In partnership with
Discourse on Jewish-Arab partnership or binationalism in Israel-Palestine repeatedly runs into the same dead end: the demand for political symmetry within a profoundly asymmetrical reality.
The partnership or party is often imagined as a neutral space, one in which Jews and Palestinians supposedly engage as equals, share leadership, and jointly articulate a common vision. Yet under conditions of apartheid and genocidal war, and in a space governed by Jewish supremacy — political, military, economic, and linguistic — this conception is not only detached from reality but also reproduces the existing hierarchical power relations it aims to transcend.
Under such conditions, binationalism requires an uncomfortable and fundamentally different political move: the participation and engagement of Israeli Jews in Palestinian-led initiatives, political parties, and movements, despite the apparent contradiction this might create with calls for equality. At least in its initial stages, this move demands an unequivocal political choice from Israeli Jews — one that entails relinquishing leadership, centrality, and the presumed right to “set the framework,” and instead joining a struggle for rights led by the oppressed indigenous group until shared sovereignty is achieved.
This is not an act of goodwill or moral generosity, but one of political responsibility akin to white activists who chose to join black movements in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa — not in order to “balance” the struggle, but to challenge from within the apparatus of supremacy they themselves had built and benefited from. The engagement of Jewish-Israelis in Arab parties (or in parties with a Palestinian majority and leadership that insist on creating space for Jewish participation, such as Hadash), is a step toward recognition that binationalism or Jewish-Arab partnership is impossible without a real dismantling — that is, decolonization — of ethno-national power relations.
The call for Jewish-Arab partnership and equality cannot exist in isolation from a deep political reckoning by the dominant collective, given the oppressive structures it has created, benefited from, and continues to sustain. Such a reckoning requires, among other things, a willingness to relinquish leadership and centrality, and a readiness to dismantle hegemonic power as a condition for participation in a shared struggle.
This is why the prevailing argument expressed among Israeli leftist activists, including in radical circles, that a “Jewish-Arab party” is needed, and that the existing Arab parties are not binational because they are led by Palestinians, merits scrutiny. This argument ignores the settler-colonial historical and political context in which Arab parties in Israel operate, as well as the material and violent conditions that shape their political action.
Arab parties in Israel suffer from real shortcomings, including internal contradictions, gender inequality, and at times the absence of a sharply articulated binational vision. Yet for nearly two decades, and especially in recent years, they have operated under conditions of what I call ongoing sociopoliticide: political, social, civil, and linguistic erasure; the systematic narrowing of parliamentary space; legal and public delegitimization; and the framing of Palestinian political presence itself as a threat that must be neutralized.
Within this reality, the very insistence on political representation, sumud (steadfastness), institutional survival, and the defense of basic rights — and at times even their very survival, in the face of escalating violence, crime, and organized state abandonment — constitutes a radical political act in its own right. Under such conditions, the parties’ struggle against erasure and the imperative of survival often come at the expense of articulating a comprehensive ideological vision — particularly when their people in Gaza are subjected to genocide and amid an increasingly extreme Israeli legislative regime. The absence of a fully developed binational political project does not reflect a principled absence of a binational perception; rather, it is a constraint imposed by a violent settler-colonial reality.
In fact, a systematic historical analysis of Palestinian political activism inside Israel since 1948 reveals a picture quite different from that which dominates public discourse. For decades, Arab parties have often been the main — and at times the only — actors advancing a shared political horizon and a conception of binationalism, even if not always articulated under that name. They did so through sustained civil struggle, demands for substantive rather than merely formal equality, and efforts to forge political partnership under conditions of deep structural inequality in a settler-colonial state.
Crucially, this political activity has never been detached from a profound commitment to the rest of the Palestinian people. Even while operating within Israel’s constrained and coercive civic framework, Arab parties maintained a political and moral affinity to their people beyond the Green Line and perceived their popular struggle against occupation as inseparable from a broader struggle for decolonization (even if they did not always employ that terminology) and liberation, alongside a sustained challenge to the ethno-national hegemony of the Jewish state.
In doing so, they embody a conception of collective political responsibility that extends beyond Israeli settler-colonial citizenship, refusing to be confined by the boundaries the colonial regime seeks to impose.
Binationalism or Jewish-Arab partnership, then, does not begin with the creation of a new “joint” Jewish-Arab party devoid of history. Nor can it be a slogan that hovers above power relations, built around Jewish-Israeli political convenience. Rather, it begins with an uncomfortable political choice: recognizing that the political space is not neutral, that leadership cannot be symmetrical, and that those who benefit from structural supremacy must choose to join the struggle rather than lead it. Anything less is not binationalism, but a softened version of the existing order.
For Israeli Jews, this means relinquishing leadership, and the presumed right to set the rules of the game, even if only temporarily. It calls for moving beyond the search for a “balanced framework” toward joining existing political spaces led by Palestinians — spaces that invite Jewish Israelis to participate on an equal footing, through the renunciation of privilege and supremacy, and to become part of a shared struggle for a common life in this land, even when such frameworks do not always align with a preferred “liberal” self-image.
The binationalism proposed by Palestinians in Israel is, in effect, a radical alternative to the settler-colonial project. In this sense, it is not a moral compromise or an abstract formula of coexistence, but an anti-colonial political project that seeks to dismantle relations of domination, restore historical responsibility for past injustices to the center of politics, and establish a shared political community grounded in equality, justice, and liberation.
This choice is neither marginal nor symbolic. It is a real political test: Are Jewish Israelis who oppose Jewish supremacy willing to act within spaces they do not control, accept Palestinian leadership, and struggle against a state that claims to speak in their name? Without such a move, the discourse of Jewish-Arab partnership or binationalism remains hollow, a moral gesture devoid of political consequences.
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This is the political challenge facing Israeli Jews who oppose apartheid, genocide, and the supremacist regime: not to ask what a comfortable Jewish-Arab partnership looks like, but rather what a form of binationalism that actively disrupts the existing order and secures full equal rights between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians looks like. Alternatives that avoid this choice would merely reproduce the status quo under a different name.
A binational future is not a matter of formulating a new ideology, but of political practice in the present. It will not emerge through the creation of yet another “joint” Jewish-Arab party but through strengthening existing Palestinian parties, expanding their base of action, and drawing a clear line against Jewish ethno-national supremacy. Only from within an asymmetrical struggle — one that acknowledges the power relations rather than obscuring them — can true political partnership take place.
A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.
