The two elections Israel has held so far this year may not have produced a prime minister, but they have at least brought clarity to the catastrophic state of the Israeli left. It feels inadequate to speak merely of a pro-occupation consensus when, outside the radical right, the Palestinians are hardly mentioned at all. With no two-state solution on the horizon, the Left has simply stopped discussing solutions. Campaigning on Netanyahu’s corruption or the skyrocketing ultra-orthodox population is better politics than talking about a political settlement, which sounds like an abstraction after decades of an abortive “peace process.”

The program currently supported by Israel’s left parties – separation – is quite different from a two-state solution. Under a separation model, Israel would retain Jerusalem as its “undivided capital,” along with the main settlement blocs, which are home to the majority of the settler population. Palestinians would be given a measure of superficial control over their Bantustan-like territory, but it would remain demilitarized, fragmented, and subject to nightly IDF raids: far short of genuine self-government.

Sometimes, as with former foreign minister Tzipi Livni, separation is dressed up as a revivified two-state solution, though it is more often presented as an alternative to two states. The appeal of such a program is obvious: it allows opposition politicians to gesture toward peace while carefully avoiding Palestinian sovereignty, to preserve an impregnable Jewish majority between the river and the sea, and to present their capitulation as resistance to a Western media still hungry for liberal Zionist heroes.