After the “time of monsters” – what next for Israel and Palestine?
JVL Introduction
A review of a book with a blueprint for moving from apartheid to democracy was published just days before the Trump led “ceasefire. Peace with justice will need a rupture and that may be some way off but Israel’s actions over the last two years have cemented opinion against it. True, the western powers are doing their best to save Israel from itself and hope it can retain legitimacy. As the reviewer says: “A new narrative seems hard to imagine, given the last hundred or so years of history. But there are moments when transformation becomes possible, when changes on the ground can rupture longstanding beliefs and biases, and a new political and social set of relations make possible what for so long seemed impossible. We are nowhere near that moment, yet change is happening, including shifts in opinion, new political realities, and a far more expansive global solidarity movement for Palestine than ever before.”
LL
This article was originally published by The Guadian on Sat 25 Oct 2025. Read the original here.
From Apartheid to Democracy – a ‘blueprint’ for a different future in Israel-Palestine
New book, published just before the ceasefire deal, describes in granular detail the conditions for dismantling apartheid in Israel-Palestine
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It’ll be much more difficult to build a new future and new relationships between Israel, Palestine and the wider world than it was for South Africa.
South Africa’s racist whites wanted to crush resistance to apartheid, their goals weren’t to kill or drive out the black population (on whom they depended for labour, customers and some income from taxes). They hadn’t engaged in the genocide of black and coloured South Africans in the years immediately before the ending of the white-ruled state. Yes, they behaved horribly to retain the privileges of power, status, wealth and security being white gave them … but perhaps not as badly as the Israeli state and many Israelis have over the last 70 years.
If there’s sufficient external pressure on Israel to drive that state and its people into genuine negotiations with the Palestinians for a just, sustainable peace and reparations for the harm they’ve done, will Israel implode into fragmentation and civil war under its internal contradictions? Many sections of Israeli society already loathe, distrust and are in pitched battles with each other.
If Israel isn’t driven into negotiating in good faith with the Palestinians within the near future then it seems to me the risks of Israel tearing itself apart are unchanged but the process will happen more slowly. Emigration from Israel hit a peak last year. That peak may well become the “new normal”.