EP 30: The Myths That Define Israel-Palestine – Part 5: The Two State Solution

The two-state solution has defined the conversation around Israel-Palestine for decades. In this Season 1 finale — the fifth and final part of this series — I make the case that it was never real. It was always a framework designed to manage Palestinian oppression while calling it a peace process. And I lay out what I believe is the only honest alternative. 

Check out my substack page where I tackle some of the episode topics in depth and write about other issues our country and the world are facing today. https://substack.com/@ktdpodcast 

Transcript

Speaker 0:01

On February 28th, 2026, something happened that hadn't happened since 1967. Israel closed Al-Aqsa Mosque during the month of Ramadan. Islam's third holiest site during Islam's holiest month. It remained closed for 40 days, even on Eid-al-Fitr the day that marks the end of Ramadan and one of the most sacred days for Muslims. Israel says that they formally closed all religious sites in the old city, Al-Aqsa. The Western Wall. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre. citing the war on Iran as a security justification. But it was Palestinian Muslim worshipers who were met with stun grenades and tear gas when they tried to pray as close to the mosque as they could get. Palestinian religious leaders were unambiguous about what this was. Not a security measure, but the latest step in a long-term strategy to consolidate Israeli control over Al-Aqsa, using the war as cover. And this part is worth remembering. These weren't Palestinians from the occupied territories. Some were residents of East Jerusalem. While others were Israeli citizens. Their status didn't matter. What mattered is that Israel controlled their right to access their place of worship. This is what Israel does to its own Palestinian citizens. I've spent the better part of a year documenting what they do to the people they control who don't even have the pretense of citizenship. Let's look at where things stand right now for those groups. Since the supposed ceasefire took effect in October, 2025, Israel has killed nearly 750 Palestinians in Gaza. Injured over 2000 more. Half of them, women and children. In that same time period, four Israeli soldiers have been killed. In the West Bank, settler attacks are becoming more brazen and deadly by the day. Recently, settler stormed the village of Tayasir, beating a 75-year-old man in his home. His wife died of a heart attack days later. When CNN's crew arrived to document it. Israeli soldiers detained them, putting the photojournalist in a choke hold. On camera, those soldiers declared all the West Bank belongs to Israel and spoke of revenge. The battalion was suspended. 31 members of Netanyahu's own coalition demanded it be redeployed. And in the last few days of March, Israel passed a law institutionalizing the death penalty for Palestinians who kill Israelis, but not vice versa. In celebration government ministers and supporters wore noose pins on their lapels. A yellow pin designed to look like the hostage solidarity ribbon, but shaped like a noose. Far right national Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir posted about gallows. Back in early March, during Purim, while the law was still being debated, a Knesset member filmed herself holding a noose in one hand and a fake lethal injection in the other. Saying, "it doesn't matter if it's by injection poison or by rope, what's important is a death penalty for terrorist law". Yuli Novak, executive director of B'Tselem, one of Israel's own leading human rights organizations, wrote in the same week that the law passed that Israel is not a democracy. It is a system of lethal control. Around the same time, Israel's defense minister announced plans to permanently occupy southern Lebanon and destroy homes along the border. Explicitly modeling it in his own words on what Israel did in Gaza. And adding fuel to the fire. Israeli forces are calling Christian Village mayors in Southern Lebanon. Ordering them to expel displaced Shia civilians, sheltering in their towns, and demanding the names of those taking refuge. mayors of several towns refused to hand over names saying that these were not Hezbollah militants, but civilians. The mayor of one town, expressed his dilemma openly, who should I protect. Since the war began 40 days ago more than 1.2 million Lebanese have been displaced. Over 1,700 killed and nearly 6,000 injured. On April 8th alone, after the supposed cease fire with Iran took hold, Israel launched the largest coordinated strike of the war, killing over 250 people. Meanwhile, the war on Iran is at a fragile two week standstill. The conflict launched at the behest of Israel, fulfilling Netanyahu's 40 year obsession with destroying Iranian power in the region, has killed thousands and displaced millions. The Strait of Hormuz blockade for 40 days sending global energy markets into chaos remains disputed, even as a ceasefire takes hold. Looking at all these events together. One thing is clear. Israel has dropped any pretense of operating within internationally recognized boundaries. The expansion of strategy is no longer hidden. Back in June of last year, I talked about Israel's regional ambitions, the Greater Israel Project, and what we're watching now is that project accelerating. And here's what's equally shocking. Arab governments, the same ones that publicly declare solidarity Palestinians are openly cooperating with Israel against Iran. Working with the very government that is killing and displacing their neighbors, protecting their own regimes while millions of Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iranians pay the price. And driving all of it, is America's open approval. Mike Huckabee, the US Ambassador to Israel, sat down with Tucker Carlson back in February and was asked whether Israel has a biblical right to take over the entire Middle East, from the Nile to the Euphrates, encompassing Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and beyond. His answer, "it would be fine if they took it all". And Bezalel Smotrich Israel's finance minister, the man who said Israel would kill the idea of a Palestinian state, responded by posting on social media. "I love huckabee". Something must change. Not eventually. Now. If the foundation of question of Palestinian freedom is not resolved. The Gaza playbook will keep expanding. Lebanon today. What tomorrow? The father of a 31-year-old volunteer ambulance driver killed in Gaza during Ramadan said it best. "There's no ceasefire. It's all talk for the media. In reality, there's no ceasefire." He was talking about Gaza. He could have been talking about the entire region. There is no ceasefire. There is only escalation. And a world that keeps waiting for a peaceful resolution, a two-state solution while the fire spreads. Today I'm going to tell you why what we've been waiting for has always been a lie and what we need instead. Over the last four episodes, I've dismantled four myths. Palestinians always reject peace. That Israel is just defending itself. That Israel is a democracy. And that Israel has no partner for peace. Today I'm taking on the fifth, and unlike the others, this one requires dismantling not just the process, but the concept itself. Because the two states solution wasn't just pursued dishonestly. Even under ideal conditions. It was never a workable framework for genuine Palestinian freedom. But first, let me show you why the idea has never been pursued honestly. Not recently, not even starting in 1948, but before Israel was even created in 1937, the British Peel Commission proposed partitioning Palestine for the first time, a Jewish state and an Arab state. David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel's first prime Minister, publicly supported it. That same year he wrote to his son that accepting partition would be "a first step toward possession of the land as a whole". Internal Zionist discussions documented by historians show that partition was treated as tactical and temporary, a way to gain international legitimacy and a foothold while keeping the larger territorial goal intact. Then there's the 1967 war. I covered it in detail in episode 27, so I'll highlight what's important for this argument. Three separate US intelligence assessments told President Johnson before the war that Egypt was not going to attack. Johnson himself told Israel's foreign minister, "even if Egypt attacks, you will whip the hell outta them". General Matityahu Peled, chief of logistical command during the war in 1972 said this; "the thesis, according to which the danger of genocide hung over us in June, 1967, and according to which Israel was fighting for her very physical survival was nothing but a bluff. Which was born and bred after the war". In 1971, Mordechai Bentov, a member of the wartime government, said the following. "This whole story about the threat of extermination was totally contrived and then elaborated upon... to justify the annexation of new Arab territories". This just confirms what Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, has been documenting. That Israel's political and military elite had long regarded 1948 as a missed opportunity. That they hadn't taken all of historic Palestine. Now let's turn to the so-called offers of peace. I described in detail what Oslo and Camp David really offered back in episode 26. So I'll just name the pattern here. Oslo gave Palestinians nominal control. Over 18% of the West Bank, Israel retained full control over 60%. All the agricultural land, all the water resources, every settlement. While Palestinians were told to trust the process, the settlement population doubled from 110,000 in 1993 to 220,000 by 2000. Rabin remembered as Israel's great peacemaker stated explicitly one month before his assassination that "any Palestinian entity created under Oslo would be less than a state". Camp David in 2000 offered a fragmented Palestinian entity disconnected cantons with Israel, retaining control over borders, airspace, water, and the right to intervene militarily at any time. Robert Malley, president Clinton special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs was in the room at Camp David. He described the offer to Palestinians as "severe lack of sovereignty". Israel's own foreign minister said if he were Palestinian, he would've rejected the deal. And that brings us to today, the current leadership in Israel is the most right wing in its history. And the most blatant about their stated goals. I covered some of the comments made by Netanyahu and Smotrich in episode 28 and 29, but they're worth naming again here. In 2019 at a Likud party meeting, Benjamin Netanyahu told his own colleagues, "anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of the Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas. Transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank". And in February of this year, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announcing New West Bank expansion said, "we will continue to kill the idea of a Palestinian state". There's one more thing about this topic that I want to address because I hear it often. That this is Netanyahu's government, the most right wing in Israeli history. If moderate Zionists can get back into power, the two state solutions, that has a chance. It's a comforting idea because it turns a systemic problem into a personal problem. As I've shown throughout this series, Netanyahu is not an aberration. He is a combination of a policy that every Israeli government has followed. The most revealing evidence comes from the liberal Zionist opposition itself. Writing in Al Jazeera in 2015, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe wrote this about Isaac Herzog, the leader of the liberal Zionist opposition. Herzog's nightmare. He repeated over and over was a country where Jews and Palestinians would live together. His answer was separation, ghettoization enclaves. "We are here and they are there". Even Haaretz's own liberal journalist Barak Ravid warned that a binational state would mean stabbings on a daily basis. As Pappe concluded in that piece, the idea that a liberated Israel-Palestine will be a democracy for all, has never been on the liberal Zionist agenda". So we've established that the two state solution was never honestly pursued that every government left center and right maintained the same structural goal. Palestinian containment, not Palestinian freedom. But here's what I want you to sit with before we go further. We still talk about the two state solution as if it's a future possibility, something to work toward, a destination we haven't reached yet, as if the situation on the ground is still open. Still negotiable, still waiting for the right moment and the right leaders to finally get it done. But the situation on the ground resolved itself a long time ago, just not in the way the two state framework pretends. There has only ever been one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Israel controls all of it. The borders. The airspace, the water, the movement of people, the economic policy, every aspect of life for everyone living between the river and the sea flows through Israeli control, regardless of whether you live in Israel as a citizen or are stateless in the occupied territories. In April, 2023, foreign policy experts writing in Foreign Affairs magazine put it plainly. "The temporary status of occupation of the Palestinian Territories is now a permanent condition in which one state ruled by one group of people ruled over another group of people". Sarah Leah Whitson and Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man in their book from Apartheid to Democracy Drive Home this point. "What replaced the shock of October 7th renewed calls for a two state solution. Recognition of Palestinian statehood without enforcement is still the same evasion dressed up in new language. The choice in front of us was never one state versus two states. That choice was for closed decades ago by the settlements, the military infrastructure and the explicit policy decisions. The actual choice is whether the one state that already exists will be democratic with equal rights for everyone living under its control, or whether it will continue as what it already is, an apartheid state". Once you accept that one state already exists, the burden of proof shifts entirely. You are no longer the radical for proposing one Democratic state. The radical position is insisting that partition is still possible after 700,000 settlers have been planted throughout the West Bank and east Jerusalem. After the governing coalition has said openly, it will kill the idea of a Palestinian state. After the liberal opposition has said its nightmare is Jews and Palestinians living together. So when I make the case for one Democratic state, i'm not proposing something new. I'm describing what already exists and asking whether we're finally honest enough to demand that it be democratic. And I'm not the only one saying it. Some of the most compelling voices making this argument come from places that might surprise you. These voices come from completely different places. A Palestinian scholar who has been making this argument since 2006. A liberal Jewish intellectual who spent decades advocating for two states. And an Israeli historian. They reached the same conclusion through different doors. In 2006, Ali Abunimah, creator of the Electronic Intifada and author of One Country, A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse, sat down with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, to make this argument. And what I'm arguing is that that really, the conventional wisdom that partition is the solution is completely wrong. And in fact, partition is the problem. I think we need to do the work of imagining a different kind of future, one in which Israelis and Palestinians can start to see themselves together. That's very, very hard work in the current context, but I think. Uh, looking at other examples around the world, like South Africa, like Northern Ireland, even like Canada, where they're still struggling with these issues As we see today, uh, there is a different path that we have to seize other than the apartheid reality Israel is creating with the world's complicity. He went on to describe the two state solution as a multi-billion dollar peace process industry that has cynically, dangled, statehood before Palestinians for decades, producing not a state but a fragmented dependent entity while Israel continued to entrench its control. When challenged with the fact that many prominent leaders advocating for Palestinians did not believe in one state solution, he said something that has only become more true over time. Thinking that two states is the only realistic option that one state is a fantasy, had it exactly backwards. The fantasy was believing that partition was still achievable after decades of settlement expansion. The realistic option was confronting the one state reality that already existed and demanding that it be democratic. The world ignored him. 14 years later, someone who had spent those same years arguing the other side arrived at the same conclusion. Peter Beinart, who was a professor of journalism and political science editor at large of Jewish currents, and as author of the book being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza for most of his adult life, he was one of the most prominent liberal Jewish voices arguing for two state solution. In July, 2020, he published an essay in the New York Times titled I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State. He wrote that he had been arguing for two states since 1993. When he was 22 years old, watching Rabin and Arafat shake hands on the White House lawn. He believed in it because he understood what Israel meant to Jews who had experienced displacement and persecution. It wasn't abstract for him. But he also wrote this: "events have now extinguished that hope". By 2020, 640,000 Jewish settlers lived in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, the Israeli and American governments had, in his words, "divested Palestinian statehood of any real meaning". His conclusion wasn't that Jews did not deserve a home in that land. It was that a Jewish home and an exclusively Jewish state are not the same thing. The essence of Zionism was always a thriving Jewish society. A place of refuge and cultural life. His grandfather and father loved not a Jewish state, but a Jewish society. Beinart argued it was time to abandon Jewish Palestinian separation and embrace Jewish Palestinian equality through whatever shared democratic form that takes. And he concluded that ethnic supremacy was never the point of Zionism. It had become the point, but it didn't have to be. The following year, Ilan Pappe, one of the most important scholars of this conflict, spoke with the Palestine Chronicle about why one democratic state is not just the moral choice, but the only honest one. Here's what he said about the viability of the two state solution. Uh, I think that, uh, the two-state solution was never a viable, uh, uh, solution. There were times where maybe it looked a bit more viable for very few weeks after the. June 67 war when not one Jewish settlers came into, uh, the West Bank. Uh, but uh, it was not viable even then because it did not fit, uh, the basic, uh, policy of the Zionist movement since its, uh, inception in its arrival in Palestine in the late 19th century. He also described the generational divide between how Palestinians viewed a one state solution. There is a, a big difference between the opinions of the younger generation and the older generation when it comes to the one state solution. Uh, when you ask the older generation, then the, uh, despair from, uh, the two state solution as a, a feasible, uh, idea is indeed the main motive for, uh, uh, rejecting the two state solutions. However, if you go to the younger generation, and we should remind our viewers that uh, more than 50% of the Palestinians are under 18. Under under 18. It's a very, very young population. Uh, when you go to the younger generation, they believe in the one state is based on a certain moral ideological, uh, infrastructure. It is not just a disparate from the two state solution. It's a genuine belief. That, um, post Liberation Palestine should be a place where they would like to live in. Young people didn't just want another Arab state. They wanted a place that could be a "lighthouse for human rights and civil rights". Palestinian polling backs this up By 2020, support for one state and two states among Palestinians was virtually tied. And among those aged 18 to 22, 1 state was already the preference. Three voices 20 years apart, all arriving at the same explicit conclusion. One Democratic state. But there is a fourth voice that I wanna mention, one that doesn't mention the one state explicitly, but his conclusion is impossible to dismiss. Yehuda Shaul is a former Israeli soldier and co-founder of Breaking the Silence, an organization of IDF veterans documenting what the occupation actually looks like from the inside. In March, 2026, he spoke to the New Yorker about what Israeli policy in the West Bank has produced. Settlement approval under the current government has accelerated dramatically over the past three years. The explicitly stated purpose in the government's own words is to bury the possibility of a future Palestinian state. But what I want you to hear from Shaul isn't the documentation of dispossession, it's his conclusion about what this means for Israel itself. He said. "If anyone wants to prevent another October 7th. If anyone wants to protect and defend the lives of Israelis and Palestinians, then you must give Palestinians freedom. The security of Jewish self-determination is interlinked and intertwined with achieving Palestinian self-determination. And what's happening in the West Bank on a daily basis is eroding this possibility". Shaul isn't prescribing one state, but his conclusion points in the same direction as the others. If Palestinian freedom is a prerequisite for Israeli security, if the two are genuinely inseparable, then the question becomes, what does shared freedom actually look like in practice? That question is no longer just being asked in academic journals or opinion pages. In 2018, Palestinian and Israeli Jewish activists launched the one Democratic state campaign in Haifa, a grassroots political movement with a concrete program working toward a single democratic state in historic Palestine where Palestinians and Israeli Jews live in equality. The argument has moved from the page to the street. Before we talk about what one Democratic state actually looks like, let me address something that underlies almost every objection to it. The assumption that Jews and Palestinians are simply incompatible, that the violence between them is ancient and inevitable. That separation is the only answer because these people cannot live together. The historical record says otherwise. For centuries, under Ottoman rule, Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities lived alongside each other in Palestine. Jewish communities existed in Jerusalem and other cities for generations alongside Arabs. Trade shared neighborhoods daily life conducted across religious lines. The conflict between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians over this land is not ancient. It is modern. A product of 19th and 20th century nationalism and colonialism, not centuries of inevitable religious warfare. As Ilan Pappe documents, early Jewish settlers were often welcomed by Palestinians. it was only when it became clear the settles had come not to live alongside the native population, but in place of it that resistance began. So if coexistence was historically possible, if the conflict is political rather than eternal, the question then becomes what institutional framework could make coexistence possible again? We can look towards other deeply divided societies to see a path forward. South Africa showed that a society built on racial domination could transition to democratic governance. Imperfectly. Incompletely. But meaningfully. Northern Ireland showed something more specific. That political violence rooted in oppression declines when people gained real rights and representation. The IRA didn't stop because British Security Forces defeated them. They stopped because Catholics became equal political partners. South Africa's transition remains incomplete in ways that matter. Economic apartheid persists. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission fell short of real accountability. Those who designed the system largely kept their wealth. Those failures are a warning. Not a template to repeat. But both cases establish something important. This has been done before. The question is whether we learned from what worked and what didn't. The most detailed practical blueprint for this transition comes from Sarah Leah Whitson and Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, in their book From Apartheid to Democracy, published in 2025. Their framework begins with the recognition that you cannot negotiate your way to democracy when one side has no rights and the other has all the power. The first requirement isn't a peace agreement. It's ending Israeli crimes, the illegal occupation, the apartheid system, something that simply has to stop before anything else is possible. From there, they propose a transitional government, tasked with dismantling, repressive and supremacist institutions and laws. Creating equality where none exists today. Guaranteeing equal political representation with safeguards against majoritarianism. And laying the foundations for a transitional justice process. After a three year transitional period, they propose a referendum. Let the people decide with a democratic vote, what permanent political structures they want. One state, two states a confederation. Chosen freely by people with equal rights. Their blueprint is breathtaking in both scope and detail, and should be studied by all groups working to end the Israeli Palestinian conflict. I think their sequencing is right, and I agree that a single democratic state should be the baseline from which any future arrangement emerges. However, I part ways with the authors on two fundamentally connected issues. First the Timeline. The authors are clear that three years is the emergency phase, dismantling the legal architecture of apartheid, abolishing discriminatory laws, creating the basic conditions for democratic governance, not completing the transformation. I respect that framing, but even South Africa's compressed four year transition, widely admired as a model left enough undone that economic apartheid persists. What gets left undone in a compressed timeline tends to stay undone. My concern is this, will three years be enough even for the emergency phase? Or will it create too much pressure to run the referendum before the conditions genuinely exist for it to hold? Second, there's the referendum itself, even framed as modifying a democratic baseline. I worry it creates unnecessary risk. The geography alone makes genuine partition unworkable. The West Bank aquifer supplies both populations and Israel controls it. The deep water ports are on the Israeli Mediterranean coast. The most fertile agricultural land, the systematically stolen. Even with the fairest possible border, you'd likely end up with a Palestinian entity that is landlocked or nearly so. Water dependent on its neighbor. And economically non-viable. And then there's the polling. A March, 2025 poll published by Haaretz found that 82% of Jewish Israelis support the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. 56% support the expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel, and only 9% of Jewish Israeli men under 40 fully oppose the ideas of expulsion and transfer. I understand that polling taken under these conditions has real limits. These are attitudes formed under an active genocide. After decades of dehumanization. South Africa's white population held similarly, extreme views about Black South Africans, in the 1980s. Those views shifted. Not completely, not fast enough, but meaningfully. Once the institutional framework changed and people's daily experience replaced the propaganda. So I don't believe these numbers are permanent, but they reflect attitudes built over 77 years and likely won't shift in three. And if you run a referendum before they do even one where the democratic state is a default, the institutional protections have to be strong enough to survive that pressure regardless of any vote. The federal democratic framework shouldn't be a transitional arrangement that gets voted away. It has to be the final destination. So what would that look like in Israel? An independent constitutional court insulated from electoral pressure and the final arbiter of rights for everyone. Graduated amendment procedures requiring super majorities for fundamental constitutional changes, preventing simple majority domination. Regional autonomy over education, cultural policy, and religious affairs protecting both Jewish and Palestinian communal identity. Hebrew and Arabic as equal languages. Religious practice for all faiths constitutionally guaranteed. On Jerusalem rather than the impossible partition that every negotiation has floundered on. The city functions as a shared federal capital. International guarantees for holy sites. Municipal governance for everyone who lives there. Neither people's exclusive possession, both people's home. And then there's the settlements. How they will be handled is one of the hardest aspects of all of this. Let's be clear about what they are. An illegal occupation built through the violent displacement of Palestinians, one of the core ongoing crimes I've documented across this entire series. That cannot be papered over in the name of pragmatism. And yet, with 700,000 settlers now embedded throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem, forced mass evacuation creates its own humanitarian and political crisis. The practical question isn't whether the settlements were legitimate, they weren't. But how do you govern a territory where they now exist while ensuring Palestinians receive full restitution and equal rights? A genuine transitional justice process. Must include land restitution as a core component. Not symbolic, not optional. The theft has to be remedied. But we have to be honest about the challenge. Decades of occupation, settler violence and deliberate destruction mean that much of the documentation of Palestinian land ownership likely no longer exists. Relying solely on surviving paperwork effectively rewards that destruction. What's needed is an independent, international panel empowered to hear individual cases, conduct its own research, interview its own witnesses to adjudicate land claims where even documentation has been lost or destroyed. Post-war restitution processes in Europe after World War II grappled with exactly this problem. The tools exist. What's required is the political will to use them. Once this is all done, some settlers may choose to remain as equal citizens under equal law without separate roads, without military protection, without legal privilege. No longer settlers in the colonial sense, just citizens. The path has to be available to those willing to accept it. The question isn't whether such a system will be perfect. It won't be. But it is a system with historical precedent adapted to the specific realities of this conflict. The real question is whether it's better than what exists right now. Everything I've laid out in this episode, the historical record, the voices, the blueprint points in one direction. But there are real objections that need to be addressed. So let's get through them. Number one, Israel has a right to exist. Jews need their own state. There is legitimate concern behind this. The Holocaust was real. Jewish displacement and persecution across centuries was real. Pogroms, inquisitions, expulsions, genocide. For a people who have been stateless and persecuted for so long. The desire for a place of safety and belonging, a society where Jewish life could flourish without fear is completely understandable. But safety and belonging cannot come at the expense of another people's freedom. Otherwise, you are perpetuating the same horrors that were inflicted upon you. As Peter Beinart argued, the essence of Zionism was never a Jewish state. It was Jewish home. Federal democracy provides that home. What it cannot provide is ethnic supremacy over another people. Number two, how do you guarantee Palestinians won't be oppressed forever? Honestly, you can't, and that's a real problem worth taking seriously. History has shown us repeatedly that those in power will do everything they can to remain in power. Jim Crow lasted nearly a century after emancipation and racial animus remains prominent today. Economic apartheid persists in South Africa long after political apartheid ended. Formal equality and lived equality are not the same thing, and the distance between them can last generations. But we can learn from those failures. In America slaveholders lost the war, but kept their land. In South Africa, apartheid architects kept their wealth and status. And in both cases, that impunity became the seed of the oppression that followed. Nuremberg showed a different path. That crimes of this magnitude require individual accountability all the way down. Not just the people at the top, the commanders, the soldiers, the bureaucrats, and the settlers who murdered and filmed it. A genuine transition in Israel palestine has to learn from all of it. Better institutions and real accountability. Without both you don't have reconciliation, you have impunity with a new flag. Number three, but what about daily violence? Won't Israelis face attacks every day? Political violence is most often a symptom of oppression, not ancient hatred between people who cannot coexist. Remove the oppression, the symptom changes. The IRA didn't stop because British Security forces defeated them. They stopped because Catholics became equal political partners. And White South Africans feared exactly this, that ending Apartheid would bring a blood bath retribution. It didn't. When people gain real rights and a genuine stake in the system, the incentive for political violence changes fundamentally. And we already know coexistence is possible here. Jews, Christians and Muslims live together in this land for centuries. Number four, why would Palestinians ever agree to live next to their oppressors? They already do. That's the point. 2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel already live in the state second class, but present. Another 5 million in Gaza and the West Bank already live under Israeli military control. The question has never been whether Palestinians share the land with Israelis. The question is whether they share it as equals or as subjects. And if the concern behind this question is really about violence, look at the data. In the West Bank alone. Over the past two years, Israelis have killed Palestinians at a ratio of roughly 17 to one. Nearly half of the Palestinian killed were unarmed at the time. The violence in this conflict runs overwhelmingly in one direction. Palestinians aren't the primary threat to Israeli safety. It's the opposite. Which brings us to the harder version of this question. From someone who genuinely asks, why would Palestinians ever agree to share a country with people who have oppressed dispossessed and slaughtered them for generations? That's difficult to answer. But remember, real accountability and reparations are built into everything we've discussed. Palestinians aren't being asked to simply forgive and forget. They're being asked whether they want rights equal standing self-determination on their own land. And let's be clear about what one Democratic state actually means. It isn't a concession of Palestinian national aspirations. The two states solution was a concession. Palestinians agreeing to partition the land that was originally theirs in its entirety. One Democratic state with genuine equality and accountability is closer to the original vision of decolonizing Palestine than anything the peace process has ever offered. Number five, how do you move world leaders who are so committed to two states? You don't move them with better arguments. You move them with consequences. The anti-apartheid movement against South Africa in the 1980s didn't win because government suddenly developed a conscience. It won because the economic and political cost of maintaining the status quo became unsustainable. Boycott, divestment, sanctions. The accumulation of pressure made continuation more costly than change. The same movement exists today around Israel Palestine. BDS. Campus divestment movements were active across the United States and Europe. They face significant repression now, but this is early stage. Like the anti-apartheid movement, before it gained critical mass. But the direction is clear. The ICC has issued a arrest warrants for Israeli leaders. Ireland has imposed boycotts on settlement products. Public opinion, particularly among younger Americans, including younger American Jews, is shifting faster than at any point since 1948. And there are independent voices within the international system worth rallying behind. Francesca Albanese the UN special Rapporteur on Palestinian Territories has documented Israel's crimes and report after report. And has been confirmed to her position through 2028, despite relentless efforts to remove her. The Trump administration imposed sanctions on her. European governments called for her resignation based on a video deliberately edited by pro- Israel lobby group, to misrepresent her comments. Hundreds of un staffers backed her anyway. She represents something important, an independent accountability mechanism within the UN system that Israel and its allies have tried and failed to silence. We should all be listening to what she is saying. Change doesn't happen when leaders decide to change. It happens when the cost of not changing becomes too high. So, where does this all leave us? What can we actually do about any of this? America has been funding and supporting Israel for 78 years. As citizens, that makes us complicit. But it also means we have leverage and that leverage runs through American politics. Let's start with AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. You've likely heard of them. If you haven't, you should know exactly who they are and what they do. AIPAC measures its success, not just by which candidates it elects, but by which candidates it destroys. It has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in recent election cycles targeting any member of Congress who questions unconditional support for Israeli government policy. Not American interests. Israeli policy. On March 17th, APAC spent a reported $22 million across four congressional primaries in Illinois alone. Money funneled through shell PACS with names like, Elect Chicago Women and Chicago Progressive Partnership. No mention of Israel, no mention of AIPAC. designed to be invisible. Their results were mixed. But here is what AIPAC chose to brag about. They celebrated defeating candidates, affiliated with the squad, Bernie Sanders and Justice Democrats, who they described as attacking Israel and demonizing pro-Israel Americans. One of those candidates was Kat Abughazaleh, a Palestinian American woman running for Congress. AIPAC spent millions specifically to defeat her, then celebrated it as their victory, even though their own candidate also lost in the same race. Kat wasn't the only one. They've been doing this for years. Decades. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Invisible money deployed specifically to keep anti-Israel voices out of American politics. This can't go on. We need to push back. So here's what I'm asking. The candidates AIPAC is trying to destroy are exactly the ones worth paying attention to. The squad, Bernie Sanders Ro Khanna, and the candidates they endorse and support. Justice Democrats are the political organization working to elect more of these candidates. These are the candidates willing to condition American military aid on human rights compliance. That is not a radical position. You do not write a blank check to a government committing genocide. So here's my ask. Before you vote in any primary or general election, find out who funds the candidates in your district. There's a site called Track AIPAC built specifically to document pro-Israeli lobby spending on federal candidates. It's grassroots, it's up to date, and exactly the kind of transparency tool the lobby has tried to shut down. And understand what you're pushing back against. In episode 28, I documented the infrastructure designed to silence this conversation. The AI powered legal threats. The career destruction, the permanent digital blacklists. That infrastructure exists precisely because the people running it know that when Americans understand what is actually happening, they don't support it. The suppression is an admission of weakness. An informed public is what they fear most. Well, we've made it to the end of the series. Across five episodes. I worked to dismantle the myths that have defined the Israel-Palestine story for decades. That Palestinians have rejected multiple fair peace offers. That Israel is just a small country defending itself. That it's the only democracy in the Middle East. That they've never had a true partner for peace. And that the two state solution is the only answer to the conflict we see before us. The truth is simpler and more devastating than any of these myths. There has only ever been one state between the river and the sea. Israel has controlled all of it. The only question that remains is whether every person living under that control would have equal rights. That's not a radical idea. It's the minimum requirement of justice. It's what South Africa chose when the world said it was impossible. It's what serious people across the ideological spectrum are saying out loud right now. The two state solution was never real. It was a framework designed to manage Palestinian oppression while calling it a peace process. And now you know that. Five episodes, 78 years of false promises. One honest conclusion. As I close out this series and the season, I wanted to take a moment to reflect back. Working on each episode made me confront the harsh truth of how little I really knew about what was going on in the world around us. For example, i've always been aware of what's happening to Palestinians peripherally, the way most of us are aware enough to feel uncomfortable. Not aware enough to act. And I continued to lead my life. What this research did was make that impossible. Not because the information was new. Much of it has been documented for decades, but because I finally sat with it. All of it. The clear and compelling evidence from historians, soldiers, and human rights workers saying plainly what the Israeli government is doing. But what appalled me most is that world leaders have known about this for decades. They saw the settlements expanding, the children dying, the laws being passed to make it all permanent. It was deliberate, sustained complicity by those in power who had every opportunity to stop it and chose not to. But here's what I tell myself and would say to anybody else facing the same dilemma I did. The fact that we didn't know the full depth of this, that's not an indictment on us. It's an indictment on the systems designed to keep us from knowing. On those in power who continue to perpetuate atrocities around the world and on media landscape that too often buries the truth. But the truth is finding its way through anyway. And now that we see it, we must take responsibility. It is through our collective voice that change will happen. To those of you who listen to this episode, this series, or this entire season, thank you. I started this show to better understand the world around me. I hope. In doing so, I've helped you do the same. Next season. I'll turn the same investigative lens on the economy, healthcare, and the environment, but this time try to offer solutions as well. Until then, stay curious, stay critical, and stay connected. I.