The Settlers Are Not Leaving: Decolonization, not coexistence

Editor’s Note: The following article was written in response to Lara Kilani’s essay “Liberation Is Not Integration: On liberal Zionism, one-state fantasies, and what Palestinians actually want” published by Mondoweiss on December 8, 2025.

In her recent Mondoweiss essay, Lara Kilani observes that when Western liberals or segments of the international left promote a “one-state solution,” they often imagine a future in which Palestinians and Israelis become co-citizens, sharing institutions, civil rights, and an aspirational harmony. But for many Palestinians — especially those experiencing siege, displacement, bombardment, land confiscation, and the continual fracturing of their social and political worlds firsthand — this invitation to integration reads less as liberation and more as a demand to neutralize the political meaning of their suffering.

Kilani’s critique is incisive. She makes a compelling case for centering Palestinian perspectives and material realities rather than projecting externally conceived ideological solutions onto them: any one-state vision that fails to confront the structures of settler colonialism risks normalizing their outcomes. Her intervention exposes the conceptual shallowness of liberal fantasies that confuse coexistence with justice.

Yet to turn her insight into a broader political intervention, we must widen the frame she leaves underdeveloped: what Palestinians actually mean by “one democratic state,” the strongest decolonial versions of that vision, the structural death of the two-state paradigm, and — most difficult — what liberation can look like when the settler society refuses to leave.

What “one democratic state” actually means to Palestinians

Kilani notes, correctly, that Palestinian preferences are not monolithic and that support for a “one democratic state” is neither majoritarian nor stable across time and geography. But the crucial point is not simply that Palestinians disagree. It is that “one democratic state,” as imagined by many Western activists, bears little resemblance to what Palestinians themselves mean when they speak of a shared polity.

For many Palestinians who do endorse a single state — including myself — the political vision behind it is not integration into an existing order. In my essay “Don’t call me Ishmael; don’t call me Israel — call me one democratic state!”, I begin by exposing Israel as a settler-colonial formation whose structure depends on erasing Palestinian presence materially, legally, and historically — from graves and mosques to villages, land registries, and citizenship categories. By tracing contemporary desecrations alongside archival Zionist statements and exclusionary laws, I show that these acts are not deviations but the logical expression of the state’s foundational architecture.

The phrase “one democratic state in historic Palestine” is, for the Palestinians who use it, almost never a plea to be granted equal rights inside the existing Zionist order. It is shorthand for a thorough decolonization: return, land restitution, dismantling of apartheid laws and institutions, and a new constitutional order detached from ethnonational privilege. Kilani identifies the gap between this vision and Western liberal projections but does not fully draw out its strategic consequence: Palestinian support for a single democratic framework, where it exists, flows from a demand for foundational justice, not from a desire to integrate into the settler state as it stands.

The strongest One-State vision (and why power makes it unreachable — for now)

The strongest version of the one-state proposal demands dismantling Zionist legal and military structures, return, land redistribution, transitional justice, and a secular constitution that repudiates ethnonationalism.

Yet the central problem persists: there is no plausible pathway from the current balance of forces to this horizon. A genuinely decolonized one-state future would require Israeli de-Zionization, the relinquishing of military, nuclear, and economic supremacy, the dismantling of a settler-colonial political economy, and the absorption of millions of returning refugees — transformations that the Israeli state is structurally designed to prevent. Naming these obstacles is not pessimism; it is political clarity. The gap between what justice requires and what the existing power structure can tolerate is not a conceptual weakness of the one-state vision but a structural condition that must be confronted honestly.

The two-state paradigm as a mechanism of management

Kilani does not say, but it is equally true, that the mainstream alternatives — two states or some enhanced form of Palestinian autonomy — are no more realistic than the strongest one-state visions they are often invoked to counter. If the one-state fantasy can obscure the depth of Israeli structural power, the two-state fantasy obscures the political, territorial and demographic realities that have already foreclosed it.

A viable Palestinian state has been rendered structurally impossible by the fragmentation of the West Bank into isolated enclaves, the annexation and Judaization of Jerusalem, relentless settlement expansion, and Israel’s comprehensive control over borders, airspace, imports, energy, and taxation. The destruction of Gaza as a livable polity, the Palestinian Authority’s severe crisis of legitimacy and capacity, and the United States’ and European Union’s commitment to a “peace process” devoid of enforceable outcomes ensure that “statehood” remains permanently suspended.

Under these conditions, two states is not a diplomatic horizon but a rhetorical technology — one that indefinitely defers Palestinian liberation and functions as a mechanism for managing a colonized population rather than resolving a colonial condition. It promises a future that the structure itself is built to prevent. This is not a neutral failure; it is a governing strategy, one that has successfully absorbed decades of Palestinian demands into a process with no endpoint. It continues to do so with Trump’s “peace plan.”

When the settlers stay

The hardest question is what decolonization means when the settler society is not leaving. The Mondoweiss piece gestures toward this dilemma but does not confront it directly. Yet this is the core of the problem. In nearly every historical case where settlers remained — Algeria being the rare exception, where the overwhelming majority of European settlers departed only after a protracted anti-colonial war — two trajectories emerged.

In the first, structural domination was reconstituted under new constitutional or multicultural veneers. Post-apartheid South Africa offers the clearest example: formal equality was achieved, but racialized economic hierarchies, land distribution patterns, and security structures remained largely intact. Namibia’s independence preserved colonial-era land ownership almost wholesale, while Morocco’s administration of Western Sahara recognizes Sahrawi identity in principle but maintains an extractive political and resource regime. Here, the settler form survives through the appearance of transformation.

In the second trajectory, a hybrid political formation took shape that preserved settler military and economic supremacy while granting Indigenous populations only symbolic or constrained civic equality. This pattern is visible in French Polynesia and New Caledonia; in Kenya after the Mau Mau uprising, where the settler elite relinquished political office but retained disproportionate landholdings; and in the post–Civil War American South, where nominal civil rights masked the endurance of structural white control. In such cases, domination is not abolished — it is redistributed and repackaged.

Neither trajectory amounts to liberation. This is why the Palestinian question cannot be reduced to the familiar binaries of one state versus two, integration versus independence, or coexistence versus separation. The deeper question is how liberation can be imagined when the settler society intends to retain sovereignty, military dominance, and demographic permanence. Any credible political horizon must begin by facing this directly rather than assuming it away.

Precision against power: naming the actual architecture

Kilani’s essay includes a searing line — quoted from a friend — asking who would want to “live and share space with genocidaires.” The term captures the visceral experience of Palestinians who have survived, witnessed, or been shaped by genocide, and it is entirely appropriate as an expression of how integrationist proposals are felt in the midst of mass violence. Yet because the phrase appears without further analytical differentiation, it risks being read as collapsing the Israeli state, its institutions, and its diverse social constituencies into a single undifferentiated category.

Kilani herself does not engage in such flattening; her focus is on the political meaning of Palestinian suffering and the inadequacy of liberal one-state imaginaries, not on providing a sociological map of Israeli power. But this is precisely where further clarity strengthens the critique. Israeli state policy can be described as genocidal under international law; public opinion surveys during the Gaza war showed broad support for escalated violence; and Israeli society is deeply stratified along ethnic, class, religious, and ideological lines — Ashkenazi elites, Mizrahi citizens, Russians, Ethiopians, Haredim, and settlers occupy different positions within the racial and political order.

Meanwhile, discrete state institutions — the Civil Administration, COGAT, the Ministry of National Security — translate ideology into the daily machinery of dispossession and control. Naming these layers does not dilute the indictment; it sharpens it.

By distinguishing between policy, ideology, public sentiment, institutional mechanisms, and internal social hierarchies, Palestinians can describe domination with greater precision and develop strategies that confront the actual architecture of power rather than an undifferentiated abstraction.

From constitutional fantasies to building decolonial power

This recognition — that neither integration into the existing settler state nor a territorially truncated mini-state can deliver liberation — requires a fundamental shift in focus. The task is not to choose between failed blueprints but to identify the political imperatives that follow from a clear-eyed assessment of the structures of domination already in place.

Liberation begins with reasserting Palestinian political agency and refusing the outsourcing of Palestinian aspirations to Western think tanks, donor regimes, or solidarity infrastructures that continually script “what Palestinians want.” It requires decentering the state itself: the fixation on statehood — whether one or two — has narrowed political imagination and obscured the possibility of non-statist, networked, transnational, or confederal forms of collective life.

Israel’s fiscal chokehold — control over clearance revenues, VAT, customs, and every economic artery — is not a technical detail but the central mechanism that turns “autonomy” into managed dependency. Any constitutional form negotiated while that chokehold remains intact will merely formalize captivity under a new flag.

Liberation therefore requires building material and economic resilience first: parallel institutions, tax-resistance mechanisms, land-defense cooperatives, transnational networks, and digital and financial tools that loosen the occupier’s grip. Only on that terrain can constitutional questions become meaningful rather than decorative.

The same principle extends to the broader political field. Freedom of movement, land restitution, and the right of return must be treated as foundational rather than negotiable items subordinated to constitutional design. And the struggle must be situated within global transformations: U.S. decline, emerging multipolarity, shifting Arab alignments, and new forms of digital and economic organization.

Israel’s vulnerability is structural, not moral; its power rests on systems that can be weakened, not on ethical claims it has long since forfeited. Any credible liberation horizon must respond to that reality with strategic, not symbolic, clarity.

Conclusion: No Blueprint Without Power

Liberation requires unflinching clarity. Kilani’s intervention matters because it exposes how easily Palestinian aspirations are overwritten by external projections — how quickly calls for “coexistence” or “equality” dissolve the political meaning of Palestinian suffering.

But the deeper insight her essay opens, and that this one pursues, is that naming the limits of liberal fantasies is only the beginning.

If integration is not liberation, and if the two-state formula has long since become a mechanism of population management rather than a political horizon, then Palestinians and their allies must confront what follows: no constitutional design — one state, two states, confederation — can substitute for the work of building decolonial power. A just future depends not on selecting the correct blueprint but on reorganizing Palestinian political life, weakening the structures that sustain Israeli supremacy, cultivating international leverage, and restoring Palestinian agency to the center of political imagination.

Kilani is right that clarity is feared by power. The task now is to extend that clarity into strategy: to name the structures that confine Palestinian possibility, to reject the frameworks that domesticate Palestinian demands, and to imagine liberation not as what the world will tolerate, but as what Palestinians require to live freely on their land.