20 April 2026
By Stephen Gowans
On April 14, Ezra Klein, the New York Times’ columnist and podcaster, sought a “reckoning with Israel’s ‘one-state reality’.” He organized a discussion with Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami, a pair of academics who had written a 15 July 2025 article in Foreign Affairs, The Promise and Peril of Recognizing Palestine. Their article asked whether “a two-state solution [could] emerge from a one-state reality?”
The discussion had two merits: First, it acknowledged that a Jewish supremacist state exists from the river to the sea. As Lynch and Telhami put it in their Foreign Affairs article:
Israel is not a democratic state incidentally occupying Palestinian territory. All the territory west of the Jordan River has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where the land and the people are subject to radically different legal regimes, and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste.
Israel, in other words, is a democratic state for Jews, and a Jewish state for Palestinians, on whose country, land, and homes, Israel has been built. The philosopher Domenico Losurdo called it a Herrenvolk democracy—a democracy for (and only for) a master people. Others call it, correctly, an apartheid state. The three descriptions are congruent.
The second merit was Telhami, who offered a number of important insights. I’ll cite but one.
Israeli strategy from Day 1 has been to have what they call escalation dominance. It is a one-sided deterrence; it is that whenever there’s a fight with any party in the region, Israel can escalate it to the next level until it has the upper hand, and it will always have the upper hand. In effect, you’re saying you have to have strategic dominance over every conceivable party in the Arab world and the Middle East. That’s half a billion people. And you are a country of 10 million. That is why Israel doesn’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons
The last sentence, perhaps, requires some elaboration. Consider this: On April 18, New York Times’ reporters Mark Mazzetti, Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes began a report on the US-Israeli war on Iran with the following: “The United States and Israel launched their war against Iran on the argument that if Iran one day got a nuclear weapon, it would have the ultimate deterrent against future attacks.”
Note that the reporters didn’t say the two aggressors attacked Iran because it had threatened either country or any of their allies, or because they were motivated by human rights considerations. Instead, they wrote that the United States and Israel launched their war to prevent Iran from acquiring the nuclear arms that would provide Tehran a means to deter future US and Israeli aggression. These arms would, in Telhami’s words, check US and Israeli escalation dominance. Were Iran to achieve this objective, it would deny the two aggressor states strategic dominance over “half a billion people” and “every conceivable party in the Arab world and the Middle East.” Thus, it is not a nuclear threat to the physical safety of Americans and Israelis that Washington and Tel Aviv seek to deter, but a threat to their ability to dominate West Asia and its hundreds of millions of people.
Klein, a man who acknowledges that he does not count himself among those who want to see Israel cease to exist (though the idea that anyone should want an apartheid state to continue exist is troubling), offered his own commentary, some of which had merit.
- He argued that “the one-state reality” [which is to say, Israeli apartheid, is] not accidental. It was, and is, not intended to be transient. It was being etched into the land — in stone and cement, in settlements and checkpoints, in the construction of walls and the demolition of homes.”
- He noted that “More settlements were approved in the last year alone than in the previous two decades combined.”
- He lamented that “Israel has allowed — has protected — a terrifying rise in settler and military violence toward the Palestinians who live” in the West Bank, adding that “There is no doubt, if you go there, who rules the West Bank — and it is not the P.A.”
- He pointed to how “Israel has used the war in Iran as cover to invade Lebanon, displacing more than a million people, adding that “it is an open question whether any of those 600,000 Lebanese will ever be able to return to their homes.”
- He acknowledged that Israel has no intention of allowing the Palestinians a state of their own.
Sadly, Klein’s merits are outweighed by his egregious faults. Significantly, he fails to explain how Israel’s resolve to deny the Palestinians a state of their own has left the Palestinians bereft of any option but violence to redress a fundamental wrong; and that this, by itself, explains the outbreak of Palestinian violence on 7 October 2023.
Palestinian rebellion was met on the Israeli side by Tel Aviv stepping up its decades-long efforts to erase the Palestinians as a people. These efforts have been evinced, to use the language of the Genocide Convention, in the:
- Killing of Palestinians in large numbers;
- Inflicting on them serious bodily and mental harm; and
- Imposing on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their demise.
Klein excuses these genocidal acts as “what any state and any people would do.” That’s doubtful. What any state and people might have done, and certainly could have done, is begin to redress the historical injustices that produced the rebellion. As Marx observed about the 1857 Indian Rebellion against the country’s British colonizers: “There is something in human history like retribution.” (The Indian Revolt, 16 September 1857) Or, to borrow from Marx again, with appropriate alterations of language for time and place: “However infamous the conduct of the Palestinians on 7 October 2023, it was only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of Israel’s own conduct”. Any serious effort to prevent future Palestinian violence, would address the root of the violence, not try, by escalation dominance, to suppress it, so that the fruits of the injustice Zionists have visited upon their victims — the theft of their land, homes, property, and country — can continue to be enjoyed by Israeli Jews into the future. That is what is meant when one says Israel’s response to the Palestinian rebellion is justified because it is what any state or people would do.
Genocide is built into settler colonialism. Settlers seek the land of indigenous peoples for the exclusive use of their own ethnic group. European settlers did so in North America, Australia, and New Zealand; German settlers did so in southwest Africa; and the Nazis tried to do so in eastern Europe, where Slavs, Jews, and Roma–the occupants of the land Hitler coveted for Lebensraum and German settlement–paid a terrible price. Jewish settlers have done the same to the natives of Palestine. In all cases, the result has been genocide. Settlers drive indigenous peoples off land they covet by expulsion, extermination, or both. Settler colonialism rests on the logic of the elimination of the natives.
Settler colonial states of the past have acted just as Israel, a settler colonial state of the present, has. But that’s hardly a justification for genocide. The Nazi SS Einsatzgruppen shot 34,000 Soviet Jews and dumped then in the Babi Yar ravine in September 1941 in retaliation for Soviet agents detonating mines in occupied Kiev which killed as many a three-hundred German soldiers. This was an instance of settler colonial forces undertaking harsh reprisals against the violent rebellion of the natives, in this case, against an ethnic group, Jews, viewed by the Nazis as being intimately linked to the political leadership of the resistance, or terrorists, as the Nazis called them. According to Klein’s logic, the Nazi reprisal killings were justified as “what any state and any people would do.”
It might also be pointed out that if Israel did “what any state and any people would do,” then Hamas and Hezbollah have done what any colonized and oppressed people would do. Colonized people never allow the colonizer to despoil their country, land, homes, and property, without putting up a fight. We might call this an iron law of history. To borrow Marx’s language, the inevitable rebellion of the Palestinians on 7 October 2023 no more lends itself to moralizing – for or against – than does an earthquake in California or a snowstorm in Canada, both inevitable events. It’s what colonized and oppressed people have always done and will always do. So, if we can point to genocide as what any colonial settler state and settler people would do to the people it’s oppressing, we can also point to violent rebellion as what any colonized people would do to the people who are oppressing them.
Klein’s heart bleeds for Palestinians who have been denied a state of their own and for the Shia of south Lebanon who the Israelis have driven from their homes, perhaps never allowed to return. But in his view, Hamas and Hezbollah, the inevitable response to Zionist settler colonialism, are anathema. Israel’s “right to reprisal against Hamas and Hezbollah,” he says, “is undeniable.” Sure, as much as the SS’s right to reprisal against Jews for the killing of three-hundred German soldiers at Kiev was undeniable. Zionists will object that you can’t compare Israel to Nazi Germany. But you can. As a settler colonial state, Israel shares much in common with its settler colonial cohorts: the United States, Canada; Australia; New Zealand; and Germany.
Klein must, in the words of the Syrian singer Siba, “demonize our revolutionaries,” as much as Israel must “eradicate our roots; demolish our homes; criminalize our existence; falsify our origins; separate our loved ones; and slaughter our children.”
Those who pity the oppressed but condemn their rebellion and demonize their revolutionaries are no friend of the oppressed. They aid the oppressor. But, then, I suspect Klein is alright with that.
Who Rules the US Revealed in Washington’s Cuba Demands
The idea that US foreign policy is driven by national security and human rights considerations is contradicted by the list of demands the US State Department issued to Havana last week. In reality, US foreign policy is driven by the interests of US businesses and investors, as the US demands make clear.
Cuba must:
o Transition to a market-based economy;
o Expand its private sector;
o Open its door to foreign-investment;
o Compensate U.S. citizens and corporations whose assets and properties were nationalized in the 1960s;
o Release political prisoners;
o Expand political freedoms.
Washington “signaled that the United States would not tolerate resistance to its demands.”
The New York Times’ headline that reported on this meeting said that US officials travelled to Havana to lay out proposals, when, in point of fact, as the text of the article indicated, the US delegation issued demands to which it said it “would not tolerate resistance.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Epstein Avant La Lettre
I have been reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, the first modern autobiography. I was shocked by one incident the eighteenth-century composer, novelist, and philosopher describes.
Rosseau writes of “a little girl of eleven or twelve,” named Anzoletta, who he and his friend, Carrio, bought from her mother with the aim of enjoying her “sensual pleasures,” that is, keeping her as a sex slave.
Carrio, who was a lady’s man, grew weary of always going to women who belonged to others and took it into his head to have one of his own; and as we were inseparable he suggested to me an arrangement which is not rare in Venice, that we should keep one between us. I agreed. The next question was to find a safe one. He made such thorough investigations that he unearthed a little girl of eleven or twelve, whom her wretched mother wanted to sell. We went to see her together…She was fair and gentle as a lamb. … We gave the mother some money, and made arrangements for the daughter’s keep. (The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Book Seven, Penguin, 1953, p. 302.)
Rousseau says that he developed a parental affection for the girl that prevented the relationship from developing into a sexual one. All the same, he and Carrio bought the girl with the intention of “being the corrupters of her innocence,” as Rousseau writes.
What is striking is that the theorist of liberalism passed over the incident without showing the faintest pang of conscience, though at other times he expressed great remorse for actions that by today’s standards pale in comparison with the intended sexual enslavement of a prepubescent girl.
Throughout his Confessions, Rousseau claims to tremble in outrage at wrongs and the exploitation of the weak, though clearly his aversion to injury inflicted on the weak was far from universal, and likely very much limited to inflictions upon people such as himself, and certainly not on little girls of poor families.
What's Left 