Tin Lizzie, DL in WA

I’ve been reluctant to talk too much on the show about imagined solutions for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I don’t think any of the underlying conditions for a political solution are present. We’re in a presolutionary space.

I worry about it as a form of escapism. It’s more comfortable to debate two-state models or one-state imaginings rather than confront the realities of what is happening right now.

But the other reason I have backed off from these conversations is that the old solutions don’t fit the present reality.

I don’t see how a two-state solution is still possible given the number and size of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. They’re not going away. Or the insistence on a right of return for Palestinians.

I don’t think a one-state solution is plausible or likely. The Jewish people in and around Israel want self-determination and sovereignty. So, too, do the Palestinians. Neither side, given their history, is going to willingly give the other that kind of power.

But a number of people I trust have written to me saying I should look at the A Land for All plan. A Land for All was founded in 2012 by a group of Israelis and Palestinians. It’s attempting something different, something I find in some ways beautiful: Not a two-state model of separation, not a one-state model of unification, but a confederation model that centers both peoples’ connections to the land and tries to combine the free movement of people with separate political entities. In this model, you would have an Israel and a Palestine. There would be free movement, but political separation. The borders would be open, but, they say, hopefully secure.

There’s a lot to unpack about all this. I have a lot of questions. I would describe my own thinking here as intrigued — not convinced. But I do think it is worth considering a new political vision, even though I think we’re far from the conditions that might make one possible. Because if you don’t have any idea of where you’re going, how do you get there?

Rula Hardal is a Palestinian citizen of Israel who received her doctorate in political science from the University of Hannover in Germany. May Pundak is an Israeli lawyer, activist and social entrepreneur. Her father, Ron Pundak, was an Israeli historian who played an important role in the Oslo peace process in the 1990s.

Hardal and May Pundak are the co-executive directors of A Land for All, and so I wanted to ask them both about the proposal, as well as the politics, questions and social forces that have undermined every other plan.

Ezra Klein: Rula Hardal, May Pundak, welcome to the show.

May Pundak: Thank you so much.

Rula Hardal: Thank you.

I think that people listening are familiar with the two-state solution concept: an Israel and a Palestine separated and side by side.

People have heard ideas for a single state, where you would have people throughout the territory, throughout the land, all voting within the same political system. I don’t think that they are as familiar with what you’re offering — a confederation model.

So May, let me begin with you. How does this differ from the two-state solution that has been pursued for so long?

Pundak: So first of all, let me say that we are offering what we call a new vision. But in that new vision, it is still based on two sovereign independent states — Israel and Palestine.

The two-state solution, the classic version of it, was based on a paradigm of segregation and separation, and we are moving away from that and offering a model that is based not on a zero-sum game but rather on acknowledging two very important components of the conflict.

No. 1: Both Israelis and Palestinians have an immense psychological and social connection and sense of belonging to the entire homeland — from the river to the sea. That’s a fact.

No. 2: The intertwined reality on the ground — meaning that today Israel-Palestine, in a way, is already shared — the intertwined reality is everywhere we look. And so the model says yes to sovereignty, yes to nation states, yes to identity, yes to borders.

And there’s another layer to that, of a shared mechanism of shared institutions that take care of things that have to be taken care of jointly. So there is a human rights court, and there is cooperation around the economy, and climate challenges are dealt with together. Because you can’t deal with these things separately — but also because it’s a mechanism to ensure a sustainable peace.

So that word “shared” is important in your vision. Your father was one of the negotiators at Oslo. He spent his life working on the two-state solution paradigm, and that paradigm is built on the idea of security through separation, at least on the Jewish side — that if we can just separate, everybody can live in peace. Everybody can leave each other alone.

What led you to move away from that vision and toward this idea that peace doesn’t come through separation, that it comes through a shared set of institutions and interests?

Pundak: Well, I would say two main things. The first one was that I found myself advocating for the two-state solution for many, many years. I was doing much more anti-occupation work. I wasn’t really interested in solutions. We kept that separate from each other.

But at a certain point, and this was after my father passed away — and I think that was part of my reckoning process, of grief, of just coming to terms with the fact that I’ve been fighting for the two-state solution.

But at a certain point, I started feeling that this model is crumbling between my fingers, and I don’t believe in it anymore. The reality is telling me something else. Meeting Palestinian friends who are telling me something else. Meeting the international community, I’m learning something else. Living in Israel, I’m learning something else.

So I’m there, advocating for the two-state solution as an activist, but everywhere I’m hearing the two-state solution is dead. It’s impossible.

And at the same time, in Israel, this idea of peace, of negotiations, of two-state solution, is becoming irrelevant in the public discourse. There’s no conversation about this.

In 2018, I had my first son, and we were living in the States for a couple of years. Coming back to Israel, no one was talking about a future for my child — about security, about safety, about vision, about horizon, about hope. No one was telling me what we’re fighting for, and that two-state solution has become an empty shell for people to talk about something but not take any action.

And by not taking any action, we’ve been led to Oct. 7. By not presenting a viable vision and not organizing ourselves around that, we’ve succumbed to managing the conflict.

So we’ll talk about the two-state solution, but everyone knows it’s not going to work. And we find ourselves in international, very important forums with serious decision makers who say: Two-state solution — we know it’s never going to happen.

So in a way, for me, I was taking the life of my children into my own hands. I was like, OK, that’s just not good enough. We have to reimagine a two-state solution that can work or a new vision that will actually be able to be pragmatic and practical to work, but also organize and excite Palestinians and Israelis.

And I’ll just say one more thing about that kind of transformation: For me, coming from a human rights background, I wanted to be a human rights lawyer to end the occupation. And I understand that sounds a little naïve today. I still think that Israelis who are doing that work are saints, and this is the most important work to be done.

But at the same time, we haven’t seen Palestinians as equal politically. We can maybe save them, we can control them — there’s a dynamic, that power dynamic, always underneath. And for me, the positionality of realizing, in my skin, that until Rula and the Palestinian people are safe and free, we will never be free and liberated and safe, either. Our security is dependent on each other.

Rula, I know that you previously were a supporter of a one-state solution. Tell me about how you came to this idea and how your thinking evolved.

Hardal: I came to this idea because I started realizing two things: First of all, we already have a one-state reality, or one-state construction on the ground, between Jordan and the sea, but under one regime and one power, which is the Israeli one. And the Palestinians live under daily domination and occupation and military control and apartheid, and, needless to say, in the last two and a half years, ethnic cleansing and genocide and annexation of their tiny, small part of the land. I mean the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

I’m not sure that even you, the audience, is understanding what’s happening in the West Bank. People hear about having checkpoints, and there is military control, terrorism and violence of the settlers, but the reality on the ground is way worse.

The daily domination and control of people’s lives in the West Bank is just immense. I don’t know if there is something similar, or has been, in other places under other conflicts. And because we are not speaking about a very direct war, it’s ongoing, long-term, daily atrocities and restrictions and humiliation of people.

So to start from this fact and reality on the ground, it will be hard for us to move — especially now after what has happened in the last two and a half years — immediately toward an equal one-state reality, where actually all Palestinians and all Israelis are equal in the same one state.

The second point: I claim, from my research and observations, that the majority of the Palestinians and the Israeli Jews on the ground in Israel-Palestine are not in a post-national mind-set the way I thought, and the way that a lot of people here think. The sense of ethnonational belonging and interests, and national symbols, and the desire for each group to have its own political, national entity is still very strong, and we need to acknowledge that and to respect that.

The last few years have been staggering in their violence. You’ve used the word “genocide” and “domination,” and here you are also advocating for a plan that, at its core, would require people to treat each other with trust, as equals in a shared enterprise.

It feels hard not only to imagine the plan but to imagine the people who would engage in this plan.

Hardal: Yes.

So this may seem like a simple question, but I think it’s an important one to try to feel: Why are you not held back by the belief that this is impossible to solve?

Hardal: Well, I think it’s very hard. It’s very complicated. We are now facing a very —maybe the ugliest — phase of the history of both people since Oct. 7. We are not ignoring all of that. I’m not ignoring that.

We were speaking, a couple of days ago, with some friends and policy experts in Washington. And one of them, who is an Egyptian American, we’d been speaking about Gaza, and he brought an Arabic word to describe what all of us feel and felt while watching the second Nakba, the genocide, 24/7 on our screens. The word, which doesn’t exist in the English language, is “qahr.”

Qahr is a combination of being angry and the humiliation of your humanity, existence and who you are, and being helpless that you cannot — you don’t have anything to do.

That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. Because if there is something to save in our souls as Palestinians, and if there is something to save in terms of dreaming about Palestine — even in part of historic Palestine — this is something that I’m committed to do after what happened in Gaza.

Gaza is gone. And we are involved with a lot of people who are involved with what’s going on in Gaza: the Board of Peace, the executive committee and so on, and the many actors in the international community. The amount of helplessness, the lack of orientation and ability to make decisions and to do things on the ground is just insane. I don’t want to see that in the coming years when it comes to the whole Palestinian situation.

Because what is threatened now, since Oct. 7 — in a very direct, intensive way — is the collective, political and national being of the Palestinians in Palestine. And I’m doing this work in order to just maybe save what is to be saved there.

If we don’t offer new arrangements, a new political vision, if we don’t see this very bad situation as an opportunity to start — I don’t have any illusions, I cannot promise anybody that this solution, or any other solution, similar or different, is going to be implemented tomorrow or next year. Or I don’t know when. But history is not static, and we cannot know now when this opening is going to come.

We Palestinians are not going to give up. We are there, and we insist to be there. This is our place, and we are going to continue to struggle.

Pundak: Can I say something about trust? As an Israeli, I think that’s an important question for us to deal with.

What is the alternative? The alternative right now is either continuing in the footsteps of this government, which is to destroy the Palestinian peoplehood, or a fake status quo — I don’t know if that would be the right term — this belief that we can just not solve this conflict.

And so the first thing that we need to commit ourselves to is realizing that if we’re not going to solve this conflict, it will solve us. That is what led us ——

What does that mean? Because, as you know better than I do, most Israelis — the center of Israeli political opinion, actually — do not think there is no alternative.

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The alternative is the path they’re on. The opposition party, even in this election, is not hugely different from Benjamin Netanyahu on this.

The idea, as best I understand it, is basically: The alternative is that there is Jewish Israeli security supremacy over the land. And the conflict, so to speak, can be controlled and managed.

They’re not going to let their guard down the way they did before Oct. 7. There’s going to be more settlement building. There’s going to be more control — Israel controls roughly 65 percent of Gaza now.

Pundak: Absolutely. This is absolutely true.

To some people, this is not just an alternative. This is a pathway to realizing quite ancient hopes.

So when you’re in conversation with that ——

Pundak: Yeah, so that is all true, and what we are seeing play out right now in Israel-Palestine, this is the reality. And my question to us Israelis is: Has this ensured your safety and security?

The answer is no.

If you are messianic, and you have dreams that are beyond life, that are about eternity, that’s a different timeline. But for people who are actually concerned with safety and security for their children, and a better future and life, the current paradigm has not ensured our safety and security until this day.

It’s not only Oct. 7. What about what’s happening now with Israel re-entering Lebanon? What’s happening with Iran? What’s happening in the south?

There’s no place where we actually feel safe right now, and I think that’s an important realization that we have to say out loud and confront: We’re not safe now. This has not given us safety.

I’ll give you a more concrete example: In the place where we have seen the utmost commitment to segregation and separation, and the billion-dollar wall, and these mechanisms, and all of the I.D.F. security measures and technology, that is where all hell broke loose. That’s Gaza.

So when people say that big walls will ensure my safety, I say: No, they won’t. I live in Jaffa. There’s a lot to say about the inequality of Palestinian citizens of Israel, but the truth of the matter is that Palestinians who are living within Israel and have more rights — not equal rights at all — that is where we’re not slaughtering each other. Those are the kindergarten teachers of my baby.

So no one will convince me that security will be given to me or ensured to me by bigger and more walls and more separation. That’s No. 1.

The other thing that I want to say about this is history. History shows us, also, in Israel — I think that Egypt is probably the best example. After 1973, Anwar Sadat was considered Adolf Hitler, and Egypt was considered the next biggest threat to Israel. And then we got to ’79. There’s a peace agreement, and that today ensures my safety. Israelis take vacations in Sinai, and that’s the safest border that I have as an Israeli. So we have to flip the narrative based on history.

The last thing that I’ll say about this is that when you look at other conflicts around the world, but also in Israel-Palestine, before negotiations, there’s no belief that this can be solved. Once negotiations start, suddenly the belief in public opinion rises.

A month before the Berlin Wall fell, people said that it would never fall. A month before the Good Friday Agreement was signed, people said that it would never be solved. Well, guess what? It was.

We need to get to that tipping point. We’re doing the work on the ground. But once we get there — and that moment will come — are we ready with a good, pragmatic, relevant solution?

That is what we’re here to do.

One of the things I’ve been curious about is how both of you see, in your respective parts of these societies, the role of the religious factions.

Something that many people involved in previous negotiations have said to me is that they never knew how to approach people who were not working off the interests of today but instead on a more eternal timeline — to use a term you used.

These are significant factions in both societies. I mean, right now the Netanyahu coalition is in a state of instability and fracture, because it might lose ultra-Orthodox support.

How, in this vision, do you balance people whose belief is that there is a divine right and writ to a certain outcome?

Hardal: I think both national movements, if we consider now, for two minutes, Zionism to be a national movement — and it is — but not only ——

Pundak: You see how difficult a partnership is, right? I mean, this is a good example of just emphasizing how difficult this work is. Just by Rula saying: Zionism is a national movement. I mean, yes, it is also.

Hardal: Yes, but Zionism has developed also to have another component, which actually constitutes the major problem in Israel-Palestine, and for the Palestinian people, which is the settler-colonial aspects of Zionism.

So to go back to the national aspects of Zionism, I think all of us — Palestinians, Israeli Jews — changed, and both societies developed to be much more conservative and religious. I think there is a tendency among Israelis, even secular, liberal, to use religion and to emphasize the role of religion and conservatism when it comes to imagining the future and speaking about Israel-Palestine.

While in the Palestinian context, less. It’s more about the importance of ——

Can you defend that statement for me? I mean, Hamas is a very religious organization.

Hardal: Yes, absolutely, and it’s part of an Islamic — political Islamic movement ——

I understand that, but maybe I can better understand what you’re saying here. You’re saying that there’s a tendency for secular Israelis to overstate the role of religion as a barrier on either side?

But it feels like it’s quite real on both sides. And Hamas is religiously informed. Much of Israeli society is quite religiously informed.

And to take these views sincerely, they are not just based on a horse trading of interests around security and prosperity in the moment — they’re connected to questions that are less vulnerable to transactional solutions.

Hardal: Absolutely. I agree with you, but I was trying to describe the development that actually brought both of us, Palestinians and Israelis, to this situation.

We do not skip, in our political vision, all of these aspects and developments. We start from acknowledging, not only international law and rights — and all of these liberal approaches and universal approaches — but we start from the connection of both people to Israel-Palestine as part of their religious, historical, cultural and also political identity.

So we know that it’s important. And in the way that we cannot avoid other lessons learned from our history, and the history of negotiations and peace efforts, we also cannot ignore this very important component that describes our societies.

Pundak: Yes, I absolutely agree. I think that one of the lessons learned from Oslo, as you said, is that this cannot be a liberal, elite, intellectual, secular solution.

Israel and Palestine, today, are becoming more and more religious, if anything. More and more traditional. Less and less liberal. Both societies. So this is a very important question.

For me, one of the reasons I joined A Land for All was because I had to come to terms with my blind spot around this exact reality. And looking within that — and I think that Rula said it so beautifully — the beginning of the solution is emotions. The very strong emotions that also have a religious connection to the entire homeland. We all love this place, literally to death, right? We love it so much, it’s making us crazy.

So I would say that’s a really strong part of our work, and I would even say that one of the most beautiful moments in our events in Israel is that when we have events, religious people come to them, and they say: This is the first time that we feel part of the peace camp. We don’t feel that you’ve excluded us. We feel that we can be part of this, and we can support this. And that’s very reassuring right now.

So let’s talk about what this vision actually calls for. I want to talk through the dimensions of the plan, and then also, of course, through some of the challenges or questions it opens.

The first tenet in your paper is open borders. What do open borders mean in this context, Rula?

Hardal: First of all, I do want to see the day that Israel is going to define its borders. Because we are not there now. Even to speak about borders between Israel and Palestine, it sounds imaginary now, because Israel is still in the ideology of expansion in the whole Middle East. And this is one of the problems, by the way, with the Zionist ideology ——

But your plan does call for a border.

Hardal: We are speaking about gradually opening the borders between Israel and Palestine as two states.

We will have borders, but we want to have these borders open in order to, first of all, implement and give people the ability to practice what we started our conversation speaking about — the connection to the entire homeland.

For me, the whole space is going to be Palestine. It’s been Palestine, and it’s going to continue to be Palestine. Despite the definitions of two territories and the acknowledgment of the state of Israel and the state of Palestine, it will be — in my blood, in my soul — Palestine. And for the Jews, they can also consider the whole entire homeland, if they would like to, as Israel or Eretz Israel.

So opening the borders will give both people the opportunity to practice this sense of belonging and connection — but also to reside from one place to another. For example, if you are an Israeli Jewish citizen, and you have practiced as a software engineer, and you want to work for a company in Rawabi, in the West Bank — there is a tech park in Rawabi, in Bir Zeit, near Ramallah — you will be able to work there. You will apply for a work permit, and if you would like to, you can also take your family with you and have an apartment there.

It’s like in any other place in the world, even here. You live in New York, but you work in, I don’t know, L.A. This ability for people to move between the two spaces — and we are speaking about a very tiny, small place, Israel-Palestine. It’s like New Jersey, I think.

So it’s very natural for people to also move between the two spaces, because of their circumstances, life conditions and because of their connection.

In that scenario that you laid out, the software engineer who wants to work outside Ramallah, that person, even if they moved there — and this seems to me to be one way this vision differs from one-state visions — they would still vote for the prime minister of Israel.

Hardal: Exactly.

And similarly, somebody from Ramallah, who maybe moves to work near a hospital in Tel Aviv — they can live in Tel Aviv, but they would still vote for the prime minister or leader of Palestine.

Hardal: They will continue having their citizenship rights in their national state.

Palestinians vote for the Palestinian government, but they can have residency in Israel and, accordingly, all the civil rights and local rights that come with the residency status — and vice versa.

The whole concept is to start with freedom of movement and freedom of residency. This concept actually gives us a space to think about arrangements when it comes, for example, to solving the very important issue — one of the core Palestinian issues — which is the right of return and the Palestinian refugees.

These refugees will get citizenship in the state of Palestine, but they will be able to also apply for residency in Israel, in the place that they were expelled from originally in ’48.

I’m going to come back to the right of return in a moment, because I do want us to talk about it.

But, May, I want to ask the question that I think many Israeli Jews would have, hearing this, which is: How can you possibly have open borders and be safe? How can you have open borders and not have someone in the West Bank coming through with explosives strapped to them and then blowing up a bus in Tel Aviv, as happened many, many times — as you know much better than me.

Even here, in America, with much more peaceful relations with Mexico and Canada, the idea of open borders is politically lethal. The concerns are primarily security and overwhelm. So how do you answer those concerns?

Pundak: There’s a practical answer to that, which is we’re not talking about no borders.

The question is not if there’s going to be a border. It’s: What kind of a border will there be — and in order to achieve what?

We are committed, first and foremost, to the security of both people. That is why we do what we do, for the security of Israel and for the security of Palestine.

What we’re offering here is moving gradually — gradually, with all the mechanisms needed. And we can look at places like the European Union.

So it’s important to keep in mind that the European Union is one good example, but there’s no exact example for Israel-Palestine. And I want to say that because a lot of the time people get stuck and say: Oh, it’s not exactly the same. It’s impossible. Here’s Jews and Arabs. This is the Middle East. It’s a different time. And because there’s no other exact example: It’s never going to work.

And that “never going to work” mentality is part of what got us to this awful situation we’re in. There is no unique, perfect example.

It’s good to talk about Northern Ireland as another example of power-sharing and transitioning from a zero-sum game into freedom of movement, freedom of residency. I mean, decoupling that nationality from a geographic space and into sustainable peace. So there are other examples out there.

What I have been admiring about the European Union, and what has helped me, is, No. 1: the political imagination of it. If you were in Europe 80 years ago, and someone told you that in 75 years you would be able to move freely between France and Germany, and your grandchildren will be able to reside in Berlin as French hipsters, you would say: There’s no way. Lock her up.

But that’s the reality today, and the reality of that came from a place of interest, and that’s very important to say, as well. This was not, you know, that the French and Germans were starting to love each other, and they said: How can we live together happily?

It was after hundreds of years of bloodshed and the realization that their shared interests can actually ensure their safety. It took 70 years, 60 years, 50 years to get to an arrangement of freedom of movement.

That’s OK. I have 50 years to wait for peace. I don’t have 50 years waiting for what’s going on right now to continue.

But how do you ensure security at this border? When people hear “open border,” they hear easeful freedom of movement through a line that barely exists.

What are you actually envisioning there?

Pundak: So we are talking about borders, for sure. What we’re suggesting is not to not have security arrangements.

It’s, of course, to have very sophisticated security arrangements. Again, I think that the European Union is a great way — or Northern Ireland, and Ireland and the U.K., are great places to see how that works without compromising on security — on the contrary — but basing it on an individual question rather than a collective question. It will have to be a process.

So we start with borders, and then we start within these borders, creating the ability to move freely between the two states, based on your individual security file rather than a collective, ethnic, religious question.

Right now, if you’re a Palestinian, you can’t cross the border, although there’s a lot to say about that, with the amount of Palestinian workers entering Israel every day. And no one is even talking about that when it comes to security, because we depend on it.

What I think is exceptionally meaningful with the A Land for All proposition is that it tackles the motivations of the conflict. Now this does not mean that we’re going to sign an agreement, and everything will be perfect. But if you have that endgame clear, and if you have answered the collective needs of both people, you take away the justification, the normalization, of conflict and violence. I think that is the biggest new thing that we offer.

Hardal: I have a shorter answer for this question, actually, Ezra. Let’s remember how things started. Everything started in ’48.

Pundak: Even earlier.

Hardal: Of course, earlier, but the important point, at which everything started, is actually ’48, the Palestinian Nakba — first Nakba. We now have a second Nakba.

So in this case, if we are going to have a political settlement and peace and reconciliation and recognition — and I’m speaking about big concepts, but we believe that it’s doable — there will be no need to speak about this question: How can we ensure the security of the Israeli Jews?

I do want to ensure their security. But you know what? I think that who is more threatened and has been threatened equally, at least equally, like the Jewish Israelis — if not more in the last two and a half years — are also the Palestinians.

So we need to mutually revise what has happened over the past, I don’t know, eight decades and start from that.

I don’t disagree with that, but I think that it creates this chicken-and-egg question with the plan you’re offering. To say that if there is no need for violence, there will be no violence — I mean, that’s true. But it’s somewhat tautologically true.

Some people might say: Look, this is a huge step forward. I’m willing to approach this peacefully. But every day in the West Bank, radical settlers are committing tremendous acts of violence. During the second intifada, there was constant suicide bombing.

One of the histories of this region, as you both know better than I do, is violent spoilers making peace projects or settlement projects impossible.

So it is true that if you could get to a point where there was no more violence, then a lot of the ideas on this become much easier. I’m not worried about the absence of aggressive security on the California-Arizona border, but that’s not where things are.

Pundak: But that’s exactly the opposite.

Tell me.

Pundak: So we’re not going to sign an agreement and open the borders. That is not the plan. We will absolutely have to go through a long process. And again, that has been done in other places with bloodier conflicts. So we have to let go of the fact that it’s impossible.

But the truth is that we have left room for spoilers, and we have experienced the fallout of previous negotiations because there has never been a commitment to a clear endgame.

So during the Oslo Accords, there were steps. There was a process. But at no point did Israel say: There will be, at the end of this process, a Palestinian sovereign, independent state. Never.

And if you don’t have that commitment to the endgame, then you leave room for spoilers. Palestinians are never going to buy that anymore, ever. We’ve failed too many times to say: Oh, yeah, eventually there’s going to be kind of a two-state solution — without doing that.

So what we are saying is that we need to flip that on its head. I think the recent moves of several states to recognize Palestine first was a step in that direction. Not to say that the two-state solution is the end of the process, but a Palestinian state has to be the beginning of the process in order to get to a reality where we could actually make peace.

But I guess the reason I’m pushing on this is that the politics of Israel could not be farther from that in any possible way.

Pundak: Absolutely.

And so to say that the only way to think about this plan, or the only way to think about this approach, is that there needs to be, first and foremost, an ironclad commitment from, let’s say, a supermajority of Israeli Jews to go not just to a two-state solution but to a confederacy with shared sovereignty over Jerusalem — which is one of the tenets of the plan — with a form of right of return throughout the entire land.

And to say that the promise is that security will follow that, when I talk to people there, and they all say: Well, look, we tried a peace process. We tried Oslo, and what we got was a second intifada. We are not going to make that mistake again.

So when you are trying to pitch it to the audience that you need to get to agree to it — which are the people who live near you — what do you say to them?

Pundak: Things are changing in the Middle East, and in Israel-Palestine, in a way that they haven’t in a very, very long time. For the past 20 years, we have been under this false assumption that we can, again, not solve this conflict.

Oct. 7 is not, was not, a security problem. It’s a political problem. It’s an outcome of not solving the conflict.

Do we have all the answers? Absolutely not. We have invested 30 years in thinking about the paradigm of separation for peace, which I think today is impossible to achieve, and also not desirable if we learn from other conflicts.

We haven’t invested nearly anything in trying to elaborate a vision like this, that learns from mistakes of the past and learns from other conflicts that have been solved sustainably. That is what we need to do today.

This is not to say that security is not our No. 1 concern. As Rula said: security for both people. Because a lot of the time when we say “security,” we mean security for Israeli Jews. I would say that has been part of the problem with the international discourse around this.

But I, as an Israeli, trust and know that we have the technical capacity in Israel to deal with this challenge. There’s no doubt that we have the technical capacity.

But the question is: Where are you going? What is the vision? What is the endgame? Because if the endgame is what we had 30 years ago, that hasn’t been relevantly updated, that doesn’t tackle the core deadlocks of the two-state solution that we all know — refugees, water, Jerusalem, borders, settlements. If we don’t have good answers to these questions — and that’s what we’re doing — we will never get to a place where we can actually move forward.

Tell me a bit more about the way that the vision approaches the settlements. I always think about some conversations I had, when I was also there, where Israeli Jews said to me: These lines you all draw are ridiculous — the idea that, if there is any Jewish connection to the land, it is deeper to Hebron than to Tel Aviv. That if there’s any religious grounding for why we are here, it does not follow the boundaries of the ’67 borders.

And I also remember realizing, when I was driving around the West Bank, that these settlements are not going away.

The Israeli Jews from the old peace camp, who tell me: Oh, maybe we can still — it’s too many people. It’s too big. It’s too entrenched. They’re building more every day.

One thing that I find very interesting in this project is that — you can frame it in different ways, but in a way that is different from, I think, the two-state solutions with all of its land swaps and everything — you’re able, much more directly, to simultaneously accept the presence of Jewish people in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, and accept the Palestinian right of return at the same time.

When I read it, and I doubt this is how you all would frame it — though maybe you do — it almost feels like a trade.

Pundak: Well, first of all, we are very careful not to make that symmetry between refugees and settlers. It’s very important for us not to make that symmetry, for all the reasons. But what I would say ——

Why?

Pundak: Because refugees have a right to be part of their homeland. They have been subjected to terror and to expulsion from their homes.

The settlement enterprise is an illegal and immoral enterprise. It is against international law, a lot of it is against Israeli law, and it is based on a system of supremacy. There’s no question about that, and we are all in agreement with that.

But what we also see is that Jews have a strong sense of attachment, and that’s not going to change. That has been going on forever. Jews have forever lived in that piece of land, and they probably forever will. Because that attachment is greater than anything else, than the sovereign. It’s greater than that.

And what we are offering around that is not to approve the settlements and normalize them and say: They’re there, so whatever. They can stay. Not at all. But it is to say that we understand that there needs to be a mechanism to deal with Jews who have a very strong sense of attachment to their homeland, and for them to be able to live there safely, but with no privileges, control, terror to Palestinians.

So it’s important for me not to make that symmetry, but it is important for me to say that A Land for All has this elegance to it. It is a holistic approach.

When I talk about it, as a trade, the way I read the plan — and again, this might be wrong — I’m reading it as a person who lives in the United States — I was thinking about it in terms of interests.

One of the things that feels different to me about A Land for All is that there are certain interests that both societies hold very dear that have typically been excluded or pushed to the side as too difficult or too extreme for the main negotiations.

The main ones I think of there are the right of return, which the Israeli governments have functionally not been willing to discuss at any serious level.

Settlements, which people have not known what to do with, and that the more they have been built, the more unlikely their unwinding has become. And the fact that people still talk about it, to me, is evidence of a dead paradigm they’ve not figured out an answer to.

And Jerusalem, which is another complex conversation. But those two specifically. I guess you would describe it as an elegance, but, to me, what it looks like is a bringing into the conversation of two quite profound interests that have been pushed to its margins with arguably somewhat disastrous results.

Hardal: Yes. The right of return of the Palestinian refugees is one of the core issues — political, moral, emotional issues — of the Palestinian question. Any solution that tries to avoid referring to this issue is going to fail. And we are speaking of about half of the Palestinian people.

We didn’t speak much about the aspects of recognition and historic reconciliation between the two people that are two important principles that our paradigm and political platform is based on.

This political vision — before saying more about the right of return of the Palestinian people — needs actually transformative national narratives of both people.

Can you say more about what that means and what those narratives would be?

Hardal: Yes. I will start with us Palestinians. I think it’s time for all of us to acknowledge the collective history and memory of the Jewish people that is shaping their fears, insecurities and so on.

It doesn’t in any way mean to give them any legitimacy for what has been done to the Palestinian people in the last 80 years. But we need to understand these people, and these are very deep, psychological aspects of any conflict that we need to acknowledge.

The same for the Israeli Jews. They also need to have this national narrative transformation of moving from denying the Nakba and what happened there and the injustices, and to acknowledge this is something that they did.

And in order to move forward, acknowledgment is very important, and the reconciliation with our self-histories and memories and with the others are very important.

I think this question of how people’s stories both change and coexist is really important and worth spending time on. Because it’s a hard one to address through policy. Plans don’t know what to do with stories and identities. But it’s also a place where, for instance, the European Union example begins to break down.

One very important dimension of the European story was an agreed-upon post-World War II narrative: Germany was wrong. Germany had lost. Germany was defeated. Germany was correctly occupied. Germany was not allowed to have a military ——

Pundak: And that’s not going so well right now.

But you got a fair amount of peace out of it, so we’ll see. We’ll see what happens with the Alternative for Germany, or AfD.

But the point I’m making about that is that one way that Europe, as we now think of it, was built was on a very bloodily agreed-to description of what had happened. And that’s not going to be true here.

Pundak: No. And I think that’s actually, as you said, also part of the weakness of these arrangements. I think that Rwanda is also a good example of that — of the weakness of this history of winners. I think that what we are suggesting is something that is, again, like breaking away from the binary.

And this is also the origin of A Land for All. It was a group of people who came to terms with the fact that the two-state solution, as we know it, is no longer viable. It can’t physically happen.

Learning from the mistakes and saying: Why? Why has this failed? Or in the control that we have — I’m not talking about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin — but what is in our control to learn from the reasons why? And the co-creation, which I think is really the secret ingredient, right?

I mean, Israelis have been trying to negotiate with Americans over Palestine for a long time. That hasn’t been successful. It has to be co-created in order for it to be acceptable.

So another thing we learned from Oslo is that the conflict didn’t start in 1967. The occupation is a problem, but it’s not the problem.

It needs to go backward. It needs to address the motivations, the narratives. And so if you do not come with a narrative that addresses religion, that addresses belonging, that addresses belonging to the entire homeland, to the refugees, the Nakba, the Holocaust ——

Hardal: And now, in addition, we have Oct. 7.

Pundak: Of course.

Hardal: And the genocidal war in Gaza without, again, doing symmetry between both events. Part of this package needs to be also to practice accountability for those who were involved in all of these atrocities and massacres and killing and so on.

I want to hold on this for a minute, because I think two things you both have said here in the last couple of minutes open up questions that — certainly in my reading of the plan and the documents — are not answered.

One is this question of accountability that you brought up. If your belief is that there cannot be peaceful sharing and partnership, absent some kind of accountability process, what do you imagine that looking like? And why do you imagine that players on either side would submit to it?

And two, both of you brought up quite a lot of the long historical stories both sides tell. But I actually don’t understand how this is able to address that. How does this address the completely incompatible narratives of what happened on Oct. 7 and after it?

I can sort of understand how it addresses the Nakba. I can read that in the plan and its focus on creating a space of right of return. I can see that.

But there’s a lot that has happened since that is not answered there — from the peace processes to the second intifada. So there’s a sort of a difference between saying there’s a plan for now versus a plan to reconcile this shared history.

Which of those are we looking at? And if you believe we’re looking at the second — a way to change the way Israelis see themselves, a way to change how Palestinians see themselves — I mean, that in some way seems like an even harder challenge than trying to imagine new border policies.

Pundak: Yeah.

What is the mechanism, the levers, that you see doing that?

Pundak: One of the research groups that we are organizing is about transitional justice. We are committed to learning from other places to ensure that we incorporate those lessons in this program, in this solution.

And so I’m humbled to say that we have amazing experts — international and Israeli and Palestinians — who are doing that work. With that, I think that this solution — the fact that it does talk about the past in a way that reconciles the main collective needs of both people, for freedom, for acknowledgment of their history, for self-determination, for the connection, as we said, to exercise that relationship with the entire homeland, to address the issue of the Nakba properly, to envision a future that is better — that is better than what they have.

And Rula always says this, that when we talk to Palestinians, what we often hear is: Well, this is definitely much better than Oslo. Like, this is better, much better for Palestinians than what we’ve been given before.

Hardal: I do want to say a couple of words about that.

I don’t want the Israeli Jews to love the Palestinians and vice versa. And we are not going to love each other — not at this moment and not in the coming years. Maybe. And we don’t need to forget and not to forgive. But we need to ensure that we have another situation in which we can at least continue living. The other problems maybe won’t be solved in our generation, but in the other generations.

We have to start implementing the political vision itself gradually, and changing the reality in order to open the space for deeper transformative conversations between the two people that will come one day.

I want to pick up on something you just said, which is around gradualism. There’s one dimension of looking at this, which is like a big plan. It’s a kind of final equilibrium that would be a radical transformation of these two societies and their relationships with each other.

But to go back to something we were talking about earlier — if you take the E.U. example, it begins with the steel and coal community. And so if you imagine a world that is six or seven years down the road — not a world of Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas or Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid and Abbas — but there’s been a sort of revolution or two in leadership. And it’s not that who has come into power is transformationally different, but they’re open to something new, and there’s a feeling that this has gone — the fighting, that it has all become destructive, that it is going nowhere.

There’s space. For whatever reason, there is space. But there’s no space for an end to all these issues — there’s just space to try something new. What does gradualism look like? What is the steel and coal community? What are the things that could begin to build the sense of trust or belief — because you saw it work on a small scale — that then ladders up to larger possibilities?

Pundak: You know, when we met with a very, I would say, important regional player in the past few months, the first thing that they said is like: Do not talk to us about a “road map.” We never want to hear that word again, ever. Like, just don’t even mention it.

Our commitment is to present an endgame that can work. Because we know that without that clear endgame, you just repeat mistakes of the past.

OK, but you have to start somewhere.

Pundak: Yes, absolutely. But it’s important for me to just reiterate how important that is, and how we have examples on the ground that show that. What I would say is, except for that commitment to an endgame —like that clarity of where this is leading us, and no questions about that — is issues like public health. I think that public health and economy and climate are things that impact our day-to-day life, and are great examples of places where we know we can’t work separately. If you have Covid in Tel Aviv, you will have Covid in Ramallah.

That’s in my imagination of this, without developing the blueprint exactly yet of how to get there. And again, we’re working on it. I would say that those are the places where I would imagine this starting from. Health care, economy, climate, water, Jerusalem. The places where it actually ——

Do you want to say a word on what that would mean for Jerusalem?

Pundak: I would add to that also security. Security cooperation — not under a system of control and violence.

I want to dig in on this a little bit, because that was a list of, I would say, issues escalating in their scale. You can imagine modest levels of cooperation in public health, all the way up to Jerusalem and security, which are core. So I think the reason I’m asking this, and the reason I’m pushing a little bit on this question, is that I don’t think people will believe in your endgame until they see it work in miniature.

Pundak: Yeah.

Your view, as I hear it, is that people have to be committed to the endgame for this to even begin.

Pundak: Mm-hmm.

But, you know, I can read the polling. You do not have the support for that right now.

Pundak: Right.

So if you’re ——

Pundak: But again, you didn’t have the support for Oslo before Oslo, or ——

But Oslo didn’t work.

Pundak: Sure. Absolutely. But, and again, that’s because no work was also done on the ground to complement it.

So the question I’m asking is: If there is a moment of opportunity, and you could implement something — security or Jerusalem are both good examples — I find it to be one of the more depressing realities of the situation, that the degree of cooperation and the effectiveness of the cooperation on security between the Palestinian Authority, or P.A., and the Israeli government has been sort of pocketed by the Israeli government as opposed to being the basis of something bigger.

Pundak: Yeah.

But you put that on the table as something that you could imagine as being a place where there could be a more transformational thing. Because it has also created a negative outcome, where the P.A. has lost and eroded support and legitimacy.

Now I would say that was sort of the way the Israeli government wanted it. But talk me through one place — be it Jerusalem, security, something else — where people would look at this, and in your view, they would see it, and then they’d say: Oh, maybe these A Land for All people are right. Maybe if we share as opposed to separate, maybe if we cooperate as opposed to dominate, you get an outcome that is, for — in this case — Jewish Israelis, safer and more stable and more just, without having to be committed to the entire vision.

Hardal: There are a lot of examples in the health field. But I’m not sure that I do want to cooperate with you in this conversation, on this topic, because I think it needs to be in a different way. The Palestinians are not going now to accept or agree to actual partial steps on the ground until — I think there is a need for something dramatic.

And people from both sides need to see a plan with a timeline, not, again, some steps here — like what has been happening since last fall with Gaza. People are — and believe me, you are in these conversations, in a lot of international context — speaking about the reconstruction of Gaza and the humanitarian situation, of course, without doing anything.

That is, for sure, since September or October. But nobody is speaking about the rest of the Israelis and the Palestinians, and about where we are heading this time. So no, I’m not going to accept all of these failures.

We start, first of all, from acknowledging —in transformative acknowledgment and recognition — the state of Palestine. Countries and states need to start filling in this recognition with actions: diplomatic, political, legal, economic and so on, OK? To start with.

And presenting a platform for the political vision. I hope it’s going to be our political vision, and we are happy to bring much more insights and blueprints and content to whole phases. But we know, all of us, we know in, I don’t know, 2050, we will be there. And people will start also seeing the improvement in the conditions of their lives ——

Pundak: Right, I think that’s No. 1.

Hardal: Immediately. But we cannot do it the way it was done 30 years ago.

For me, it creates an interesting instability in how to think about what you all have released here. And the way I’d put it is this: I take the point that you need a vision you’re working toward. And I also take the point that I think you’re making here, which is that it would be folly right now to think that every sentence put down on a plan in 2026, even in a world where that plan became viable, would be the final structure of the plan or would be how it would be implemented. That requires a level of policy literalism that even I am not willing to do.

But I guess what you’re both getting at on some level — and I agree with, but is in some ways a harder question — is not what kinds of answers you might imagine a constructive process with people committed to a just outcome might entertain. It’s how you get to the point where there’s a room with a table, with people who can begin debating the finer points of the plan.

Israel is, at this moment, undoubtedly the stronger actor in this conflict, and there is very, very little room for much that is in this vision, in Israeli politics. The coming election is going to pit Benjamin Netanyahu, whose, I think, politics are well understood, against Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. And Bennett is, I think, one of the leaders of that coalition. I mean, he has traditionally, on many of these issues, been to Netanyahu’s right.

Pundak: Correct.

And so I can read the polling there. For the commitment to this kind of vision that you’ve described needing, you would need a wholesale change in the structure of Israeli public opinion and leadership.

What is your theory of what creates that change that makes this possible?

Pundak: Well, yeah, that’s kind of what we’re doing. That’s the work. We’ve never said that it’s easy work. And even more so, there are no shortcuts. There are no shortcuts.

When you think about Northern Ireland, for example, as I said earlier, a month before the Good Friday Agreement, no one believed it would ever end. But there were at least three, if not more, very intense years of working bottom-up to make people start imagining that the Good Friday Agreement can and will happen, with civil society, with journalists, with artists.

There needs to be a whole mechanism of moving the society from where we are today, which is annihilation of the Palestinian people.

But what moves it? The young in Israel today are to the right of older generations.

Pundak: Yeah, absolutely. That’s one of the biggest problems.

Society has moved, and it is moving. And it is changing. But not in the direction of this. So ——

Pundak: No, no, and I would say ——

I know there are no shortcuts, but, even on a 10-year time frame, what do you believe will change attitudes sufficiently so that something like this becomes possible?

Pundak: We’re not in a postwar election. There isn’t even a cease-fire in Gaza right now. There’s no cease-fire, and the war continues, and people are very much still entrenched in the reality of Oct. 7. And so I am not counting on these elections to get us to that vision — not at all.

But right now, within these elections, within the political framework in Israel, the conversation is so, so limited. It’s between, really, the political imagination, which is becoming our reality, of the reality in Gaza and the West Bank, and eliminating the Palestinian people and then delegitimizing Palestinian citizens of Israel.

That’s the other part of that spectrum, and it’s basically all we have within the Jewish parties. There is no vision. I come back to this point because I think — and I know, as an Israeli — that young people are looking for hope and for alternatives.

Sorry, I want to push us from a space of realism here. Young people have moved to the right in Israel. There are left-wing politicians in Israel, like Yair Golan. They are not popular.

Pundak: No, but Yair Golan is also not offering hope — real hope — to solve this conflict and for security.

But are people lacking for vision, or do they not want a vision like this?

Pundak: No. I think that we have been trained and normalized this thinking that we do not need to solve this conflict. And I think that Oct. 7 is the worst wake-up call that we could have imagined.

We said that this will blow up in our face. We never imagined it to be so bad, but this is and should be — and I believe, again, that this is not the postwar election that we’re waiting for — the time to integrate into the Israeli public discourse the fact that this conflict needs to end, that there is a solution.

I will say — and this is not to counter the reality where Israelis are not at all interested in anything right now of such — but we have met, in 2025, 15,000 Israelis — that is equivalent to half a million Americans — who have been looking for vision and hope and alternatives and ways out and political imagination. We’ve been doing it, I would say the majority of these, with young people, with political imagination workshops, with soft entrance points. Not immediately to say: This is the vision. Vote for this vision.

No. But to say: Guys, wake up. Your future is in your hands. The leaders are not giving us that. It has to come from us — from civil society, from artists, from journalists, from small politicians.

That is something that we are very committed to doing. And we see that our movement has been growing exponentially since Oct. 7.

People are looking. Are we there yet? No. But, for example, our dear friends at Standing Together, who are one of the largest, bottom-up, Jewish-Arabic movements on the ground today in Israel — they, a few months ago, announced that, for their 10th anniversary and around everything that’s going on, they’re committed to presenting a political vision. That political vision is ours.

And so you see that there’s an emergence coming out of Oct. 7, of people looking for a new big idea. Because everything has been shattered, and paradigms that we’ve been working around are crumbling.

So when you ask me about where I find hope when I read the polls, when I see the young people voting for Itamar Ben-Gvir more and more, when I see how saturated Israeli society today is with violence — because the violence is everywhere — it is with these young people who are asking me: How can I join A Land for All? And we’ve been getting these by the thousands.

So I’m not looking for shortcuts. We are here to do that work. But if we don’t start now and present that alternative now, we’re absolutely never going to get there.

Hardal: I agree with May about all of that. I think we need a lot of pressure from outside in order to promote this change inside Israel.

I think it’s not only the void of people, and it’s not only that people got used to not speaking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We’ve been seeing how they speak and treat Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank. So there is something ——

Pundak: And inside of Israel, as well, by the way.

Hardal: Yes. And against us Palestinian citizens in Israel.

The degree of the dehumanization of the Palestinian people in the Israeli public conversation and political conversation is just insane. And not surprising, because this is actually the nature of settler-colonial, violent, arrogant societies. But also of ——

Pundak: But also of separation.

Hardal: And also of separation. And also of propaganda — of propaganda in the media and in the whole political conversation and discourse in Israel over years. And that’s why I think there is a place for top-down change in Israel and for pressure from outside.

Pundak: I just want to say, we are taking the agency of Israelis and Palestinians leading a vision, but we can’t do it alone. We can’t.

At this point, thinking that Israelis can ensure the safety or security of Israel — or of Palestinians, for sure — is wrong. There is no way we can do this without serious pressure and without serious commitments of international actors.

So this is absolutely to say that this should be a wake-up call for the international community — not to talk about the two-state solution but to end the atrocities on the ground first and foremost, and then by securing and committing to a real solution.

That is a good place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience?

Rula, why don’t we begin with you?

Hardal: I decided to choose three books that are related to the conversation that we are having today.

The first one is “The Holocaust and the Nakba,” edited by good colleagues and friends, Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg. It’s very important to understand what’s happening now. It was written before Oct. 7 and the genocide in Gaza, but it’s still a very important, essential book.

The second is “States of Denial” by Stanley Cohen. It’s not about Israel and Palestine, but I claim all the time that the Israelis are suffering from severe collective denial and blindness. I’m trying to understand that, and I think a lot of people need, want, maybe, to understand. And this book is very important and helpful.

The last book is by our colleague and friend Omer Bartov — his very recent, latest book, “Israel: What Went Wrong?”

May?

Pundak: I’m also thinking about where I’m at today, and so I was thinking of three books.

One is looking to the past and learning from it: Hussein Agha and Robert Malley’s book “Tomorrow Is Yesterday.” We’re doing this as people on the ground, who are committing to doing this bottom-up work of building the movement and vision. But they’ve been there in the negotiations, learning from the mistakes, and I think that this is a practice we overlook, and we need to really do more often — learning from our mistakes. So that’s the past.

The second is “A Psalm for the Wild-Built” by Becky Chambers. It’s a genre that I — do you know this book?

Yes. I didn’t expect it to pop up here.

Pundak: Yes. It’s from a different world, which is very off-genre for me, but I’m so grateful that I have read it.

We’ve been in the business of dystopias for a long time. As a Jew, I am committed to practicing my political imagination. It’s part of my heritage, and we’ve neglected that. So this book by Becky Chambers has really allowed me to sit with alternative futures and help me imagine beyond what I think is possible. I think that’s so important.

And the third is a kind of book for the present, which is a children’s book. There are never enough good recommendations for a children’s book. It’s a book by Tove Jansson. It’s the “Moomin” series, which allows me to, first of all, read a book to both my 4- and 8-year-old, which is not so easy to find, something that we all enjoy. But also it is a profound, I want to say humanist — but, of course, it’s not only about humans — but a very sensitive series that allows room for emotions and for tackling very serious philosophic questions and fears, in a way that helps me be present with my children and kind of remember why I’m doing what I’m doing.

May Pundak, Rula Hardal — thank you very much.

Pundak: Thank you.