When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict there has been a seismic shift in the questions both experts and activists confront. This shift is occasioned by the disappearance of a negotiated two-state solution as a credible object of policy by any major actor and by the consolidation of a one-state reality between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. It does not matter much whether this reality is understood as the product of American policy, the power of the Israel lobby, Israeli security imperatives, the domination of Israeli political and cultural life by the right-wing, the disappearance of a credible Palestinian negotiating partner, the density of Israeli settlement throughout the West Bank, or the weakness of international institutions. What matters is that things have drastically changed and, as is common in any domain of human investigation, change has far outrun the conceptual and theoretical tools used for analysis, explanation, prediction, and policy guidance.
What is now in shortest supply when it comes to understanding the Palestinian-Israeli predicament are new ways of thinking, new questions, and new problem statements, anchored in the reality of a single (albeit non-democratic) state ruling (in different ways) all the populations between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Our goal is to develop questions, methods, and conceptual and theoretical approaches attuned to the one-state reality. This will likely require a shift toward longer time frames for the posing and examination of trends, dynamics, and possible outcomes. It will mean shifting categories and questions so that topics that researchers in this area have been accustomed to treating as significant, but are now uninteresting and unproductive of new insights, are replaced by unfamiliar but, under now prevailing circumstances, appropriate and stimulating.
We are interested in manuscripts that ask questions about the current and future implications of the one-state reality. For example: How can political relations among hostile populations be transformed when the political arena is integrated in reality, if not as a matter of formal legislation? What form, and across what time frame, does democratization take when the problem is integrating large previously excluded populations from the demos rather than replacing autocracy with democracy? What are the limits of designed or architected visions as guides or contributors toward stable “solutions,” as opposed to thinking about outcomes as emergent or evolutionary processes shaped by unintended consequences of partially successful or failed projects? How do specific issues traditionally considered within the context of Israeli-Palestinian relations present themselves differently once the occupation is imagined as ending, not through disengagement but through integration or system transformation—issues such as Jerusalem, demography, secular-religious relations, the meaning of the “Jewishness” of the state; the option of annexation; the significance of Jewish settlement (on one side of the Green Line or the other); the implications of the inclusion of the Gaza Strip as a kind of “prison” within, not outside, of the State of Israel; the opportunities for Jews and Arabs to manipulate and exploit gaps between an official regime of separation into different entities: “State of Israel,” expanded East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, “Area A,” Area B,” and Area C” and the Gaza Strip vs. the actual fact of continuous Israeli state domination.
When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict there has been a seismic shift in the questions both experts and activists confront. This shift is occasioned by the disappearance of a negotiated two-state solution as a credible object of policy by any major actor and by the consolidation of a one-state reality between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. It does not matter much whether this reality is understood as the product of American policy, the power of the Israel lobby, Israeli security imperatives, the domination of Israeli political and cultural life by the right-wing, the disappearance of a credible Palestinian negotiating partner, the density of Israeli settlement throughout the West Bank, or the weakness of international institutions. What matters is that things have drastically changed and, as is common in any domain of human investigation, change has far outrun the conceptual and theoretical tools used for analysis, explanation, prediction, and policy guidance.
What is now in shortest supply when it comes to understanding the Palestinian-Israeli predicament are new ways of thinking, new questions, and new problem statements, anchored in the reality of a single (albeit non-democratic) state ruling (in different ways) all the populations between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Our goal is to develop questions, methods, and conceptual and theoretical approaches attuned to the one-state reality. This will likely require a shift toward longer time frames for the posing and examination of trends, dynamics, and possible outcomes. It will mean shifting categories and questions so that topics that researchers in this area have been accustomed to treating as significant, but are now uninteresting and unproductive of new insights, are replaced by unfamiliar but, under now prevailing circumstances, appropriate and stimulating.
We are interested in manuscripts that ask questions about the current and future implications of the one-state reality. For example: How can political relations among hostile populations be transformed when the political arena is integrated in reality, if not as a matter of formal legislation? What form, and across what time frame, does democratization take when the problem is integrating large previously excluded populations from the demos rather than replacing autocracy with democracy? What are the limits of designed or architected visions as guides or contributors toward stable “solutions,” as opposed to thinking about outcomes as emergent or evolutionary processes shaped by unintended consequences of partially successful or failed projects? How do specific issues traditionally considered within the context of Israeli-Palestinian relations present themselves differently once the occupation is imagined as ending, not through disengagement but through integration or system transformation—issues such as Jerusalem, demography, secular-religious relations, the meaning of the “Jewishness” of the state; the option of annexation; the significance of Jewish settlement (on one side of the Green Line or the other); the implications of the inclusion of the Gaza Strip as a kind of “prison” within, not outside, of the State of Israel; the opportunities for Jews and Arabs to manipulate and exploit gaps between an official regime of separation into different entities: “State of Israel,” expanded East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, “Area A,” Area B,” and Area C” and the Gaza Strip vs. the actual fact of continuous Israeli state domination.
