The false symmetry of Jewish-Arab partnership
A man holds a sign that reads ‘Life’ in both Hebrew and Arabic during a protest against the war in Gaza in Tel Aviv, 24 April 2025
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury writes in +972 on 11 February 2026:
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.