From Apartheid to Democracy – a ‘blueprint’ for a different future in Israel-Palestine

<p>New book, published just before the ceasefire deal, describes in granular detail the conditions for dismantling apartheid in Israel-Palestine</p><p>While languishing in prison during Benito Mussolini’s fascist reign in Italy, Antonio Gramsci wrote in his Prison Notebooks about an “interregnum”, a transition between the old order that was dying and a new order that had yet to be born. That in-between time was, he wrote, “a time of monsters”.</p><p>Those words, a “time of monsters”, could be used to describe the period of death and destruction unleashed in the two years since 7 October 2023, in the narrow strip of land comprising the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/gaza">Gaza</a> Strip. If the deal reached between <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/israel">Israel</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/hamas">Hamas</a> that was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/12/trump-israel-gaza-war-hostages">brokered</a> by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/donaldtrump">Donald Trump</a> continues to hold, it raises questions about what type of future awaits the lands between the river and the sea – an Israeli-government and settler-controlled land mass that both Israelis and Palestinians inhabit, which represents Israel’s apartheid-based one-state reality.</p><p>Robert Gottlieb is professor emeritus at Occidental College and the author of more than a dozen books, including, most recently, Care-Centered Politics: From the Home to the Planet (MIT Press)</p><p>From Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestine is out now (<a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/books/from-apartheid-to-democracy/paper">University of California Press, $26.95</a>)</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/oct/25/from-apar