Today’s Times of Israel published perhaps the most feasible proposal for Israel’s survival: to walk away from the practical non-solutions and embrace the one deemed impossible. Gershon Baskin, the Israeli peace activist who ran the back channel that freed Gilad Shalit, opens “The Israel We Could Have: A Political Fantasy That Doesn’t Have to Remain a Fantasy” this way: “Imagine that in the coming days, Gadi Eisenkot calls Mansour Abbas, Yousef Jabareen, and Ahmad Tibi and invites them to join Israel’s next government. Not as outsiders providing parliamentary support, but as full partners with ministerial responsibilities. Then he calls Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, Avigdor Lieberman, and Yair Golan and tells them that the time has come to abandon one of the most destructive conventions in Israeli politics: excluding Arab citizens from national political power. Imagine that they all agree.”

“I know. This is political fantasy,” Baskin writes. “But after everything Israel has experienced, we need to imagine something radically different. Not simply replacing Benjamin Netanyahu, but replacing the political culture that brought us here.” His imagined cabinet puts Arab ministers in charge of interior, health and education—"not a government of the Left or Right. It is a government of national reconstruction”—with a “guiding principle: Israel will never have security until Palestinians have freedom, and Palestinians will never have freedom until Israel has security.”

He concludes: “Excluding Arab citizens from government is not a law of nature. It is a political choice. So is the belief that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can never be resolved, or that military force alone can provide lasting security. Perhaps Lieberman will never sit with Jabareen, Bennett with Abbas, or Eisenkot with the Joint List. But every political transformation begins when someone decides that what has always been considered impossible is no longer acceptable.”