliberately behaves badly to annoy antisemites. 

We are also unaware of the discriminatory regime imposed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, i.e., discrimination in terms of rights—rights of settlement, construction, movement, trade, submission to a heteronomous and military justice system—in a territory according to national criteria. All this is perceived as temporary, pending the resolution of the conflict, without us seeking to resolve it, incidentally. Without us really measuring our status as occupiers—hence the euphemistic expression “disputed territories”. I am stating the obvious when I say that this temporary situation has now lasted 58 years, and that the prospects are no longer for its prolongation, but for an end to the status quo through formal annexation, which would then become “apartheid”.

The end of the status quo

We are emerging from the status quo in the worst possible way. Since December 2022, and even more so since the war in Gaza, Israel has been sinking into the abyss. We did not recognize the Nakba, but today, the Nakba is being claimed to be inflicted a “second” time on Gaza and the West Bank. The rule of law is crumbling.

A proverbial phrase attributed to Golda Meir, not without accuracy, is often invoked in Israel: “We prefer your condemnations to your condolences.” In a kind of headlong rush, Israel is precisely seeking out condemnation, undermining its diplomatic relations with all European chancelleries and with the candidates for the Abraham Accords. It is burying with a bang the two-state solution, the prospects for which are becoming increasingly blurred. In a way, since Israel assumes that it is not being judged for what it does, but for what it is in essence, it deliberately behaves badly in order to provoke antisemites.

Not to mention its conduct of war in Gaza, its deliberate plans for ethnic cleansing, indiscriminate bombing, war crimes, the use of starvation as a weapon of war, the detention of Palestinian prisoners in inhumane conditions in Sde Teiman and their extension to the West Bank, the widespread dehumanization of Palestinians and their complete erasure, including in anti-war rhetoric.

For a Zionism without occupation 

Finally resolving the Palestinian question

Anti-Zionists often lament that when Israel is critically examined, our criticism is limited to the colonization of the West Bank and the current far-right government, without seeing the roots of this colonization or the responsibilities of previous governments, both Likud and Labor, both secular, in the colonization and the failure of the peace process. And they lament that we do so in order to save our non-irredentist Zionism. This criticism is not false, but it is truncated. Our criticism focuses on this government because it is indeed more dangerous than its predecessors and it is against this government that we must fight today. But it is indeed Zionism as it actually exists that must be blamed for the colonization.

The aim of this exercise is not to save secular Zionism by contrast, but to redefine our Zionism without the occupation, hence this internal criticism.

Colonization did not begin in December 2022 nor with Netanyahu, but quickly after 1967. It has been encouraged by both the right and the left, for religious, security, and territorial reasons. For security reasons, turning a blind eye to the religious motivations of the settlers themselves—which then removes any rationality that security reasons might have had. It was initially conceived by the left, including Yigal Allon.

Without resolving the Palestinian question, Zionism struggles to take on this role of refuge state, normalizer of Jewish identity, and defuser of antisemitism. 

When, in 1968, Gush Emunim⁵ re-established Gush Etzion, this was done with the knowledge of the military administration of the West Bank and was ratified a posteriori by the state. The underlying idea of the state, then Labor, was indeed to occupy the settlements, but as a “collateral” to negotiate peace, or to occupy these territories to ensure Israel’s security. This was not the settlers’ view; for them, the West Bank was “as Jewish as Tel Aviv”. The government was aware of this, but allowed it to flourish nonetheless. The JNF, whose mission was to purchase land and maintain forests and agricultural land for the Yishuv thanks to donations from Jewish philanthropists in the diaspora, changed its aims after 1967 and gradually expanded its activities to include the colonization of the West Bank, since there was no more land to acquire after 1948.

All this means that the colonization of the West Bank cannot be viewed as a limited phenomenon. Should it be considered more in the context of the establishment of the State of Israel? This would require a nuanced approach, since the establishment of settlements in an occupied territory administered from a neighboring metropolis cannot be equated with the settlement of a territory to which Jews have aspired for two millennia, without external support, with a view to establishing an independent state, their own and theirs alone.⁶ This requires even greater nuance, given that the word “colonial” is now a loaded term. It affects the very essence of the State of Israel and has a clear goal: to undo what history has done, by writing off Israeli Jewishness as a loss.

We must face up to the colonial dimension of Israel’s founding, and do so without false concessions. We must question the myth of “a land without a people for a people without a land”—a myth quickly contradicted by reality. The Yishuv certainly settled on the coastal plain and the Jezreel Valley, which were sparsely populated by Palestinians, but they were there too, and there is no denying that the idea of a Jewish state implied the national dispossession of non-Jewish residents (as the Balfour Declaration put it). The idea of granting full citizenship to Palestinians in a Jewish state came with an ulterior motive: if there are not many of them. It would have been impossible for the state created by Resolution 181 to be a Jewish and democratic state without the departure of part of the Palestinian population, and while the exile and expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians was not entirely attributable to Israel, the refusal to allow their return was, because it threatened Israel’s viability.

Without resolving the Palestinian question, Zionism struggles to assume its role as a refuge state, a normalizer of Jewish identity, and a defuser of antisemitism. We cannot and must not revoke our solidarity with Israel, and it is in solidarity with Israel that I believe Israel must resolve the Palestinian question in order to fulfill its role as an emancipator of the Jewish people. The Palestinian question is undoubtedly the one that Israel has most avoided, before attempting to resolve it in the 1990s and 2000s, and then completely exacerbating it since then. We often separate the issue of antisemitism in the diaspora from that of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because we do not want antisemites to be able to shirk their own responsibility by blaming it on the conflict. But the two issues are indeed intertwined: Zionism is the Jews’ autonomous response to antisemitism. However, as long as Israel remains an open wound for the Palestinians, ignores its consequences on others, continues to subjugate another people, and remains embroiled in deadly and indefinite wars, then Israel cannot be the truly independent nation that must bring about lasting change for the Jewish people.

The story is not over

The story is not over, and things can be different. It is a matter of separating the two peoples and establishing two states. That is to say, establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel, with borders close to those of the Green Line, taking into account the demographic realities of the large settlement blocs, according to the Olmert-Al Kidwa plan. Only such a solution can resolve this conflict and elevate the Palestinians to the same national dignity that the Jews achieved on May 14, 1948. In such a Palestinian state, the descendants of the refugees of 1947-1949 would finally enjoy citizenship. This is where most of them already reside, retaining their refugee status. Those exiled outside Mandatory Palestine, in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, could exercise a right of return to a sovereign Palestine. Let us not delude ourselves: it is a huge sacrifice for the Palestinians to abandon the multigenerational project of returning to what is now Israel, the coastal plain, Jaffa, Lydda, Ramle, Haifa.

Israel has long believed that what is known as the Nakba was merely a historical fact, that the expulsion of the Palestinians had already been compensated for by the expulsion of 800,000 Jews from the Arab world, and that this was a population transfer similar to the Greek-Turkish conflict in Cyprus the partition of India, or the repatriation of German nationals and ethnic Germans. One important difference remains: Palestinian refugees did not enjoy citizenship in the aftermath of the War of Independence, nor were they repatriated or impatriated to a sovereign Palestine. Israel can be held responsible for making their return impossible, but not for the annexation of Palestinian territories by Jordan and Egypt and the continued status of Palestinians as refugees in those territories until 1967. Since then, Israel has also been responsible for the failure to establish a Palestinian state. What should be done about the right of return today? In my view, it must collapse with the advent of a Palestinian state, or rather be realized within that Palestinian state. Allowing the return of Palestinians, who now number not 700,000 but 5.8 million⁷, would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Not only can I not agree to this, but it seems to me to be the least plausible scenario.

To think that Israel would want to allow the return of refugees and renounce its national identity as a Jewish state is grotesque. How can the right of return be perpetuated in a country where Jews no longer represent the majority of the population?

Israel and Palestine form a “one-state reality” in which settlement areas are intermingled, in which Israeli civil law generally applies to settlers in the West Bank and military law to Palestinians, in varying proportions.⁸ While the two populations do indeed live side by side, they live separately and are driven by a deep-seated mutual hatred. On the one hand, this hatred is justified by October 7, the suicide bombings of the second Intifada, and the refusal to recognize Israel, but it is also sometimes motivated by anti-Palestinian racism. On the other hand, it is justified by the deadly war waged in Gaza, the uninhibited violence of the settlers in the West Bank⁹, the occupation and its humiliations, the repression of the two Intifadas, the memory of exile, and sometimes also motivated by anti-Semitism and the refusal to accept the defeat of 1948. This refusal has been prolonged indefinitely by the failure to resolve, either in 1948 or in 1967, the second part of the partition plan. Israel holds the West Bank and refuses to stop colonization. To think that Israel might want to allow the return of refugees and renounce its national determination as a Jewish state is grotesque. How can the Law of Return be perpetuated in a country where Jews no longer represent the majority of the population? How can the military power of the IDF, not to mention the atomic bomb, reasonably be shared, and thus half of its control ceded to the Palestinian people, when the interests of the two peoples diverge so greatly? All this is infinitely less plausible and less desirable than the withdrawal of some 200,000 settlers. Jewish and Palestinian groups with such divergent interests and such different social and economic development conditions cannot form a healthy and free political system. It would become a matter of group representation rather than a democratic system. Élie Beressi further demonstrated in the columns of Le Point¹⁰ the aporia that a binational state would constitute.

Outline of the two-state solution 

The healthiest and most practicable solution is indeed the separation of the two peoples into two states. A Jewish state, which will continue to have a Palestinian minority representing 20% of the population, will include the populated and border settlement blocs as well as the old city of Jerusalem. In this configuration, a third of the settlers would have to be evacuated¹¹, perhaps fewer with a different border demarcation.

A Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, which would finally become sovereign over most of the West Bank and would no longer be a Bantustan under Israeli military rule at the borders of each city. A state that would make all its Palestinian residents citizens, whether or not they are refugees, and that could also decide to welcome Palestinian refugees from abroad. A state that would also be demilitarized, since Israel can only relinquish its power over the West Bank and Gaza on the express condition that its basic security is not compromised.

Presented in this way, the solution is unbalanced for the Palestinians, and indeed it is. However, the extent of the concessions that Israel would have to make in such a scenario must be taken into account. It would mean renouncing an occupation which, while its objectives were not solely military but also irredentist and messianic, was in part military. It would mean renouncing the power it exercises today. Giving up the West Bank also means giving up Judea and Samaria—its Hebrew name. The coastal plain represents almost nothing in the earthly imagination of Judaism; all (or almost all) of the central holy sites of Judaism are in Judea and Samaria: the Temple Mount/Esplanade of the Mosques, managed by the Waqf, the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem, Joseph’s Tomb in Shechem (Nablus). Above all, this solution would put an end to the occupation of the Palestinians, give them national sovereignty, make them masters of their own destiny, and finally break the cycle that began in 1948, which consisted of not acknowledging the Arab defeat and replaying the 1948 scenario in every war. At that time, there were 2 million Palestinians and Jews on this land; today there are 15 million. The future of these two populations is at stake, as is the possibility of them living side by side in peace.

1. “Benjamin Netanyahu ‘must not forget that his country was created by a UN decision,’ says Emmanuel Macron; the Israeli prime minister responds,” Le Monde, October 15, 2024.

1. “Benjamin Netanyahu ‘must not forget that his country was created by a UN decision,’ says Emmanuel Macron; the Israeli prime minister responds,” Le Monde, October 15, 2024. ↩︎
2. At the end of March 2025, a conference organized by the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs was to bring together actors in the fight against antisemitism, in practice the European far right, the same people already gathered by the National Conservatism Conference, and a handful of Jewish institutional leaders from the diaspora. Most of the guests invited from this pool withdrew from the conference when they learned that the European far right had been invited. ↩︎
3. Jonas Pardo and Samuel Delor, Petit manuel de lutte contre l’antisémitisme (A Short Handbook on Combating Antisemitism), 2024. ↩︎
4. This book also consists of a critical examination of Zionism, its unspoken assumptions and its limitations, from a Zionist perspective. It served as a guide for the writing of this article. ↩︎
5. Gush Emunim, or Bloc of the Faithful, is a fundamentalist Israeli political and messianic movement that justifies the creation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank/Judea and Samaria in the name of religious imperative. ↩︎
6. I attempted this exercise, examining the founding of Israel in this critical reading of Maxime Rodinson’s Israel, Colonial Fact? ↩︎
7. Estimated number of refugees and their descendants in 2021. ↩︎
8. Which can be described as “apartheid”? See in K.: Apartheid – an elephant painted red and “Apartheid” or the denial of politics in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. ↩︎
9. It is difficult to describe the nature of the law that applies to settlers as a whole. Some areas of law fall under civil law, others under military law, which means that the settlements are annexed in law, at least partially. Since 2015, the Yesh Din association has been compiling all legislation that can be considered annexation in law in the Annexation Legislation Database. ↩︎
10. Élie Beressi, “Is a single Israeli-Palestinian state a viable solution? Elie Beressi responds to Rima Hassan”, Le Point, November 17, 2023. ↩︎
11. According to demographic data compiled by Shalom Akhshav. ↩︎