Israel-Palestinian Conflict: The One-State Delusion

Four left-wing academics recently made a case for giving up on a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In a piece in Foreign Affairs titled “Israel’s One-State Reality,” Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami argue that the Israeli presence in the West Bank has rendered political separation a near impossibility and assert that the U.S., rather than clinging to an Oslo-era anachronism, should abandon its support for a two-state resolution to hostilities and forsake its closest ally in the Middle East.

What the authors are really saying, however, is much simpler — the pernicious underlying message is only thinly concealed. “There is one Jewish state in the world. In the end, and after one removes all the academic posturing, theirs is a proposal to eliminate it,” Elliott Abrams, former foreign-policy adviser to Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump, explained. “I put this article down as fundamentally one more effort to bring the existence of the State of Israel to an end.”

About the Author

Bobby Miller

Bobby Miller is an ISI Fellow at National Review and a graduate student at Georgetown University.

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Four left-wing academics recently made a case for giving up on a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In a piece in Foreign Affairs titled “Israel’s One-State Reality,” Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami argue that the Israeli presence in the West Bank has rendered political separation a near impossibility and assert that the U.S., rather than clinging to an Oslo-era anachronism, should abandon its support for a two-state resolution to hostilities and forsake its closest ally in the Middle East.

What the authors are really saying, however, is much simpler — the pernicious underlying message is only thinly concealed. “There is one Jewish state in the world. In the end, and after one removes all the academic posturing, theirs is a proposal to eliminate it,” Elliott Abrams, former foreign-policy adviser to Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump, explained. “I put this article down as fundamentally one more effort to bring the existence of the State of Israel to an end.”