Forced out of Jerusalem as a child during the Nakba of 1948, Ghada Karmi is a prolific author on the Middle East conflict. Her works include Married to Another Man, which takes its title from the Zionist claim that the land of Palestine was wrongly ‘wedded’ to a different people. This book argued that the reconciliation of the populations of historic Palestine would rely on them accepting shared democratic values, living as equal citizens in one state. She expanded upon this approach in many other texts, including 2023’s One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel.
The October 7 attacks in southern Israel and the vastly destructive IDF response — by the time of writing killing close to 35,000 Palestinians — have shaken any prospect for any peace settlement in the region — and changed Karmi’s own thinking. In an interview with transform! she reflects on the failure of the peace process since 1993, the cynical evocation of the ‘two-state solution’ by Western leaders, and the seeming impossibility of finding any shared future, based on either one or two states.
I listened recently to a talk you gave about the indulgence that Israel enjoys from its allies in key Western states. Joe Biden recently said that Israel’s reaction to the October 7 attacks has been ‘over the top,’ but this was hardly damning criticism. What do you mean by Israel’s ‘impunity’?
GK It’s quite obvious that Israel has enjoyed impunity for its actions from the very start, 75 years ago. When it was established in 1948, it carried out many violent military acts to clear the territory of what it intended to become the Jewish state. In that violence, most of Palestine’s population was expelled. That expulsion, that ethnic cleansing, created a huge refugee problem for Palestinians, which has never been put right. They have never been allowed home, and their right to return has never been recognised by Israel.
Israel committed this very great crime against the Palestinians and got away with it. Israel never paid any kind of price for this. It didn’t compensate the refugees for the loss of their land or their property. It never paid a penny toward their upkeep in refugee camps. That’s what I call impunity. It’s been the same ever since, over the last 75 years. There was only one occasion when Israel did not get away with what it did. And that was a unique occasion in 1956 when Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt. For Britain and France, the aim was to get back control of the Suez Canal, while Israel was there to grab territory from Egypt. But the then-US president, Dwight Eisenhower, didn’t permit Israel to do that, ordered it out of the territory it had invaded, and it was forced to obey. That’s the only time in all these decades that Israel has been called to account for anything.
Israel has always denied Palestinians’ refugee status — and used claims of UNRWA employees’ involvement in the October 7 attacks to pressure its allies to shut off funding to this refugee relief agency. In late January, several Western countries including the United States, Britain, Germany and Italy complied. Still, a couple of states, like Spain and Ireland, dissented. So, what splits can we see in this unconditional Western backing for Israel?
GK Generally, Western states have been very unwilling to get Israel to do something it doesn’t want to do. That remains true to this day, which is why we have this tragedy in Gaza. But there are some exceptions like Spain and Ireland.
I think we need to look at the generality of this. The West has, by and large, supported Israel no matter what it does. And in that support, the key party is the United States. We see that clearly in the war on Gaza since October 7; for without constant US armament, and funding and diplomatic cover for Israeli actions in Gaza, these actions would have stopped a long time ago. It’s no exaggeration to say that today, even after all this, all the US president has to do is to lift up the phone, speak to the Israeli Prime Minister and say, you must stop this war, or else you won’t get a single gun or piece of ammunition, not a cent from the United States. Watch and you’ll see that the war will end immediately. So, we may see some differences in the ranks of Western states in terms of how much support they give Israel. But these are all details. The reality is that, so long as you’ve got the United States and the United Kingdom (where I live) actively arming Israel, it’s pretty hopeless. There’s no way the Israelis are going to stop the assault on Gaza.
At the Munich Security Conference on February 17, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed that Israel has an ‘extraordinary opportunity’ to normalize ties with its Arab neighbours. This idea that this war provides a moment to reach a general peace settlement is widespread: at the same Conference, EU foreign affairs commissioner Josep Borrell said that this is the time to go back to a two-state solution, albeit one that faces major difficulties delineating borders in the West Bank. At the same time, Benjamin Netanyahu has explicitly said that there is no way that this war can lead to a Palestinian state, which, he claims, would ‘reward’ Hamas for the October 7 attacks. If, as you say, the US has such leverage over Israel, do you think Washington does indeed remain committed to two-state solution — even one based on ‘Bantustans’? Or is the talk of a ‘peace process’ to achieve two states utopian rhetoric by this point?
GK The two-state solution is a non-starter, and there are very good reasons for that. First, the Israelis don’t want it. And it’s not just Netanyahu. From the very beginning, not a single Israeli political leader has ever accepted the creation of a Palestinian state, and Israel has never supported a two-state solution.
The second problem is logistical. There are over 130 Jewish-Israeli settlements in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and there are 700,000 settlers living in those settlements. So, unless you remove the settlements and the settlers, there is no territory on which to establish the Palestinian state. People keep talking about the two-state solution as if it was something that could happen. But it can’t, unless the people who support it can show us that they will remove the settlements. Unless they can undertake to do that, they should stop talking about it.
But even beyond the logistics, there’s the problem of the justice of the solution. How is it fair to partition Palestine like this: to give the Israeli-Jewish population four-fifths of the territory and leave one-fifth for the Palestinians? — who, we mustn’t forget, are not just the people living at currently in Gaza and the West Bank, but all the people in the refugee camps, and all the people in exile. So, all those millions also need to come home to a state. How are they going to be accommodated?
Once you realise that this is the central question, the answer becomes very clear: and it’s perfectly well known to all these political leaders, their think tanks and their advisers. The two-state solution is a mantra which they keep trotting out because it sounds good: the world looks on and says, two states for two peoples seems fair, and the West which in fact supports Israel a million percent can say that it’s trying to do something for the Palestinians. Sounds good, but it’s nonsense.
In the mid-2000s you were in Ramallah working with the Palestinian Authority (PA). You discuss this in a 2019 London Review of Books article, which speaks of the prospect of Palestinian statehood as ‘Constantly Dangled, Endlessly Receding.’ There, you talk about the hopes that the Oslo Accords and the formation of the PA created among Palestinians: the aspiration of making some partial progress toward sovereignty. But you draw a sharply negative conclusion about the reality: you say that the whole territory of Israel-Palestine ‘is one state in all but name — but with markedly different rights for its various classes of citizen.’ So, what judgement would you pass on the PA, over the last three decades, but also in the course of the current war? It seems not only unable to propose solutions, but to be struggling to be taken as a serious player.
GK Look back to 1993 and the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Before that, Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian leadership had been barred from Palestine: they were regarded as terrorists, and nobody dealt with them. Now, advance from that position to 1993, when, because of the Oslo agreement, Arafat and the leadership were allowed back into part of Palestine — not the whole of Palestine, but Gaza. So, there was an optimism there. There was no pretence that ‘this is it.’ But the Palestinian leadership thought that it was the first in a series of steps which they hoped would lead eventually to something far better than what has in fact happened.
They were wrong because the Israelis never had any intention of allowing any more steps after that initial one. What the Palestinians ended up with was the Palestinian Authority, which functioned as a regulatory body for the civil affairs of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. That’s all it was allowed to do. It had no political role. It had no power. It had no arms except local police and no control over the borders of the Palestinian areas. Quite simply, there was an Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories. And what can be expected from an authority set up in such circumstances, policed by Israel and under its control?
The PA had no political independence. It couldn’t make any decisions about its people other than over health care and schooling and things like that. But it couldn’t even control the free movement of the population: they couldn’t move from one part of the Occupied Territories to another. They couldn’t move in or out of Israel, except with Israeli permission.
This is, then, an Authority with very little authority. My criticism is that the PA should always have made this clear to the world: it should have said, ‘we’re administering civil affairs, but have no independence or sovereignty. It isn’t a position we like to be in, but we are occupied by Israel.’ I’m afraid they didn’t always make that clear. They got a bit carried away.
When I worked for them, I myself got carried away. You get this impression when you’re working for the PA: you start to see yourself genuinely as an alternative government that would become an independent state once the territory is liberated. And the PA thought it would be the government of that independent state.
It’s tragic — and very, very foolish. So, they went along with Israel. They policed the territory on behalf of Israel. They even arrested their own people if those people were resisting Israeli domination. They really came to act as Israel’s local policemen among the Palestinians. It’s a terrible thing to say about a Palestinian leadership, but it’s the truth.
The fundamental problem is Israel’s occupation. This is what happens in situations of colonial occupation. It happens everywhere historically where you’ve got a colonising power which is in control of a native population. What does the colonising power do? It sets up a local leadership which it bribes or privileges, so that this local leadership will be loyal to the coloniser, not to the native population. Palestine was no different.
When Gazans are barely able to survive hour by hour, it can seem abstract and unreal to talk about future political structures. When I was preparing our interview, this reality was much on my mind. But the war also affects the discussion about these future structures: the long-term effect of the brutality, the relentlessness, the openly genocidal statements coming from the Israeli leadership. What hope can one have for a future of coexistence or treating each other as equal citizens? If in Gaza most people are too young — average age, 18 — to have seen anything other than these wars, what are the bases for peace?
GK Up till October 7, I had gone along a track in my thinking where I saw that only one realistic future existed for the two peoples in the entire territory between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. Here are two sets of people present in roughly equal numbers: Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. Currently, these two populations are ruled by one sovereign ruler, the state of Israel. But that rule is unequal: it employs apartheid, is cruel to the Palestinians, doesn’t give them rights, and all this is clearly wrong. I thought that the best way forward out of this horrible impasse was for us to move towards a situation in which both communities would live together as equal citizens of one state, and that state would be democratic. It would represent its citizens. It would not discriminate. It would not be an apartheid state.
It would be a democracy. And that seemed to me to be a realistic, practical and humane vision. The people I met, unless they were strongly Zionist, would think this was a noble aim. However, we need to understand that all of that was changed by October 7.
The period since that date has shown us a very ugly reality, which had been conveniently hidden behind a facade in which Israel was presented to the world as a kind of liberal democracy, along the lines of similar states in the West, in Europe, and in the United States. We understood that Israel had its extremists, its orthodox sections, its ultra-religious groups — but overall, it was a liberal democracy. But now we’ve seen what Israel has done in Gaza. And opinion polls taken during this Gaza assault have shown over 90 percent agreement amongst Jewish Israelis with what the government is doing, and 42 percent of them don’t think that the Israeli army is harsh enough on the people of Gaza. When you get such information, when you see that you have a whole citizenry united behind a brutal government, which has executed a monstrous assault on civilians, killing children, killing women, indiscriminately starving them and preventing water from reaching them — when you see this kind of inhumanity, as a human being you have to ask yourself: what are we dealing with? That’s not a liberal democracy. Some might say that this was indeed the reality during the age of imperialism and colonisation, when Western armies colonised and brutalised native populations. But the idea that Israel is somehow a light unto the nations is ridiculous.
What we’re seeing had been there all along, but it was disguised under a veneer of public relations, of propaganda. It’s now become clear that the Israeli state is based on ideas that are antithetical to democracy, are based on Jewish supremacy, and a Jewish population entitled to be privileged and not to be punished for anything or interfered with. That it must do whatever it wants.
It’s been a quick learning curve — for me, and I’m suggesting that it should be one for other people, too. They have to ask themselves: what are they dealing with, here? It has upended the whole beautiful idea of a one-state democracy. Because clearly you can see that Palestinians are so brutalized, so badly treated by the Israeli state and its people. How are they going to live with these murderers? I have to use strong language. But I’ve got to get this idea across to people: they’ve got to wake up.
I sympathise with the thrust of your response: it’s difficult to see any path to a peaceful settlement or democracy or even coexistence. Still, even before this war there were plenty of reasons to believe that Israel would not accord democratic rights to the mass of Palestinians. There are surely some democratic pressures from the Arab population within Israel, and to a lesser extent from small left-wing opposition groups among Israeli Jews. But is the idea of one-versus-two state, as if either could happen, misleading? You tell us that the state of Israel effectively controls the whole territory. Parts have electoral and parliamentary processes, others don’t and never will. Palestinians are forced to deal with the various consequences of that. But it is hard to see what leverage they really have in shaping the overall outcome.
GK You’re right. In my book I talk about a situation where you have an Israeli-Jewish population that’s become accustomed to the privileges that come with being colonialists. It was already very difficult to see how that would change. It’s obvious that there were always difficulties in the way of the one-state idea.
But what I also argued in the book that it’s not enough to just agree with the idea that it’s better to have people living together in equality and in harmony. You need to ask: how are we going to get there, given what you and I’ve just said? You’ve got a privileged population believing that all the resources of that piece of land belong to them, with the idea that non-Jews are lesser people. How is the one-state outcome going to happen? I never believed that a population which is so currently privileged is going to willingly give up its privileges in return for embracing people it despises. And the Palestinians were never going to accept a people they saw as usurpers and murderers.
In the book, I postulated that the end point would be for the two peoples to live together in one space. I thought this would come about through changes on the ground. By that, I don’t mean everybody starting to love each other. I mean the resistance on the part of the Palestinians who might be bludgeoned into submission from time to time by the army, but would always rise up again. I foresaw that situation as untenable: that it was not possible to go on governing people who constantly rise up against you, try to kill you, to ambush you. In my view, that was unworkable and in the end, by the logic of these currents in society, the previously dominant party would have to climb down and have to change.
Now, I must say that, although it can still happen, something else has been added to the mix: the awareness or realisation that we’re dealing with an Israeli population that’s bloodthirsty, that’s unmoved by what is happening, that supports its army and eggs them on to kill innocent children and civilians without any qualms.
You say that you thought the recurrence of Palestinian uprisings — even if they are suppressed from time to time — could make the situation untenable also for the Israelis, who would thereby have to change their ways. But this same idea has also been raised in Israel in response to October 7. The suggestion often made is that Benjamin Netanyahu had long tried to ‘wall off’ the conflict, maintaining Gaza as an ‘open air concentration camp’ and abandoning any kind of peace talks. As if by building enough walls, the problem could be screened from view, separated from Israelis’ own reality. But after October 7, even many unmistakably Zionist critics of Netanyahu said that this strategy had failed, since the attacks that day brought massive suffering to Israeli society. Does Israeli society want to be in a permanent state of war, and can it accept a reality where events like October 7 sporadically happen?
GK That’s a very good question, if you’re not one of those people: the problem is that the Israeli leadership didn’t take the lesson that you’ve just been talking about. They learned another lesson, which is that the only way forward is to expel the population. That’s very scary for everybody — for Palestinians, of course, in the first place. You’d have to be extremely dim not to see what the steps Israel is carrying out in Gaza, and what they’re leading toward. The Israeli army moved the people from northern Gaza to the south, right up against the Egyptian border. It seems clear that they somehow want to get the Egyptians to open the border and for the Gazans to be thrown out into Sinai.
I’m not saying that that’s what they’re going to achieve, but that’s what they’re aiming for. Likewise in the West Bank, which we mustn’t forget. Settlers are being encouraged to go around killing whoever they feel like, making life intolerable for the Palestinians of the West Bank. The brutality there has the same idea behind it: to expel that population towards Jordan.
This is the lesson that Israel has drawn from October 7, instead of drawing another lesson which says, wait a minute, we’re doing something wrong, we can’t have an open-air concentration camp and expect nothing to happen. We can’t go on occupying these people and ruling them and expect nothing to happen. The lesson they drew was that the only way forward is to get rid of the Palestinians.
I’ve believed for years that the best way forward for these two communities is to live together in equal citizenship. Now, we’ve seen the Israelis trying hard to take the worst revenge imaginable on civilians, as if to say, ‘we have been hurt, and so we’re going to hurt them a hundred times more’. On the other hand, it seems to me that the regional resistance forces — the likes of Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Kata’ib Hezbollah in Iraq — are saying to Israelis: listen. You’re not going to last long in this region if you continue with ideas of superiority, supremacy, entitlement, grabbing what you want. If you continue like that, you will have perpetual war. Drop these ideas and learn to be people living in the Middle East. Stop thinking you’re Americans or Europeans currently on leave in this region. Nobody is going to kill you if you do that, but if you continue along this path of entitlement and supremacy, where you can kill anybody with total impunity, you’ll have perpetual war.
In Europe, there have been some important anti-war movements, indeed most of all in the country where you have long lived — Britain. In other cases, there are rather less. Here in Berlin, there are spirited demonstrations against the war, which are surely important in challenging the German government and the media-political support for Israel, but they haven’t got a great deal of leverage over the conflict itself. Earlier, you said that the US government has the ability to stop this happening. But what real leverage can peace movements have — consequences which, more than raising the banner of a tragic and beautiful cause, materially affect the situation in Palestine?
GK First, we shouldn’t forget the impact that solidarity with the Palestinians has on the Palestinians. They take heart from the support of people outside, including in Europe. It’s not just about whether those movements succeed, but the very fact of showing solidarity, of trying to help — that is, in itself, very important for the Palestinians.
Second, there is a job of work to be done with ordinary people. Pause for a moment the idea that they can actually influence government and formal structures — which, you’re quite right, seems virtually impossible. But ordinary people need to start getting used to the idea that Palestinians are human beings and that they deserve to have some of the things that the population in Germany, for example, enjoys and takes for granted. So, there’s a job of educating ordinary people to express solidarity with something they would find themselves agreeing with: ideas of equality and freedom.
You could even imagine a situation in which — not unlike the anti-apartheid solidarity movement, which started in Britain in the 1960s and spread everywhere — you could have a meeting of minds and aims across countries, between activists and well-meaning ordinary people. That has an effect, also on those in power. It’s not something they can ignore. There’s a job of work to be done, and one must never flag, or give up on Palestine.