Time to talk about a one state solution?

This piece was published in The Australian on Saturday January 19. It has been slightly edited to take into account the release of three hostages by Hamas as part of the ceasefire agreement that came into force on Sunday.

Michael Gawenda

A few weeks ago a senior executive at one of Australia’s great sandstone universities, asked me whether it was OK to civilly discuss – and even advocate for – a one-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Given what had happened at the university where this person works and at other Australian elite universities, this seemed to be a question disconnected from reality. The release of three women hostages held by Hamas since October 7 2023 as part of a ceasefire agreement, does not change that.

There is a lot of pain still to come. An end to the war is a long way off and a long-term peace agreement of any kind between Israel and the Palestinians remains a hope and a dream, and in this long and bitter conflict hopes and dreams have ended in nightmares.

But the idea, coming from a senior executive at an elite university, that we here in Australia, we should have a civil discussion – in our parliaments, in our universities, in our media – about whether Israel should cease to exist, remains astounding.

Have there been civil conversations about Israel and the Palestinians and Zionism, at the university where he works? I should have asked him. Civil conversations, there among the angry, often hate-filled demonstrations, the occupation of university buildings, the encampments, the end-of-Israel slogans, the slogans of Hamas-like triumphalism and the vitriol directed at Jewish students?

Had he, I should have asked, been to the CBD on any Sunday afternoon and witnessed the demonstrations that are ever more hate-filled, more apocalyptic, more uncompromising, so that Jews do not go to the CBD on Sundays? If he had witnessed such a demonstration, did he wonder whether his question about a civil conversation about Israel and the Palestinians and Zionism could do anything more than inflame the demonstrators? That they would do anything else than treat the question with contempt?

Then there are the Jews. Australian Jews, I mean. Were they to be included in this civil conversation about a one-state solution for the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians?

There are increasing numbers of people on the left – the Greens and Jewish anti-Zionists among them – who do not believe a civil conversation with Jews, who do not renounce Israel and Zionism, is possible or even desirable. These Jews are, after all, supporters of genocide and white supremacy and colonialism.

To be fair, I believe that the senior university executive who asked me the question about whether a civil conversation was possible about a one-state solution – one state from the river to the sea, I assume he meant – is not a supporter of the concept of good and bad Jews.

The civil conversation he had in mind would not exclude Jews like me who feel a deep connection – a connection approaching love – with Israel despite its flaws and darknesses, and despite Benjamin Netanyahu and the racists and Jewish supremacists who are senior ministers in Netanyahu’s government.

But still, given all that has happened since October 7, 2023, at the university, given the weekly CBD demonstrations, given the social media rivers of hate against Jews and Israel and Zionists, given the vandalised Jewish homes and businesses, the synagogue that was burnt and the defacement of other synagogues, given all that, what sort of civil conversation does he imagine is possible about whether Israel should cease to exist? Even if Jews like me are not excluded from the conversation?

For that is the essence of his question: given Israel’s history, the way it was established, the way the Palestinians were dispossessed, the way Zionism was a settler-colonial ideology, a white supremacist ideology and given what Israel has done in Gaza, isn’t Israel a failed state that should never have been born?

And isn’t it time to discuss – civilly, of course – what sort of state might replace it?

It is a dark and threatening question for most Jews, difficult to answer in a civil way given that it implies the possibility that Israel has no right any longer – if it ever did – to exist. It remains a dark and threatening question despite what has happened this week.

And of course, it is a question that has no salience in Israel or among Palestinians, the vast majority of whom, in their post-October 7 world, see the conflict as a zero-sum game with no end to it except victory for their side.

That has not changed with the beginning of the ceasefire.

How is it, then, that a senior executive at one of Australia’s elite universities, given all that has taken place at his university, thinks a civil conversation, about whether the erasure of Israel is a good or bad thing, is worth having? What would be the point except to legitimise, make kosher, the question of whether Israel should be erased?

Still, I think it was remiss of me not to answer the question – I basically obfuscated; said it was a complex question that required a certain amount of unpacking. And that we should discuss it further. Blah blah blah blah.

Despite everything, the question from the senior university executive has been on my mind ever since he asked it. And it has been more urgently on my mind these past few days.

I have written scores of articles since October 7, 2023 – many published in this paper – but I have not written about the war in Gaza, with its unspeakable horrors.

I have written about the state of the world for diaspora Jews, Australian Jews in particular.

I have written a lot about journalism and the way journalism has been compromised by an abandonment of basic principles – that journalists should be fair and accurate and never activists for a cause.

I have written about the way things that would once have been unthinkable have become normalised. I have written about the blatant and increasingly virulent hostility towards Jews and the demonisation of Israel, which for many leftists including significant members of the Labor Party has become the incarnation of colonial, racist evil.

I have written about the targeting on social media of artists and writers and academics who are now routinely referred to as demonic supporters and promoters of the Israeli genocide.

And I have written about the abject failure of the Albanese government and the public institutions whose mission it is to combat anti-Semitism, to address Jewish vulnerability and call out and stamp out anti-Jewish violence.

None of this, not a single article, was published in The Age, the newspaper I edited for seven years. The paper where I worked for most of my half-century in journalism. The paper is not up for a civil conversation with me, not about the crisis in journalism, not about the way government and institutions have failed to respond to Jew hatred.

The last time The Age published me was a month or so before October 7 when it ran an extract from my book, My Life as a Jew. The book was published three days before October 7.

Former colleagues at The Age came to the launch. Journalists from across the media came to the launch – I had, after all, been a journalist for a long time.

Since then, some of my former colleagues who came to the launch of my book and celebrated with me have asked me questions like the one the university executive asked: what’s my position on the Gaza war? How can the deaths of so many civilians be justified? Can Israel be a democracy and a Jewish state, and if it can’t what’s the alternative? These questions are asked by former colleagues and friends who are not antizionists and who do not accuse Israel of being a genocidal state rooted in an evil racist ideology.

Former colleagues and friends who believe these things do not ask me these questions, they simply end our friendship.

They are fair questions, heartfelt questions, even though in the greater scheme of things why should it matter so much to friends and former colleagues what I think about these things?

It often feels like it matters in large part because they want me to say publicly that I have not become hard-hearted, that I see and feel heartsick at the suffering of the people of Gaza, that I am no supporter of Netanyahu and his fascist ministers who are creating hell for Palestinians in the West Bank.

There are Jewish journalists who have answered these sorts of questions, “spoken out” against the war in Gaza, expressed their pain at the destruction and death visited upon Gazans, and who have declared that what is being done by Israel is “not done in my name” and have been awarded for their cry of pain with major journalism awards.

I have written none of these things. I have answered none of the heartfelt questions asked by my former colleagues and my friends, not publicly anyway.

In an extract in Pearls and Irritations from his recently published memoir, Robert Manne, one of Australia’s great public intellectuals, writing about our disagreement in the 1980s about whether Australia should conduct war crimes trials of people who had settled in Australia after World War II and were accused of committing serious crimes during the Holocaust, refers to me as “the journalist Michael Gawenda, a current defender of Israel’s behaviour in Gaza”.

I was puzzled by this at first, this reference, in passing, to my supposed defence of Israel’s “behaviour” in Gaza. How was it at all relevant to our long-ago disagreement about the war crimes trials?

And then I realised Manne was trying to be ironic: Gawenda was for war crimes trials for old Nazis but now he defends the war crimes being perpetrated by the Israelis.

I don’t think I have defended Israel’s behaviour in Gaza but the point is that Manne assumes this about me and he makes this assumption because I have not – unlike him and other people like him – written articles and made speeches at rallies that excoriate Israel and express a powerful disillusionment with the whole Zionist project.

I don’t think I have defended Israel’s behaviour in Gaza but the thing is, I am not disillusioned with the whole Zionist project. My attachment to Israel, my concern for its people, is undiminished. It remains for me, a miracle, a deeply flawed miracle, but a miracle still.

Israel is not a genocidal state. The suggestion is obscene. And worse than that. The idea that Israel has forfeited its right to exist – if it ever had such a right – is also obscene. And worse than that.

That these accusations are now made, and these judgments are now delivered by substantial sections of the left, including much of the Labor Party left, remains shocking to me.

So what is my answer – what should my answer have been to the question asked by that senior executive at one of our elite universities: Is it OK to have a – civil, of course – discussion about a one-state solution? What is my answer in light of the freeing of the three women hostages and ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas?

One state from the river to the sea, a discussion about whether the slogan “From the river to the sea” is a perfectly OK slogan for the protesters at our universities and on the streets of our cities to chant? A civil discussion about that? How does the senior university executive imagine that on his campus, with some of the academics out there standing shoulder to shoulder with the protesters, with Jewish students feeling unsafe on campus, there could be a civil discussion about whether Israel should survive as a Jewish state?

Or does he imagine that as a result of the ceasefire agreement, all these protests will end, all the activist academics will fall silent and go back to teaching or research, all the chants of “From the river to the sea” will change to a chant for peace?

There is a world in which such a discussion of “one state” could happen, but it is not the world in which we are living, the world we have been living in since October 7, 2023. It is not even the world in which there is some hope that the war in Gaza might indeed end.

Nor in this world – even now – do I have answers to the heartfelt questions asked of me by some of my former colleagues and even some of my friends. What I have are half-answers because what I think and feel is contradictory and fragmented and that, inevitably, would be misunderstood.

Here, in Australia, have we crossed some sort of line where hostility towards Jews is part of a reality with which we have to live? In which being a supporter of Israel is to be an evil Zionist, an advocate for genocide?

I would say all this to the university executive if he asked me his question now. Then I would suggest that there is much to be done at our universities and by our governments and our institutions that matters much more than whether we should have civil discussions about whether Palestine should be free, from the river to the sea.

Michael Gawenda is the former editor-in-chief of The Age and is the author of My Life as a Jew (Scribe, 2023).