Here is a wonderful blog item by Scott MacLeod of Time Magazine, about Condoleezza Rice’s testimony before the House yesterday. The perspicacious MacLeod notes Condi’s words doubting the two-state solution.
Our concern is growing that without a serious political prospect for
the Palestinians that gives to moderate leaders a horizon that they can
show to their people that indeed there is a two-state solution that is
possible, we will lose the window for a two-state solution.
Amazing. MacLeod lards this revelation with some politically-correct handwringing about Israel’s "death warrant" but his general attitude is thoughtful and considerate, I believe he even uses the a-word (apartheid).
Why is this wonderful? 1, Right now Israel is a state of mind as much as anything. A state of the American Jewish mind. The reality of Israel is a country struggling to fit as "western" into a very different geography. This is an ancient problem, and the reason that Richard Cohen of the Washington Post called Israel’s creation "a mistake" last year. The more Israel adjusts to the reality of its Arab milieu, rather than western identity and support, the better for everyone. I’m not saying one-state or two-state, I’m saying Middle Eastern country. 2, Israel is becoming every American’s business. Yesterday I blogged that Haaretz reports that Condi has likened the situation of Palestinians to blacks in the south under Jim Crow. Good for her; she is bringing her own personal lens to bear on the situation. We will only find a solution here when All Americans feel that this problem is their business and they can bring their experience to bear on it. From my background as a Jewish kid growing up in the boomtime of American liberalism of civil rights and feminism and gay liberation. To John Mearsheimer’s military realism. To Condi’s black perspective. To MacLeod’s apparent revision of Time Magazine’s Arabism. To my liberal Protestant mother-in-law smuggling sheets into a hospital in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, cordoned off by the hateful security fence. America is our country! Let us think as Americans about this problem! As it is, only Jews are licensed to review Walt/Mearsheimer. It is a form of intellectual apartheid.
3, Condi has great political insight. She is the silver lining of the cloud of the Bush Administration. Her statement is wise. For years we on the left were pushing for a two-state solution. The center and right said this was preposterous. Finally they have accepted the reality, but it is usually an "entity." A non-viable state. Forclose the two-state possibility, and it ebbs away into a different reality: the one-state solution that leftwingers (Tony Judt, not Walt/Mearsheimer) are beginning to flock to.
O.K., let’s talk about Israel’s "death warrant," per MacLeod. Go to Tel Aviv. See the amazing buildings, see the amazing economy and restaurants. See the gay men, see the fruit stands. They will always be there. Read the amazing newspapers. We won’t let this be pushed into the sea. Jews will always be in the Holy Land. The Israel created by the yishuv and European emigration is a great fact. The political structure they have created, in which Jews control the holy sites of Jerusalem (and make the birthplace of Jesus a no man’s land), and will forever in Olmert’s belief, is repugnant. Liberal Americans have to help Israel get to the next place, to accept the presence of Arab Muslims and Christians. Right now the discourse on this issue, in liberal America, is dominated by 19th-century ideals of ethnic separation that border on the racism of ethnic cleansing. Here is Henry Kissinger, given space in the Washington Post, to promote "transfers" of Arab and Jewish land to maintain a Jewish majority in Israel.
Israel will face this demographic crisis again and again. So long as Jews find a comfortable place in America and Europe and decline to emigrate to the Jewish state–which is the great reality of the liberal western world–Israel will require more hateful gerrymandering and wall-building and you-can’t-marry-her-ism to preserve her from her surroundings. Let’s follow Condi to a better place…
