The intellectual dishonesty of Shlomo Sand His new book is a work of sophistry

And so, we come to his latest book Israel–Palestine: Federation or Apartheid?. Here, Sand “explores” two political solutions for the current conflict: a bi-national federation or what he terms an apartheid-like reality. There is, glaringly, no option of two states. The idea of a state for Jews, the state of Israel, is a non-starter.

It is from this bogus binary that we begin. What follows is expected: the first chapter opens with Sand quoting the Right-wing Zionist thinker Vladimir Jabotinsky, allowing him to make the case for Zionism being an entirely colonial endeavour. Predictably, there is no mention the continuous Jewish presence in the land since the defeat of the Jewish prince Simon Bar Kochba in AD135 and the fact that, apart from a brief period in the 18th century, the Palestinians who lived there did so as subjects of foreign rulers.

Jabotinsky, by the way, is more comprehensively dealt with by the other Israeli revisionist historian Avi Shlaim, in his book Iron Wall. I have my own issues with Shlaim’s work, but he is a harmless man and possessed of magnificent hair. I once sat in a lecture of his at university, marvelling at how it corkscrewed out of his skull in all directions, so white and flocculent you could stuff a duvet with it.

Sand is a more aggressive polemicist, but he does make some valid points. His youthful activism was, he said, filled with hope that “the Israelis would see that, logically speaking, they simply could not expand their country at the expense of others while continuing to live in peace with them”. Few would disagree with that. He then goes on to lament that the articles he wrote and the marches he attended didn’t succeed in drilling this notion into the establishment — a sentiment also shared by many Israelis.

He fails to properly interrogate the degree to which the Palestinian side is culpable for the failure to reach peace. But again: fair enough. He’s far from alone in this. No, the bigger problem here is one of intellectual dishonesty. Take this — frankly pretty important — paragraph:

“And then October 7 came upon Israel, with Hamas’s brutal attack on areas next to Gaza. This horrible massacre bears certain similarities to the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, which was carried out by Christian Phalangists while the Israeli Defence Forces under Ariel Sharon stood by, allowing the attack to take place. It was the same Ariel Sharon who, later, in 2005, evacuated the Gaza Strip and contributed to Hamas’s rise to power, further exacerbating the discord within the Palestinian leadership.”

It doesn’t take much effort to parse this sort of guff. The biggest single massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is perfunctorily dealt with in a single line, before Sand moves on to invoke a massacre committed by Lebanese Christians almost half a century ago. As it happens, the two events “bear certain similarities” (mark the weasel phrase) to the degree that almost any acts of horrific violence do — and this illuminates nothing. He then castigates Ariel Sharon for literally doing what Sand says he spent most of his youth calling for: withdrawing from occupied Palestinian land. Sand goes on to describe how October 7 “came as an utter shock to the Israeli public”. I’d argue it came as a “shock” to any right-thinking person – unless you believe that Palestinians are savages, which I do not.

He then asks: “So what was the source of this raging hatred that translated into such terrible war crimes?” It was “convenient”, he says, “for many Israelis to explain the massacre in terms of the traditional hatred of Islam towards Jews, thus ignoring the long history of Muslim–Jewish relations since the Crusades and Salah ad-Din”.

Well, ok. It’s true that Jews tended to fare better in Muslim lands than in Christian ones, but they did so as dhimmis — religious minorities under Islamic rule who could not bear arms, hold various public offices, were generally forced to wear distinctive clothing, and often subjected to pogroms. And then there is the question of Jew-hatred.

Unlike most armchair pundits, I have been to both the West Bank and Gaza. There I have met countless Palestinians who impressed me with their charm, their stoicism in the face of undoubted suffering, and their hospitality. Many Palestinians are absolutely not antisemitic.

But there are also a lot who are; and they tend to be in Hamas. The conditions in Gaza will inevitably create resistance, but October 7 was about something else. Just weeks after the atrocity, I was shown footage of a jubilant Hamas terrorist calling his father after the attack. “Father… I killed 10 Jews with my bare hands,” he roared. “Check your WhatsApp. Father, be proud of me!” In Khan Younis, a member of Islamic Jihad told me that Jews are the descendants of pigs and apes and should be killed.

These people are of little concern to Sand, whose sophistry leads him to his central concern: “Given these circumstances, can an exclusively Jewish state in the Middle East have any secure future?”

Again, to be fair to him, Sand understands the geopolitical Molotov cocktail that one state would be. But, he says smarmily, “as Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist idea, once said [of the idea of a Jewish state]: ‘If you will it, it is no dream.’”. Sand correctly points to the systematic settler theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank, and the reprehensible legal architecture that has sprung up to enable it, giving many incontestable examples of both. These “facts on the ground” make two states no longer viable, he argues. The reality, however, is that there is no “solution” to this nightmare other than compromise, and certainly not self-erasure by one side. Because in the end, when you strip away all the rhetoric, hate, and endless debates about history, the only germane fact is this: the land has two peoples, and neither of them are going anywhere.

Let’s be clear: the one-state “solution” is not an alternative for Israel but an alternative to Israel. To expect the only Jewish state in the world to voluntarily extinguish itself is fundamentally unserious. My family lived as Jews in Iraq for centuries — possibly even before the advent of Islam. But none of that mattered: a few years after Israel was founded, they were forced to leave for fear of facing violence or worse. This is why Israel exists. Against that there can be no retreat.

In a recent update to his book Jerusalem, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore proposes a different mental formulation for thinking about the future: “Two nations, two republics.” Two peoples living in two separate sovereign states alongside each other. This is the only viable future. Yes, the settlements must be dismantled (or equivalent land given from Israel). Yes, it will be an immense political (and indeed physical) undertaking, but it happened in Gaza, albeit on a smaller scale. It just takes political will. And for now, that is lacking on both sides.

Even so, we must hope that it will come because “one state” is not just delusional, it is dangerous. It helps to keep the conflict alive by making Palestinians believe that no compromise is necessary, which emboldens Israel’s fanatics and undermines its moderates. In the interim, both sides are condemned to interminable suffering. This is what matters. Not that people in Europe or the United States, which really do have long traditions of meting out colonisation and genocide, get to feel better about themselves.

Sand is an Israeli — though he has publicly declared that he no longer wishes to be considered a Jew — so he does have skin in the game. But in the end, one has to ask: what’s the difference between him and Netanyahu? Both are living in an alternative reality, talking about different variations of a one-state “solution” that, practically speaking, will only bring civil war, which the Israelis would win, as they have an army, navy and Airforce. Look around the Middle East and consider how non-Muslims fare in society. Look at Lebanon to see how trying to cram various confessions into a single entity has worked out.

So “two nations, two republics” it must be. It is the only hope of real justice for two peoples who are, however much they might wish otherwise, manacled to each other forever. The road will be long and incredibly hard — but remember, Shlomo, if you will it, if you truly will it, it is no dream.

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David Patrikarakos is UnHerd‘s foreign correspondent. His latest book is War in 140 characters: how social media is reshaping conflict in the 21st century. (Hachette)

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