Someone must be wrong. Right?

Anything but fast fashion, these two mapped shirts argue for primacy going back two millennia or three. On the left, Palestine, aka “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” On the right, its twin, Greater Israel, dreamland of the Israeli right and the American Jewish wrong.

Two differences: the T-shirt on the right includes the Golan Heights (another story altogether), and neither shirt recognizes the existence of the people of the opposing clothes line. While in vogue, these shirts are not going to get anybody anywhere. Certainly not to a negotiated settlement and a Palestinian state.

Going just by the maps, it’s hard to tell who’s who. That’s the problem with the one-state solution. Whose one state is it? Who decides? I refer you to the one-state solutions called Bosnia and Lebanon for possible answers.

While the maximalists make their cases via wardrobe and humorless memes (often gifts from Israel’s right-wing Christian supporters), arguing over the real name of the land, who the real colonialist is and who was and wasn’t there first, I can say for certain that the Israel supporters have a leg up on the Palestinians when it comes to aspirational maps.

It was the pre-state Zionist right that, led by the Irgun militia and with no chance whatsoever, set its sights on both sides of the Jordan River.

Times changed as Jordan became a country and later made peace with Israel. The Irgun map, along with the Irgun, became a museum piece.

That is, until this month when Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel “There’s no such thing as a Palestinian people” Smotrich spoke from behind a dais fronted by a map of Israel whose contours provocatively contained Jordan. Such is the quality of persons keeping Benjamin Netanyahu in power.

Much of this is a sideshow for those of us not in the war zone but want the moral high ground as if we were. For the Palestinians, they had their October 7, and Israel had everything after. And out of this unimaginable theater of death, all they seemed to have gotten are these crummy T-shirts.