Beyond bi-nationalism? The Young Hebrews versus the ‘Palestinian issue’

Abstract

The bi-national option for the solution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is as old as Zionism itself. The standard bi-national scenario envisaged an accommodation in a shared polity of separate Jewish and Palestinian identities. The Young Hebrews movement defied this paradigm by arguing that these identities were not national and should be incorporated into the Hebrew nation. This article analyses the Young Hebrews’ solution to the ‘Palestinian issue’ by showing that they used it as a tool to destroy Zionist hegemony in Israel and open the way to a radical geopolitical rearrangement of the entire Middle East.