Israelis have dropped two-state solution for three-class society: Yuval Noah Harari

Sapiens author says many Israelis want one state with ‘Jews on top’.

Israelis have given up on a two-state solution for the long-running conflict with the Palestinians and instead have largely embraced the establishment of a multi-tiered class system with Jews on top, Yuval Noah Harari, one of Israel’s most prominent public intellectuals, claimed last week.

Speaking with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Harari – a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of several international bestsellers, including Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century – asserted that “a lot of the Israeli public has gradually switched from a belief in the two-state solution to at least an implicit belief in the three-classes solution, that you have just one country between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean with three classes of people living there.”

This includes, he contended, “Jews, who have all the rights; some Arabs, who have some rights; and other Arabs, who have very little or no rights.”

“And this is increasingly the situation on the ground. And this is increasingly also the aspiration or the mindset of even people in government and this is extremely worrying but this is what is happening,” he said.

However, a recent Israeli Democracy Institute poll showed that only 31% of Israeli Jews agreed with the sentiment that the next government should try to advance such an endgame to the conflict.

Harari has been touted as a leading thinker of the 21st century by figures such as Bill Gates, has had his picture taken with presidents, foreign ministers, billionaires and other celebrities and has become a darling of the news media.

He is also a harsh critic of Israel’s rightward shift, refusing to participate in an event at the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles several years ago in protest over the discriminatory surrogacy law and nation-state law.

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Yuval Noah Harari: Israelis Support ‘Three-classes Solution’ to Palestinian Conflict (Haaretz)

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Photo: Yuval Noah Harari (Kristof Van Accom / Belga / AFP)