As the genocide unfolds nightly on our TV screens, the need for a solution that can deliver peace from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea has never been more urgent. Three very different books that discuss these solutions are Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A reckoning by Peter Beinart, One State: The only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel by Ghada Karmi, and Palestine and Marxism by Joseph Daher. All make the case that a single, secular democratic state based on equality is the essential ingredient.
Beinart’s book is aimed at Jewish readers. His goal is to win the hearts and minds of Jews who are Zionists and support the apartheid Israeli settler state. Beinart is now an outspoken critic of the Israeli government’s policies towards the Palestinians. But he didn’t start out that way. Having once backed the Zionist settler state, this book sets out to convince his peers to take the same political leap.
At the core of the book is an argument that support for Zionism is not an inherent part of being Jewish — they are two distinctly different things, despite the Zionists’ endless conflating of the two.
Beinart argues, “We need a new story — based on equality rather than supremacy — because the current one doesn’t endanger only Palestinians. It endangers us.” Trotsky shared this understanding that Zionism is a catastrophe for both Arabs and Jews. He warned in 1940 that the attempt to solve the “Jewish problem” in Europe through the dispossession of the Palestinians would be a “bloody trap.”
Beinart ends his book on a hopeful note, arguing for “liberating ourselves from supremacy so, as partners with Palestinians, we can help liberate the world.” The author passionately believes that “Israeli Jews and Palestinians could live together in full equality with a true process of reconciliation and full refugee return.”
Ghada Karmi, a Palestinian-born doctor and activist, shares this perspective. During her childhood, her family was expelled from West Jerusalem in 1948 during the Nakba. In One State, Karmi argues that the lands from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea have been a single state since 1967 — one based on supremacy. Central to the struggle today, she argues, is to dismantle the apartheid state and launch a fight for equality.
Karmi asserts there is a pressing need to think beyond the two-state solution, which she believes is grossly inequitable and has always been delusional. As Israel ploughs on with its expansionist project, carving up what little remains of the West Bank and Gaza, the fiction that two states can ever solve anything stands exposed. She is “bewildered” that Western leaders continue to peddle the fantasy that two states could be viable.
Karmi wants a multicultural society based on a secular democratic state where everyone is equal. Like Beinart, she also has hope. Karmi believes that a single state based on equality is inevitable — it is just a matter of when. She remains optimistic, because the level of support for the Palestinian cause has never been greater.
Palestine and Marxism is by Syrian Marxist, Joseph Daher. Coming in at a little over a hundred pages, the book accomplishes a huge amount. It situates the Palestinian struggle in the context of imperialism. Once Israel was established, Daher characterises it as playing “the role of guard dog for Western imperialist interests in the region for decades.” Daher succinctly explains the history of antisemitism, the rise of Zionism, and the Nakba. Published in 2024, he describes events in Gaza as a new Nakba.
Both Karmi and Daher point to the betrayal of the Palestinian people by the Oslo Accords. Karmi says of Oslo that it “left Israel in control of the borders, the airspace and the settlements; the Israeli Army could move freely along all roads and had security jurisdiction over every aspect of Palestinian life.” This played a key role in turbo-charging support for the Islamic fundamentalism of groups such as Hamas. While neither Karmi nor Daher support the politics of Hamas, both seek to explain the rise in support for the group in the failure of Arab nationalism to deliver a way forward. Daher, who is speaking very much to a socialist audience, gives clear advice throughout. For example, “Socialists should also be careful not to conflate Islam and Islamic fundamentalism. Instead we must make a sharp distinction between the religion Islam and fundamentalist groups.” He warns that Islamophobia is a form of religious bigotry peddled by the ruling class.
Daher, like Beinart and Karmi, advocates a single, secular state without any form of discrimination and in which every Palestinian has the right of return. He also discusses a winning strategy. Pointing to the millions of Palestinian refugees living throughout the Middle East and North African region, he highlights that their struggle is intertwined with that of the working class and peasant masses. He concludes, “This is why there is a dialectical relationship between the struggles; when the Palestinians fight, this triggers a regional liberation movement, and the regional movement in turn fuels that of occupied Palestine.” The main task for the Left, he believes, is to promote regional solidarity from below, arguing that the fight for Palestinian liberation is at the centre of the struggle of the entire region.
A theme which runs through all three books is exposing the systematic campaign by the Zionist lobby to characterise anti-Zionism as antisemitic. Karmi believes that the greatest beneficiary of the blurring of the definition of both is Israel and its supporters.
Beinart has a whole chapter on this, titled “The New, New Antisemitism.” In it he shows how these charges of antisemitism are deployed with a single goal — to discredit and silence all criticism of the war on Gaza. He explains what is behind the twisted strategy of labelling anti-Zionism as antisemitism: “If conflating Israel and Judaism is a terrible way to defend Jews, it’s an effective way to discredit Palestinians because it turns Palestinian opposition to Zionism from a natural response to oppression into a form of bigotry.”
Beinart is angry about this strategy of mischaracterising what words mean. He argues, “The double standard isn’t accidental. The whole point of conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is to depict Palestinians and their supporters as bigots, thus turning a conversation about the oppression of Palestinians into a conversation about the oppression of Jews.”
Daher’s book ends with a number of invaluable appendices. One specifically addresses the overheated Zionist campaign to demonise — and in some countries even criminalise — the chant, “From the river to the sea: Palestine will be free,” labelling it a call to eradicate all Jews from Israel. He presents the history and concludes that, “contrary to the Israeli version of the slogan,” its use “promotes, for the vast majority of supporters of the Palestinian cause, a democratic and inclusive solution.” Beinart agrees. He sees this chant as a call for peace and freedom based on a single, democratic secular state.
Beinart, Karmi and Daher are speaking to different audiences but all powerfully make the case for a single, secular state based on genuine equality. Karmi says “it is the only just arrangement to resolve a conflict whose essence was injustice.”
• Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A reckoning, Atlantic Books, 2025 • Ghada Karmi, One State: The only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel, Pluto Press, 2023 • Joseph Daher, Palestine and Marxism, Resistance Books, 2024
These books, along with a wide selection of reading about Palestine, are available in the Solidarity Salon Bookstore,113 Spring Street, Reservoir.
