From Apartheid to Democracy – a ‘blueprint’ for a different future in Israel-Palestine

While languishing in prison during Benito Mussolini’s fascist reign in Italy, Antonio Gramsci wrote in his Prison Notebooks about an “interregnum”, a transition between the old order that was dying and a new order that had yet to be born. That in-between time was, he wrote, “a time of monsters”.

Those words, a “time of monsters”, could be used to describe the period of death and destruction unleashed in the two years since 7 October 2023, in the narrow strip of land comprising the Gaza Strip. If the deal reached between Israel and Hamas that was brokered by Donald Trump continues to hold, it raises questions about what type of future awaits the lands between the river and the sea – an Israeli-government and settler-controlled land mass that both Israelis and Palestinians inhabit, which represents Israel’s apartheid-based one-state reality.

So what is next? The continuation of the apartheid regime? A two-state solution where one state has no or limited capacity to function? More Israeli military occupation? An accelerated Nakba that more methodically expels Palestinians from the land? A new colonial presence where some foreign entity or individuals are the de facto interim rulers?

Or, eventually, something else – something requiring a transformation of existing relationships through a new process, one taking us firmly beyond our time of monsters.

When the ceasefire deal was struck, the Los Angeles Times, in an article on reactions in Israel, quoted Udi Goren, an Israeli celebrating at Hostages Square whose cousin was killed on 7 October. Israel needed new faces to make change, he told the reporter: “Now is the time for us – Israelis and Palestinians – to support a better future, to draft a new narrative for ourselves.”

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.

The possibility of such rupture and transformation is an underlying premise of Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man and Sarah Leah Whitson’s book, From Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestine. Published just days before the ceasefire deal was reached, the book describes in granular detail the conditions for dismantling apartheid in Israel-Palestine.

Schaeffer Omer-Man and Whitson have been deeply engaged on the ground for years. Schaeffer Omer-Man, the former editor of +972 Magazine, and Whitson, who has been a human rights lawyer and former advocate at Human Rights Watch, both currently work at Democracy for the Arab World Now, which focuses on reforming US foreign policy in the Middle East and north Africa from a human rights perspective. The group was founded by the former Washington Post columnist and Saudi democracy advocate Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered by Saudi assassins seven years ago.

When I first learned about Schaeffer Omer-Man and Whitson’s Blueprint concept a few months ago, I was skeptical given the horrific genocide unfolding in Gaza. The intent of the titular blueprint is to “design the process for dismantling Israel’s military occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory and dismantling its regime of apartheid”. To do so, Schaeffer Omer-Man and Whitson created an actual working document for a transition that would end apartheid and establish the basis for democracy in Israel-Palestine. This will not occur, they argue, in the next day, nor the next month, nor the next year. It can happen only after a process that brings about a pivotal rupture that provides the basis for something new.

We don’t know what that rupture will entail, but the ground has been laid over these last two years. Perhaps a shift in attitudes about Israel and Palestine in the US and Europe will finally bring about the end of arms sales, or expanded boycott initiatives. Perhaps bodies such as the international court of justice will bring new forms of pressure to bear – pressure that the diplomatic community decides to enforce. Such developments could combine with mass movements outside Israel, making international isolation so extreme that Israel will be forced to reconceive its underlying structures of inequality in order to rejoin the community of nations.

Schaeffer Omer-Man and Whitson are realists: apartheid rule is deeply entrenched, functioning in many ways beyond Israel’s military occupation through an entire system of laws, practices and norms that creates and maintains a system of domination, including in pre-1967 Israel. These laws affect everyday life, they write, including: “political representation and organization, free expression, land use, ownership, zoning and other property-related matters, immigration, personal legal status, including family law; access to natural and economic resources; the provision of state services and benefits; policing and security; institutionalized distrust and permanent suspicion of non-Jewish citizens and residents and others”.

They conclude: “Simply ending the occupation and extending the existing legal framework to the occupied territories is wholly insufficient for dismantling apartheid.”

In each of these areas, the blueprint provides a map of how to begin to dismantle a deeply unequal system and move toward meaningful democracy in Israel-Palestine, whether through a single democratic state, a confederation or even two states connected to each other, with both populations engaged in a democratic process to select the preferred option. One area where such a transition is fundamental is the freedom to move or remain in place, they write, as restrictions on movement, they argue, are one of the central tools the apartheid regime has used to manage the Palestinian population.

The authors look to South Africa and Northern Ireland, both of which saw political change that had seemed unimaginable. Relying on those examples, the blueprint identifies a multilayered process of co-conciliation, reparations and the creation of an inclusive political framework.

The book was published before the ceasefire was reached, but it is fair to say that the deal is not going to pave the way for the blueprint anytime soon. We are not yet at the point of rupture. Once we get there, it may reveal that new narrative that the blueprint will help shape.

• Robert Gottlieb is professor emeritus at Occidental College and the author of more than a dozen books, including, most recently, Care-Centered Politics: From the Home to the Planet (MIT Press)

• From Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestine is out now (University of California Press, $26.95)