{"id":316218,"date":"2026-05-18T12:00:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T11:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=316218"},"modified":"2026-05-16T12:59:37","modified_gmt":"2026-05-16T11:59:37","slug":"can-israel-save-itself-some-proposals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/05\/can-israel-save-itself-some-proposals\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Israel Save Itself? Some Proposals"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Challenge of Illegitimacy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s quest for absolute security by recourse to war, as combined with territorial expansion, regional hegemony, Iranian regime change, apartheid and genocide, are governmental postures destructive to law, morality, and stability. Palestinian erasure as a political actor and the permanent victimization of its people as refugees, apartheid subalterns, and unwanted presences in their homelands seems to be generating its own disaster scenarios.\u00a0 Despite waging wars against neighboring countries without experiencing serious retaliation Israel\u2019s long-term prosperity and survival, let alone its claims of being a democracy, have never seemed worse. Signaling this dismal future is Israel\u2019s dramatic loss of legitimacy as a sovereign state is greater than it has ever been as a result of its severe and continuous crimes against the Palestinian people and due to its regional acts of aggression against its neighbors utterly disregarding their territorial sovereignty.<\/p>\n

Geopolitical prudence on the part of Israel might have served the country well given the dire experience of settler colonial projects, including Algeria, Rhodesia, and South Africa. Each of these regimes fell despite being militarily dominant in relation to national resistance movements. The situation faced by Israel is notably different. Israel, although controversial from its outset, has so far successfully defied the anti-colonial trend by its ruthlessness, military prowess, sophisticated diplomacy, its pragmatic economic and political usefulness as an arms supplier, and above all by its status as a reliable actor when it comes to guidance and assistance for governments facing hostile movements of resistance or insurgency in their own country and by their geopolitical utility to the West.<\/p>\n

Even the United States in the aftermath of the 9\/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, adopted Israel tactics of dealing with Global South movements of resistance as \u2018terrorism,\u2019 with little concern about the justice of the grievances that motivated recourse to violent forms of opposition and resistance. Launching a global war on terror led the United States to deepen it dependence on geopolitical militarism, an expensive substitute for reliance on soft power to gain support for its post-1945 leadership role in the world, which were widely regarded as contributions to the public good or at least seen as l the \u2018lesser of evils\u2019 throughout the long Cold War. These high risks \u00a0of global catastrophe are both direct (a war fought with nuclear weapons) or indirect (as a consequence inattentiveness to the increasing gravity of climate change threats, related disruptive mass migration and refugee crises).<\/p>\n

This dangerous situation has intensified during the second term of Trump\u2019s US presidency, exhibited by disregard for constitutional constraints on domestic governance aggravated by substantial impoverishment at home and a military budget that exceeds that exceeds the combined expenditures of the next 44 countries. [See William D. Hartung & Ben Freeman, The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home, <\/em>2025].<\/p>\n

In recent decades, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, Israel has been insulated from political accountability as it became a de facto member of the Atlantic Alliance that has coercively perpetuated Western dominance in the post-Cold War and post-colonial global settings. It is best understood as the fulfillment of Samuel Huntington\u2019s prophetic anticipation of an emergent \u2018clash of civilizations,\u2019 with a strategic fault-line in the Middle East. Israel in this sense was accepted, without acknowledgement, as the cutting edge of Western strategic ambitions in the region centering on the aggressive containment of Iran and its Islamic movement allies in the region.<\/p>\n

The successive wars launched in flagrant violation on international law against Iran in the last year are a dramatic stage in this clash, with the limits of Western (US and Israel) almost total military domination offset by Iran\u2019s countermoves, especially the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz with its disruptive effects of energy and fertilizer supply chains in a manner harmful to the entire world economic order. This Western destructive encounter with Iran\u2019s so-called \u2018axis of resistance\u2019 to extra-regional encroachment by Israel and the US is actually of a defensive character, seeking to safeguard national rights of self-determination from extra-regional hegemony and intervention. Iran has on its side never made clear whether it is unconditionally opposed to any presence of Israel in the region or whether its objection is to Israel\u2019s adherence to an aggressive Zionist ideology and its ties to the militarized geopolitics of Atlanticism. This latter is dramatically manifest in relation to nuclear weapons, considering its justification of war against Iran on the unconvincing \u00a0grounds that it seeks this weaponry while years earlier covertly facilitating Israel\u2019s acquisition of the weaponry years earlier, principally as a result of French assistance.<\/p>\n

The Huntington clash thesis is being currently undermined by Trump\u2019s disavowal of alliance diplomacy and hints of embracing the management of global security by the leading geopolitical actors, China and Russia in addition to the United States. This new approach to global security could take the form of either a cooperative or competitive arrangements. If cooperative, it would likely be combined with an acceptance of agreed spheres of influence in a manner comparable in some ways to World War II peace diplomacy as envisioned at Yalta and Potsdam with the central goal being to avoid costly and dangerous confrontations. In this event, Israel\u2019s geopolitical security would seem newly dependent on its questionable designation of the Middle East as falling within the US sphere of interest. If this possibility\u00a0 materializes, whether or not formally, it threatens Israel with a new circumstance of geopolitical vulnerability. The recent weakening of European governmental support and American societal support for Israel suggest that such contingencies are not fanciful. A straw in the wind was the recent speech by the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, at World Economic Forum in which he interpreted Trump\u2019s diplomacy as producing a \u2018rupture\u2019 in Atlantic alliance relations rather than as a gentle process of adaptation that he labeled as a smooth \u2018transition\u2019 to a more multipolar world. If such a view prevails in Europe, it will leave Israel outside the Western civilizational enclosure, and subject its political future to the mercurial will of Trump\u2019s trans-actual approach to international relations.<\/p>\n

Zionist Ideology and Israeli Practice–Shifting Rationalizations and Perceptions<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Zionist movement was born from a dual sense of a visionary return to the promised biblical homeland and an escape from the discriminatory strictures of European antisemitism. Its birth experience as a movement is associated with the 1897 First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. Its early period of advocacy was widely discounted as the pursuit of an unrealizable utopian project.<\/p>\n

Then came World War I, which witnessed Jewish influence on the side of liberal democracies and a certain resultant leverage. This was turned into tangible gains by way of the Balfour Declaration issued in 1917 with a pledge of support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This was a pure colonial gesture disregarding the political will of the resident majority Arab population. It also served British strategic interests at the time seeking control over this former Ottoman territory to protect its imperial interests, especially the stability of the vital trade route to Asia principally by way of the nearby Suez Canal.<\/p>\n

Although US opposition to any new colonial acquisitions after World War I defeated British ambitions to turn Palestine into a new colony. Yet it managed to achieve political and administrative control over Palestine by way of the Mandate System, which also had the effect of advancing the Zionist Project. The UK applied its divide and rule colonialist modalities, encouraging Jewish immigration to offset Arab nationalist agitation and demographic weight as the majority population.<\/p>\n

Then in the 1930s Nazism came to Germany, and in its early years its antisemitic agenda actually converged with the Zionist agenda of encouraging Jewish immigration to Palestine to create divide and rule stability for British governance of the Mandate. When the Nazi program intensified antisemitism with concentration camps that soon became death camps, as well as generating antisemitism in Poland and elsewhere in Europe, the Holocaust unfolded by lethal stages. The liberal democracies, and included the US, did little to oppose Hitler\u2019s genocidal antisemitism during the course of World War II. By stages Jewish armed militia trained in Europe, especially Poland, staged their own national war of liberation by means of anti-British terrorism, clouding Zionist identity. {See Thomas Suarez, State of Terror: How terrorism created modern Israel<\/em> (2016) .<\/p>\n

After the defeat of Germany in the World War II the Zionist movement moved quickly to enlist the support of the victorious countries to bring a Jewish state into being. It was Orientalism in practice with no meaningful participation of the Arab majority population in the post-1945 arrangements for Palestine. These were shaped by the application of the characteristic British colonial exit strategy of partition to separate ethnicities previously antagonized by colonialist styles of governance, given a further push by the UN partition GA Resolution 181, 1947.<\/p>\n

Palestinians rejected partition by such a UN diktat, while the Zionist continued to grab what the political space was granted to their movement at a given time. A war between the two peoples erupted in 1948 that ended with Israel in control not of the 55 percent Palestinian territory originally granted but 78 percent, leaving Palestine with a mere 22 percent. This Palestinian residual was administered by Jordan and Egypt until the 1967 War. In 1947-48 period the infamous Nakba<\/em> occurred expelling 75 percent of the Arab population in the area set aside for Jewish statehood or acquired by conquest, a total of 750,000 Palestinians became refugees in what Palestinian territory remained or in neighboring Arab countries, especially Lebanon and Jordan, and to a lesser extent, Syria. Palestinian homes and villages left behind were largely destroyed in defiance of the international law promises of repatriation.<\/p>\n

Against this background Israel was established in 1948, quickly recognized by states around the world, and admitted to the UN without questioning the several legally and morally dubious dimensions of Israels\u2019 coming into being. This process unfolded shortly after the war ended. Global human empathy and Western liberal guilt about the failure to do more to protect Jews in Europe during the Hitler period allowed Israel to have a soft landing as a sovereign state in a form that exceeded the Balfour pledge and even the recent partition arrangements in an atmosphere where the neglect of Palestinian rights in their own homeland was hardly even noticed in world public opinion.<\/p>\n

The next important development was the 1967 War that resulted in Israeli occupation of Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza, supposedly as a short-term reality to be followed by Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 \u2018green line\u2019 borders as decreed by the unanimous SC Resolution 242. This resolution was claimed by its supporters as a prelude to the two-state solution that had become the consensus position at the UN but blindly overlooked the increasingly manifest intention of Israel to deny Palestine any viable form of statehood.<\/p>\n

As so often Israel stalled in carrying out any withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territories, and then abandoned any pretense of withdrawal, but on the contrary claimed Jerusalem as its national capital and began an unlawful large-scale settlement process that signaled its intention to remain indefinitely in control of these Palestinian territories. In accord with past manipulations, the Zionist leadership of Israel took a further step toward their ultimate goal of a one-state solution by making the occupation repressive and permanent. Palestinians objected but typically could gain no political traction in the West or even at the UN to challenge Israeli expansionism and lawlessness.<\/p>\n

The next important stage as of 1993 was centered on the Oslo Diplomacy that looked toward conflict-resolution and a gradual process of implementing the two-state approach with the US Government acting as the intermediary. The continuation of settlement expansion together with assassination of the more peace-minded Israeli leadership of Rabin made questionable whether the Oslo process was ever supposed to be an example of peaceful settlement, at least in terms of Israeli participation and the centrality of US role as the partisan mediator conditioning its actions by conformity to Israel\u2019s priorities. [See Rashid Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit<\/em> (2016)] Edward Said, then the leading Palestinian public intellectual, considered the Oslo framework as a trap for the Palestinians, faulting the Arafat leadership for placing trust in Washington as concretely exhibited by neither insisting on confirming its right of self-determination in its framework nor a freeze on settlement expansion.<\/p>\n

From the collapsing Oslo illusions up to the present represents further moves toward an Israeli one-state solution from the river to the sea achieved coercively without even the cosmetics of a negotiated arrangement. The depiction of this Zionist endgame became manifest in the Knesset adoption in 2018 of Basic Law provisions proclaiming Jewish supremacy, reserving for Jews\u00a0 sole control participation in the political processes of self-determination. Subsequent developments, dramatized by the genocidal retaliation to the October 7 attack, which remains an uninvestigated occurrence in 2023. Suspicions remain due to Israel\u2019s implausible failures of surveillance and a peculiar heedlessness to detailed warnings from the highest US and Egyptian intelligence sources of an impending attack from Gaza.<\/p>\n

In summary, after 1967 Israel was guilty of apartheid in increasingly explicit forms, a prelude to the genocide in Gaza under cover of retaliatory claims of self-defense since early October 2023, paused by Trump diplomacy since October 2025 under the misleading terminology of \u2018ceasefire.\u2019 \u00a0Israel has continued to impede humanitarian relief urgently needed by the surviving remnant of the Gaza civilian population coupled with intensified unrestrained settler violence on the West Bank and regional aggressions in Lebanon, Iran, and Syria.<\/p>\n

It not surprising that noted observers speak of Israel in the midst of a \u2018death\u2019 spiral that threatens its very existence as a sovereign state. Given its current embrace of Zionist extremism and its nuclear arsenal, there concerns about Israel\u2019s future seems overdue, especially if its relations with former Western supporter s weakens or is lost. Such a development would add muscle to its already reputational decline and pariah status.<\/p>\n

Saving Israel<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is the provocative thesis of this short article that Israel is doomed to an autocratic illegitimate future of apartheid governance if it does not make radical changes in its orientation toward the Palestinian people, its approach to state\/society relations, and its regional warmongering security operations.<\/p>\n

To escape from such a future, the political leadership of Israel must withdraw from politics followed by a credible plea of new leaders for the rejection of Zionism as an ideology of the state of Israel. This rhetorical initiative must be accompanied by the release from prison of all Palestinian political prisoners, including Marwan Barghouti, and the repeal of the 2018 Basic Law conferring Jewish supremacy. Also, a Peace and Reconciliation Commission with full judicial powers should be constituted by mutual agreement, but without authority to issue punitive judgments, although punitive measures, including reparations for past crimes, should be recommended in the final report.<\/p>\n

Once political prisoners are released, the Palestinian Authority should be dissolved. Future Palestinian international representation to be determined by internationally monitored elections that include Palestinians in refugee camps located in foreign countries.<\/p>\n

These are steps preliminary to negotiations of peace between representatives of the two political communities, with a neutral mediating government selected by the UN Secretary General and endorsed by a veto-free two-thirds super-majority in the General Assembly and the Security Council. The objective of the negotiations is to reach agreement on a provisional governing arrangement in both countries for two years, followed by the drafting of a single constitution or two separate constitutions, containing a commitment to respect the rule of law in the context of national governance and international participation. The negotiations will also be premised on acceptance of a commitment to accept and diligently apply the international law of human rights, including the obligation to settle disputes by peaceful means.<\/p>\n

Obviously, this is a sketch of a peace process that aspires to be both durable while rendering justice, and establishing mutually beneficial coexistence based on secular standards of ethnic equality in either a confederal one-state form or according to a formula for a two-state solution that revives the idea of Jerusalem as an internationalized city as envisioned in the original UN partition proposal.<\/p>\n

Concluding Remark<\/strong><\/p>\n

I fully expect many readers to dismiss what I have proposed as nothing more than a pipe-dream with a zero prospect of becoming a political project, much less a political solution. The same skepticism would have greeted such a perspective in South Africa just before the country and most of the world were shocked by an unexpected political awakening of the racist leadership. It took the form of releasing the star political prisoner, Nelson Mandela, from prison after 27 years of confinement, and expressing support for a constitutionally based democracy embodying ethnic equality.<\/p>\n

Of course, there are important differences between South Africa and Israel, but also illuminating similarities of the dead end futures both countries faced if adhering to the policies and practices that led them to be classified as pariah states. Both governments were widely condemned by the peoples of the world and increasingly shunned by states and international institutions. At this stage my hope is for dialogue internally and internationally, and for a process by which the citizenry of Israel reassess whether Zionism is capable of achieving security, legitimacy, and positive identity at home and in the world.<\/p>\n

We do know this much: without boldness of imagination, both Israelis and Palestinians have no hopes of escaping their respective tragic circumstances.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Prof. Richard Falk is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Media Service<\/em><\/a> Editorial Committee, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute. He directed the project on Global Climate Change, Human Security, and Democracy at UCSB and formerly served as director the North American group in the World Order Models Project. He also is a member of the editorial board of the magazine <\/em>The Nation. Between 2008 and 2014, Falk served as UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine. His book,\u00a0<\/em>(Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance\u00a0(2014), proposes a value-oriented assessment of world order and future trends. His most recent books are\u00a0<\/em>Power Shift (2016);\u00a0<\/em>Revisiting the Vietnam War\u00a0(2017);\u00a0<\/em>On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament\u00a0(2019); and\u00a0<\/em>On Public Imagination: A Political & Ethical Imperative, ed. with Victor Faessel & Michael Curtin (2019).\u00a0He\u00a0is the author or coauthor of other books, including\u00a0<\/em>Religion and Humane Global Governance (2001), Explorations at the Edge of Time\u00a0(1993),\u00a0<\/em>Revolutionaries and Functionaries\u00a0(1988),\u00a0<\/em>The Promise of World Order\u00a0(1988),\u00a0<\/em>Indefensible Weapons (with Robert Jay Lifton, 1983),\u00a0<\/em>A Study of Future Worlds (1975), and\u00a0<\/em>This Endangered Planet\u00a0(1972).\u00a0His memoir,\u00a0<\/em>Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim\u00a0was published in March 2021 and received an award from Global Policy Institute at Loyala Marymount University as \u2018the best book of 2021.<\/strong>\u2019 He has been nominated frequently for the Nobel Peace Prize since 2009.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

JOIN THE BDS-BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT, SANCTIONS CAMPAIGN TO PROTEST THE ISRAELI BARBARIC GENOCIDE OF PALESTINIANS IN GAZA AND WEST BANK.<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

DON’T BUY PRODUCTS WHOSE BARCODE STARTS WITH <\/em><\/strong>729, WHICH INDICATES THAT THEY ARE PRODUCED IN ISRAEL. DO YOUR PART! MAKE A DIFFERENCE!<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

7 2 9: BOYCOTT FOR HUMAN JUSTICE!<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Israel\u2019s quest for absolute security through war, with territorial expansion, regional hegemony, Iranian regime change, apartheid and genocide, is destructive to law, morality, and stability. We do know this much: without boldness of imagination, both Israelis and Palestinians have no hopes of escaping their respective tragic circumstances.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[3287,1559,1854,101,100,1199,2242,87,865,1966,1644,88,2416,3536,771,427,3534,2897,880,99,70,965,1025],"class_list":["post-316218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial","tag-anti-zionism","tag-collective-punishment","tag-crimes-against-humanity","tag-cultural-violence","tag-direct-violence","tag-ethnic-cleansing","tag-famine","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-hunger","tag-international-court-of-justice-icj","tag-israel","tag-israeli-occupation","tag-military-industrial-technological-complex","tag-nakba","tag-palestine","tag-palestinian-holocaust","tag-sociocide","tag-state-terrorism","tag-structural-violence","tag-usa","tag-war-crimes","tag-west-bank"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316218"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":316222,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316218\/revisions\/316222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}