Egalitarian Bi-nationalism for Israel/Palestine

There is a growing agreement among scholars, politicians and experts that the oppressive realities and colonial policies in Palestine/Israel are politically unacceptable and morally indefensible. Leading human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B’Tselem have published extensive reports that identify these colonial policies and their disastrous impacts on the lives and rights of the Palestinians. The question of putting an end to these wretched and segregationist realities and policies and moving to more transformative and inclusive solutions has preoccupied several scholars and politicians in Israel/Palestine and beyond. Liberal and national principles in the forms of one-person one-vote or territorial and ethnic partition have been at the center of debates on these transformative solutions.

This talk argues that egalitarian bi-nationalism is better equipped to address the underlying issues of the conflict in Israel/Palestine than the liberal and secessionist national frames. Egalitarian binationalism, the talk goes on to argue, better satisfies the urge for self-determination of Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews than the benign neglect majoritarianism of the liberal state or ethnic secession and the partition of the two-state solution. The talk concludes that egalitarian bi-nationalism’s insistence on envisioning affective relations of co-belonging based on an ethics of equality, parity, mutual legitimacy, and cohabitation offers rich resources for historical reconciliation and decolonization in Israel/Palestine.

Bashir Bashir is associate professor in the Department of Sociology, Political Science, and Communication at the Open University of Israel and a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Currently, he is a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His primary research interests are nationalism and citizenship studies, liberalism, democratic theory, decolonization and the politics of reconciliation. He is the co-editor of The Holocaust and Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia University Press, 2018); and The Arab and Jewish Questions (Columbia University Press, 2020).

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