Ezra Klein has a new video out, and it’s getting traction. His argument: There is already a “one-state reality” stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea—and it’s time Americans wake up to it.
Fair enough. That’s a serious claim. It deserves a serious engagement. So I listened.
I expected a hard conversation. I was hoping for a challenge. Israelis need to have a serious conversation about the millions of people living under our military rule. Yes, this issue defined our politics for a generation—but that was years ago. And the problem, with all its moral and political consequences, has only deepened. There are plenty of explanations for how we got here, many of them valid and important. Some of my own essays and videos on the subject have been widely consumed over the years. But none of them make the daily reality of occupation vanish.
So I expected to sympathize with a call not to look away, with an honest grappling with the fact that millions of Palestinians have lived under Israeli military rule for decades. With a call to reshoulder the task of finally ending this wrong.
I even expected to sympathize with an outsider telling us: Enough with the history—look at what is.
Instead, I found a man hiding from the very realities he claims to expose. Klein markets himself as the king of difficult conversations—and this particular difficult conversation has been the backdrop of my entire life, so let’s have it.
But it was not to be.
What I heard from Klein wasn’t a man talking about real people, but about an imagined moral journey he wants Americans to take, a performance of American moral awakening that manages to avoid discussing the hardest realities facing Israelis, Palestinians, and Lebanese—and that even included a familiar sleight of hand: insisting that an issue dominating American discourse has somehow been ignored until his intervention.
